Mary Marchan's Ph.D. Final Defense

All That We Owe Each Other lingers in the intimate, everyday scenes that shape life between tomboys, their kin, and their communities in Siquijor, Philippines. In these encounters, I trace how gender and kinship come into being not as fixed identities or inherited truths, but as collective projects—provisional, improvised, and held together by debts, obligations, and the fragile labor of “becoming with.” Gender appears here as a relational substance and practice, something that circulates across bodies and generations, gathering form through proximity. I use proximity as a conceptual framework to illuminate how relationships are made, sustained, and transformed through gender—how gender coheres not within individuals but in the spaces between them. Based in ethnography, autoethnographic reflection, and drawing on feminist, postcolonial, decolonial, and queer-of-color thought, I approach proximity as both an analytic and a method: a way of attending to the subtle gestures, improvised affinities, and movements of closeness through which people come to know one another. My own diasporic formation—as a queer Filipino raised within Western grammars of gender and sexual personhood—shapes how I apprehend these relationships. Diaspora becomes one of the relational conditions through which proximity comes into view—an interpretive stance rooted in memory, desire, and an attachment to relationships that are both mine and not mine. Ultimately, this dissertation offers proximity as a way of understanding how gender, kinship, and belonging take shape through the everyday work of living with and for one another—even across oceans, histories, and time.

 

Mary Marchan is a doctoral candidate in the Department of American Studies at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities. She teaches courses in LGBTQ Studies, and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at San Diego State University, where she is committed to relational and community-rooted pedagogy. Her broader intellectual work explores Filipino and diasporic queer worlds, everyday relationalities, and gender in contexts shaped by colonial history, migration, and global modernity. What guides her scholarship and teaching alike is a love for storytelling, for queer and relational ways of knowing, and for the small, improvised acts of care that make another world imaginable. 

 

For Zoom information, please contact Tamara Hageman ([email protected]).