Abstract
Watching the fall 2010 season premiere of the popular musical television show Glee, I recall wondering, “What is a Filipina doing in Lima, Ohio?” when Sunshine Corazon, a new Philippine exchange student played by Filipina international recording artist Charice Pempengco, sang Lady Gaga and Beyonce’s “Telephone” in the girls’ bathroom with Rachel Berry, William McKinley High’s glee club star whom viewers love to hate. Given the underrepresentation of Filipina/os on mainstream US television, I found Sunshine particularly surprising because she was a featured character and because she was in the Midwest—a part of the country not readily imagined as a place where Asians and Asian Americans live. Five shows later, Blaine Anderson, an attractive, openly gay, and vocally talented student from a rival glee club, The Warblers, captured viewers’ hearts with his rendition of Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream.” Whereas Blaine’s racial-ethnic identity was not made obvious on the show, the Internet was abuzz with reports that the actor who plays Blaine, Darren Criss, is half Filipino, citing Criss’s Twitter page. Together, Sunshine and Blaine dramatize the simultaneous absence and presence of Filipina/os in US national culture and illustrate how race and sexuality continue to be framed as mutually exclusive within popular discourses. More importantly, these two characters invite us to consider the erotics of racial difference and remind us that race continues to play a central role in the visual economy of television despite popular claims that we now live in a post-racial United States. Focusing on Glee’s second season, in which these two Filipina/o actors debut, this essay explores how Filipina/o-ness simultaneously materializes as queer and materializes queerness, even if the actors do not necessarily play Filipina/os on the show. On the one hand, the presence of Filipina/os on Glee initially seems strange and out of place—in short, queer—because these racially marginal actors
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