Youtube video: How de Filipino Really Feel About LGBTQ folk? | Breaking The Tabo

In this breaking The Tabo video, Sapphire Sandalo shows the precarious position the Filipino LBGTQ people in the Philippines. One the one hand, it seems that we are celebrated, but the other hand, we are also being oppressed.

While many claim that they are accepting to LGBTQ people and that they love having gay friends, we are also simultaneously excluded. We are welcome for as long as we can make them laugh, do their hairs, nails and make-up. In other words, they love us when we do not upset the status quo, when we rehearse stereotypes.

The friendship they offer is patronising at best. They consider us our friends, but we are still consider to be inferior because we are perceived to be immoral and unnatural.

How is it like for a bakla to be raised by homophobic parents?

If I could only choose my own family, I would not choose mine. My parents are narrow minded homophobic bigots. It is harsh, but it is true. One could only imagine how terrible my childhood was while growing up in the Philippines. How would I be able to feel safe out there, when I did not feel safe in my own home?

Homosexuality in the Philippines – at least during my childhood – has more to do with gender and less about same-sex sexuality. Of course, same-sex sexuality plays a role. A Filipino gay man is attracted to a straight man, but a straight man who have sex encounters and sometimes even relationship with a bakla is not perceived to be homosexual.

Most baklas fall in love with a straight man, but the straight man cannot love the bakla the way the bakla loves the man. We are destined for heartbreak because our love will always be unrequited. The man will just use the bakla for his financial gain.

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.

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.

Gender Studies? Why Study Gender Studies in the First Place?

In the previous blog entry, I recounted a conversation I had with somebody – a sort of which I often had and perhaps will continue to have – about the degree I took in the university, namely, Gender Studies. It is quite often that I find myself in a situation in which I justify, if not apologize, studying Gender Studies in graduate school.

Gender Studies? What about gender? There are men and women, what is so complicated about it? Why the need to study gender and to study in graduate school in the first place? And here is the question I find most irritating of all: ‘what can you do with it’, which also reads: ‘how can you earn money from it’?

A Conversation That Might Have Inspired This Blog Called The Baklush Phenomenology

Below is an excerpt of a conversation or rather a ‘small talk’ I had sometime ago. I already have had many conversations of this sort and this is just one of them.

Interlocutor: Did you study?

Me: Yes I did. I attended a graduate school in gender studies. I have completed my masters degree there.

Interlocutor: A gender what?