Bakla and Foucault: Some Reflections on Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Traditional Ides and Believes around Same-Sex Sexualities in the Philippines.

Many scholars point out that Michel Foucault’s body of work is mainly Eurocentric. For instance, his work on The History of Sexuality Volume I: The Will to Knowledge – in which he postulates that on the onset of modernity, homosexuality has emerged as an identity – might be true within the Western context but not necessarily useful when trying to understand same-sex ideas and practices in differently developed societies, such as the Philippines. But then at the same time, it is also important to acknowledge that – at least in his work on the History of Sexuality, Foucault does not claim universality. His view on the discourse on sex and how it paved away to the emergence of homosexual identity deals specifically on the context of Western socio-cultural and historical context.

Although Foucault’s work deals with the ideas on homosexual identities within the context of the modern West, it can nonetheless still inform – at least in part – our reflections on same-sex practices and encounters in non-Western societies like the Philippines. The main objective of this post is to further expound on Foucault genealogical history of homosexuality by looking into the traditional ideas and believes around same-sex sexualities within the context of the Filipino society. In this post, I would like to demonstrate how the construction of the Bakla identity can disrupt the linear narrative through which the history of the modernized gay identity is told.

I Am Being A Bakla: Some Reflections On Michel Foucault’s History Of Sexuality Volume 1

In his lecture entitled ‘Holding It Straight: Sexual Orientation in the Middle Ages’, Dr. Bob Millshas demonstrated how our ideas and beliefs around sexual orientation are rather recent developments. In the middle ages for instance, people who were attracted to the members of the opposite sex did not see themselves as heterosexuals. The same thing can be said to men and women who have a romantic relationship or sexual encounter with the members of the same sex: they do not see themselves as homosexuals. To refer to them as such would not only be an anachronism but could also be misleading. Sex and sexuality are what they do, it is not who they are. In other words, sex, sexuality, sexual orientation – no matter how you want to call it – were not the defining factor through which they identify themselves. Watching his lecture (see the video above) has propelled me to reflect upon how I own and claim the bakla identity.

Kimberly Crenshaw’s Intersectionality: Informing the Analysis on the Experiences of Queer of Colours in Western Societies

The concept of intersectionality is one of the most valuable idea I have acquired while studying gender studies in the university some years ago. This concept did not only informed the theoretical framing of my research project,  but needless to say that as a queer of colour in a predominantly white society, it has also provided me the perspective through which I can make sense of my own positionalities. Furthermore, intersectionality has also equipped me with vocabularies through which my experience as queer of colour can be articulated.

Kimberly Crenshaw, a Black feminist and a legal scholar, coined the idea of intersectionality. It first appeared in her seminal article entitled: ‘Demagrinalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,’ which was published in 1989. Here, Crenshaw argues that:

Black women are sometimes excluded from feminist theory and antiracist policy discourse because both are predicated on a discrete set of experiences that often does not accurately reflect the interaction of race and gender. These problems of exclusion cannot be solved simply by including Black women within an already established analytical structure. Because the intersectional experience is greater than the sum of racism and sexism, any analysis that that does not take intersectionality into account cannot sufficiently address the particular manner in which Black women are subordinated (1989:140).

The Religious Queer: The Discourse on the Western Gay Politics And How Religion Is Implicated Within

Reflecting upon my being a practicing Catholic while also being queer at the same time, which I recounted in my previous post entitled:  The Catholic, The Queer, and Probably an Unbeliever Too?, made me think of the discourse on the Western Gay Politics into which I was introduced while still in the graduate school. According to this discourse, the Western societies – unlike the differently developed societies – are modern and progressive because the historically marginalised subjects such as women and queers in these societies are liberated from subjugations. The de-secularisation of the Western societies that has taken place in the second half of the 21^st century – according to many scholars both in social sciences and the humanities – proved to be quite favourable towards those who have been hitherto marginalized and excluded from the norms of heteronormative masculinity.

History of Homosexuality: Antique versus Modern

 

Modernity is a word populated by people who define themselves as gay, lesbian straight, bisexual, bi-curious, exhibitionist, submisives, dominatrixes, swingers (people who engage in partner exchange), switchers (people who change from being gay to being straight men), born-again virgins (people who technically lost their virginity but pledge to renounce sex until marriage), acrotomopiliacs (people who are sexually attracted to amputees), furverts (or furries) – people who dress up in animal suits and drive sexual excitement from doing so, or feeders (people who overfed their generally obese partners). The important point here is that we draw on these categories in order to make sense of who we are: We define ourselves in part through sexuality (Mottier 2008: 1).

Perhaps, one would find it quite reasonable to claim that the work of Michel Foucault on ‘History of Sexuality’ is influential in queer theory and sexuality studies. In this text, Foucault provides a historical narrative of the emergence of modern identities that are primarily constructed – at least huge in part- along the lines of sexualities. Here, he convincingly argues that, unlike in pre-modern times, hetero/homosexuality is no longer just about what we do but also emerged as identities through which we identify ourselves.  Homo/heterosexuality is not only concerned about the question of with whom we are sleeping with, but also answers the questions of who we are and how we relate to the society we inhabit.

The Baklush [bᴧk-lu:ʃ] Phenomenology Blog: What’s up with the title?

Bakla is a Tagalog term that encompasses homosexuality, hermaphroditism, cross-dressing, and effiminacy. One of the bakla’s singular attributes is a sense of self entrenched in the process of transformation [Manalansan 2003: ix].

Phenomenology is the study of structures of consciousness as experienced fromt he first-person point of view… Literally, phenomenology is the study of “phenomena”: appearances of things, or things as they appear in our experience, or the ways we experience things, thus the meanings things have in our experience [Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy].

This blog called the Baklush [ bᴧk-lu:ʃ ] Phenomenology begun with a narrative of a personal conversation explaining to the interlocutor what gender studies is while also justifying why I have embarked myself into studying it in the first place.  To read this particular conversation – a sort of which I often encounter – please click this link: A Conversation That Might Have Inspired This Blog Called The Baklush Phenomenology.

Situated Knowledges: Donna Haraway (1988)

We seek not the knowledges ruled by phallogocentrism (nostalgia for the presence of the one true Word) and disembodied vision. We seek those ruled by partial sight and limited voice – not partiality for its own sake, but rather, for the sake of the connections and unexpected openings situated knowledges make possible. Situated knowledges are about communities not about isolated individuals. The only way to find a larger vision is not to be somewhere in particular. The science question in feminism is about objectivity as positioned reality. Its images are not the products of escape and transcendence of limits (the view from above) but the joining of partial views and halting voices into a collective subject position that promises a vision of the means of ongoing finite embodiment, of living within limits and contractions – of views from somewhere (Haraway 1988: 590).

In her work on ‘Situated knowledges and the Science Question in Feminism’ Donna Haraway (1988) – a biologist who later in her career became a feminist philosopher of science – coined the term ‘situated knowledges’, which has become a buzzword in feminist scholarship and activism. One cannot underestimate how influential this particular idea is in the ways in which feminist scholars and activists pursue and produce knowledge-claims. More importantly, situated knowledges is a mind-set: A fundamentally different way of experiencing and articulating the spaces we both construct and inhabit.