Under Bright Lights By Bobby Benedicto

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Published
October 27, 2015
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This review forum follows from an author-meets-critics session on Bobby Benedicto’s Under Bright Lights: Gay Manila and the Global Scene, organized by Natalie Oswin and held at the 2015 Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers in Chicago.

This review forum follows from an author-meets-critics session on Bobby Benedicto’s Under Bright Lights: Gay Manila and the Global Scene, organized by Natalie Oswin and held at the 2015 Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers in Chicago. The forum includes reviews by Gerry Pratt, Derek Ruez, and David K. Seitz, as well as a response from Bobby Benedicto.

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Under Bright Lights Review by David K. Seitz

Bobby Benedicto’s "Under Bright Lights: Gay Manila and the Global Scene" is an extraordinary contribution to contemporary debates on globalization, sexuality, and space. Through years of careful ethnographic attention to the clubs, house parties, and hookup and dating sites frequented by Manila’s middle and upper class gay men, Benedicto powerfully demonstrates how an emergent “bright lights scene” dreams of its perpetually deferred arrival at a distinctly modern, global gay “elsewhere,” and how those dreams are haunted by halting neoliberal inequality and racial shame.

By

David K. Seitz

Under Bright Lights Review by Derek Ruez

In "Under Bright Lights", Bobby Benedicto offers an incisive account of the lives and spaces of the "bright lights" scene of privileged gay men in Manila. The book productively complicates the place of what he calls the "third world" queer in our critical imaginaries by highlighting the complicity of members of the bright lights scene in the neoliberal capitalist order shaping the conditions of life in Manila.

By

Derek Ruez

Under Bright Lights Review by Gerry Pratt

Under Bright Lights is an extraordinary and accomplished book that makes a poignant and thoroughly geographical argument about the privileged gay scene in Metro Manila that existed from roughly 2003-2009. The scene was not defined by a street or a district; it was a series of nodes (clubs, bars, commercial developments and private homes) linked through travel in private cars, at an insistent remove from the poverty so evident on streets throughout the city.

By

Gerry Pratt

Under Bright Lights Response by Bobby Benedicto

I wrote this book driven by the sense that the reparative instinct, inasmuch as it has become an instinct and inasmuch as it works defensively against the threat of paranoia, also anticipates objects in advance, also forecloses surprise. The hermeneutics of suspicion may, as Lauren Berlant rightly put it, “always find the mirages and failures for which it looks,” but I was convinced then, as I am now, that the reparative instinct also always finds the ameliorative practices on which it pins its hopes (2011: 123).

By

Under Bright Lights By Bobby Benedicto

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cholars and practitioners of urban planning need to rethink the field’s futures at this important historical juncture: some might call it a moment of truth when there is little left to hide. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed many cracks, contradictions, and inequalities that have always existed but are now more visible. This also includes the global vaccine apartheid that is ongoing as I write these words. Moreover, this is a time when the violence through which U.S. imperialism has exercised power worldwide is increasingly exposed. Protests in the summer of 2020, which spread all over the United States like fire through a long-dried haystack, showed Americans and the whole world that racialized violence and police brutality are real. They also revealed that such brutality is spatially facilitated in American apartheid—a condition that planning has been far from innocent in creating and maintaining. I think this reckoning is particularly important in the United States, the belly of the beast, where there might have been more of an illusion about planning innocence.

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Moreover, this is a time when the violence through which U.S. imperialism has exercised power worldwide is increasingly exposed. Protests in the summer of 2020, which spread all over the United States like fire through a long-dried haystack, showed Americans and the whole world that racialized violence and police brutality are real. They also revealed that such brutality is spatially facilitated in American apartheid—a condition that planning has been far from innocent in creating and maintaining. I think this reckoning is particularly important in the United States, the belly of the beast, where there might have been more of an illusion about planning innocence.

  • Moreover, this is a time when the violence through which U.S. imperialism has exercised power worldwide is increasingly exposed.
  • Protests in the summer of 2020, which spread all over the United States like fire through a long-dried haystack, showed Americans and the whole world that racialized violence and police brutality are real.
  • They also revealed that such brutality is spatially facilitated in American apartheid—a condition that planning has been far from innocent in creating and maintaining.
  • I think this reckoning is particularly important in the United States, the belly of the beast, where there might have been more of an illusion about planning innocence.

What’s a Rich Text element?

Moreover, this is a time when the violence through which U.S. imperialism has exercised power worldwide is increasingly exposed. Protests in the summer of 2020, which spread all over the United States like fire through a long-dried haystack, showed Americans and the whole world that racialized violence and police brutality are real. They also revealed that such brutality is spatially facilitated in American apartheid—a condition that planning has been far from innocent in creating and maintaining. I think this reckoning is particularly important in the United States, the belly of the beast, where there might have been more of an illusion about planning innocence.

  1. Moreover, this is a time when the violence through which U.S. imperialism has exercised power worldwide is increasingly exposed.
  2. Protests in the summer of 2020, which spread all over the United States like fire through a long-dried haystack, showed Americans and the whole world that racialized violence and police brutality are real.
  3. They also revealed that such brutality is spatially facilitated in American apartheid—a condition that planning has been far from innocent in creating and maintaining. I think this reckoning is particularly important in the United States, the belly of the beast, where there might have been more of an illusion about planning innocence.

What’s a Rich Text element?

Moreover, this is a time when the violence through which U.S. imperialism has exercised power worldwide is increasingly exposed. Protests in the summer of 2020, which spread all over the United States like fire through a long-dried haystack, showed Americans and the whole world that racialized violence and police brutality are real. They also revealed that such brutality is spatially facilitated in American apartheid—a condition that planning has been far from innocent in creating and maintaining. I think this reckoning is particularly important in the United States, the belly of the beast, where there might have been more of an illusion about planning innocence.

What’s a Rich Text element?

Moreover, this is a time when the violence through which U.S. imperialism has exercised power worldwide is increasingly exposed. Protests in the summer of 2020, which spread all over the United States like fire through a long-dried haystack, showed Americans and the whole world that racialized violence and police brutality are real. They also revealed that such brutality is spatially facilitated in American apartheid—a condition that planning has been far from innocent in creating and maintaining. I think this reckoning is particularly important in the United States, the belly of the beast, where there might have been more of an illusion about planning innocence.

What’s a Rich Text element?

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This review forum follows from an author-meets-critics session on Bobby Benedicto’s Under Bright Lights: Gay Manila and the Global Scene, organized by Natalie Oswin and held at the 2015 Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers in Chicago. The forum includes reviews by Gerry Pratt, Derek Ruez, and David K. Seitz, as well as a response from Bobby Benedicto.