No Daddy

This multimedia video performance is about the exploration of race, gender and sexuality, drawn from my own experience as a gay, assimilated, Filipino immigrant male. The video is a social commentary on several socially constructed concepts that have profoundly affected me throughout my life. No Daddy also investigates how popular media plays a prominent role in modern society in influencing and subjugating social and individual consciousness, particularly my own.

As a gay, ethnic, immigrant, male, visual, video and performance artist myself, it empowers me to illustrate how my sexualized and the racialized body can become a site for the articulation of and resistance to racial and gender ideologies. In creating work that documents my biography, it celebrates and validates "our" existence and addresses the current lack of representational images of queers of color on screen, particularly Filipinos. With my project, I will use the tool of oppressive media and transform it into a liberating vehicle against this discrimination. My postmodernist approach of reworking available material from popular culture in addition to my own original work gives me a powerful weapon in the struggle for empowerment, while providing opportunities to use strategies of appropriation as an assault against racism, sexism, and homophobia.

Martha Gever, Queer Looks: Perspectives on Lesbian and Gay Film and Video (Routledge, New York)