ABSTRACT
This chapter reflects on the question of interlinguality and how it may prove critically generative to frame our inquiries into the specificities of LGBT critical and theoretical work in our and perhaps other global locations from the perspective of how translational it all is. This is especially the case to the degree that, around the world, LGBT discourse is being conducted in the anglophonic register, which merely reflects trends in technological and cultural globalisation as a whole. Translation can serve as a conceptually generative frame within which to resituate questions about race, class, gender, and sexuality, as these are being increasingly “articulated” in various locations in Southeast Asia. This chapter argues that the “moderately nativist” position in the study of gender and sexuality in the postcolonial context is simply another register of the critical position that recognises the translational dynamic between local and translocal—between “oral” and “textual,” “traditional” and “modern,” “Western” and “postcolonial”—conceptual histories. It is these histories that the chapter seeks to unpack, primarily through postcolonial readings of two key anglophone Philippine literary and critical “gay” texts.
