Christine Bacareza Balance

Postdoctoral Fellow

UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow, Christine Bacareza Balance, will be in residence in the Music Department for the academic year (2007-2008). Her faculty host and mentor is Professor Deborah Wong.

Dr. Balance specializes in the areas of Asian American cultural studies with emphases on Filipino/Filipino American arts and culture, performance studies, American ethnic studies, gender & queer studies, and popular culture. She received her PhD in Performance Studies from New York University in 2007 with a dissertation entitled, “Intimate Acts, Martial Cultures: Performance and Belonging in Filipino America.” She holds an M.A. in Performance Studies from NYU (2000) and a B.A. from the department of Ethnic Studies at University of California, Berkeley (1998).

Dr. Balance's work has been published in Women & Performance: a feminist journal; the Asian American Writer's Workshop's TEN magazine; and a forthcoming anthology on Filipino American performers (ed. Theo Gonzalves, Meritage Press, 2007).

She has presented her work at national and international conferences and symposia such as: Point of No Return: Freestyle Music Symposium (USC, 2006); Music, Performance, and the Racial Imagination (NYU, 2005) and the annual meetings of the American Studies Association (ASA), Association of Asian American Studies (AAAS), Performance Studies International (PSi), and the Experience Music Project's Pop Music conferences.  She has taught courses on Asian American Women in Popular Culture; Performing Race and Representation; and Asian/Pacific American Genders & Sexualities in both NYU's Asian/Pacific American Studies program and Vassar College's American Cultures program.

In conjunction with her academic work, Dr. Balance has worked as a research consultant to the Ford Foundation's Arts and Culture program; advisory board member to the 1st Asian American Theatre Festival; co-organized the 1st and 2nd annual queer Pilipina/o conferences (UCLA, 2000 and 2001); special events coordinator with both NYU's A/PA Studies Institute and Asian CineVision's Asian American International Film Festival; and project coordinator to Puro Arte, an ongoing collaboration between San Francisco/Bay Area-based Filipino/Filipino American arts, academia, and community development. She also plays the accordion and is a vocalist for the New York-based Hawaiian-inspired new wave band, The Jack Lords.

During her time at UCR, Dr. Balance will be working on revising her dissertation into a book manuscript. Intimate Acts, Martial Cultures looks at the types of aesthetic practices that are developed by Filipino Americans at the crossroads of violence, intimacy, and belonging in three disparate sites of inquiry—queer Filipino American men’s subcultural practices; recordings by DJ Qbert and the Invisibl Skratch Piklz; and the creation of Filipino American community-based theatres. She will also begin research for her next project, Deviations: Law-Breaking Acts in Filipino American Culture, which looks at queer Filipino American cultural forms (music theatre pieces, independent films, and solo performances) produced through and by way of two notorious figures: Andrew Cunanan and Imelda Marcos. She can be reached via email at: cbb210@nyu.edu.

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