Articles & Features 

Contact Bryon Senga of UP Center for Women's and Gender Studies at research.cwgs@up.edu.ph, sengabry@gmail.com to access article.

This essay examines the performance and video art piece Cosmic Blood, by Gigi Otalvaro-Hormillosa, a queer Colombian and Filipina American artist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. It argues that Cosmic Blood is a performative intervention into dominant modes of reading the racialized and gendered Filipina body, as well as a critique of absolutist notions of national and ethnic belonging. Cosmic Blood challenges the inherent heteronormativity and masculinism of dominant notions of nation and kinship, accomplishing this imaginative intervention by its retroping of the past through a lens of queer desire. Within Otalvaro-Hormillosa’s retelling of the moment of first contact, queer bodily desire is the locus of power relations between colonizer and colonized. In this vision of the past, the figure of the Filipina is presented as a desiring subject, resisting the overdetermined tropes of woman as nation, territory, and land that are both a legacy of colonization, and a persistent narrative within contemporary articulations of national and diasporic belonging. In doing so, Cosmic Blood presents a possibility for forms of belonging that exceed the absolutism of race, ethnicity, and nation, while also imagining a utopian vision of the future that critiques the material conditions of the present.

Contact Bryon Senga of UP Center for Women's and Gender Studies at research.cwgs@up.edu.ph, sengabry@gmail.com to access article.

Heteronormative assumptions in development discourse render queer experiences and their political implications largely invisible in studies of development in the Philippines. There is, however, a need to examine queerness in the context of intersecting power relations of class, sexuality, and gender. In this article, I share my experience of using the visual method of auto-driven photo-elicitation in research- ing the relation between queerness and globalization in the context of call center work and the globalized space of the Makati central business district (CBD). The data gathering activity involved two phases: the photography phase, where participants took pictures in response to prompts in a shoot- ing script, and the interview phase, where participants talked at length about the photographs they had taken. The photo- graphs and interviews were then coded to bring out pat- terns and relationships that describe a particular form of subjectivity, which in turn was examined within a network of discourses in discourse analysis. Upon discussing the con- text of the research as well as the concepts on which the data gathering method is based, I explore the usefulness of the method to research in general as well as its place in feminist research in particular.

Contact Bryon Senga of UP Center for Women's and Gender Studies at research.cwgs@up.edu.ph, sengabry@gmail.com to access article.

The 20th anniversary of the Beijing Platform for Action (BPfA) and the release of the Commission on Higher Education (CHED)’s Memorandum Order No. 1 (CMO-1) on gender mainstreaming sparked an assessment of gender mainstreaming’s effectiveness in education. Conducted from October to December 2015, the paper is a case study on the gender culture of a school that is in the process of complying with CMO-1. This school is a private, co-educational institution of higher education (IHE) in the Philippines’ National Capital Region (NCR). Key informant interviews (KIIs) with two administrators, focus group discussions (FGDs), and in-depth interviews (IDIs) of 17 student leaders and volunteers revealed the students’ experiences in the campus that are related to issues of security (microaggression and sexual harassment) and equity (gender-fair language and gender stereotyping). Participants described the gender issues they faced in the absence of an explicit and overarching gender policy on campus. Notable themes include a culture that normalizes gender-based violence, the invisibilization of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community, and the privileging of men in the IHE. The results of this paper were used to generate concrete policy and program recommendations in light of gender mainstreaming.

Contact Bryon Senga of UP Center for Women's and Gender Studies at research.cwgs@up.edu.ph, sengabry@gmail.com to access article.

This article focuses on the narratological strategies deployed by komix creator Emiliana Kampilan, whose multi-modal storytelling and editorial choices are grounded in Philippine feminist activism. By analyzing Kampilan’s online sticker series, first graphic novel, and editorial work for a lesbian komix anthology, this article traces how Kampilan draws together the discourses of gender, sexuality, and political engagement. We attempt to ground this strategy in the local production context surrounding lesbian narratives, where the struggle between visibility and misrepresentation continues to require narrative innovation across media. Deploying Sara Ahmed’s (2006) notion of queer orientation to tie in the discussion of the formal aspect of the gaze in comics—the narratology that allows sexual identities of fictional characters to find expression on the page—and the politics of looking at and between these characters, we argue that Kampilan’s project comprises a redirection of the gaze to the margins. Kampilan strategically romanticizes non-normative character representations and relations by re-orienting popular tropes: that is, selecting imagery already associated with traditional gender categories, she revises them to relay progressive and inclusive signification. Through close reading, we demonstrate how the confluence of subversive language and feminine- coded motifs, the collapse of historical time to simultaneously represent past and present politics, and the relegation of normative and patriarchal antagonism to the periphery, allow the creative work to challenge readers to relearn narrative cues and perhaps glimpse alternative horizons of a more inclusive Philippine society.

Contact Bryon Senga of UP Center for Women's and Gender Studies at research.cwgs@up.edu.ph, sengabry@gmail.com to access article.

The COVID-19 pandemic created significant disruptions in the usual economic and social routines, which required a lot of pre-pandemic affairs to be recalibrated, revisited, changed, and updated to fit the necessities of the “new normal.” In the case of digital media, a surge of content arose largely due to its popularity, touching the themes of the pandemic centering on homosexual love and its relations to household affairs, family and personal relationships, and the professions. Dubbed as the “boys’ love” (BL) genre, it portrays many of the facets of gender roles that are widely discussed in gender studies and research, while working under the lines of exposition in relation to the effects of the pandemic. We discuss some of the themes of the Filipino (or Pinoy) BL genre that have implications to gender economics in particular, and gender studies in general. Given the presented facets and dynamics of gender in this genre, we indicate some possible future work, research, and other areas for discourse and enrichment under the themes of LGBT.

Contact Bryon Senga of UP Center for Women's and Gender Studies at research.cwgs@up.edu.ph, sengabry@gmail.com to access article.

Because of the vulnerability of Filipino youth to several sexual and reproductive health (SRH) problems, the comprehensive sexual education (CSE), as stipulated in the Responsible Parenthood and Reproductive Act of 2012, provides Filipino students with opportunities to be informed and empowered to make proactive decisions about their sexuality (Nyika et al., 2016). Although gender equality and equity are positioned as core values in this policy, prejudice and discrimination against the LGBTQ+ community remain pervasive and institutional in the Philippines (Thoreson, 2017). Thus, there is a need to evaluate CSE-related policies. This study conducted a qualitative gender analysis of CSE-related policies and programs following the Six Domains of Gender Analysis by the USAID Interagency Gender Working Group. The analysis showed that sexual health education in the Philippines excludes topics, perspectives, and health problems relevant to Filipino LGBTQ+ youth. This is because CSE in the Philippines follows a heteronormative framing focused on family formation and procreation, is largely influenced by Catholic doctrines, and deploys an individualistic discourse on SRH that falls under the same pedagogy that excludes the LGBTQ+ community. Policy and program recommendations are made in evaluating the design and implementation of Comprehensive Sexual Education in the Philippines.

Contact Bryon Senga of UP Center for Women's and Gender Studies at research.cwgs@up.edu.ph, sengabry@gmail.com to access article.

What does it mean to grow old for older/tiguwang lesbians? In this study, seven key informants from Davao City were interviewed and two focus group discussions were organized to allow the participants to provide in-depth descriptions of their experiences and perspective concerning aging. The interview questions were informed by the life course perspective of Dewilde (2003). The unfolding themes were critically analyzed following Meyer’s minority stress perspective (2003). Privileging the assumptions of a narrative-constructivist qualitative method (Creswell, 2014), this study holds that the older/tiguwang lesbians construe aging as an intersection of perspectives, issues, responsibilities, and capacities. Such intersections are gleaned in the following meanings of aging: (1) as reflective of class difference – as a privilege given the demands of everyday struggles especially those who are tied to the daily grind of work, and as a possibility that demands preparation for some who can save, or have more than one source of income, (2) the process of creating/living with a family of choice, (3) having to bear the responsibility of taking care of one’s parents, (4) as a two- pronged experience of settling in a place, and cultivating resilience in confronting emerging issues, and (5) as a demonstration of agency as creators of their lived worlds.

Contact Bryon Senga of UP Center for Women's and Gender Studies at research.cwgs@up.edu.ph, sengabry@gmail.com to access article.

This paper explores the health situation and health seeking behavior of tomboys, bakla, and minamagkit from Mountain Province. Minamagkit can be translated as “like a lady” referring to a person whose biological sex at birth is male, but whose gender identity and expression is female. The research objective is to document and analyze the general health situation of these groups and their sexual and reproductive health seeking behavior, using a gender and culturally sensitive approach. The research also employed the analytical lenses of intersectionality, critical medical anthropology, and ethnomedicine. Using intersectionality, the health situation and health seeking behavior of the tomboys, bakla, and minamagkit were analyzed taking into consideration the various dimensions of their identity such as gender, sexuality, ethnicity, indigeneity, socio- economic class, geographic location, culture, etc. The analytical framework of critical anthropology and ethnomedicine, i.e., using Western biomedicine, popular and folk medicine, were employed to arrive at a more nuanced understanding of the health seeking behavior. Like the general population in Tadian, Bontoc, and Sagada, the minamagkit, bakla, and tomboy key informants commonly rely on the popular and folk sectors of ethnomedicine. The popular sector includes strategies employed by the family and other significant social networks which are not part of the medical profession. The folk sector includes strategies employed by “nonprofessional” indigenous healers. Results suggest that the socio-economic status, gender/sexual identity, indigeneity and geographic location of residence, and the general situation of the health infrastructure in the Philippines and Cordillera significantly impact on the poor health situation and health seeking behavior of the tomboys, bakla, and minamagkit. The project consists of two parts. The first phase is the research on the health and well-being of the tomboy, bakla, and minamagkit. The second phase consists of sexual and reproductive health seminars, and providing medical tests related to cardiovascular, respiratory, sexual, and reproductive health.

Contact Bryon Senga of UP Center for Women's and Gender Studies at research.cwgs@up.edu.ph, sengabry@gmail.com to access article.