Kelly Loves Tony pt. 1 and From Khush List to Gay Bombay

Danielle Marie Herrera
Prof. Maira
ASA 4 A04
18 May 2017

The first half of the film Kelly Loves Tony follows a young couple from Richmond. Kelly gets pregnant right before her and her boyfriend Tony's high school graduation. Both Kelly and Tony are of Laotian descent, and Tony is an ex-gang member. Kelly's pregnancy leads to their parents arranging their marriage without her consent, perhaps to justify or destigmatize her pregnancy. In accordance with Laotian tradition, Kelly moves in with Tony's family and is expected to practice being a proper wife and daughter-in-law. The film focuses on several struggles between the couple, including Tony's risk for deportation due to past crime, Kelly's desire for higher education, and tension between Kelly and Tony's family. I found their struggles relevant to my own family's struggles in the Philippines; my cousin and his wife also conceived a child as teenagers and needed to deal with adapting to each other's families. In addition, I found it interesting that Tony and his family saw Kelly's desire to go to community college as an act of selfishness while Kelly viewed it as an act that would benefit Tony and their son Andrew in the long run. The first half of the film was very powerful in exhibiting Kelly's agency.

Roy Sandip's article "From Khush List to Gay Bombay: Virtual Webs of Real People" analyzes the rise of online queer communities and its positive and negative implications. Although online communities provide safe, anonymous spaces for queer folks around the world and can unify people across global borders, it does inspire harmful or hateful discourse due to the anonymity as well as limit the scope of such liberating movements to those who have Internet access. In other words, cyber communities exclude queer individuals of lower classes. The article touches on several other issues including pinkwashing, a phenomenon in which liberation for queers is used as an excuse for imperialism. I find pinkwashing to be a highly prevalent concept that bears resemblance to the speculation around George W. Bush's "war on terror" declaration, which was named a necessary fight against terrorism rather than an invasion of Middle Eastern land for resources to propel the self-interest of the U.S.