Remediation at Seksuwalisasyon ng Halalan sa #RP69FanFic

Abstract

The night after the May 2016 national and local polls, the hashtag #RP69FanFic emerged at the top of the local twitter trends. The viral hashtag, which took off when film critic Philbert Dy tweeted his idea to create a “Sandro Marcos-Baste Duterte slashfic,” generated over 37,000 “slashfics” or fan-generated homosexual narratives. These satirical pieces of “twitter fiction” depicted imaginary homosexual encounters involving the sons of Presidential and Vice-Presidential candidates. This paper principally approaches these twitter narratives as instances of what Michel De Certeau called “textual poaching,” or the practice of appropriating and reworking textual material by citizens/ audiences/spectators as their tactical response to dominant narratives. Reading some of these twitter narratives as libidinal projections of national anxieties, this paper discusses the dynamics of national libidinal economy in #RP69FanFic by looking into the interaction between the sexualized construction of these “slashfics” celebrities in social media, and the popular affective response to the potential revival of the figure of the masculine state through the threat of dictatorial return.