Making a Scene

Transpinay: Genealogy of a term

“…The separation of gay and bakla from transgender, as a disentanglement of gender and sexuality, can be attributed to two broad shifts in LGBT politics in the Philippines in recent years: on the one hand, the rise of a gay male globality, and on the other, the rise of a trans globality, both of which position themselves in relation to the bakla figure. One shift involves the rise of global gay subjects, which Benedicto argues has led to an ongoing disappearance of the bakla (2014). In his study gay globality in urban Manila, Benedicto writes about “the classed and feminized figure of the bakla —a local sexual formation often read as a conflation of homosexuality, transvestism, and lower class status—as an outsider within, a specter linked to the past…” (2014: 11).…”

“…One shift involves the rise of global gay subjects, which Benedicto argues has led to an ongoing disappearance of the bakla (2014). In his study gay globality in urban Manila, Benedicto writes about “the classed and feminized figure of the bakla —a local sexual formation often read as a conflation of homosexuality, transvestism, and lower class status—as an outsider within, a specter linked to the past…” (2014: 11). Benedicto then describes how the “bright lights scene,” or the spaces of gay globality characterized by incorporation into politics, consumer markets, and mainstream gay media representations, tries to “exorcise” the figure of the bakla , but that the bakla figure “keeps returning, not because it still exists as a tradition, but because the scene requires it, keeps it as a mirror that holds up an image of what gay life ‘was,’ what it might still be, and what it might become again if the scene stumbles on the march toward ‘modernity’ and fails to plug those lines of flight that steer it ‘backwards’” (2014: 11).…”

“…Whereas bakla and beki/becky contain what might viewed as a conflation of gender and sexuality, the announcement that transpinay is not bakla or beki/becky helps to produce rather than just describe the categorical distinction between gender identity and sexual orientation. Put simply, the emergence and uptake of transpinay has helped to institutionalize a further separation of gender and sexuality in the Philippines, a process similar to how globalized gay men in the Philippines, in their embrace of masculinity, distanced themselves from the effeminate bakla (Benedicto, 2014; Manalansan, 2003). This discussion also resembles processes that Halberstam has described as “subtle discursive shifts which have made transgenderism in the United States and Europe into simultaneously a mark of the historically specific definitional cleaving of homosexuality from gender variance” (2012: 344).…”

The Aversion to Theory

“…We witness things about social life, pose our questions, and make methodological moves always already with a set of ideas, perspectives, analyses, and theories in tow. Think about what it would mean to bring Michel de Certeau into the space of a hotel suite in Metro Manila to punctuate a story about gay pleasures spiked with ennui (Benedicto, 2014, p. 42). Or to marshal the idea of the “hybrid collectif,” first articulated in the conceptual terrain of the sociology of science and technology, to explain the complex deadliness of America’s policing of its southern borders (De León, 2015, pp.…”