Allan Punzalan Isaac Lecture: Queer for Uncle Sam

"Queer for Uncle Sam: 'West Side Story' and Puerto Rico's Ambiguous Positions." This lecture by Allan Punzalan Isaac, assistant professor of English at Wesleyan University and Author of American Tropics: Articulating Filipino America, will include an introduction by UH Manoa writer-in-residence, R. Zamora Linmark.

Before Rita Moreno breaks out into the celebrated and delightful rendition of “(I want to be in) America” in West Side Story, Bernardo, the Puerto Rican Sharks leader, accuses his girlfriend, Anita, of being “queer for Uncle Sam” alluding to her misplaced feminine desires for America. Her object of desire and the desire itself are cast as abnormal or improper as they threaten Bernardo’s masculinity and future, thus conflating gender, nation and sexuality.

From this accusation to the Jets’ “social disease” and the figure of Anybodys in the shadows, the film offers a whimsical but complicated interrogation of the “queer” position Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans take in relation to the US polity. The unincorporated territory, Justice Fuller asserted in 1901, is “like a disembodied shade, in an intermediate state of ambiguous existence.” Restaging the Romeo and Juliet heterosexual plot into a star-crossed turf war between Puerto Ricans and white ethnics in New York of the 1950s, the movie musical’s refusal to articulate US Empire emerges in an interrogation of proper and improper national desires, masculinities and femininities, homosocial and heterosexual intimacies.

Event Sponsors: American Studies, Ethnic Studies, Filipino Languages and Literature, the Center for Philippine Studies, Women's Studies and LGBTI Student Services.

Event Sponsor
LGBTI Student Services, Univeristy of Hawaii at Manoa

More Information
Camaron Miyamoto, 956-9250, lgbtq@hawaii.edu

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