Comedy, Affect, and Ideology: A P-MCDA of Girl, Boy, Bakla, Tomboy
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.48048/ajac.2027.181Keywords:
P-MCDA, Psychoanalysis, Critical discourse studies, Philippine pop culture, Comedy and ideology, Diaspora and migration, Ideological enjoyment, Global South media studiesAbstract
This study examines the film Girl, Boy, Bakla, Tomboy as a site where gender, family, and diaspora are negotiated through comedy rather than resolved. Departing from representational readings of queer visibility, the article employs Psychoanalytic Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (P-MCDA) to analyze how ideology operates through visual form, performance, narrative structure, and affect. Findings show that the film sustains a fantasy of family unity by redistributing contradiction across its four protagonists, with queer characters—particularly the bakla—absorbing emotional excess, resentment, and bodily sacrifice to stabilize the family as a symbolic whole. Comedy emerges not as a neutralizing force but as an ideological technology that transforms structural inequalities into manageable experiences of enjoyment. Diasporic privilege and local precarity are displaced into interpersonal rivalry and medicalized sacrifice, allowing reconciliation without confronting the conditions that produced familial rupture. The article operationalizes fantasy and enjoyment alongside multimodal coding to read ideological attachment as a textual effect, not only as a representational pattern. By foregrounding fantasy, affect, and sacrifice, the article contributes to Philippine film studies, Global South queer theory, and psychoanalytic media analysis, offering a framework for reading Southeast Asian popular cinema beyond visibility politics.
Highlights
• Demonstrates that Girl, Boy, Bakla, Tomboy sustains the fantasy of family unity through the unequal redistribution of emotional and bodily labor onto queer characters, rather than through narrative resolution.
• Shows how comedy functions as an ideological technology that manages contradiction through enjoyment, allowing inequality, sacrifice, and diasporic tension to remain affectively livable.
• Reveals migration as a form of psychic rupture masked by humor, where diasporic privilege and local precarity are displaced into interpersonal rivalry instead of structural critique.
• Moves beyond visibility-based and representational readings of the bakla in Philippine cinema by specifying the affective conditions—fantasy, ideological enjoyment, and bodily sacrifice—through which queer visibility is sustained on screen.
• Advances Global South queer media analysis by challenging liberal identity frameworks and foregrounding sacrifice, repression, and fantasy as central mechanisms of popular cinema.
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