New Boy, An Excerpt: On the Sensorial Tropics and Queer Consciousness

This excerpt of a chapter seeks to employ the tropic as a presence shaping the queer protagonist’s consciousness. The novel, from which the chapter is taken, riffs on two genres: the campus novel and boys’ love. Conventions and motifs from these genres (discussion of ideas, rediscovery of the self, foes turning into lovers, among others) are adapted and merged. As he tries to settle into his temporary residence, a Filipino exchange student in Bangkok discovers that he is infatuated with a Thai classmate. Meanwhile, the heat, working as a sensorial mirage, tricks him into feeling uncannily at home—a feeling which the unmistakably local disrupts, casting him as the foreigner that he truly is. His growing affection seems to present a way to live in the moment. Or is he daydreaming through homesickness? The chapter hopes to recast the homo tropicus,[1] whose yearning is framed by time that is distinctively tropical, within a fiction that has fortuitously allowed Filipino queer spectators and Thais, who perform the “queer” in boys’ love, to regard one another. [1] Jacobo, Jaya. “Homo Tropicus: A Yearning.” Kritika Kultura 16, 065-083, 2011, p66-83.