ABSTRACT
Kaming Mga Talyada (aka We Who Are Sexy) was produced in 1962 for the Filipino domestic film market by Sampaguita Pictures, one of the major studios in the Philippines (Cayado, 1962). It was an ephemeral piece of popular entertainment that took advantage of the extended appearance of U.S. trans-sexual celebrity Christine Jorgensen at a Manila nightclub in order to weave a surprising complex tale of contemporary Filipino gender and sexuality. In spite of the film’s light comic tone, Kaming Mga Talyada substantively engages with the effects of the newly spectacularized medico-juridical discourse of transsexuality—which circulated globally in the 1950s and 60s via the figure of Christine Jorgensen—on Filipino configurations of sex/gender/sexuality/identity and thus on the biopolitical equations by means of which sovereign power reproduced and sustained itself.
