Mikee N Inton-Campbell | California State University, San Marcos (original) (raw)
Papers by Mikee N Inton-Campbell
This chapter examines the interactions between the bakla as an embodiment of femininity and globa... more This chapter examines the interactions between the bakla as an embodiment of femininity and global transgender discourse by looking at how acts of transitioning and embodiment are represented in films from the Philippines. Bakla is a Tagalog term and gendered identity that is a hybrid of the ideas of male homosexuality, transgenderism, cross-dressing, and effeminacy. The most common bakla trope is that of a woman trapped inside a man’s body – a concept that is similar to how transgenderism is understood. I argue that while both global trans discourse and kabaklaan (being bakla) are rooted in an interiorized disconnect between the body, mind, and spirit, kabaklaan offers an alternative discourse to this interiority that does not pathologize or medicalize this disconnect. I further argue that because many other performative aspects of kabaklaan resonate with global trans discourses, local social movements have adopted these global discourses in framing their struggle under legal Human Rights frameworks. Philippine cinema, however, offers an alternative viewpoint that does not necessarily reflect trans struggles as a human rights issue, but rather as an issue of social, particularly familial, acceptance. The Philippines’ unique colonial history has also influenced how the bakla is conceptualized: three centuries of Spanish Catholic rule attempted, unsuccessfully, to root out practices of transvestism and homosexuality as immoral, while fifty rapid years of modernization under the American regime brought into the country discourses that pathologized both cross-dressing and same-sex sexuality. The bakla, in short, has become doubly marginalized because of the dominant religious discourse that codes him and his sexuality as immoral and psychiatric discourse that brands him as mentally abnormal. As such, it is no surprise that the word is also commonly used as a pejorative. However, the word remains perhaps the most popular and common signifier for a (male) person whose performance of gender or sexuality falls short of heteronormative ideals. The rise of LGBT rights social movements in the country, as well as the growing popularity of the global gay lifestyle, during the 1990s has also impacted how the bakla is understood in contemporary society. For many Filipino middle class gay men in urban settings, the term remains a pejorative drawn along lines of socio-economic status and the performance of classical masculinity, as well as sexual desire directed toward other gay men, instead of the bakla’s penchant for cisgender, heterosexual men. The term bakla is more commonly associated with the lower class, effeminate ‘parlor gays’ who work in lower class salons. The term bakla is also, quite oddly, rejected by many transwomen. The Society of Transsexual Women of the Philippines (STRAP) coined the term ‘transpinay’ in 2008 in an attempt to localize global trans discourse. The term is a combination of the words ‘trans’ and ‘pinay’, the colloquial Tagalog word for women. Bakla, for these transwomen, connotes maleness and the inability to embody womanhood, but I also argue that there is a strong class bias around the use of the word bakla in these transgender social movements, most of which are comprised of well-educated, middle class transgender people. While the word transpinay, and conversely transpinoy for transgender men, has gained some traction within the wider trans rights movements in the country, it remains unknown and unused outside of these circles – very rarely and only very recently have the media, for example, used the word to describe transgender women in the news. In Philippine cinema, the word transgender does not exist. Occasionally, a film will use the word ‘transsexual’, most often to refer to a person who has undergone complete gender confirmation surgery. In this chapter, I examine the idea of bodily transformation mainly through two films – the camp superhero movie, Zsazsa Zaturnnah, which is based on a comic book penned by Carlo Vergara, and Miguel/Michelle, the story of a transwoman who returns to her provincial home town in the Philippines after years of living and transitioning in the United States. In Zsazsa Zaturnnah, I examine the transformation of Ada, a bakla salon worker, into Zsazsa, a cisgender female superhero who is forced to battle a group of feminist aliens in an attempt to thwart their goal of eliminating all male forms from the universe. I see this transformation as a realization of the bakla’s ultimate dream – to embody womanhood. Ada’s transformation, however, causes a disconnect between Ada’s true self and his heroic alter ego. Zsazsa is portrayed as a temporary embodiment of female power that ultimately fails to defeat the colonialist radical feminist agenda. She is forced to transform back into Ada in order to defeat the aliens. I argue that this shows how the bakla challenges toxic feminism, which aims to exclude both transgender women and cisgender (gay) men from realms of…
This chapter explores Philippine cinema’s representations of the bakla, a local gendered identity... more This chapter explores Philippine cinema’s representations of the bakla, a local gendered identity that conflates ideas of male homosexuality and transgenderism. By examining the films of Dolphy, the chapter outlines tropes that have become associated with the bakla, including the conversion trope, wherein the bakla are forced to conform to traditional notions of masculinity. The chapter also identifies tensions between contemporary representations of the bakla as the masculine gay man and as the transgender woman in films—tensions that also exist within the wider Southeast Asian context. Looking at the bakla as the primary queer figure in Philippine cinema enables film audiences to examine more closely similar figures in other Asian cinemas: the kathoey of Thailand, the waria of Indonesia, and the mak-nyah of Malaysia.
Akda: The Asian Journal of Literature, Culture, Performance, 2022
In this short essay, I reflect on representations and themes in trans cinema in the Philippines. ... more In this short essay, I reflect on representations and themes in trans cinema in the Philippines. I examine the emerging and intersecting themes of precarity and motherhood in two recent films –Rod Singh’s Mamu and a Mother too (2018), and Isabel Sandoval’s Lingua Franca (2020). I look at how economic and social precarity tends to pervade the lives of trans women, and how transness itself becomes a form of precarity under the legal system’s lack of accommodation to trans rights. I also examine trans motherhood and make the argument that while it destabilizes biology as the root of motherhood, it also reifies traditional tropes of Filipina motherhood that center it on self-sacrifice. Finally, I look at how precarity and motherhood intersect in Philippine Trans Cinema.
1. In this paper I explore the portrayal of a Filipino gendered identity, the bakla, and its diff... more 1. In this paper I explore the portrayal of a Filipino gendered identity, the bakla, and its differentiation from a hegemonic construct of 'global gay identity' in the film Here Comes the Bride, released in 2010 and directed by Christ Martinez. Bakla is a construct that conflates cross-dressing, effeminacy, male homosexuality and low class status. Utilising Nancy Fox's method of multimodal critical discourse analysis, as demonstrated in her analysis of the Hollywood film The Kids are All Right (Lisa Cholodenko, 2010),[1] I study the film in terms of three component modes: linguistic, visual and performative. The linguistic mode examines the film's use of language as reflected in all aspects of the scripting; the visual mode examines the use of mise-en-scène such as costumes, props and settings; and the performative mode examines how the characters are shaped by the actors in terms of body movement, facial expression, speech patterns and type-casting. These three mode...
ASEAN Queer Imaginings, 2021
The SAGE Handbook of Global Sexualities, 2020
This chapter examines the interactions between the bakla as an embodiment of femininity and globa... more This chapter examines the interactions between the bakla as an embodiment of femininity and global transgender discourse by looking at how acts of transitioning and embodiment are represented in films from the Philippines. Bakla is a Tagalog term and gendered identity that is a hybrid of the ideas of male homosexuality, transgenderism, cross-dressing, and effeminacy. The most common bakla trope is that of a woman trapped inside a man’s body – a concept that is similar to how transgenderism is understood.
I argue that while both global trans discourse and kabaklaan (being bakla) are rooted in an interiorized disconnect between the body, mind, and spirit, kabaklaan offers an alternative discourse to this interiority that does not pathologize or medicalize this disconnect. I further argue that because many other performative aspects of kabaklaan resonate with global trans discourses, local social movements have adopted these global discourses in framing their struggle under legal Human Rights frameworks. Philippine cinema, however, offers an alternative viewpoint that does not necessarily reflect trans struggles as a human rights issue, but rather as an issue of social, particularly familial, acceptance.
The Philippines’ unique colonial history has also influenced how the bakla is conceptualized: three centuries of Spanish Catholic rule attempted, unsuccessfully, to root out practices of transvestism and homosexuality as immoral, while fifty rapid years of modernization under the American regime brought into the country discourses that pathologized both cross-dressing and same-sex sexuality. The bakla, in short, has become doubly marginalized because of the dominant religious discourse that codes him and his sexuality as immoral and psychiatric discourse that brands him as mentally abnormal. As such, it is no surprise that the word is also commonly used as a pejorative. However, the word remains perhaps the most popular and common signifier for a (male) person whose performance of gender or sexuality falls short of heteronormative ideals.
The rise of LGBT rights social movements in the country, as well as the growing popularity of the global gay lifestyle, during the 1990s has also impacted how the bakla is understood in contemporary society. For many Filipino middle class gay men in urban settings, the term remains a pejorative drawn along lines of socio-economic status and the performance of classical masculinity, as well as sexual desire directed toward other gay men, instead of the bakla’s penchant for cisgender, heterosexual men. The term bakla is more commonly associated with the lower class, effeminate ‘parlor gays’ who work in lower class salons. The term bakla is also, quite oddly, rejected by many transwomen. The Society of Transsexual Women of the Philippines (STRAP) coined the term ‘transpinay’ in 2008 in an attempt to localize global trans discourse. The term is a combination of the words ‘trans’ and ‘pinay’, the colloquial Tagalog word for women. Bakla, for these transwomen, connotes maleness and the inability to embody womanhood, but I also argue that there is a strong class bias around the use of the word bakla in these transgender social movements, most of which are comprised of well-educated, middle class transgender people. While the word transpinay, and conversely transpinoy for transgender men, has gained some traction within the wider trans rights movements in the country, it remains unknown and unused outside of these circles – very rarely and only very recently have the media, for example, used the word to describe transgender women in the news.
In Philippine cinema, the word transgender does not exist. Occasionally, a film will use the word ‘transsexual’, most often to refer to a person who has undergone complete gender confirmation surgery. In this chapter, I examine the idea of bodily transformation mainly through two films – the camp superhero movie, Zsazsa Zaturnnah, which is based on a comic book penned by Carlo Vergara, and Miguel/Michelle, the story of a transwoman who returns to her provincial home town in the Philippines after years of living and transitioning in the United States.
In Zsazsa Zaturnnah, I examine the transformation of Ada, a bakla salon worker, into Zsazsa, a cisgender female superhero who is forced to battle a group of feminist aliens in an attempt to thwart their goal of eliminating all male forms from the universe. I see this transformation as a realization of the bakla’s ultimate dream – to embody womanhood. Ada’s transformation, however, causes a disconnect between Ada’s true self and his heroic alter ego. Zsazsa is portrayed as a temporary embodiment of female power that ultimately fails to defeat the colonialist radical feminist agenda. She is forced to transform back into Ada in order to defeat the aliens. I argue that this shows how the bakla challenges toxic feminism, which aims to exclude both transgender women and cisgender (gay) men from realms of power. Ada also challenges the privileges of the “fully transitioned” transgender woman by reclaiming his male anatomy and still being able to remain a feminine figure.
Miguel/Michelle follows the struggles of Michelle, a returned Overseas Filipino Worker, who has completed her transition abroad and has come home to seek her family’s acceptance. I read the film alongside transgender discourse in academia and activism, and argue that while these discourses push for the legal rights of trans people, in the Philippines, trans rights are centered around ideas of social acceptance and familial bond.
The Palgrave Handbook of Asian Cinema, 2018
This chapter explores Philippine cinema's representations of the bakla, a local gendered identity... more This chapter explores Philippine cinema's representations of the bakla, a local gendered identity that conflates ideas of male homosexuality and transgenderism. By examining the films of Dolphy, the chapter outlines tropes that have become associated with the bakla, including the conversion trope, where the bakla are forced to conform to traditional notions of masculinity. The chapter also identifies tensions between contemporary representations of the bakla as the masculine gay man and as the transgender woman in films-tensions that also exist within the wider Southeast Asian context. Looking at the bakla as the primary queer figure in Philippine cinema enables film audiences to examine more closely similar figures in other Asian cinemas: the kathoey of Thailand, the waria of Indonesia, and the mak-nyah of Malaysia.
In this paper I explore the portrayal of a Filipino gendered identity, the bakla, and its differe... more In this paper I explore the portrayal of a Filipino gendered identity, the bakla, and its differentiation from a hegemonic construct of 'global gay identity' in the film Here Comes the Bride, released in 2010 and directed by Christ Martinez. Bakla is a construct that conflates cross-dressing, effeminacy, male homosexuality and low class status. Utilising Nancy Fox's method of multimodal critical discourse analysis, I study the film in terms of three component modes: linguistic, visual and performative. The linguistic mode examines the film's use of language as reflected in all aspects of the scripting; the visual mode examines the use of mise-en-scène such as costumes, props and settings; and the performative mode examines how the characters are shaped by the actors in terms of body movement, facial expression, speech patterns and type-casting. These three modes intersect and together construct and reflect discourses on gender in film. 2. The primary theoretical interest of my method is Judith Butler's theory of gender performativity; and her general work in Queer Theory that denaturalises concepts of sex, gender and sexuality by claiming no essential meaning or necessary interrelation.[2] Butler exposed the social construction of each in orthodox feminist discourse which she claims essentialises the idea of gender by rooting it in the sexed body. She calls the easy assignation of gender and the assumption of a 'natural' sexuality the 'heterosexual matrix,' where a person's sex is held to determine her gender and gender determines desire.[3] Butler proposes that instead of understanding gender as a predetermined given, we can understand it as the result of a constant repetition of behaviours that constitute a set of socially sanctioned actions for one sex or the other.[4] Gender, in other words, is the result of performance rather than a stable, fixed attribute. 3. The universalising implications here are, of course, problematic. The academic and writer J. Neil Garcia has problematised Butler's notion of performativity for the Philippine context by critically examining her example of drag performance—how cross-dressing exposes the fluid conditions of gender and sexuality—in relation to the bakla.[5] In Philippine culture, identity is rooted in ideas of the interior self: the kalooban,[6] which literally means 'that which is inside.' While Butler's heterosexual matrix does exist materially in the Philippines, gender does not strictly operate on binaries of male/female and masculine/feminine.[7] A popular childhood rhyme 'Girl, Boy, Bakla, Tomboy' features four genders: between heteronormative (girl, boy) and non-heteronormative (bakla, tomboy).[8] The two [purportedly] non-heteronormative genders are understood as people whose interior genders do not match their exterior bodies. The bakla, for example, has traditionally been defined as a 'woman-hearted man.'[9] This rooting of the self in the interior explains why the bakla cannot sufficiently expose the fluidity of gender, unlike the performance of drag does. Further, kabaklaan— being bakla—does not disrupt ideas of gender but is an embodiment of the otherness of the female sex. Local discourses on the ontological nature of the bakla (including 'woman trapped inside the body of a man') claim that the feminine expression of this gender is essential and that bakla are women. The incursion of western-derived identity discourses could, of course, allow the bakla to adopt other labels for their gender and sexuality; gay, for example, has become a more politically correct term for bakla in contemporary times.
殷美琪 Mikee INTON 摘要 本文將分析菲律賓、泰國及印尼以男同志為題材的電影中，在男性身上體現 的酷兒特質。菲律賓、泰國及印尼這三個國家均有悠長的性別跨越傳統，而這些 傳統亦隨著歷史演... more 殷美琪 Mikee INTON 摘要 本文將分析菲律賓、泰國及印尼以男同志為題材的電影中，在男性身上體現 的酷兒特質。菲律賓、泰國及印尼這三個國家均有悠長的性別跨越傳統，而這些 傳統亦隨著歷史演變，在現代社會以獨特的形態呈現：菲律賓的 bakla、泰國的 kathoey、及印尼的 waria 族群。透過三地例子的相互對照，本文嘗試探討不同 的性別操演策略及性別體現，以及勾勒出性別恐懼及恐同意識如何透過電影影響 該地區的主流性別論述。
This chapter examines the interactions between the bakla as an embodiment of femininity and globa... more This chapter examines the interactions between the bakla as an embodiment of femininity and global transgender discourse by looking at how acts of transitioning and embodiment are represented in films from the Philippines. Bakla is a Tagalog term and gendered identity that is a hybrid of the ideas of male homosexuality, transgenderism, cross-dressing, and effeminacy. The most common bakla trope is that of a woman trapped inside a man’s body – a concept that is similar to how transgenderism is understood. I argue that while both global trans discourse and kabaklaan (being bakla) are rooted in an interiorized disconnect between the body, mind, and spirit, kabaklaan offers an alternative discourse to this interiority that does not pathologize or medicalize this disconnect. I further argue that because many other performative aspects of kabaklaan resonate with global trans discourses, local social movements have adopted these global discourses in framing their struggle under legal Human Rights frameworks. Philippine cinema, however, offers an alternative viewpoint that does not necessarily reflect trans struggles as a human rights issue, but rather as an issue of social, particularly familial, acceptance. The Philippines’ unique colonial history has also influenced how the bakla is conceptualized: three centuries of Spanish Catholic rule attempted, unsuccessfully, to root out practices of transvestism and homosexuality as immoral, while fifty rapid years of modernization under the American regime brought into the country discourses that pathologized both cross-dressing and same-sex sexuality. The bakla, in short, has become doubly marginalized because of the dominant religious discourse that codes him and his sexuality as immoral and psychiatric discourse that brands him as mentally abnormal. As such, it is no surprise that the word is also commonly used as a pejorative. However, the word remains perhaps the most popular and common signifier for a (male) person whose performance of gender or sexuality falls short of heteronormative ideals. The rise of LGBT rights social movements in the country, as well as the growing popularity of the global gay lifestyle, during the 1990s has also impacted how the bakla is understood in contemporary society. For many Filipino middle class gay men in urban settings, the term remains a pejorative drawn along lines of socio-economic status and the performance of classical masculinity, as well as sexual desire directed toward other gay men, instead of the bakla’s penchant for cisgender, heterosexual men. The term bakla is more commonly associated with the lower class, effeminate ‘parlor gays’ who work in lower class salons. The term bakla is also, quite oddly, rejected by many transwomen. The Society of Transsexual Women of the Philippines (STRAP) coined the term ‘transpinay’ in 2008 in an attempt to localize global trans discourse. The term is a combination of the words ‘trans’ and ‘pinay’, the colloquial Tagalog word for women. Bakla, for these transwomen, connotes maleness and the inability to embody womanhood, but I also argue that there is a strong class bias around the use of the word bakla in these transgender social movements, most of which are comprised of well-educated, middle class transgender people. While the word transpinay, and conversely transpinoy for transgender men, has gained some traction within the wider trans rights movements in the country, it remains unknown and unused outside of these circles – very rarely and only very recently have the media, for example, used the word to describe transgender women in the news. In Philippine cinema, the word transgender does not exist. Occasionally, a film will use the word ‘transsexual’, most often to refer to a person who has undergone complete gender confirmation surgery. In this chapter, I examine the idea of bodily transformation mainly through two films – the camp superhero movie, Zsazsa Zaturnnah, which is based on a comic book penned by Carlo Vergara, and Miguel/Michelle, the story of a transwoman who returns to her provincial home town in the Philippines after years of living and transitioning in the United States. In Zsazsa Zaturnnah, I examine the transformation of Ada, a bakla salon worker, into Zsazsa, a cisgender female superhero who is forced to battle a group of feminist aliens in an attempt to thwart their goal of eliminating all male forms from the universe. I see this transformation as a realization of the bakla’s ultimate dream – to embody womanhood. Ada’s transformation, however, causes a disconnect between Ada’s true self and his heroic alter ego. Zsazsa is portrayed as a temporary embodiment of female power that ultimately fails to defeat the colonialist radical feminist agenda. She is forced to transform back into Ada in order to defeat the aliens. I argue that this shows how the bakla challenges toxic feminism, which aims to exclude both transgender women and cisgender (gay) men from realms of…
This chapter explores Philippine cinema’s representations of the bakla, a local gendered identity... more This chapter explores Philippine cinema’s representations of the bakla, a local gendered identity that conflates ideas of male homosexuality and transgenderism. By examining the films of Dolphy, the chapter outlines tropes that have become associated with the bakla, including the conversion trope, wherein the bakla are forced to conform to traditional notions of masculinity. The chapter also identifies tensions between contemporary representations of the bakla as the masculine gay man and as the transgender woman in films—tensions that also exist within the wider Southeast Asian context. Looking at the bakla as the primary queer figure in Philippine cinema enables film audiences to examine more closely similar figures in other Asian cinemas: the kathoey of Thailand, the waria of Indonesia, and the mak-nyah of Malaysia.
Akda: The Asian Journal of Literature, Culture, Performance, 2022
In this short essay, I reflect on representations and themes in trans cinema in the Philippines. ... more In this short essay, I reflect on representations and themes in trans cinema in the Philippines. I examine the emerging and intersecting themes of precarity and motherhood in two recent films –Rod Singh’s Mamu and a Mother too (2018), and Isabel Sandoval’s Lingua Franca (2020). I look at how economic and social precarity tends to pervade the lives of trans women, and how transness itself becomes a form of precarity under the legal system’s lack of accommodation to trans rights. I also examine trans motherhood and make the argument that while it destabilizes biology as the root of motherhood, it also reifies traditional tropes of Filipina motherhood that center it on self-sacrifice. Finally, I look at how precarity and motherhood intersect in Philippine Trans Cinema.
1. In this paper I explore the portrayal of a Filipino gendered identity, the bakla, and its diff... more 1. In this paper I explore the portrayal of a Filipino gendered identity, the bakla, and its differentiation from a hegemonic construct of 'global gay identity' in the film Here Comes the Bride, released in 2010 and directed by Christ Martinez. Bakla is a construct that conflates cross-dressing, effeminacy, male homosexuality and low class status. Utilising Nancy Fox's method of multimodal critical discourse analysis, as demonstrated in her analysis of the Hollywood film The Kids are All Right (Lisa Cholodenko, 2010),[1] I study the film in terms of three component modes: linguistic, visual and performative. The linguistic mode examines the film's use of language as reflected in all aspects of the scripting; the visual mode examines the use of mise-en-scène such as costumes, props and settings; and the performative mode examines how the characters are shaped by the actors in terms of body movement, facial expression, speech patterns and type-casting. These three mode...
ASEAN Queer Imaginings, 2021
The SAGE Handbook of Global Sexualities, 2020
This chapter examines the interactions between the bakla as an embodiment of femininity and globa... more This chapter examines the interactions between the bakla as an embodiment of femininity and global transgender discourse by looking at how acts of transitioning and embodiment are represented in films from the Philippines. Bakla is a Tagalog term and gendered identity that is a hybrid of the ideas of male homosexuality, transgenderism, cross-dressing, and effeminacy. The most common bakla trope is that of a woman trapped inside a man’s body – a concept that is similar to how transgenderism is understood.
I argue that while both global trans discourse and kabaklaan (being bakla) are rooted in an interiorized disconnect between the body, mind, and spirit, kabaklaan offers an alternative discourse to this interiority that does not pathologize or medicalize this disconnect. I further argue that because many other performative aspects of kabaklaan resonate with global trans discourses, local social movements have adopted these global discourses in framing their struggle under legal Human Rights frameworks. Philippine cinema, however, offers an alternative viewpoint that does not necessarily reflect trans struggles as a human rights issue, but rather as an issue of social, particularly familial, acceptance.
The Philippines’ unique colonial history has also influenced how the bakla is conceptualized: three centuries of Spanish Catholic rule attempted, unsuccessfully, to root out practices of transvestism and homosexuality as immoral, while fifty rapid years of modernization under the American regime brought into the country discourses that pathologized both cross-dressing and same-sex sexuality. The bakla, in short, has become doubly marginalized because of the dominant religious discourse that codes him and his sexuality as immoral and psychiatric discourse that brands him as mentally abnormal. As such, it is no surprise that the word is also commonly used as a pejorative. However, the word remains perhaps the most popular and common signifier for a (male) person whose performance of gender or sexuality falls short of heteronormative ideals.
The rise of LGBT rights social movements in the country, as well as the growing popularity of the global gay lifestyle, during the 1990s has also impacted how the bakla is understood in contemporary society. For many Filipino middle class gay men in urban settings, the term remains a pejorative drawn along lines of socio-economic status and the performance of classical masculinity, as well as sexual desire directed toward other gay men, instead of the bakla’s penchant for cisgender, heterosexual men. The term bakla is more commonly associated with the lower class, effeminate ‘parlor gays’ who work in lower class salons. The term bakla is also, quite oddly, rejected by many transwomen. The Society of Transsexual Women of the Philippines (STRAP) coined the term ‘transpinay’ in 2008 in an attempt to localize global trans discourse. The term is a combination of the words ‘trans’ and ‘pinay’, the colloquial Tagalog word for women. Bakla, for these transwomen, connotes maleness and the inability to embody womanhood, but I also argue that there is a strong class bias around the use of the word bakla in these transgender social movements, most of which are comprised of well-educated, middle class transgender people. While the word transpinay, and conversely transpinoy for transgender men, has gained some traction within the wider trans rights movements in the country, it remains unknown and unused outside of these circles – very rarely and only very recently have the media, for example, used the word to describe transgender women in the news.
In Philippine cinema, the word transgender does not exist. Occasionally, a film will use the word ‘transsexual’, most often to refer to a person who has undergone complete gender confirmation surgery. In this chapter, I examine the idea of bodily transformation mainly through two films – the camp superhero movie, Zsazsa Zaturnnah, which is based on a comic book penned by Carlo Vergara, and Miguel/Michelle, the story of a transwoman who returns to her provincial home town in the Philippines after years of living and transitioning in the United States.
In Zsazsa Zaturnnah, I examine the transformation of Ada, a bakla salon worker, into Zsazsa, a cisgender female superhero who is forced to battle a group of feminist aliens in an attempt to thwart their goal of eliminating all male forms from the universe. I see this transformation as a realization of the bakla’s ultimate dream – to embody womanhood. Ada’s transformation, however, causes a disconnect between Ada’s true self and his heroic alter ego. Zsazsa is portrayed as a temporary embodiment of female power that ultimately fails to defeat the colonialist radical feminist agenda. She is forced to transform back into Ada in order to defeat the aliens. I argue that this shows how the bakla challenges toxic feminism, which aims to exclude both transgender women and cisgender (gay) men from realms of power. Ada also challenges the privileges of the “fully transitioned” transgender woman by reclaiming his male anatomy and still being able to remain a feminine figure.
Miguel/Michelle follows the struggles of Michelle, a returned Overseas Filipino Worker, who has completed her transition abroad and has come home to seek her family’s acceptance. I read the film alongside transgender discourse in academia and activism, and argue that while these discourses push for the legal rights of trans people, in the Philippines, trans rights are centered around ideas of social acceptance and familial bond.
The Palgrave Handbook of Asian Cinema, 2018
This chapter explores Philippine cinema's representations of the bakla, a local gendered identity... more This chapter explores Philippine cinema's representations of the bakla, a local gendered identity that conflates ideas of male homosexuality and transgenderism. By examining the films of Dolphy, the chapter outlines tropes that have become associated with the bakla, including the conversion trope, where the bakla are forced to conform to traditional notions of masculinity. The chapter also identifies tensions between contemporary representations of the bakla as the masculine gay man and as the transgender woman in films-tensions that also exist within the wider Southeast Asian context. Looking at the bakla as the primary queer figure in Philippine cinema enables film audiences to examine more closely similar figures in other Asian cinemas: the kathoey of Thailand, the waria of Indonesia, and the mak-nyah of Malaysia.
In this paper I explore the portrayal of a Filipino gendered identity, the bakla, and its differe... more In this paper I explore the portrayal of a Filipino gendered identity, the bakla, and its differentiation from a hegemonic construct of 'global gay identity' in the film Here Comes the Bride, released in 2010 and directed by Christ Martinez. Bakla is a construct that conflates cross-dressing, effeminacy, male homosexuality and low class status. Utilising Nancy Fox's method of multimodal critical discourse analysis, I study the film in terms of three component modes: linguistic, visual and performative. The linguistic mode examines the film's use of language as reflected in all aspects of the scripting; the visual mode examines the use of mise-en-scène such as costumes, props and settings; and the performative mode examines how the characters are shaped by the actors in terms of body movement, facial expression, speech patterns and type-casting. These three modes intersect and together construct and reflect discourses on gender in film. 2. The primary theoretical interest of my method is Judith Butler's theory of gender performativity; and her general work in Queer Theory that denaturalises concepts of sex, gender and sexuality by claiming no essential meaning or necessary interrelation.[2] Butler exposed the social construction of each in orthodox feminist discourse which she claims essentialises the idea of gender by rooting it in the sexed body. She calls the easy assignation of gender and the assumption of a 'natural' sexuality the 'heterosexual matrix,' where a person's sex is held to determine her gender and gender determines desire.[3] Butler proposes that instead of understanding gender as a predetermined given, we can understand it as the result of a constant repetition of behaviours that constitute a set of socially sanctioned actions for one sex or the other.[4] Gender, in other words, is the result of performance rather than a stable, fixed attribute. 3. The universalising implications here are, of course, problematic. The academic and writer J. Neil Garcia has problematised Butler's notion of performativity for the Philippine context by critically examining her example of drag performance—how cross-dressing exposes the fluid conditions of gender and sexuality—in relation to the bakla.[5] In Philippine culture, identity is rooted in ideas of the interior self: the kalooban,[6] which literally means 'that which is inside.' While Butler's heterosexual matrix does exist materially in the Philippines, gender does not strictly operate on binaries of male/female and masculine/feminine.[7] A popular childhood rhyme 'Girl, Boy, Bakla, Tomboy' features four genders: between heteronormative (girl, boy) and non-heteronormative (bakla, tomboy).[8] The two [purportedly] non-heteronormative genders are understood as people whose interior genders do not match their exterior bodies. The bakla, for example, has traditionally been defined as a 'woman-hearted man.'[9] This rooting of the self in the interior explains why the bakla cannot sufficiently expose the fluidity of gender, unlike the performance of drag does. Further, kabaklaan— being bakla—does not disrupt ideas of gender but is an embodiment of the otherness of the female sex. Local discourses on the ontological nature of the bakla (including 'woman trapped inside the body of a man') claim that the feminine expression of this gender is essential and that bakla are women. The incursion of western-derived identity discourses could, of course, allow the bakla to adopt other labels for their gender and sexuality; gay, for example, has become a more politically correct term for bakla in contemporary times.
殷美琪 Mikee INTON 摘要 本文將分析菲律賓、泰國及印尼以男同志為題材的電影中，在男性身上體現 的酷兒特質。菲律賓、泰國及印尼這三個國家均有悠長的性別跨越傳統，而這些 傳統亦隨著歷史演... more 殷美琪 Mikee INTON 摘要 本文將分析菲律賓、泰國及印尼以男同志為題材的電影中，在男性身上體現 的酷兒特質。菲律賓、泰國及印尼這三個國家均有悠長的性別跨越傳統，而這些 傳統亦隨著歷史演變，在現代社會以獨特的形態呈現：菲律賓的 bakla、泰國的 kathoey、及印尼的 waria 族群。透過三地例子的相互對照，本文嘗試探討不同 的性別操演策略及性別體現，以及勾勒出性別恐懼及恐同意識如何透過電影影響 該地區的主流性別論述。