Christine Bacareza Balance is Associate Professor of Asian American Studies and Gender & Sexuality Studies at UC Irvine. Her first book, TROPICAL RENDITIONS: MAKING MUSICAL SCENES IN FILIPINO AMERICA (Duke University Press, 2016) examined the performance and reception of post-World War II Filipino/Filipino American musicians. Her next book project, THE AFTERLIVES OF MARTIAL LAW, investigates the sensational politics of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos’ 21-year rule over the Philippines. Balance’s writings have been published in Women and Performance: a feminist journal, Journal of Asian American Studies (JAAS), Theatre Journal, to name a few. She has been the recipient of a Consortium for Faculty Diversity (CFD) Pre-doctoral Fellowship at Vassar College (2006-2007), a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship (2007-2009), a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship (2013-2014), and a Society for the Humanities (SOH) Fellowship at Cornell University (2014-2015). From 2003-2006, she served as a Research Consultant for the Ford Foundation’s Arts & Culture Program; Events Associate for NYU’s Asian/Pacific American Studies Program; and Editorial Assistant to Jessica Hagedorn for the literary anthology CHARLIE CHAN IS DEAD 2: AT HOME IN THE WORLD (Penguin, 2004). She continues to collaborate with Lucy San Pablo Burns (UCLA) on a co-edited anthology, CALIFORNIA DREAMING: PRODUCTION & AESTHETICS IN ASIAN AMERICAN ART (University of Hawai'i Press, forthcoming).
My areas of expertise are race, performance, and U.S. popular culture; the histories and cultural aftermath of U.S.-Philippine relations; and queer/feminist studies. I have published articles on former Philippine First Lady Imelda Marcos, the rise of Asian American YouTube artists, R&B/pop singer Bruno Mars, Glee’s karaoke aesthetics, literary works inspired by spree killer Andrew Cunanan, and the California-based history of writer/performer Jessica Hagedorn. My first book TROPICAL RENDITIONS: MAKING MUSICAL SCENES IN FILIPINO AMERICA examined the performance and reception of post-World War II Filipino/Filipino American musicians, arguing for a practice of disobedient listening, one that listens against dominant discourses of racial and cultural authenticity. I drew from archival and ethnographic research, close reading and listening, artist interviews, and performance/musical analysis. My next book project, THE AFTERLIVES OF MARTIAL LAW, examines the politics of cultural memory by focusing on President Ferdinand Marcos’ martial rule in the Philippines (1972-1986). It hones in on “fictions of dictatorship,” the ways that Marcos and his wife Imelda exploited the sensorial and spectacular and the means by which contemporary U.S.- and Philippines-based artists to remember martial law today.
