LGBT Studies in the Philippines
... As the acronym itself announces, LGBT Studies describes a method, field and perspective of academic inquiry into gender and sexuality, as these relate to, inform and challenge the question of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender politics and identities. As such, while arguably content-specific, LGBT Studies to me signifies primarily a point-of-view, a political and politicized approach toward the question of non-heteronormative forms of identity and desire. ... Nonetheless, LGBT functions less as a name as a marker, a heuristic one, that signals the sheer undiscipline of identities that fall outside this norm. In the Philippines, some of these identities are bakla, bayot, tomboy, lakin-on, agi and bantut. ... interrogations, LGBT Studies nonetheless supersedes existing narratives of identity-formation by furthering both a sexuality-oriented, anti-homophobic critique, and a critique that seeks to describe, as well as to defend, gender non-conformity (such a critique may be called, in the case of male-to-female transgenderism, anti-effeminophobic; sorry, but I don’t know the counterpart term in the case of female-to-male transgenderism). One might say that LGBT Studies treats issues of both sexual dissidence (homo-, bi- and other eccentric sexualities) and gender dissidence (androgyny, effeminacy, hyperfemininity, transsexuality, drag, etc.) The great and uneasy message of diversity-through-unity (or unity-through-diversity) that inheres in the political label “LGBT,?itself bespeaks the kind of beautifully savage and productive tension that we in the LGBT movement are keenly aware of. I propose that LGBT Studies constitutes the academic front of the LGBT movement. ... In other words, the work of LGBT Studies may be seen to be as much about identity-construction as identity-deconstruction; as much about self-affirmation as auto-critique; as much about myth-making as demystification.