Queering the Troubled Tropics in Panx Solajes’ Post-Haiyan Short Films

Abstract

This article apprehends a precarious moment when the queer and the tropics coincide to form a new fabric of sensing in this age of climate crisis. Queer and tropics are intimate, not only because both embody their inherent openness and fluidity, but also because each is woven closely by the corollary contradictions that besiege them, such as heteronormativity, capitalism, and environmental degradation. Within such an intersecting framework, this study critically engages with a selection of three works by the queer Filipino filmmaker Panx Solajes who attentively observes the aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan (locally called Yolanda) in the Philippines, a tropical storm that occurred in 2013, and is still considered to be one of the strongest in modern records. Solajes’ post-typhoon films Balud (2014), Iskwater (2015), and Himurasak (2015) are experiments in the troubled tropics that configure a queer vision to engender a habitable and inclusive future through a coupling of human and nonhuman subjectivities. Thus, this post-Haiyan filmography relies on unconventional and resistant forms of queer visibilities that respond to the current climate crisis. Such filmic reading, therefore, can best emerge through allied histories of queer studies, the tropics, and the environment to harness discursive turns that offer alternatives from rigidly pessimistic and realist horizons of the future. This study commits to render visible a balance between the duty to remember and the agency to imagine a habitable future in this equatorial zone of the earth.