Christine Bacareza Balance is Associate Professor of Asian American Studies at UC Irvine. Her writings on former Philippine First Lady Imelda Marcos, Asian American YouTube artists, Bruno Mars, Glee’s karaoke aesthetics, and spree killer Andrew Cunanan have been published in Women and Performance: a feminist journal, Journal of Asian American Studies (JAAS), and Theatre Journal. Balance is one-eighth of the New York-based indie rock band, The Jack Lords Orchestra. Her first book Tropical Renditions: Making Musical Scenes in Filipino America is forthcoming (Duke University Press, April 2016).

"The Gangsters We Are All Looking For"
From 1980 until 1985, poet/performer Jessica Hagedorn led the Gangster Choir, a poet’s band that included performance artists Laurie Carlos & Nicky Paraiso, musicians Butch Morris, Julian Priester, Bugsy Moore, and a young guitarist named Vernon Reid. The Gangster Choir embodied downtown New York’s spirit of cross-genre and experimental collaborations in its performances at well-known venues. Against the persistent assumed whiteness of its music scene, the multiracial group’s “corporeal complexity, history, and politics” were memorable but simply disregarded. Their eclectic sound and look posed a challenge for record label marketing execs and even downtown New York cultural historians today. As female vocalists, Hagedorn and Carlos betrayed expectations of simply “singing,” instead creating theatricalized soundscapes of vocal runs, everyday conversation, and words broken down into sounds. Through a careful consideration of archival materials, my paper considers the authorial and performance voice as one that is always-already collaborative and at the intersections of the visual, bodily, and sonic.