ABSTRACT
The reality of urban-based lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) politics in the Philippines testifies to the fact that the city is the privileged site of sexological knowledge dissemination: it is the conceptual and actual space where the ‘perverse implantations’ of global genders and sexualities have taken root and fructified. While it can be easy to fall into the habit of reading LGBT discourse as a simplistic form of cosmopolitan consciousness, in this case we need to insist on interpreting its narratives as complex post-colonial texts. This is precisely what Garcia seeks to do in this chapter: to read in the unpublished novel of Severino Montano – an important and well-traveled anglophone writer and dramatist from the first half of the 20th century – the urbane process through which Filipino gender concepts have been sexualised, mainly with the entry of modern and English-based psychological knowledges, which nonetheless created the possibility for a ‘reverse-discourse’ to be espoused by the discursive subjects this process has paradoxically produced. In particular, Garcia argues that this sexualisation is, by definition, translational, and as Montano’s work demonstrates, it is characterised by slippages and creative transformations between the source and target texts. The ironic and ‘resistant’ dynamics of this translation are easily evident in Montano’s cosmopolitanising project to masculinise the bakla, whose gender-transitive identity remains foundational to his text, despite or precisely because of his wilful attempt to supplant it.
