TRANSGENDER, TRANSNATIONAL, TRANSPINAY: JENNIFER LAUDE AND TRANS NECROPOLITICS IN THE

Zachary Frial

Faculty Advisor: You-Me Park

A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Award of Honors in Culture and Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University Spring 2018

Table of Contents Introduction: Gendered Bodies, Sovereign Bodies ...... 1 Securing/Subduing the Asia-Pacific ...... 2 Literature Review...... 3 Methodology and Chapter Organization ...... 4 Keywords ...... 6 Transpinay...... 6 Transnational...... 8 Neocolonial ...... 9 Necropolitical ...... 10 CHAPTER 1: Jennifer Laude-as-“Symbol of the Oppressed Nation” ...... 12 The Gaze and the Abject Trans Body: ...... 13 Abject Humor: Beauty Pageants and Suffer SiReyna: ...... 14 Gloc 9’s “Sirena”: Pageantry of Suffering: ...... 16 Ang Ladlad and the Anti-Discrimination Bill:...... 18 National Day of Outrage: Capturing the Cisgender Gaze: ...... 20 Conclusion: Returning the Gaze: ...... 22 CHAPTER 2: Jennifer Laude-as-Transnational Migrant ...... 24 Agency and Desire: ...... 25 Instrumentalizing the Excess: ...... 27 Desiring Labor: ...... 28 “Virtuous Third World Subjects”: ...... 29 Disciplining Desires: ...... 31 Transnational Limbo: ...... 31 Citizen-Wives and Strategy-Driven Love: ...... 33 Conclusion: Desiring Life, Desiring Death: ...... 35 CHAPTER 3: Jennifer Laude-as-“Collateral Damage” ...... 37 Liberty and Liability: ...... 38 The Sexscapes of Subic Bay: ...... 39 The Other Side of Paradise: ...... 41

Making Way for Paradise: ...... 43 “Pimps of the Nation”: ...... 45 Conclusion: Finding Feminist Resistance:...... 46 CHAPTER 4: Jennifer Laude-as-Breadwinner ...... 48 Circulating Family Care:...... 49 Creative Excess:...... 52 Becoming “Both Mother and Father”: ...... 55 Conclusion: Engendering Trans Being: ...... 57 Epilogue: Trans Necropolitics in the Age of Duterte ...... 58 Virtual Migrants: ...... 59 “Rich Person VIP, Poor Person RIP”: ...... 62 Conclusion: ...... 64 Works Cited ...... 65 Frial 1

Introduction: Gendered Bodies, Sovereign Bodies

On the night of October 11, 2014, Filipina woman Jennifer Laude was drowned by U.S. marine Private First Class Joseph Scott Pemberton, who argued that Laude had deceived and “raped” him by failing to disclose she was . The murder took place in the city of Olongapo, its Magsaysay Drive well-known for catering to the sexual pleasures of U.S. servicemen stationed at its naval base in Subic Bay.1 After Pemberton was accused and scheduled for trial, U.S. authorities refused to hand him over to the Philippine National Police, even after he was convicted. The United States cited that Pemberton was protected under the Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA) of 1998, which gave the U.S. jurisdiction over any criminal activities committed by its servicemen.2 Given that Pemberton committed the murder following the annual joint U.S.-Philippine military exercises, politicians and activists across the Philippines called for the immediate termination of both the VFA and the recently signed Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA).3 Negotiated a mere six months before Laude’s murder, the EDCA granted the United States permission to access Philippine military installations and boost its troop presence, which many activists viewed as a reversal of the 1991 Senate decision that permanently closed the U.S. bases in the country. Because it was approved without consent of the Philippine Senate, the EDCA was challenged on grounds of unconstitutionality; however, the Philippine Supreme Court upheld the agreement, stating that the EDCA was merely an extension of the already Senate-approved VFA.4 According to Judy Taguiwalo, Director of the University of the Philippines Center for Women’s Studies, the death of Jennifer Laude was a “hate on the basis of identity, a heinous case of gender-based violence, and an issue of national sovereignty.”5 Clearly not an isolated incident, for many leftists, the murder of Laude was indicative of the violence that women face as a result of imperialism and military occupation. Laude lay at the nexus of gendered and (neo)colonial subjugation: a victim as much of history as of masculinist projections of military power abroad, a figure as much of disgust to the cishetero-sensibilities of Pemberton as of abjection to the nation which she once called home. This thesis aims to fill the lacuna left by Robert Diaz in his article, “The Limits of and Gay,” seeking to “unpack the political nuances embedded in how Laude’s death has accrued meaning.”6 While no peer-edited journal article has yet been published situating Laude’s murder within its greater (neo)colonial context, numerous blogs, news articles, speeches, and statements

1. Meredith Talusan, “The Aftermath of a U.S. Marine’s Conviction in the Death of a Philippine ,” BuzzFeed News, last modified January 3, 2016, https://www.buzzfeed.com/meredithtalusan/the-aftermath- of-jennifer-laude-and-joseph-scott-pemberton?utm_term=.sgp5dPKaj#.bryeD1vXP. 2. Evalyn G. Ursua, “VFA and the Issue of Custody,” ABS-CBN News, last modified October 23, 2014, http://news.abs-cbn.com/blogs/opinions/10/22/14/vfa-and-issue-custody. 3. Allan Macatuno, “Laude Kin Joins Call to End Military Exercises with U.S.,” Philippine Daily Inquirer, last modified October 12, 2016, http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/824235/laude-kin-join-calls-to-end-military-exercises- with-u-s. 4. Ina Reformina, “SC Rules EDCA Is Constitutional,” ABS-CBN News, last modified January 12, 2016, http://news.abs-cbn.com/nation/01/12/16/sc-rules-edca-is-constitutional. 5. Judy M. Taguiwalo, “Justice for Jennifer Laude is Justice for Filipino Women is Justice for the Nation,” Asia Pacific Forum on Women, Leadership, and Development, last modified October 21, 2014, http://apwld.org/ justice-for-jennifer-laude-is-justice-for-filipino-women-is-justice-for-the-nation/. 6. Robert Diaz, “The Limits of Bakla and Gay: Feminist Readings of My Husband’s Lover, Vice Ganda, and Charice Pempengco,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 40, no. 3 (2015): 724, accessed April 13, 2018, https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/ abs/10.1086/679526. Frial 2 from politicians and activist groups have already provided their input. My work intends to expand beyond these analytical frameworks by tying Laude’s murder to transgender necropolitics; however, before doing so, I will briefly summarize the existing arguments here.

Securing/Subduing the Asia-Pacific:

After its victory in the Spanish-American War of 1898, the United States gained control over the Philippines from Spain in exchange for $20 million. A half-century later, after “liberating” the Philippines from imperial Japan during the Second World War, the U.S. granted independence to the archipelago in 1946. To ensure continued military access to its former colony, the U.S. signed both the Military Bases Agreement (MBA) and the Mutual Defense Treaty (MDT). However, strong anti-U.S. sentiment led to the Philippine Senate’s non-renewal of the MBA in 1991, supposedly leading to the permanently closure of Clark Air Base and Subic Bay Naval Station. Nevertheless, the U.S. returned to the Philippine islands through the Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA) in 1998, establishing joint “Balikatan” exercises between the two countries’ militaries. With President Benigno Aquino signing of the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) in 2014, the U.S. regained access to their old bases and license to construct new facilities.7 Leftist groups like the Gabriela Women’s Party explicitly tied this “betrayal” of Philippine sovereignty to gender violence, stating that the EDCA allows for the “rape of PH territory, resources and the rape of our women and children.”8 Indeed, the murder of Jennifer Laude following the 2014 Balikatan exercises at Subic Bay merely served as confirmation of this point. News outlets, politicians, and activists were quick to relate Laude’s murder to the Subic rape case, in which a U.S. marine was charged with (and later acquitted of) raping a Filipina woman named “Nicole” just nine years prior.9 Most immediately, the EDCA was a counter-response to China’s claims over the resource-rich Spratly Islands and Scarborough Shoal – an indirect way for the U.S. to project military power over the South China Sea. In addition to being prime fishing grounds and harboring an estimated 20 billion barrels of oil, over 1.2 trillion dollars of U.S. goods pass through this strategic maritime area. Despite claims from U.S. President Barack Obama to the contrary, foreign policy analysts agree that the signing of the EDCA furthered U.S. aims to contain a growing China and protect its geopolitical interests in the region, a strategy dubbed the “Pivot to Asia.”10 By the numbers, the U.S. planned to deploy 60 percent of its navy in the Pacific by 2020, increase its Marine presence in Australia, and stage joint training exercises with Thailand, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Myanmar, in addition to the operations already carried out in the Philippines, Japan, and South Korea. 11 In this way, Obama’s Pivot to Asia

7. Eleanor Albert, “The U.S-Philippine Defense Alliance,” Council on Foreign Relations, last modified October 21, 2016, https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/us-philippines-defense-alliance. 8. “Sad Day for PH Sovereignty, Environment – Activists,” Rappler.com, last modified January 12, 2016, https://www.rappler.com/move-ph/118766-sad-day-philippine-sovereignty-environment-activists. 9. Carmela Fonbuena, “EDCA, Olongapo Murder, and the Old Case of Daniel Smith,” Rappler.com, last modified October 28, 2014, https://www.rappler.com/nation/71871-edca-olongapo-daniel-smith. 10. Frederick Pai, “Territorial Disputes in the South China Sea,” NATO Association of Canada, last modified May 5, 2014, http://natoassociation.ca/territorial-disputes-in-the-south-china-sea/. 11. Christine Ahn, “Open Fire and Open Markets: The Asia-Pacific Pivot and Trans-Pacific Partnership,” Foreign Policy in Focus, last modified January 14, 2014, http://fpif.org/open-fire-open-markets-asia-pacific-pivot- trans-pacific-partnership/. Frial 3 aimed to curb China by projecting hegemonic influence over the surrounding Asia-Pacific nations, at significant expense to territorialized citizens like Jennifer Laude.

Literature Review:

As of April 2018, with the exception of a short article analyzing how Filipino and American media framed the murder,12 there are no publications that focus directly on the political implications of the Jennifer Laude case. Referenced in a mere three texts, the murder stands more as a footnote than a point of inquiry.13 As transgender necropolitics forms the conceptual backbone of this thesis, I draw heavily from Achille Mbembe’s original articulation of necropolitics (expanding on the Foucauldian concept of biopower), Jasbir Puar’s elaboration of queer necropolitics, and C. Riley Snorton, Jin Haritaworn, and Aren Z. Aizura’s applications of necropower to trans-of-color contexts.14 In this thesis, I hope to employ these theoretical frameworks to understand the various factors that resulted in the murder of Jennifer Laude. Given the complex nature of this project, my thesis draws from the work of numerous other scholars whose work falls at the intersections of gender, violence, imperialism, and transnationality.15 They can roughly be categorized into three themes: militarism and gender,16 work,17 and gender and migration.18 Despite scholars like Cynthia Enloe providing crucial

12. Adrian Alarilla, “The Framed Victim: Analyzing the Jennifer Laude Case in American and Filipino News Reports,” (Proceedings of The National Conference on Undergraduate Research (NCUR), University of Washington, 2015), accessed April 13, 2018, http://www.ncurproceedings.org/ojs/index.php/NCUR2015/article/ viewFile/1268/862. 13. See Diaz, “The Limits of Bakla and Gay,” 72; Michael Hawkins, “Liberty Call at Sunset: Belonging, Ageing Masculinities and Transnational Marriage in Subic Bay, Philippines” (master’s thesis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2017), 24-26, accessed April 13, 2018, https://cdr.lib.unc.edu/record/uuid:3646bc96-a435- 48c3-9401-bd02e4414be4; and Dana Collins, The Rise and Fall of an Urban Sexual Community: Malate (Dis)placed (Los Angeles: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 181n1. In Collins, the reference to Laude quite literally appears in a footnote. 14. In the following “Keywords” section, I delve more into the meanings of necropower and necropolitics, especially as they relate to queer and trans bodies of color. 15. Due to the amount of scholars I draw from, in order to conserve space, I have chosen to summarize the arguments of these scholars toward the beginning of each chapter, as is relevant. 16. See Cynthia Enloe, Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000); Anne-Marie Hilsdon, Madonnas and Martyrs: Militarism and Violence in the Philippines (Quezon City, Philippines: Ateneo de Manila Press, 1995); and Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez, Securing Paradise: Tourism and Militarism in Hawaii and the Philippines (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013). 17. See Denise Brennan, What’s Love Got to Do With It? Transnational Desire and Sex Tourism in the Dominican Republic (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, Illicit Flirtations: Labor, Migration, and Sex Trafficking in Tokyo (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011); and Lieba Faier, Intimate Encounters: Filipina Women and the Remaking of Rural Japan (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 2009). 18. See Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, “Migrant Filipina Domestic Workers and the International Division of Reproductive Labor,” Gender and Society 14, no. 4 (2000): 560-580, accessed April 13, 2018, http://www.jstor.org/stable/190302; Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, “Transnational Mothering: A Source of Gender Conflicts in the Family,” Globalization, Families, and the State 88, no. 5 (2010): 1825-1856, accessed April 13, 2018, http://scholarship.law.unc.edu/nclr/vol88/iss5/13; Martin F. Manalansan, IV, “Queering the Chain of Care Paradigm,” The Scholar and Feminist Online 6, no. 3 (2008): 1-5, accessed April 13, 2018, http://sfonline.barnard.edu/ immigration/manalansan_01.htm; and Aihwa Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception: Frial 4 foundations for understanding the linkages between militarism and gendered violence, Denise Brennan conceptualizing “sexscapes” to uncover the global flows of sexuality and desire in tourist economies, and Rhacel Parreñas detailing the inequalities of race, gender, and class that underpin economies of care, all of these texts (with the exception of Parreñas’ Illicit Flirtations and Manalansan’s “Queering the Chain of Care Paradigm”) focus on cisgender as opposed to transgender women. As such, I see my work as a crucial intervention within these three fields, not only localizing these frameworks to a specifically Philippine context but also trans-ing them by centering the lived experiences of the transpinay, or Filipina trans woman.

Methodology and Chapter Organization:

Imagining Jennifer Laude not as a detached, individual body but as a node in a larger assemblage of “dispersed but mutually implicated and messy networks” allows us to track the numerous “movements, intensities, emotions, energies, affectivities, and textures” that led to her imbrication as both a victim at the hands of U.S. neocolonialism and a martyr of the “wounded” Philippine nation.19 Jennifer Laude is merely one element in the assemblage of the transpinay (as “Filipino” + “transgender” + “woman”), through which we can connect and configure both the localized transactions (e.g.: the sex economies of Olongapo) and the vast webs of transit (e.g.: Filipina migrant pathways and U.S. troop movements) that give the transpinay meaning. Assemblage theory provides us with a suitable framework to conceptualize and comprehend the shifts and transformations through which these various “particles, and not parts, recombine, where forces, and not categories, clash.”20 Defined by their mobility and their transience, assemblages allows us to map the various geographical and imaginary terrains through which “particles” like Jennifer Laude are deterritorialized and reterritorialized by the forces of neocolonialism and . As the particles of an assemblage are removed from their original context (deterritorialized) and then reinstated (reterritorialized) in new ones, the process of deterritorialization/reterritorialization changes their meaning and thus opens new potentialities. As stated by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “[i]t may be all but impossible to distinguish deterritorialization from reterritorialization, since they are mutually enmeshed, or like opposite faces of one and the same process.”21 As deterritorialization is fundamentally bound up with displacement, Arjun Appadurai applies this abstract idea of deterritorialization to transnational migration. He claims that the movement of people, goods, and ideas across national borders arises out of the disjunctures created by global capital and cultural flows, with deterritorialization being “one of the central forces of the modern world.22 By imagining the transpinay as an always-already transnational figure, we will explore how the transpinay is created through the simultaneous Deleuzian

Mutations in Citizenship and State Sovereignty (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), accessed April 13, 2018, http://my.ilstu. edu/~jkshapi/Ong_Neoliberalism%20as%20Exception.pdf. 19. Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 211, 215. 20. Luciana Parisi, Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Biotechnology and the Mutations of Desire (New York: Continuum, 2004), 37. 21. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 258, accessed April 13, 2018, http://lavachequilit.typepad.com/files/deleuze-guattari---the-anti-oedipus.pdf. 22. Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” 301. Frial 5 deterritorialization of Western LGBT terminology to a Philippine context and the Appaduraian deterritorialization of the Philippine population through state-led migratory export. We can use Jennifer Laude herself as an example to illustrate the transformations that deterritorialization and reterritorialization induce. Via internal migration, Laude became deterritorialized from her home community of Leyte and reterritorialized as a in Olongapo. Murdered before she could marry her German fiancé, Laude was foiled in her attempted to “deterritorialize” herself from her home country of the Philippines and “reterritorialize” herself as a German citizen-wife. Upon Pemberton’s discovery of her genitalia, Laude was immediately deterritorialized as a passive feminine object of Pemberton’s desire and reterritorialized/re-“gendered” as a “man” and threat to his honor Through this act of murder, Laude was (quite physically) deterritorialized from the necropolitical environment that subjugated her in life as a transpinay and reterritorialized in death as a martyr and “symbol of the oppressed nation.” Using Jennifer Laude as a starting point, each chapter will seek to unravel the assemblage of the transpinay by mapping the various territories which form and shape it, particularly those mechanisms of biopower and necropower that mold and distort transpinay lives (and deaths). As territorial maps, each chapter will examine a different landscape of trans necropolitics, plotting media sources like blogs, news articles, documentaries, and music videos as geographical landmarks. Scholars such as Aren Z. Aizura, C. Riley Snorton, Jin Haritaworn, and Rhacel Parreñas will serve as directional guides to help us navigate these “dispersed but mutually implicated and messy networks.” Chapter 1, “Jennifer Laude-as-‘Symbol of the Oppressed Nation’,” will analyze the biopolitical/necropolitical conversions that enabled value to be extracted from Laude’s death, as her body was instrumentalized as a catalyst of political mobilization. Chapter 2, “Jennifer Laude- as-Transnational Migrant,” will look at how global capitalism manages to incorporate the desires of transpinays by shuttling them into transnational economies of sexual and reproductive labor. Chapter 3, “Jennifer Laude-as-‘Collateral Damage’,” will explore the “militourist” economies of Subic Bay, which service male/heterosexual/Western desires for capital and sex specifically by impoverishing and displacing the local residents of Olongapo. Chapter 4, “Jennifer Laude-as- Breadwinner” will uncover how the disciplinary processes of necropower paradoxically enable the emergence of “zones of alternative trans being” within migrant families and families involved in the sex trade. Finally, the Epilogue of this thesis will update our understanding of trans necropolitics to the present day, as we trace how the figure of the transpinay has evolved under the current administration of Rodrigo Duterte and his war on drugs. But what exactly is the transpinay? What does she signify? Is the trans- in transpinay the trans- in transgender or the trans- in transnational?23 Or does the trans- prefix in transpinay map its own distinct territories (e.g.: the translocal, the transcultural, the translational, the transactional)? What bodies are transformed through this trans-ing? And through what networks are they transferred? In the next section, I will introduce and define (in the form of quasi- encyclopedic entries) the four keywords that will theoretically ground this piece: transpinay, transnational, neocolonial, and necropolitical.

23. This question is a deliberate echo of Jessica Berman’s article, “Is the Trans in Transnational the Trans in Transgender?” Frial 6

Keywords

Transpinay:

The term transpinay is a conflation of the words “trans” (as in transgender or ) and “pinay.”1 It was coined in 2008 by the Society of Transsexual Women of the Philippines (STRAP) to designate a “female human being of Philippine descent who was given a male assignment at birth.”2 Similarly, transpinoy was adopted by groups such as the Association of Transgender Men of the Philippines and Pinoy FTM (an offshoot of FTM International) as a label for Filipino men of transgender experience.3 Transpinay is a deliberate departure from the derogatory slur bakla. As defined by Martin Manalansan, “while bakla conflates the categories of effeminacy, , and homosexuality and can mean one or all of these in different contexts, the main focus of the term is that of effeminate mannerism, feminine physical characteristics (i.e., small, frail bodies, delicate facial features, and so on), and cross-dressing.”4 J. Neil C. Garcia emphasizes that despite the influx of Western “LGBT” discourses of gender and sexuality, kabaklaan (or “bakla- ness”) “remains a powerful discourse, a prism through which ‘GBT’ identities are obviously being refracted, a residual ground of new identities in the Philippine corner of globality, which shall continue to haunt or inform them precisely as their founding repudiation.”5 Because of these reasons, Garcia posits that “the Filipino ‘gay’ is not the same as the American ‘gay,’ despite or precisely because of the fact that they share the same (neocolonial) marker,”6 as the Filipino “gay” constitutes a “culturally hybrid or syncretic notion that incorporates both local and translocal conceptions of gender transitivity and homo or ‘same’ sexuality.”7 Similarly, the meaning of transpinay also deviates from that of transgender or transsexual, shifting in order to “affirm [their] identities [as] women, trans, and Filipina.”8 Despite the fact that transpinay is often associated with middle-class identity and bakla with the working class, many low-income transfeminine individuals (Jennifer Laude included) have adopted the transpinay label. Nevertheless, the movement away from bakla and adoption of Western conceptions of serve as a “crucial foil against which a position of privilege is established,”9 similar to how gay is becoming the preferred moniker among upper- class and masculine urban gay men.

1. The word “pinay” is a derivation of the latter two syllables of the demonym “Filipina.” 2. Sass Rogando Sasot, “transpinay,” RECLAIM, 20, last modified July 21, 2015, https://issuu.com/ sassrogandosasot/docs/reclaimfinal. 3. Emmanuel David, “Purple-Collar Labor: Transgender Workers and Queer Value at Global Call Centers in the Philippines,” Gender and Society 29, no. 2 (2015): 174, accessed April 14, 2018, http://journals.sagepub.com/ doi/abs/10.1177/0891243214558868. 4. Martin F. Manalansan, IV, Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 25. 5. J. Neil C. Garcia, “Nativism or Universalism: Situating LGBT Discourse in the Philippines,” Kritika Kultura 20 (2013): 61, accessed April 13, 2018, https://journals.ateneo.edu/ojs/index.php/kk/article/view/KK2013. 02003/840. 6. Ibid., 59. 7. Idem. 8. Rogando Sasot, “transpinay,” 19. 9. Bobby Benedicto, “Desiring Sameness: Globalization, Agency, and the Filipino Gay Imaginary.” Journal of Homosexuality 55, no. 2 (2008): 294, accessed April 13, 2018, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/ 10.1080/00918360802265735. Frial 7

Our exploration of transpinay (particularly in the Epilogue of this piece) builds directly off of Dana Collins and Bobby Benedicto’s analysis of urban gay masculinity in Metro Manila. Both scholars are deeply influenced by Dennis Altman’s conception of the “global gay,” who is “young, upwardly mobile, sexually adventurous, with an in-your-face attitude toward traditional restrictions and an interest in both activism and fashion.”10 By distancing themselves from indigenous conceptions of kabaklaan, the “Filipino upper class aspirant to global gayness approximates the gay White male stereotype in appearance and lifestyle because it activates a fantasy” that locates homosexuality as a “space of privilege marked by masculinity, beauty, youth, wealth, and Whiteness.”11 Among upper-class Filipino gay men, bakla “functions as a regulatory status, keeping upper-class and masculine urban gay men in check in terms of their gender and class displays.” In these interactions, bakla becomes a slur “hurled at a man who non- masculine gender presentation is viewed as too public, too feminine, and/or too cheap.”12 While my studies do not indicate that self-identified transpinays infuse the term with the same connotations of global modernity as Filipino gay men, bakla and transpinay occupy different poles of meaning. As we will see in the Epilogue, the abjection and repudiation of bakla and other “lower-status Filipino queers, especially those engaged in , allows for upwardly mobile trans subjects…to imagine themselves as approximating a decent life.”13 Whereas for upper-class Filipino men gay signified mobility and modernity undoubtedly shaped by Whiteness, the use of transpinay among class-privileged transgender Filipinas reveals aspirations of respectability and national belonging. In the eyes of the general Filipino public, however, the meanings of bakla and transpinay are still regularly conflated. When asked about the widespread misidentification of Jennifer Laude as bakla, Naomi Fontanos of STRAP replied that “ generally see people like Jennifer as the most extreme form of bakla.” In fact, the “notion that someone considered male would identify as a woman instead of being content to live as bakla [strikes] many Filipinos as a fundamental lie.” If anything, Fontanos stated that the murder of Jennifer Laude had merit in that it has “has forced the country to confront the existence of transgender women.” For many transpinays, kabaklaan evokes a space of deception, disappointment, destitution, and even death – a failure to approximate the ganda (beauty) of womanhood.14 In centering this thesis on the figure of the transpinay, my intention is not “to transport the terms queer or transgender to the Philippines in a ‘Western,’ U.S. American, or global north colonial or imperialist manner.” It is clear that LGBT Filipinos have themselves localized and resignified the terms gay and transpinay for a distinctly Filipino context (albeit with classed implications). Rather, following Kale Fajardo’s notion that “the ‘coconstitutive axes of identity (race, class, gender, sexuality) potentially or regularly get reconfigured through movement,

10. Dennis Altman, “Rupture or Continuity? The Internationalization of Gay Identities,” Social Text 14, no. 3 (1996): 77, accessed April 13, 2018, http://www.jstor.org/stable/466787. 11. Benedicto, “Desiring Sameness,” 294-295. 12. Dana Collins, The Rise and Fall of an Urban Sexual Community: Malate (Dis)placed (Los Angeles: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 9. 13. Emmanuel David, “Outsourced Heroes and Labor Incorporations: Labor Brokerage and the Politics of Inclusion in the Philippine Call Industry,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 22, no. 3 (2016): 401, accessed April 13, 2018, https://read.dukeupress.edu/glq/article/22/3/381/35028/Outsourced-Heroes-and-Queer- IncorporationsLabor. 14. Meredith Talusan, “How the Killing of a Trans Filipina Woman Ignited an International Incident,” Vice News, last modified February 26, 2015, https://www.vice.com/en_us/ article/avyd4z/how-to-get-away-with-murder- 0000602-v22n3. Frial 8 travel, and migration,” we will explore how the transpinay is assembled “through transnational relations that are rooted in the hybridity, struggle, and mobility that make up urban place.”15

Transnational:

Given that the transpinay is constructed as an always-already transnational figure, it stands that it is necessary to define exactly what is signified by the term transnational. According to Dana Collins,

“The concept of the transnational counters the notion of an international world made up of concrete nation-states that regulate peoples and direct political and economic relations. Transnational analysis encourages an understanding of connections and flows between a range of locations – class, gender, urban, rural, ethnic, geographic, among others – that transcend the artificial boundaries of nation-states.”16

The transnational marks the “struggle with the ongoing problematics of nation, empire, and globe, while opening up a space of resistance to their hegemony.”17 Our discussion of transnationality would not be complete without incorporating Arjun Appadurai’s seminal work on mapping the “landscapes” of global cultural flows. Appadurai writes that the global cultural economy must be “understood as a complex, overlapping, disjunctive order,” created by dislocations in the flows of “people, machinery, money, images, and ideas…[that] have become central to the politics of global cultures.”18 It is through these transnational “landscapes” – ethnoscapes (people), technoscapes (machinery), finanscapes (capital), mediascapes (images), and ideoscapes (ideas) – that value circulates throughout the economy. These “-scapes” serve as maps through which we can attempt to parse out the “disorganized” flows that characterize the neoliberal order. Throughout the course of this text, we will trace these five “-scapes” as they apply to transpinays, mapping their circulation through the transnational flows of the Philippines’ globalized economy. The effects of technoscapes and ethnoscapes are evident in the implementation of the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement between the United States and the Philippines, permitting the “[c]onstruction of facilities and infrastructure upgrades” and “[s]torage and prepositioning of defense and HADR [humanitarian assistance and disaster relief] equipment, supplies and materiél” at designated sites across the archipelago and sanctioning “visits” by U.S. personnel on “temporary and rotational basis.”19 Ethnoscapes and finanscapes are linked not only by the export of migrant labor and the remittances they send back to the Philippines, but in the special economic zones (SEZs) at Subic Bay and Clark that serve as sites

15. Dana Collins, “Identity, Mobility, and Urban Place-Making: Exploring Gay Life in Manila,” Gender and Society 19, no. 2 (2005): 181, accessed April 13, 2018, http://www.jstor.org/stable/30044582. 16. Ibid., 182-183. 17. Jessica Berman, “Is the Trans in Transnational the Trans in Transgender?”, Modernism/modernity 24, no. 2 (2017): 220, accessed April 13, 2018, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/658469. 18. Arjun Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” Theory Culture Society 7 (1990): 296, 301, accessed November 26, 2017, http://www.arjunappadurai.org/articles/ Appadurai_Disjuncture_and_Difference_in_the_Global_Cultural_Economy.pdf. 19. “PH Primer on Military Pact with US,” Rappler.com, last modified April 28, 2014, https://www. rappler.com/nation/56598-primer-enhanced-defense-cooperation-agreement. Frial 9 of “militourist” pleasure and transnational capital accumulation. Mediascapes become relevant in analyzing how the circulation of images and information surrounding Laude’s murder laid the foundation for transnational mobilization. Ideoscapes have already been touched upon, as we examined how “LGBT discourse has to confront, dialogue and/or converge with the existing discourse of gender and sexuality in the Philippines.”20 In Chapter 3, we will add a sixth “-scape” to the mix: the “sexscape,” which “link[s] the practices of sex work to the forces of a globalized economy.”21 To control for the vulnerabilities in its sovereignty revealed by these transnational flows, the Philippine state has engaged in a project of what Anna Romina Guevara terms “state-led transnationalism.”22 As a commodity shuffled through ethnoscapes and finanscapes, migrant workers are incorporated in a “peculiar kind of ‘trickle up’ development as individual migrants’ earnings abroad become a source of foreign capital for the Philippine state.” Aside from helping to pay off debts incurred from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, remittances feed a growing bureaucratic complex, which trains Filipino citizens for work abroad, markets and negotiates contracts for their employment, and processes their work visas.23 In this way, the Philippine state is able to stay competitive in an ever-changing market and retain control over its citizens beyond its borders, while First-World nations profit off of the export of cheap labor. Thus, we can observe how in the case of the Philippines, the transnational flows that structure the movement of transpinays and other transmigrants throughout the global economy are inseparable from the (neo)colonial forces that continue to haunt the nation to this day.

Neocolonial:

In describing neocolonialism, Kwame Nkrumah writes that “[t]he essence of neo- colonialism is that the State which is subject to it is, in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty. In reality its economic system and thus its political policy is directed from outside.”24 In articulating the neocolonial subjugation of the Philippines to the United States, Neferti X. M. Tadiar writes that the Philippines is an “an exploitable body, an industry hooked up to the US desiring machine through a system of flows of labor and capital in the guise of free exchange (export-oriented, capital and import dependent) but functioning in the mode of dialysis, which gives one the strength and life depleted from the other.”25 Imagining this neocolonial relationship in heterosexually gendered terms, Tadiar articulates that the Philippines is “no wife; she is, rather, America’s mistress.” The Philippines is “the prostitute of ‘America’ who caters to the latter’s demands (ostensibly demands of global production and consumption), in other words, a

20. Garcia, “Nativism or Universalism,” 51. 21. Denise Brennan, What’s Love Got to Do With It? Transnational Desire and Sex Tourism in the Dominican Republic (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 16. 22. Anna Romina Guevarra, Marketing Dreams, Manufacturing Heroes: The Transnational Labor Brokering of Filipino Workers (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010), 6, accessed April 13, 2018, http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5hj188. 23. Robyn Magalit Rodriguez, How the Philippine State Brokers Labor to the World (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), xvi-xvii, xxvi. 24. Kwame Nkrumah, “Introduction,” Neo-Colonialism, the Last Stage of Imperialism, (New York: International Publisher’s Co., Inc., 1966), accessed April 13, 2018, https://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/ nkrumah/neo-colonialism/introduction.htm. 25. Neferti Xina M. Tadiar, Fantasy-Production: Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Consequences for the New World Order (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2004), 47. Frial 10 hospitality industry, a hostess to ‘American’ desires, a hooker.”26 While one could critique Tadiar for relying heavily on patriarchal binaries that pigeonhole women into being either madonnas and whores, her argument deliberately reiterates these logics in order to expose how neocolonialism is inextricably bound with heteropatriarchy. This metaphor becomes all the more corporeal when integrating Jennifer Laude and the economies of sex she participated in. As we will see in Chapter 3, the “rest and recreation” that took root at Subic Bay and Clark – in addition to the special economic zones (SEZs) following their conversion – processed and supplied thousands of women and other feminized bodies as global commodities to appease the imperialist desires of the United States and its soldiers. Coupling this knowledge with that of the Philippine state’s role as a transnational labor broker, we can start to fathom just how much the Philippines has been kept “artificially poor” by these compounding forces of neocolonialism.27 The publicity following the murder of Jennifer Laude was monumental in that it exposed the neocolonial machinery by which the Philippine people have been “prostituted” by its leaders. Though hardly the first time an incidence of neocolonial violence sparked international headlines, this case was nonetheless significant in that a transgender woman – more notably, a transgender woman from a Third World country – took the spotlight, divulging the disastrous repercussions that militarism had on transgender lives. Left with few options other than to engage in the sex trade (either domestically or abroad), the situation of transpinays cannot but be described as necropolitical.

Necropolitical:

Achille Mbembe expands on Michel Foucault’s conceptualization of biopower – the power of the State to “divid[e] people into those who must live and who must die” – by outlining the “contemporary forms of subjugation of life to the power of death,” or necropolitics. Through the employment of necropower, the State is able to manufacture death-worlds, “new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead.”28 In describing the ways in which liberal LGBT politics rests upon the subjugation of both (queer) people of color in Western nations and the homophobic (Muslim) Other, Jasbir Puar builds upon Mbembe’s conception of necropolitics to explore how “[q]ueerness as automatically and inherently transgressive enacts specific forms of disciplining and control, erecting celebratory queer liberal subjects folded into life (queerness as subject) against the sexually pathological and deviant populations targeted for death (queerness as population).”29 We have already witnessed these biopolitical movements occurring with class-ascendant Filipino gay men and transpinays, who fold themselves in gay globality and national belonging by repudiating “deviant populations” like low-income bakla and sex workers. While spectacular displays of violence such as Jennifer Laude’s murder are more apt to capture the attention of the public, it is important to recognize that most necropolitical violence

26. Ibid., 43, 47. 27. Nkrumah, “Introduction.” 28. Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” trans. by Libby Meintjes, Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 16-17, 39- 40, accessed November 27, 2017, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/39984. 29. Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 24.

Frial 11 occurs through what Laura Berlant calls “slow death.” The concept of “slow death” weans our focus from the “shocking” and “sensational” to the ordinary yet extreme, the “physical wearing out of a population and the deterioration of people in that population that is very nearly a defining condition of their experience and historical existence.”30 In other words, slow death challenges us to understand how such horrific violence can be normalized and dismissed. As we will see in Chapter 3, slow death defines the existence of Laude and other transpinay sex workers in Olongapo, the exploitation they suffer deemed necessary to the economic prosperity of the community. In mapping out the landscapes of trans necropolitics in the Philippines, it is my argument that the (poor/sex-working/migrant) transpinay is subject to three highly-integrated but distinct death-worlds, created through 1) the devaluation of transgender life, 2) the economic neglect of Philippine state for its citizens, and 3) the postcolonial traces of U.S. imperialism. As stated before, each chapter will chart the different territories that converged in the death of Jennifer Laude. This next chapter will examine trans death and suffering, specifically looking at how biopolitical technologies reincorporate trans bodies in the service of liberal agendas.

30. Laura Berlant, “Slow Death (Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency),” Critical Inquiry 33, no. 4 (2007): 754, accessed April 13, 2018, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/521568. Frial 12

CHAPTER 1: Jennifer Laude-as-“Symbol of the Oppressed Nation”

At the funeral of Jennifer Laude, Representative Walden Bello of the democractic socialist Akbayan Partylist was reported to have called her the “simbolo ng bansang inaapi (symbol of an oppressed nation).”1 This sentiment was echoed elsewhere, with president of the Rainbow Rights Project Angie Umbac referring to her as “our martyr, the symbol of our suffering as a community.” Naomi Fontanos of Gender and Development Advocates (GANDA) Filipinas stated that “[i]n death, Jennifer has exposed the historical marginalization of transgender people in the Philippines…[and] the inequity that exists in Philippine society that robs people like her of equal life chances.”2 Fontanos’ account of Jennifer Laude’s martyrdom correlates well with the framework of the trans afterlife disclosed in C. Riley Snorton and Jin Haritaworn’s essay on “Trans Necropolitics,” which “think[s] about how trans death opens up political and social life-worlds across various times and places.” Analyzing the condition of the trans body of color in the United States and Germany, Snorton and Haritaworn conclude:

“Immobilized in life, and barred from spaces designated as white (the good life, the Global North, the gentrifying inner city, the university, the trans community), it is in their death that poor and sex working trans people of color are invited back in; it is in their death that they suddenly come to matter.”3

Following Jasbir Puar’s reading of the biopolitical regulation of queerness as “erecting celebratory queer liberal subjects folded into life (queerness as subject) against the sexually pathological and deviant populations targeted for death (queerness as population),”4 Snorton and Haritaworn understand “biopolitical and necropolitical conversions [to] not accrue value equally to all trans people.” In fact, the same processes that condemn trans people of color as “degenerate and killable” function to “secure a newly professionalizing class of experts in the realm of life.”5 In other words, trans of color death is mobilized to secure positions of power for the privileged trans subject. Whereas Snorton and Haritaworn argue that “it is in death that [trans people] suddenly come to matter,” I argue that within the Philippine context, biopower functions to extract value from trans bodies even while they are still living. Returning to Arjun Appadurai’s concept of the “-scape,” images of trans suffering which circulate through mediascapes are mobilized for the purpose of capital extraction and liberal LGBT projects – notably, anti-discrimination bills – all while erasing the agency and subjectivity of marginalized trans individuals. This chapter will explore the ways in which visual displays of trans suffering and death are instrumentalized for these aforementioned biopolitical agendas. These visual interfaces act as

1. Buena Bernal, “Jennifer Laude, Symbol of ‘Oppressed’ Nation, Laid to Rest,” Rappler.com, last modified October 26, 2014, https://www.rappler.com/nation/72948-jennifer-laude-laid-rest. 2. Michael K. Lavers, “Murdered Philippine Trans Woman a ‘Martyr’,” Washington Blade, last modified October 22, 2014, http://www.washingtonblade.com/2014/10/22/murdered-trans-philippine-woman-martyr/. 3. C. Riley Snorton and Jin Haritaworn, “Trans Necropolitics: A Transnational Reflection on Violence, Death, and the Trans of Color Afterlife,” in The Transgender Studies Reader 2, ed. by Susan Stryker and Aren Z. Aizura (New York: Routledge, 2013), 66, 74. 4. Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 24. 5. Snorton and Haritaworn, “Trans Necropolitics,” 67. Frial 13 principal technologies through which biopower regulates and controls trans bodies, by subjecting them to the cisgender gaze.

The Cisgender Gaze and the Abject Trans Body:

In context of transgender existence, visual interfaces take various forms: films, photographs, medical examinations, airport security, even sexual dates (as in the event that led to Jennifer Laude’s murder). In essence, virtually any interaction that brings a trans body into the purview of a cisgender onlooker and thus under the cisgender gaze involves a visual interface. The cisgender gaze, in turn, “refers to the ways in which the world and trans people are presented in such a way as to make them appear as if they exist for scrutiny by, and the entertainment of, cis people.”6 Trans women – at once inhabiting a body coded transgender and female – are subject to both the cisgender gaze as well as the (heterosexual) male gaze. Laura Mulvey, analyzing, the male gaze in cinema, writes that women within mainstream films are “simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness.”7 For trans women, however, their bodies “are not merely visual objects to be looked at, but their – transfemininity most of all – is a source of reevaluation.”8 Within a film’s narrative, Mulvey writes that the presence of woman tends to “freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation.”9 Likewise, the presence of a trans body also elicits interruption, though with the effect of “forcing reevaluation” via “perceived incongruity in socially constructed understandings of sex and gender.”10 Indeed, Jack Halberstam writes that the reveal of a character’s transness – most often fetishistically through the exposure of the genitalia (the presence or absence of a penis) – “causes the audience to reorient themselves in relation to the film’s past in order to read the film’s present and prepare themselves for the film’s future.” The “exposure of a trans character” not only then constitutes not only a threat to firmly established notions of binary gender, but “expose[s] a rupture between the distinct registers of past, present, and future.”11 As evidenced by the Jennifer Laude case – the visual interface here being the sexual encounter between Pemberton and Laude – the cisgender gaze can be deadly. The discovery of Laude’s penis exposed her transness, forcing a reevaluation on the part of Pemberton. Pemberton then reinterpreted the event as “rape” because “he did not give his consent to allow a man to do that to him.”12 Framing it more explicitly in terms of temporality, Laude’s supposed “deception”

6. Galen Mitchell, “The Cis Gaze,” TransSubstantiation (blog), March 7, 2017, https://transsubstantiation. com/the-cis-gaze-6c151f9374ca. 7. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16, no. 3 (1975): 11, accessed April 13, 2018, https://academic.oup.com/screen/article/16/3/6/1603296. 8. E. Jessica Groothuis, “The Look, Interrupted: How Cinema Looks At Trans Women’s Bodies,” The TransAdvocate, last modified July 20, 2015, http://transadvocate.com/the-look-interrupted-how-cinema-looks-at- trans-womens-bodies_n_15301.htm. 9. Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” 11. 10. Groothuis, “The Look, Interrupted: How Cinema Looks At Trans Women’s Bodies.” 11. Jack Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 77-78. 12. “How Pemberton Admitted Choking Jennifer.” Youtube video, 2:25. Posted by ABS-CBN News, August 24, 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjzS0sFltjk. Frial 14 throughout the night resulted in the reorientation/reterritorialization of Laude-as-rapist and Pemberton-as-victim, prompting Pemberton to act by murdering Laude. Feeling as if “he was being raped,” Pemberton claimed to have acted “in defense of his life and honor.”13 According to Julia Kristeva, the “abjection of others serves to maintain or reinforce boundaries that are threatened.”14 The abject is defined as that which “disturbs identity system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite.”15 Thus, transgender bodies, “especially when viewed as physical bodies in transition, defy the borders of systemic order by refusing to adhere to clear definitions of sex and gender.” Laude, as an abject transgender body, threatened Pemberton’s sense of self, specifically both his heterosexuality and his masculinity, and thus she was exterminated to “maintain [his] own tenuous subjectivity.”16 The visual interface constitutes an essential biopolitical technology “by which identificatory regimes exclude subjects that they render unintelligible or beyond classification.”17 In the case of trans bodies, this takes place through the logic of the cisgender gaze. However, this exclusion does not necessarily result in the death of transgender individuals. Within the Philippines, the beauty pageant is one environment in which the presence of transgender individuals is actually tolerated. As we will see, the gay beauty pageant serves as the archetypal visual interface through which trans bodies are read in Philippine society.

Abject Humor: Beauty Pageants and Suffer SiReyna:

The gay beauty pageant is a common sight throughout all the barangays of the Philippines, attended by “local dignitaries, village businesspeople, members of elite local families; men, women and children.”18 The visual interface of the beauty pageant – as an assemblage of body, femininity, gown, stage, and audience – demands a gaze from its spectators. In the case of “Miss Gay” pageants, this gaze is the cisgender gaze, with “[e]ach queen manag[ing] to hold the gaze of the audience as it gauges how close to a cis woman they look.”19 As public spectacles, gay beauty pageants “become avenues for the bakla/transgender to live out the ultimate dream of ‘becoming’ a ‘real’ woman,” while also “allow[ing] heterosexuals a ‘safe’ place to gaze at the beauty of the transgender.”20 Womanhood for the pageantera is intrinsically connected to the gaze. The combined cisgender and (heterosexual) male gaze confers womanhood to the trans body by virtue of “whether or not she is a valid source of

13. Idem. 14. Robert Phillips, “Abjection,” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 1, no. 1-2 (2014): 19, accessed April 13, 2018, https://read.dukeupress.edu/tsq/article/1/1-2/19/91761/Abjection. 15. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. by Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 4, accessed April 13, 2018, http://users.clas.ufl.edu/burt/touchyfeelings maliciousobjects/Kristevapowersofhorrorabjection.pdf. 16. Phillips, “Abjection,” 20. 17. Ibid., 19. 18. Serena Nanda, Gender Diversity: Crosscultural Variations, 2nd ed. (Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press Inc., 2014), 85. 19. Ava Tantiangco, “Binibini Rin Kami: Trans Visibility in Philippine Pageantry,” GMA News Online, last modified May 4, 2017. http://www.gmanetwork.com/news/lifestyle/content/609393/binibini-rin-kami-trans- visibility-under-the-glitter-of-pageantry/story/. 20. mikee013, “repost: Beauconera,” Everything Is Queer (blog), October 27, 2013, https://everythingis queer.wordpress.com/2013/10/27/repost-beauconera/. Frial 15 attraction to heterosexual (cisgender) men.”21 Passing as cisgender, she becomes human; passing as a woman, she becomes a source of erotic pleasure.22 However, for those contestants who do not pass – most often individuals from “far-flung small towns” without the finances to access to gowns, makeup, and adequate options for medical procedures23 – they are “cast out” into the realm of the abject. To mediate the “anxiety at the root of this unease with transgender subjectivity,”24 audience members treat the pageanteras as sources of humorous entertainment. According to a transpinay participant, from the point of view of the audience, “they’re just men in dresses.”25 In fact, Serena Nanda writes that “there is always anticipation that the male will emerge accidentally from the female, an occasion for laughter that is not always compassionate.”26 The extraction of humor from abject trans bodies reached its most gargantuan state in the Suffer SiReyna pageant. Suffer SiReyna, a segment on the noon-time variety show Eat Bulaga aired by GMA Network during April-August 2014, is a parodic imitation of the popular transgender beauty pageant Super SiReyna, also broadcast by GMA.27 Throughout each episode, the participants are

“made to suffer (hence the name of segment) through outrageous requests by the hosts, like the ingestion of kapeng barako (Barako coffee) in powder form, the eating of raw ground pork sandwiched in slices of ampalaya (bitter gourd) and stuffed with okra, and other similarly dehumanizing acts. To add insult to injury, the contest’s winner receives cash less than P1,000 and in-kind prizes like a bundle of firewood or a big plastic bag of junkfood from a nearby sari-sari (retail) store. For 15 minutes of fame and token prizes, the contestants willingly become pawns to be humiliated and be treated inhumanely.”28

In addition to participating in these degrading physical acts, contestants are shamed on the basis of their physical appearance. In the June 11 episode, one of the hosts grants the “Georgina Wilson”-lookalike contestant the “special prize” of “tooth-faced smile of the day,” referring to the large gap left by her two missing front teeth.29 In the May 30 episode, the “Marian Rivera” lookalike is made to expose her unshaved armpits on numerous occasions. One

21. Groothuis, “The Look, Interrupted: How Cinema Looks At Trans Women’s Bodies.” 22. This is not to say that every participant in Miss Gay pageants identifies as transgender and desires to be recognized as women. Given the messy nature of the word bakla, Miss Gay pageants often feature transpinays, cross-dressing gay men, and drag queens within the same event (See Tantiangco, “Binibini Rin Kami.”). However, the cisgender gaze (along with the male gaze) remains the dominant logic through which all Miss Gay contestants are read, regardless of their actual gender identity. 23. Tantiangco, “Binibini Rin Kami.” 24. Phillips, “Abjection,” 20. 25. Jannielyn Ann Bigtas, “Binibini Rin Kami: Trans Visibility in Philippine Pageantry,” Youtube video, 8:04, posted by Jannielyn Ann Bigtas, April 16, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=oO5Y0DwPLe0. 26. Nanda, Gender Diversity, 85. 27. The word “SiReyna” is a composite of the Tagalog words “sirena” (mermaid, also derogatory slang for bakla) and “reyna” (queen). 28. John Ryan Mendoza, “How ‘Suffer SiReyna’ Highlights LGBTI Suffering,” Outrage Magazine, last modified June 10, 2014, http://outragemag.com/suffer-sireyna-highlights-lgbtqi-suffering/. 29. “Suffer Sireyna June 11,” Youtube video, 13:53-13:58, posted by HappyDabarkads, June 14, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9GCm-D58og. Frial 16 of the hosts even attempts to “wax” the underarm hair with a piece of duct tape, stating that it is for the “ilusyon.”30 It must be noted that both of these pageanteras win the contest in their respective episodes, winning the greatest audience approval out of the three participants (the May 30 episode actually resulted in a tie with “Pia Guanio,” her over-blushed cheeks being subject of ridicule).31 Instead of the penis being the fetishistic obsession of the cisgender gaze (as in film and beauty pageants), the hosts of Suffer SiReyna instead emphasize other features of the contestants’ bodies that break the “ilusyon” of femininity, which are then mined for their comedic value. Humor thus becomes a way to manage the abjection presented by the participants, and in turn, the participants are rewarded with victory if they allow themselves to endure this humiliation. While humor itself can be viewed as a form of value extracted from the “suffering” trans bodies displayed on the show, monetary value also accrues to the hosts – one of whom openly identifies as gay – in the form of the “commercial gains of the TV ratings race (and its effects on [their] career, which in turn keeps [their] current social class).”32 Thus, in accordance with Snorton and Haritaworn’s framework, the suffering of the pageanteras “secures a newly professionalizing class of experts in the realm of life.”33 The visual interface of the Suffer SiReyna pageant fortifies the social divide between privileged LGBT subjects and disenfranchised bakla and transpinays by essentially instrumentalizing these images of suffering in the service of capital gain, a biopolitical conversion that contributes to the environment of dehumanization that continues to haunt (and murder) subaltern bakla and queer lives. However, even sympathetic portrayals of the bakla can be mobilized for exploitative – albeit seemingly beneficial – means. Gloc 9’s “Sirena” (featuring Ebe Dancel) – described by openly gay TV personality Boy Abunda as “a truthful, poetic, cutting-edge narrative of a gay man’s journey that is too familiar to many of us”34 – is one such example, a tool of liberal LGBT politics that with the aim of mobilizing support for anti-discrimination bills.

Gloc 9’s “Sirena”: Pageantry of Suffering:

Gloc 9’s “Sirena” (feat. Ebe Dancel) was the lead single on his sixth album “MKNM: Mga Kwento Ng Makata” (Stories of a Poet). It exploded in popularity upon its release, becoming the 2nd most viewed Original Pilipino Music (OPM) video on YouTube and voted “Favorite Song of the Year” in the 1st Netizens’ Choice Awards.35 The music video for the song depicts the life of a bakla, chronicling their struggles with sexuality and gender with their father and other men in the community.36

30. “Suffer Sireyna May 30,” Youtube video, 13:58, posted by HappyDabarkads, June 4, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzdUJANnToI. 31. Ibid., 1:27-1:28. 32. Mendoza, “How ‘Suffer SiReyna’ Highlights LGBTI Suffering.” 33. Snorton and Haritaworn, “Trans Necropolitics,” 67. 34. Boy Abunda, “Gloc 9 Displays Sensitivity in Sirena,” The Philippine Star, last modified September 18, 2012, http://www.philstar.com/entertainment/2012-09-18/850141/gloc-9-displays-sensitivity-sirena. 35. cd, “‘Sirena’ Gloc 9 feat. Ebe Dancel is Favorite Song of the Year – Netizens’ Choice Awards,” Starmometer, last modified January 20, 2013, http://www.starmometer.com/2013/01/20/ sirena-by-gloc-9-feat-ebe- dancel-is-favorite-song-of-the-year-netizens-choice-awards/. 36. While Boy Abunda and Gloc 9 both identify the protagonist of the video as a “gay man,” the gender identity of the bakla is never definitely stated. The bakla, in fact, replies that he is a “babae” (woman) when asked if he is man or woman. For this essay, I will use gender-neutral pronouns to refer to the bakla. Frial 17

The “Sirena” music video opens to a scene of three young men, guffawing as one of them brings out two bottles of alcohol. Their revelry is soon interrupted as they turn to see a man dragging his “son” in a flowery dress toward a drum of water. It is assumed that the father’s discovery of the bakla in the dress was the inciting incident that led to this moment. The three young men cackle even louder, taunting the two by shouting, “nag-aaway ng mag-ina” (mother and daughter are fighting).37 The father dunks the bakla’s head in a drum of water, as three new individuals silently watch. A woman washes clothes in the background, unfazed by the event taking place little more than a foot from her. The father interrogates the bakla: “Ano ba? Lalaki ka ba or babae?” (What are you? Man or woman?), to which the bakla replies, “babae po” (woman, sir). The father angrily exclaims, “Walang hiya ka. Wala ko ang anak ng bakla” (You’re shameless. I don’t have a son who is a bakla).38 This sequence of events cannot but be described as a pageant of abuse, both for the men in the opening shot and for the onlookers who stand by and watch. The bakla’s entrance into the shot interrupts the rituals of male bonding practiced by the three men and the daily chores of the neighbors. With their gaze reading the bakla as less-than-human because of the bakla’s “in- betweenness,” the bakla’s suffering is rendered not as an inhumane act, but like with Suffer SiReyna, as a humorous spectacle. The father’s declaration of “walang hiya ka” cements the bakla’s status as abject – his feelings of shame deriving from the bakla’s inability to “respect borders, positions, rules,” physically manifested in the flowery dress.39 This prologue soon transitions into start of the song, cued both audibly with the entrance of music and visually by the change in setting. The camera positioned at a low-angle, looking out of the drum of water, we see the bakla’s head being dunked once more into the drum. Wind chimes and strings accompany a cross-fade to another shot of the bakla, now dressed in a white button-down shirt, fully submerged and floating in a much larger pool of water. Another cross- fade transitions us to our first glimpse of Ebe Dancel, as he sings the first line of the song – “Ako’y isang sirena” (I am a mermaid). The lyrical portion of the “Sirena” music video can be imagined as a second pageant, another opportunity to read the trans body of the bakla. The life of the bakla is now put on display for the (cisgender) viewer to judge, supplemented the lyrics sung/rapped by Ebe Dancel and Gloc 9, their words implied to be those of the bakla by the use of first-person pronouns. The lyrics of the song constitute the inner monologue of bakla, in the moment while they are being dunked underwater, possibly driven unconscious by the abusive act. The lyrics bookended by scenes of the bakla floating underwater, we can assume that the whole monologue and stream of images that accompany it lie outside of the linear time that defines the prologue. Whereas Mulvey describes the presence of women as “freez[ing] the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation,”40 the bakla is only given a chance to speak while time is frozen – the moment of abuse interrupted. As in the prologue, the bakla is laid bare before the gaze of the (cisgender) viewers of the video. The “exposure of the trans character” that takes place “causes the audience to reorient

37. “Gloc-9 feat. Ebe Dancel – Mermaid [Sirena – Eng. Sub],” Youtube video, 5:26, posted by jstasimplesub3, August 24, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtE9adF8iZQ. 38. Ibid., 0:39-0:46. 39. Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, 4. 40. Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” 11. Frial 18 themselves,”41 though the nature of this exposure is different. The music video “exposes” the bakla’s life story, rather than their genitals or other incongruous body part. The suffering of the bakla (combined with the lyrics) “forces reevaluation” from the audience, deliberately framed to be one of humanization as opposed to the feelings of pity and secondhand shame elicited during the prologue section. As a visual interface, Gloc 9’s “Sirena” intentionally captures the cisgender gaze in order to provoke a response of empathy from its viewers. Whatever “sensitivity” was put into the construction of these lyrics and the images which accompany them, they must be ultimately understood as the creation of a cisgender, heterosexual man. In their critique of the song, one trans-identified blogger prompts us ask ourselves: “Why create a martyr of the bakla?”42 As the singer and songwriter, all royalties accrue to Gloc 9, so he stands to gain in terms of both finances and popularity. However, Gloc 9 was not the sole actor who influenced the positive reception of the “Sirena” video. Gloc 9 asked several prominent LGBT personalities to appear in the video with him, all of whom appear in a montage during the final iteration of the chorus, their presence serving as a not-so-subtle endorsement of the message encoded in the video. Among them are the aforementioned TV host Boy Abunda and the three leaders of Ang Ladlad Partylist – cisgender gay men Danton Remoto and Raymond Alikpala and transpinay Bemz Benedito.

Ang Ladlad and the Anti-Discrimination Bill:

The members of Ang Ladlad Partylist proudly market it as the “only LGBT political party in the world.”43 During the 2013 election season, Ladlad candidates spent a large part of their campaign visiting local barangay beauty pageants, visual interfaces where the cisgender gaze was guaranteed and thus securing them a platform to spread their message. In both the 2010 and 2013 congressional elections, with transpinay Bemz Benedito as their candidate, Ang Ladlad ran on a single-issue campaign – the passage of a , Gender Identity and Expression (SOGIE) anti-discrimination bill that has stymied in Congress since 2001.44 According to Dean Spade,

“support for such legislation is shored up by advocates’ desire for a symbolic declaration of societal/governmental inclusion, which also increases the positive visibility of transgender people. Hate laws thus legally articulate the value of transgender people’s lives, even as this articulation of inclusion is produced by and through their deaths. Simultaneously, hate crimes legislation contributes to a broader biopolitical imperative to manage poor people and people of color by channeling them into a massive carceral project, a ‘prison industrial complex,’ through which capital gains through the privatization of prisons.”45

41. Jack Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place, 77-78. 42. mikee013. “repost: Beauconera.” Everything Is Queer (blog), October 27, 2013. https://everythingis queer.wordpress.com/2013/10/27/repost-beauconera/. 43. S. Leo Chiang and Johnny Symons, Out Run: Make Politics Fierce (Newburgh, NY: New Day Films, 2016), accessed April 13, 2018, https://georgetownu.kanopystreaming.com/video/out-run. 44. Mark Gevisser, “Ang Ladlad Party Brings Beauty Parlours and Gay Pageants Out to Vote in Philippines,” The Guardian, last modified May 12, 2013, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/may/12/ang- ladlad-philippines-elections-transgender. 45. Snorton and Haritaworn, “Trans Necropolitics,” 68. Frial 19

While the SOGIE anti-discrimination bill would force the government and other institutions to legally recognize transgender identities, a reading of the most recent iteration of the bill reveals that it seeks to dramatically expand criminal penalties and policing. According to the bill, Women and Children’s Desks will be renamed to the “Women, Children, and LGBTQ++ Protection Desks,” while SOGIE-based hate crimes will result in a fine of 100,000- 500,000 pesos (approximately US $1,976-9,880) or imprisonment of up to 6 years.46 Such policies will disproportionately affect poor people of LGBTI experience, who already report that “[e]xperiencing discrimination, harassment, violence, and abuse by police officers” works to “discourage [them] from reporting crimes, filing complaints, and seeking police assistance and protection when there is violence from family members and members of the community.”47 In short, “[t]hose injured in the event of violence benefit the least from the remedies offered by a traumatized citizenship model”48 – the traumatized citizens here being impoverished bakla and gender non-conforming individuals. As illustrated with the Suffer SiReyna pageant, socioeconomic class creates a huge rift within the imagined LGBT “community.” The leaders of Ang Ladlad all come from privileged, well-educated backgrounds. Bemz Benedito explains that “the paradigm of Ladlad is different compared to other partylist (groups since) we started in the middle class (i.e. the founding members are middle class) going to the grassroots.”49 As a “newly professionalizing and institutionalizing class of experts” pushing for these anti-discrimination bills and thus capitalizing off of the suffering and death of low-income bakla and queer individuals, the Ladlad leaders have “lives [that] could not be further removed from those they are professing to help.”50 This class distance is exemplified in a scene from the OutRun documentary, which chronicles the 2013 Ladlad campaign. Raymond Alikpala approaches a woman on the street, asking her to vote for Ang Ladlad in the upcoming election. However, the woman asks to be paid first. Alikpala apologizes to her, telling her that they are “not corrupt politicians” and pleading with her to “see us [Ang Ladlad] differently.” As he walks away, Alikpala bemoans to the camera how he really hates that “people just ask for money outright.”51 This interaction between Raymond Alikpala and the poor woman perfectly illustrates the following passage from Snorton and Haritaworn:

“The homonormative narrative of the creative-class member, who ventures into hitherto ungentrifiable territory and performs himself as a productive citizen and consumer in contrast to those whose unproductiveness and excessive reproductiveness mark their intimacies as disposable in the current diversity regime, is sprouting transgressive offshoots that equally need addressing.”52

46. Congress of the Philippines. House of Representatives, An Act Prohibiting Discrimination on the Basis of Sexual Orientation or Gender Identity or Expression (SOGIE) and Providing Penalties Therefor, 17th Cong., 2nd sess., 2017, HB No. 4982, http://www.congress. gov.ph/legisdocs/third_17/HBT4982.pdf. 47. Ging Cristobal, To Serve & Protect Without Exception: Addressing Police Abuse Toward Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and (LGBTI) People in the Philippines (New York: OutRight Action International, 2016), accessed April 13, 2018, https://www.outrightinternational.org/content/addressing-police-abuse-toward-lgbti- people-philippines. 48. Snorton and Haritaworn, “Trans Necropolitics,” 73. 49. Michael David dela Cruz Tan, “Ladlad Partylist – The Struggle,” Philippine Transgender Movement, last modified February 24, 2013, http://www.philippine-transgender-movement.com/news/ladlad-partylist/. 50. Snorton and Haritaworn, “Trans Necropolitics,” 74. 51. Chiang and Symons, Out Run, 35:54-36:16. 52. Snorton and Haritaworn, “Trans Necropolitics,” 73. Frial 20

Alikpala, as a “creative-class member,” positions himself on the side of productivity by taking the moral high ground, distinguishing himself from the “corrupt politicians.” He cannot reason why the woman asked him for money, believing it to be a symptom of the corruption that afflicts Philippine politics. However, he fails to take into account how the necropolitical environments of extreme poverty and unemployment drive “unproductive” and “disposable” bodies like this woman to solicit financially well-off members of society, especially politicians who have sufficient capital to lead a campaign. Alikpala’s ignorance betrays his class privilege and that of the party he leads, “out of touch with the grassroots and too comfortable with their own privilege.”53 Through their appearance within Gloc 9’s “Sirena” music video, Ang Ladlad was able to appropriate the images in the video for their own liberal agenda, fueling support for their campaign of anti-discrimination legislation and thus “paradoxically giving birth to both the conditions that allow more recognizable trans subjects to mobilize and ascend into life, and to the forces that immobilize subaltern trans lives.” The funeral of Jennifer Laude, as an interface of trans afterlife, was another such resource that was mined and appropriated for the “development and dissemination of many different agendas,”54 the vast majority of them effacing the possibility of subaltern trans agency and excluding their voices.

National Day of Outrage: Capturing the Cisgender Gaze:

The murder of Jennifer Laude and the subsequent media coverage constituted an interruption within the neoliberal/neocolonial projects that subject subaltern transpinay lives. Images depicting her in life and death were circulated by news outlets and on social media within and beyond the Philippines, the most striking of which were perhaps those of her beaten face and dead body slumped over the toilet.55 The media “exposure” of Jennifer Laude laid bare how the combined forces of , racism, and imperialism led to her death. With the cisgender gaze temporarily captured by the “spectacularly violated bod[y]” of Jennifer Laude, LGBT groups across the Philippines decided to plan a National Day of Outrage on October 24, the same day of the funeral. Their actions transformed Laude’s burial into a national pageantry – a murdered trans body on display for the nation and the world to take notice of. Aside from decrying the gender-based violence that killed her, the organizers of the National Day of Outrage expressed their desire to “celebrate what Jennifer’s murderer failed to see – Jennifer’s humanity.”56 However, it must be questioned what purposes lay behind this “murderous inclusion,” why it was “in death that [she] suddenly came to matter.”57 As with the Suffer SiReyna pageant and the “Sirena” music video, value was also extracted from the body of Jennifer Laude, on numerous fronts. According to Robert Diaz:

53. Ryan Richard Thoreson, “Realizing Rights in Manila: Brokers and the Mediation of Sexual Politics in the Philippines,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 18, no. 4 (2012): 541, accessed April 13, 2018, https://read.dukeupress.edu/glq/article/18/4/529-563/34837. 54. Snorton and Haritaworn, “Trans Necropolitics,” 66. 55. Jaime Laude, “AFP to Proceed with Disbarment Case vs Laude Lawyer,” Yahoo News, last modified November 3, 2014, https://www.yahoo.com/news/afp-proceed-disbarment-case-vs-000000736.html. 56. LGBT National Day of Outrage, “A STATEMENT OF OUTRAGE,” Facebook, October 24, 2014. https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=971655269517379&id= 967948093221430 57. Snorton and Haritaworn, “Trans Necropolitics,” 74. Frial 21

“Across the United States and Canada, numerous feminist organizations called for demilitarization, linking Laude’s death to the continued US presence in the global South. Organizations like Gabriela transformed the violence perpetrated on Laude into a violence done to the nation. Mainstream queer organizations in the West also denounced Laude’s death in their respective websites and blogs as they critiqued what they saw as the systemic homophobia and transphobia that continues to exist in the Philippines.”58

Within the Philippines, local LGBT activists took the opportunity to stoke support for the SOGIE anti-discrimination bill. Clara Padilla, director of EnGendeRights, lamented how Filipino-on-Filipino “hate crimes,” such as the murders of four Filipino gay men that also occurred in late 2014, garnered far less media attention.59 In a video depicting the National Day of Outrage, one participant used the video as a platform to declare how “an anti-discrimination bill is so far needed in this country” and that Laude’s murder is “just one example where a victim has been shown no respect because of it.”60 Across the Pacific Ocean, American transgender groups were also organizing rallies in support of Laude. The Filipino American Transgender Community of New York claimed Laude as “one of their own.”61 Meanwhile in Los Angeles, transnational feminist groups AF3irm and Gabriela USA joined with Hispanic transgender activist groups, including Translatina Coalition, Familia Trans Queer Liberation Movement and El/La Para Trans Latinas, in a rally recognize both Jennifer Laude and another trans woman of color, Aniya Parker, who was murdered in East Hollywood. Bamby Salcedo, president of the Translatina Coalition stated that the rally was “the beginning of a national movement.”62 These symbolic gestures of inclusion echo Snorton and Haritaworn’s observation of German transnational organizing for transgender lives, their attempts at showing solidarity with trans people from the Global South perhaps best described as “cannibalistic”: “‘Their’ deaths were not in vain, one of the speakers is said to have stated: ‘they’ made it possible for ‘us’ to come together today.”63 Meanwhile, leftist and nationalist groups like Bagong Alyansang Makabayan (BAYAN) and the National Alliance for Filipino Concerns (NAFCON) used the crime to “assail the American military’s role in the former US colony” and were even criticized for being “mainly concerned with cutting defense ties with the United States rather than supporting LGBT issues.”64 BAYAN claimed that the murder of Jennifer Laude and subsequent custody battle

58. Robert Diaz, “The Limits of Bakla and Gay: Feminist Readings of My Husband’s Lover, Vice Ganda, and Charice Pempengco,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 40, no. 3 (2015): 724, accessed April 13, 2018, http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/ doi/abs/10.1086/679526. 59. “Laude Murder Highlights Struggle for LGBT Rights,” The Philippine Daily Inquirer, last modified November 21, 2014, http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/652134/laude-murder-highlights-struggle-for-- rights#ixzz51HLSVkhu. 60. “National Day of Outrage for Jennifer Laude,” Youtube video, 1:45-1:53, posted by Coconuts TV, October 26, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIAlywFKcfY. 61. Don Tagala, “NYC Transgender Rally for Jennifer Laude,” Balitang America, last modified October 16, 2014, https://balitangamerica.tv/nyc-trans-community-rallies-for-jennifer-laude/. 62. Nimfa U. Rueda, “ Advocates Highlight Jennifer Laude Case in LA Rally,” GMA News Online, last modified November 20, 2014, http://www.gmanetwork.com/news/news/pinoyabroad/388956/ transgender-rights-advocates-highlight-jennifer-laude-case-in-la-rally/story/. 63. Snorton and Haritaworn, “Trans Necropolitics,” 74. 64. “Laude Murder Highlights Struggle for LGBT Rights.”

Frial 22

“adds fuel to the fire of the perennial demand for genuine national sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Philippines.” NAFCON President Terrence Valen referenced Jennifer Laude in an offhand remark, stating that one should “just ask the family of Jennifer Laude” to understand that “the presence of U.S. troops and drones in our country is what’s bringing real terror to militarized communities throughout the Philippines.” Cleary, Philippine leftist and nationalist groups were as negligent to the transmisogynist nature of the crime as Filipino and American LGBT groups were to its imperial backdrop. Undoubtedly, we cannot characterize all of these acts of solidarity as equally exploitative, though must continue to question the ways in which Jennifer Laude’s (dead) body was appropriated – by local LGBT groups as a victim of a SOGIE-based hate crime, by US-based groups as a fellow trans woman of color, by leftist Filipino organizations as example of neocolonial violence. These displays of solidarity were all motivated by Jennifer Laude’s death, none of which provided space for the voice of poor transpinays to speak on their own behalf. Evidently, it is only in their death that “poor and sex working trans people of color are invited back in”65 by groups who purport to represent them. This was, indeed, a fact recognized by a Latina trans activist in DC, who stated: “We [trans activists] wouldn’t be where we are today if we hadn’t been using the bodies of the dead to get us here.”66

Conclusion: Returning the Gaze:

While the cisgender gaze has the power to dehumanize transgender individuals through abjection, privileged LGBT subjects also can benefit from this power of dehumanization, appropriating images of trans suffering and death for their own political agendas. Such biopolitical conversions only serve to erase the agency of disenfranchised bakla and gender non- conforming individuals. Before closing this chapter, we will briefly look at two cases in which subaltern transgender individuals have chosen to define themselves against the disciplining cisgender gaze. The Progressive Organization of Gays (ProGay Philippines) seeks to organize bekinals (short for beking kanal, or literally “gays from the gutters/canals”) and other “impoverished bakla who are neglected by society.” Instead of being relegated to be just “seen when there was a need for someone to be laughed at” like in Miss Gay beauty pageants, ProGay sought to make the needs of bekinals more visible.67 While liberal LGBT groups like Ang Ladlad Partylist push for an anti-discrimination bill, ProGay frames sexuality as a “social justice concern alongside affordable food, potable water, stable housing, land tenure, safety, medical treatment, and other material needs.” Whereas the mainstream LGBT organizations fail to understand why “potable water [was] placed on the [ProGay] agenda ahead of sexual rights,” ProGay members understand that for the “ who work in the salons, [if] they don’t have an adequate water supply…without water they can’t work.”68 Even within the visual interface of the beauty pageant, bakla and transpinays have taken advantage of the cisgender gaze and used pageantry as a platform to discuss their own vision of

65. Snorton and Haritaworn, “Trans Necropolitics,” 74. 66. Elijah Adiv Edelman, “‘Walking While Transgender’: Necropolitical Regulations of Trans Feminine Bodies of Color in the US Nation’s Capital,” in Queer Necropolitics, ed. by Jin Haritaworn, Adi Kuntsman, and Silvia Posocco (New York: Routledge, 2014), 187. 67. Michael David dela Cruz Tan, “Meeting the ‘Bekinals,’ Outrage Magazine, last modified December 18, 2012, http://outragemag.com/meeting-the-bekinals/. 68. Thoreson, “Realizing Rights in Manila,” 541. Frial 23 liberation. One contestant replied that transpinays like her join pageants not just because “of fame, glamour and the applause of the people, but…because [they] want to have the freedom to let everyone feel that [they] are existing and [they] are part of the community.” Another participant declared that “pageants are perfect avenues for [her] to push for [her] advocacies and to help educate the public about it.”69 While it is important to recognize the agency that disenfranchised transpinays and other low-income queer have in defining and shaping their own narratives, these desires are not immune to co-optation. In the next chapter, we will analyze how the desires of transpinays drive their migration from the Philippines, providing them with recognition and freedom of expression denied to them at home. However, these biopolitical incorporations paradoxically also lead to commodification of their bodies, as their labor becomes exploited via transnational sexual economies.

69. Bigtas, “Binibini Rin Kami: Trans Visibility in Philippine Pageantry,” 4:44-4:56, 5:35-5:40. Frial 24

CHAPTER 2: Jennifer Laude-as-Transnational Migrant

There is little doubt that the murder of Jennifer Laude by Joseph Scott Pemberton was a transnational affair. However, Laude’s interaction with Pemberton was not the first sexual encounter she had with a Westerner. Transgender Filipina-American journalist Meredith Talusan conducted a series of interviews with Laude’s mother and sister, where she discovered that Laude supported her family, “using income made from webcamming, gifts from foreign boyfriends, and local sex work.” Before the incident with Pemberton, Laude had at least three foreign boyfriends: a British customer she met while working at a hair salon, a Korean businessman, and Marc Sueselbeck, a German man who eventually became her fiancé.1 Sueselbeck and Laude planned to move to Germany where they would be married. However, Laude’s first attempt to apply for a German visa in March 2013 was denied “because of the prejudices the German embassy had against her.”2 Sueselbeck speculated these “prejudices” to be that “the embassy suspected her to have illegal and criminal acts in mind, not obeying visa regulations and trying to stay illegal in Europe, also the simple reason in her gender and her being not from a rich family.”3 On October 1, 2014, the embassy informed Sueselbeck that they would finally give Laude a visa after a pro-forma interview. However, just ten days later, Laude would be found dead. That Laude engaged in several relationships with foreign men was not an experience unique to her. Perhaps the most striking discovery that Talusan made was how frequent and universal these transnational encounters were among the transpinays she spoke with. On the night of the murder, Laude had already met with three clients before Pemberton, she and other sex workers “work as hard as [they] can when the soldiers are here.” While interviewing Charis and Jamille, two of Laude’s trans companions, Talusan came to the conclusion that they had never before met a trans women who did not engage in sex work. Moreover, she found they both had already scheduled dates with Chinese businessmen the same evening of their interview. Despite the death of their friend and ever-present threat of violence from clients – “They go away if we tell them [about our status as transgender]…sometimes they threaten to beat us and we run”4 – the two transpinays continued to seek the company of foreign men. At the most basic level of analysis, poverty and anti-transgender discrimination are the priamry factors which cause trans women like Laude and her companions to enter into the sex trade and meet with foreign men. However, as is clear by Laude’s romances with men like Sueselbeck, not all of these interactions are necessarily transactional by nature or driven purely by the need to survive. Jamille and Charis spoke with Talusan about being unable to find Filipino or foreign men to meet their emotional needs, and Laude used the money she earned to support her family and pay for her gender transition. Additionally, Laude intended to get married to Sueselbeck and move to Germany as his wife.5 To understand these transnational encounters

1. Meredith Talusan, “How the Killing of a Trans Filipina Woman Ignited an International Incident,” Vice News, last modified February 26, 2015, https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/avyd4z/how-to-get-away-with-murder- 0000602-v22n3. 2. Idem. 3. Marc Sueselbeck, “READ: Jennifer’s German Fiancé Reacts,” ABS-CBN News, last modified October 16, 2014. http://news.abs-cbn.com/global-filipino/10/15/14/read-jennifers-german-fiance-reacts. 4. Talusan, “How the Killing of a Trans Filipina Woman Ignited an International Incident.” 5. Idem. Frial 25 between transpinays and foreigners as arising out solely of financial necessity would serve only to reduce the complexity of their experiences and deny their individual agency. It is thus necessary to ask: What motivates transpinays – and more broadly, transgender women from the “Third World”6 – to participate in transnational sexual economies? What drives and structures their desires, and how do their desires in turn shape these labor markets? What roles do the institutions of marriage and citizenship play? Outside of the sex trade, how does desire motivate the transnational migration of transpinays from the Philippines to (desti)nations like Singapore, Japan, the United Arab Emirates, and Israel, where they are often employed as domestic helpers and entertainers?

Agency and Desire:

According to Lieba Faier, “[t]ransnational labor migration is not just a means of managing political-economic marginality. It is also about the imaginative dreams and pleasures that can be found abroad.”7 For many migrants – cisgender and transgender – “labor migration suggest[s] access to colonial and capitalist power, financial security, independence, and the very possibilities of living a ‘modern life’.”8 For Jennifer Laude, her marriage to Sueselbeck would have not only ensured her economic mobility through increased access to material comforts and leisurely travel (as indicated by Sueselbeck’s ability to vacation multiple times in the Philippines), but secure her inclusion in a First World nation as a citizen-wife. Clearly, desires for a better life influence the decisions of transgender migrants and sex workers to participate in transnational labor markets. Scholarly literature focusing on migrant sex workers tends to stress their agency in decision-making, countering discourses of human trafficking which tend to flatten their experiences to those of victims needing to be “saved.” Sealing Cheng writes that such an analysis

“takes into account a situated individual who has particular knowledge, desire, and imagination about what life could be; an awareness of the obstacles to achieving it; a sense of power to act toward realizing it; and a readiness to adapt and devise new tactics and strategies in the process. In other words, agency is power encumbered with constraints. A migrant’s resources – in terms of qualifications, money, and network – shape the migration path she takes.”9

Denise Brennan, in her study of Dominican sex workers, demonstrates that the women of Sosúa use sex work both as a survival and advancement strategy. The women “see Sosúa’s sex trade and marriage to foreign tourists as a fast track to economic success – a way not just to solve

6. Throughout this chapter, I use the term “Third World,” rather than the politically correct “Global South,” to refer to the developing countries of Africa, Latin America, and Asia. The stereotypical perception of the “Third World” as poverty-stricken influences how Westerners – particularly tourists and expatriates – view the inhabitants of these countries, leading to fantasies of “First World” men rescuing “Third World” women from poverty and trafficking and yet in reality contributing to their exploitation. 7. Lieba Faier, Intimate Encounters: Filipina Women and the Remaking of Rural Japan (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 2009), 82. 8. Ibid., 98-99. 9. Sealing Cheng, On the Move for Love: Migrant Entertainers and the U.S. Military in South Korea (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 29, accessed April 13, 2018, http://www.jstor.org/stable/ j.ctt3fhkxr. Frial 26 short-term economic problems but to change their lives (and their families’ lives) through migration overseas, in the long term.”10 Nonetheless, it is still important to recognize that these strategies are pursued within complex sociocultural systems that ultimately limit the variety of choices available to these subjects. Rhacel Parreñas discusses the need to “construct a middle ground that recognizes the agency of migrants without dismissing the severe structural constraints that could hamper their freedom and autonomy.”11 For many female migrants, both transnational labor migration and sex work are strategies that allow these women to “pursue their projects of aspiration overseas,” producing experiences of “not only disempowerment, alienation, and frustration but also liberation, excitement, and pleasure.” 12 Likewise, transpinays also encounter discrimination and adversity abroad, though as we will soon discover, these hardships are often viewed as mere inconveniences compared to their situation in the Philippines. Like cisgender Filipinas, transpinays often find employment as domestic helpers, caregivers, entertainers, or sex workers. These economic roles – alternatively categorized as reproductive, affective, or care labor – exist along a continuum, which according to Tadiar, arises from the “global commodification of Third World women in the form of female labour export” and their “constitution as ‘feminine’ bodily beings-for-others.”13 Nevertheless, this feminine constitution is seen as empowering for many trans women, as it enables them to feel “like real women.”14 As we will see, transpinays actively employ stereotypes about womanhood – and more specifically Filipina womanhood, such as having innate caregiving abilities – in order to construct, uphold, and defend their own femininities. However, it is precisely the iterative performance of these stereotypical behaviors that enables capitalism to “incorporate their needs, desires, into its fabric.”15 Transpinays want to be recognized as legitimate women, and thus they seek to perform the roles of caregiver or sex worker precisely because these are the prescribed options available to them as feminized subjects under global capitalism. To be (Filipina) woman is to be domestic helper, nurse, or mail-order bride – the (hyper)exploited object of Western patriarchal and capitalist domination. Rather than reworking or disrupting the dominant norm, the iteration of these roles by transpinay subjects in fact “becomes the means by which the dominant norm is painfully reiterated as the very desire and the performance of those it subjects.”16 In other words, “[w]hat drives the desire [for transpinays] to immigrate as a foreign reproductive worker (as it does the desire to participate in the global economy within the global south – in tourist economies or networked economies such as Internet porn or call centre work)…is the ‘crafting of their interests as subjects of needs by

10. Denise Brennan, What’s Love Got to Do With It? Transnational Desire and Sex Tourism in the Dominican Republic (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 24. 11. Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, Illicit Flirtations: Labor, Migration, and Sex Trafficking in Tokyo (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), 7. 12. Cheng, On the Move for Love, 29-30. 13. Neferti Xina M. Tadiar, Fantasy-Production: Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Consequences for the New World Order (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2004), 50, 120. 14. Parreñas, Illicit Flirtations, 199. 15. Aren Z. Aizura, “Trans Feminine Value, Racialized Others and the Limits of Necropolitics,” in Queer Necropolitics, ed. by Jin Haritaworn, Adi Kuntsman, and Silvia Posocco (New York: Routledge, 2014), 142. 16. Judith Butler, “Gender Is Burning: Questions of Appropriation and Subversion,” in Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives, ed. by Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti, and Ella Shohat (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 389. Frial 27 biopower’.”17 The commodification of Filipina feminine labor paradoxically enables the subjecthood of transpinays just as much as it lays the groundwork for their exploitation.

Instrumentalizing the Excess:

According to Marxist scholar Randy Martin, “what is excluded is always poised to return in the form of some further productivity.”18 Within the nation-state, the (racialized) feminine body is always rendered as excess. Tadiar writes that under the neoliberal approach to economic development,

“[t]he destruction of domestic income-generating activities results in the effective dispossession of the female and feminized labour force, thus making it more accessible for exploitation and circulation as commodified products. At the same time that the feminized labour force is deterritorialized – forced to seek employment abroad, pushed out of the country by the sheer absence of means of living, pulled into advanced countries by the spaces of demand for cheap and tractable labour – it is also further grounded in the female body.”19

This logic, of course, applies to all gendered bodies not designated cisgender and male. For the remainder of this chapter, we will draw from Aren Z. Aizura’s observations on how “queer and gender variant bodies [become] the excluded surplus poised to return in the form of some further productivity,”20 focusing specifically at the bodies of transpinays. This instrumentalization of transfemininity is perhaps most evident in sexual economies (i.e.: the “ladyboy” as a racialized fetish), but Aizura applies it to reproductive work in general. Reproductive work, as you will recall, constitutes the spectrum of (feminized) economic roles ranging from sex work to caregiving to household labor. This chapter will expand upon the argument of the previous one – that necropolitics derives value from trans suffering and death – following Aizura’s claim that “we cannot theorize a trans necropolitics without exploring the mobility of gender variant bodies and the circuits of capital they/we exploit and are exploited by.”21 Excluded from the nation-state, it is in transnational markets of reproductive labor that the body of the transpinay becomes productive. Whether as a feminized body or as a “she-male,” the transpinay is “paid not for a specific skill but rather for their gendered bodies – for their embodiment of a variety of functions and services which they are expected to provide at the beck and call of their employers.”22 It is crucial to understand that it is desire to be feminized that motivates transpinays’ participation (and exploitation) in these transnational economies and “disciplin[es] workers into a new kind of work ethic based on the hope or fantasy that their dreams will come true”23 – these dreams being that of finding a rich (white) husband, attaining First World citizenship, or simply achieving economic stability through long-term employment. In this way, for the transpinay, the desire to

17. Aizura, “Trans Feminine Value, Racialized Others and the Limits of Necropolitics,” 132. 18. Randy Martin, An Empire of Indifference: American War and the Financial Logic of Risk Management (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 141. 19. Tadiar, Fantasy-Production, 55. 20. Aizura, “Trans Feminine Value, Racialized Others and the Limits of Necropolitics,” 142. 21. Ibid., 131. 22. Tadiar, Fantasy-Production, 115. 23. Aizura, “Trans Feminine Value, Racialized Others and the Limits of Necropolitics,” 142. Frial 28 be feminine becomes synonymized with the desire to be (re)productive. As we will see, only by supplying their bodies as capital to satisfy male/Western/heterosexual desires (whether as bride, sex worker, or caregiver) is the femininity of the transpinay recognized, though often at the cost of dehumanization. Like Aizura, I will use the documentary films Paper Dolls and The Amazing Truth About Queen Raquela to expand upon the theories discussed in the introduction to this chapter. The Amazing Truth About Queen Raquela, by Icelandic director Olaf de Fleur Johanneson, is a “feature film [that uses] true-life subjects,”24 recounting the allegedly “true” story of Raquela Rios. Raquela is a transgender sex worker who is “discovered” by an agent for a “ladyboy” webcamming site. The owner of the site, Michael, decides to help fulfill Raquela’s dream of travelling to Paris. Paper Dolls follows a group of transgender Filipina migrants to Israel who perform in a drag queen troupe of the same name. The film documents the relationships between the Filipina caregivers and their elderly Orthodox Jewish employers, as well as their interactions with gay Israeli director Tomer Heymann. While this chapter utilizes the same primary sources and adopts a similar theoretical basis as Aizura, I will examine more closely the role that desire serves in driving the circulation of transpinays within transnational markets of reproductive labor. Even though the Filipinas in Paper Dolls describe themselves as “describe themselves as gay and ‘identify as women’ rather than transgendered or transsexual,”25 like Aizura, I will use the terms “transgender” and “trans femininity” (more specifically, “transpinay”) to “designate the visual and intersubjective gendering and embodied practice that are imagined.”26

Desiring Labor:

For the transpinay subjects of Paper Dolls and The Amazing Truth About Queen Raquela, transnational labor markets provide an escape from the necropolitical climate that oppresses them in the Philippines. Like the Filipina migrants to Japan in Lieba Faier’s study and the women from Sosúa in Denise Brennan’s work, labor migration is imagined as providing “access to colonial and capitalist power, financial security, independence, and the very possibilities of living a ‘modern life’.”27 Throughout the documentary, Raquela repeatedly expresses her dream to walk the streets of Paris and “live a very luxurious life…shop those expensive clothes.”28 Moreover, it would allow her to have her womanhood affirmed by being perceived as an object of (male/heterosexual/Western) desire. When she walks in the streets, she imagines that people will “stare at [her], and they’ll say, ‘Who the hell is that girl? She’s very beautiful” – a sentiment which would undoubtedly spring from her Otherness as a brown trans woman from a Third World country.

24. “Ladyboy – ‘Making of’ a Film About Ladyboys (Queen Raquela),” Youtube video, 0:47-0:49, posted by poppoli, June 15, 2006, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2bIIXiJPi0. 25. Philip Himberg, “Boys, boas and a Big Issue: Writer Philip Himberg on His New Play Paper Dolls,” EveningStanford, last modified February 20, 2013, https://www.standard.co.uk/ go/london/theatre/boys-boas-and-a- big-issue-writer-philip-himberg-on-his-new-play-paper-dolls-8502557.html. 26. Aizura, “Trans Feminine Value, Racialized Others and the Limits of Necropolitics,” 131. 27. Faier, Intimate Encounters, 98-99. 28. Olaf de Fleur Johanneson, dir. The Amazing Truth About Queen Raquela, 33:44-33:54 (2008; Toronto, Canada: E1 Entertainment Distribution, 2010), DVD. Frial 29

Transpinay migrants already living abroad expressed similar feelings about the possibilities that labor migration provided, drawing comparisons between their life in the Philippines and in their host country. In her study, Rhacel Parreñas discovered that transpinay hostesses’ thoughts about Japan were summed up in the phrase, “ang Japan ay paraiso para sa mga bakla” (Japan is a paradise for the bakla). All of the transgender hostesses had migrated to Japan because it enabled them to “secure a professional status occupation that had eluded them in the Philippines, despite having degrees from some of the best universities in the country.”29 In addition to employment opportunities, many transpinays find their romantic prospects improved as well. Unlike Filipino men – who expect bakla and trans women to pay them for their company (in a reversal of “traditional gender relations of male providers and female nurturers”) – Japanese men “validate their feelings of being ‘like real women’” by providing them with opportunities for love and courtship.30 These feelings of being “like real women” were reflected by transpinays who had not been able to leave the Philippines. According to narration by Michael, the owner of the webcam site, these “ladyboys”31 wait at the airport week after week to meet with men they have spoken with through internet chats. He continues, “the dream is, one of these times, one of these wealthy Europeans or wealthy Americans is going to come off that airplane and sweep them [the ladyboys] off their feet and treat them like a woman that they feel like they are.”32 Indeed, toward the beginning of the film, Raquela herself waits for a German man named Michael (not the same as the website owner) she met online, who does not show up at the airport for her. While a chance for romance is one factor motivating transpinays to migrate abroad, migration also provides space for them to present freely as women. For Jan, one of the Paper Dolls, living and working in Israel secures her to the ability to wear “earrings, dyed hair, makeup, lipstick,” for if she dressed this way in the Philippines, her father would “beat [her].”33 As is clear throughout all of these narratives – Raquela, Bambi, and Jan – entrance into the transnational sphere (by participating in labor migration or marrying a wealthy foreigner) opens the door for transpinays to have their desires fulfilled and their identities affirmed.

“Virtuous Third World Subjects”:

The possibility for transpinays to “escape” from the Philippines (and maintain work abroad) is enabled primarily by their ability to present themselves as the ideal “Third World woman.” In two particularly intriguing shots, Raquela dons a nurse and maid outfit to attract clients for her webcam work – an embodiment that not only concatenates the various economic roles by which the Filipina woman is known (i.e.: sex worker, caregiver, and domestic helper), but physically realizes the (colonial) fantasies of Western men to sexually dominate and control submissive brown women.34 Her performance, captured through the interface of the webcam, serves as a prime example of how the “exotic is manufactured into the erotic – both privately in

29. Parreñas, Illicit Flirtation, 19. 30. Ibid., 202-203. 31. The term “ladyboy” is a derogatory term used to refer to Southeast Asian transgender women and effeminate gay men, especially from Thailand and the Philippines. It is a rough translation of the Thai word and Filipino word bakla. 32. Johanneson, The Amazing Truth About Queen Raquela, 26:21-26:54. 33. Tomer Heymann, dir. Paper Dolls, 51:52-52:11 (2006; Culver City, CA: Strand Releasing, 2007), DVD. 34. Johanneson, The Amazing Truth About Queen Raquela, 30:39-30:45, 32:42-32:51. Frial 30 consumers’ imaginations and quite publicly by entire industries that make money off this desire for difference” – a difference and Otherness that sex workers themselves take advantage of by “play[ing] up in their dress, gestures, and dance what they think the men desire.”35 These strategies are most clear in the ways that sex workers and hostesses seduce Western men, particularly sex tourists. In her ethnography of Vietnamese sex workers in Ho Chih Minh City, Kimberly Kay Hoang writes that “sex workers who cater to Western expatriates and tourists employ technologies of embodiment that are deeply embedded in discourses of Western paternalism, to attract benevolent remittances. These women project Third World dependency by embodying virtuous Third World subjects.”36 In this case, “embodiment” for the “Third World woman” entails performing stereotypes of poverty “to generate feelings of chivalry and magnanimity among customers.”37 These men imagine themselves as “engaging in charity projects that helped poor, desperate women in a developing country,”38 and the sex workers and hostesses, knowing this to be the case, deliberately fabricate stories of poverty to procure larger sums of money. For Japanese men as well, Lieba Faier reveals that they were “attracted to Filipina women because these women ‘came from a poor country,” and one Japanese husband specifically said he married his Filipina wife because he “wanted to help her.”39 Within economies of care, domestic helpers and caregivers also evoke stereotypes of Filipinas as naturally caring, despite these discourses being created by the Philippine government and private employment agencies for the purpose of marketing Filipina women as commodified labor exports. These agencies “sell Filipinas, by promoting a discourse of productive femininity rooted in a culturally essentialist logic in which the Philippines is a natural source of a cost- effective and desirable workforce that has innate caregiving abilities.”40 Cheska, one of the Paper Dolls, adopts this discourse to argue for the use of Filipinas as care labor. She states that Filipino do this work because “we have love. We are very devoted. Filipinos are very devoted.”41 Cheska’s utilization of this trope is less an internalization of this stereotype of Filipinas as naturally caring and more a strategy deployed to defend her continued employment in Israel. At this point in the film, having recently been fired, Cheska is in danger of deportation (she is later detained and sent back to the Philippines). It can be inferred that Cheska, angry from the disrespect she faces from Israelis, latches on to this argument to augment her value as a care laborer. Jan, after she was also fired, expresses similar sentiments, stating that “no matter how long you take care of [elderly Israeli men] and love them, it ends like that.”42 Despite forming personal relationships with their employers, as Filipina migrant (trans) women, Jan and Cheska are viewed by their employers as nothing more than exchangeable goods (Jan states she herself was replaced by “a new Filipino”43) with no independent desires or needs of their own. Just as “transnational capital is the only entity responsible for the

35. Brennan, What’s Love Got to Do With It?, 16, 197. 36. Kimberly Kay Hoang, Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendency, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2015), 130-131. 37. Parreñas, Illicit Flirtations, 105. 38. Hoang, Dealing in Desire, 62. 39. Faier, Intimate Encounters, 76, 37. 40. Anna Romina Guevarra, Marketing Dreams, Manufacturing Heroes: The Transnational Labor Brokering of Filipino Workers (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010), accessed April 13, 2018, http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5hj188. 41. Heymann, Paper Dolls, 55:24-55:29. 42. Ibid., 55:43-51:48. 43. Ibid., 51:28-51:29. Frial 31 identification of the Third World as a labor resource,”44 it can also be argued that only in service to transnational capital (and the various sexual/caring relationships facilitated by its circulation) can the desires of Third World women be legitimated – in other words, only those desires that serve the (re)productive needs of Western cisgender men.

Disciplining Desires:

Though evoking stereotypes of the Third World woman may allow transpinays and other women to express greater agency over their lives and control over their narratives, these stereotypes also have a disciplinary function. As stated before, performing these stereotypes “becomes the means by which the dominant norm is painfully reiterated as the very desire and the performance of those it subjects.”45 In other words, evoking a stereotype (even if with subversive intentions) can serve to naturalize it as “reality” through continual repetition. For instance, Raquela’s performance as the “sexy maid” and the “sexy nurse” can be read as reinforcing the damaging stereotypes of Filipina migrants as “inherently promiscuous,” justifying sexual abuse from their male employers.46 Whether as a sex worker, a nurse, or a domestic helper, the bodies of Filipinas are viewed as “commodities, corporeal objects for the use of others.”47 Singling out Raquela from all the “ladyboys” he employs, Michael says he will reward her for “sticking to the program” and “doing great webcam work,” paying for her to achieve her dream of going to Paris.48 Raquela’s performance is “great” precisely because she “sticks to the program,” participating in a transnational (visual) economy that profits off of this commodification of Filipina labor as “‘feminine’ bodily beings-for-others.”49 In other words, Raquela is rewarded precisely for successfully perpetuating these stereotypes. From Raquela’s point of view, she knows that “when [she] go[es] to Europe, [she] won't have anything. That’s why [she] have to work, work, work, work in order to reach [her] dreams.” Because her work is explicitly sex-based, she knows she will have to find “a rich guy who is handsome,” as he will be “the one who would fulfill [her] dreams.”50 This logic falls directly in line with Aizura’s observation that the biopolitical mechanisms that regulate the circulation of migrant labor aim at “[d]isciplining workers into a new kind of work ethic based on the hope or fantasy that their dreams will come true.”51 In a similar manner, Jan and Cheska’s ability to present themselves as “naturally caring” bodies becomes the means to secure them employment in Israel and the freedom of presenting freely as women.

Transnational Limbo:

As is evident from both the experiences of Raquela and the Paper Dolls, the desires of transnational migrants are inextricably connected to larger global migrant pathways that “facilitate the accumulation of capital in developed countries” by exploiting the labor of workers

44. Guevarra, Marketing Dreams, Manufacturing Heroes, 125. 45. Butler, “Gender Is Burning,” 389. 46. Nicole Constable, “Sexuality and Discipline Among Filipina Domestic Workers in Hong Kong.” American Ethnologist 24, no. 3 (1997): 547, accessed April 13, 2018, https://www.jstor.org/stable/647082. 47. Tadiar, Fantasy-Production, 120. 48. Johanesson, The Amazing Truth About Queen Raquela, 31:34-31:37, 38:01-38:03. 49. Tadiar, Fantasy-Production, 121. 50. Johanesson, The Amazing Truth About Queen Raquela, 4:57-5:22. 51. Aizura, “Trans Feminine Value, Racialized Others and the Limits of Necropolitics,” 142. Frial 32 from the Third World. 52 This particular apparatus of state-sponsored migration serves the dual function of “resolving [both] global capitalism’s demands for labor and neoliberalizing labor- importing states’ demands for temporary migrants who will not make claims for membership and will return to their countries of origin once their jobs are done.”53 The transient nature of their employment – regulated through strict work visas, like those of the Paper Dolls – is key toward preventing foreign workers from being “permanently absorbed into the labour market.”54 As evident through the stories of the Paper Dolls, this inability to be incorporated into any national body – forever stuck in a transnational limbo – leaves temporary migrants vulnerable to several forms of violence, among them forcible deportation and even murder. As many transpinay migrants discover, while transnational labor markets promise (and feed desires for) an escape from the death-worlds that oppress them in the Philippines, they are in fact death- worlds of their own. The temporary conditions of their transnational employment leave them in a permanent state of displacement. It is specifically this factor of temporariness that reduces migrant workers to the “level of exchange value” and allows for an “assumption of their universal equivalence.”55 Whether through online sex sites advertising “ladyboys” or local newspapers listing requests for “Filipinas,” transpinays and other feminized bodies become “situated in a transnational labor market where their skills and cultural competencies have value because they are inexpensive to purchase.”56 Jan’s former employer can easily replace her with another Filipina. After their “break-up” toward the end of the film, Michael dismisses Raquela as “one of thousands. She’s not special or unique.”57 In fact, by the time he returns to New York, he is already chatting with a Brazilian “ladyboy” named Paula. Michael’s comment – along with the fact that the Paper Dolls entered Israel specifically to “replace” Palestinian workers58 – indicates that Filipina workers are viewed as exchangeable not only with one another, but also with other Third World subjects. As Third World subjects, low-skill migrants are denied the benefits of citizenship which are granted to “educated and self-propulsive individuals…even at the expense of territorialized citizens.”59 Michael’s ability to “go down [to Brazil] and see what there is to see”60 is enabled not just by his class privilege, but by status as a First World citizen, which bestows upon him a “form of movable entitlement without formal citizenship” that is universally held by Western expatriates. In contrast, migrant workers from the Third World are stripped of the most basic political rights and conceived as a “threat to the social body.”61

52. James A. Tyner, Made in the Philippines: Gendered Discourse and the Making of Migrants (New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004), 62. 53. Robyn Magalit Rodriguez, How the Philippine State Brokers Labor to the World (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), xxii. 54. Aizura, “Trans Feminine Value, Racialized Others and the Limits of Necropolitics,” 142. 55. Ibid., 136-137. 56. William Peterson, “Amazing Show in Manila: ‘Fantasy Production’ and Filipino Labor in a Transnational, Transcultural, Transgendered Theatre Enterprise,” Theatre Journal 63, no. 4 (2011): 590, accessed April 13, 2018, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/462888. 57. Johanneson, The Amazing Truth About Queen Raquela, 1:15:35-1:15:39. 58. Heymann, Paper Dolls, 1:02-1:18. 59. Aihwa Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and State Sovereignty (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 16, accessed April 13, 2018, http://my.ilstu.edu/~jkshapi/Ong_Neoliberalism%20 as%20Exception.pdf. 60. Johanneson, The Amazing Truth About Queen Raquela, 1:16:32-1:16:37. 61. Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception, 209. Frial 33

Migrants are particularly vilified because of their “in-between” status as a temporary source of labor for the national economy, necessary to its functioning and yet not able to occupy a space of belonging within it. As we recall from the previous chapter, the “abjection of others serves to maintain or reinforce boundaries that are threatened.”62 Domestic helpers and caregivers in particular occupy a particularly abject position within national economies because of their ambiguous gendered-sexual roles as reproductive workers. As a racially-Othered woman who is disconnected from her own children and family (or simply unmarried and thus “unattached”) but performs a “crucial role in the material and social reproduction of middle-class families,” the foreign maid/caretaker fuels anxiety over her inability to fit within the traditional structures of the heteropatriarchal family and the nation-state. As such, Filipina migrant women are constantly perceived as “racially and socially contaminating.”63 These biopolitical disparities on the basis of ethnoracial difference are reflected in how the Jennifer Laude case was administered. As an officer in the United States Armed Forces, Pemberton was protected under the Visiting Forces Agreement. The United States determined the conditions of Pemberton’s custody, despite having committed the crime on Philippine soil. As such, he was “detained in a 28-cubic-meter, air-conditioned freight container with military- type cot bed and grilled windows, directly guarded by US Marines while Philippine military police [were] posted outside the fenced compound of the Joint US Military Assistance Group (Jusmag).”64 On the contrary, Laude was blamed for the loss of an estimated 20 million pesos (about US $425,000) as a result of the suspension of off-base liberty privileges for U.S. servicemen. A local taxi driver in fact stated he himself “would have killed her too.” In regards to the case, he exclaimed that there are “so many families that have gone hungry because of [the Laude family’s] greed” in pursuing the case, as he and other Olongapans have lost the majority of their customers due to the liberty ban. Another Olongapan summed up local sentiment toward the Laude case thusly: “Transgenders should be kicked out of Olongapo.”65

Citizen-Wives and Strategy-Driven Love:

Apart from already disturbing borders of sex and gender, transpinay migrants occupy a liminal space within/without the heteropatriarchal matrix of nation, home, and family. As gendered bodies “hired to perform reproductive services but excluded from reproductive activities of [their] own,”66 transpinays – Jennifer Laude herself included – engage in the strategy of “marrying for a visa” in order to fold themselves into the body of the nation-state as “productive” citizen-wives. According to Denise Brennan, “[m]arriage in a tourist economy – especially in an internationally known sex-tourist destination – often has nothing to do with emotion-driven love

62. Robert Phillips, “Abjection,” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 1, no. 1-2 (2014): 19, accessed April 13, 2018, https://read.dukeupress.edu/tsq/article/1/1-2/19/91761/Abjection. 63. Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception, 206-207. 64. Christian V. Esguerra, “Aquino: Pemberton Getting Special Negative Treatment,” Philippine Daily Inquirer, last modified October 23, 2014, http://globalnation.inquirer.net/113169/ aquino-pemberton-getting-special- negative-treatment-in-laude-slay-probe. 65. Meredith Talusan, “The Aftermath of a U.S. Marine’s Conviction in the Death of a Philippine Trans Woman,” BuzzFeed News, last modified January 3, 2016, https://www.buzzfeed. com/meredithtalusan/the- aftermath-of-jennifer-laude-and-joseph-scott-pemberton?utm_term=.sgp5dPKaj#.bryeD1vXP. 66. Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception, 208. Frial 34 or romance.”67 Instead, many sex workers, as well as other workers within transnational markets of reproductive labor, pursue marriage for reasons of “strategy-driven love.” Parreñas differentiates between the two types of love in that “emotional-driven love would refer to irrational feelings one holds outside of conscious thought, while strategy-driven love would be motivated by one’s material wants and needs.”68 In fact, the entire plot of The Amazing Truth About Queen Raquela is premised on the practice of strategy-driven love. As stated before, Raquela hopes that “a rich guy who is handsome…[will] fulfill [her] dreams” of walking the streets of Paris – an opportunity that presents itself in the form of her employer Michael.69 For transpinays and other Third World women, there are few options to secure First World citizenship other than through marriage. Within Sosúa, “marriage between Dominicans and Europeans and between Dominicans and Canadians emerges as an economic strategy as well as a legal route to securing the papers necessary to migrate off the island,”70 whereas in Japan, “long-term legal residency in Japan is conditional on their participation in a heterosexual union with a Japanese national either through marriage or by giving birth to a child.”71 However, the ability of transpinays to engage in heterosexual marriage is complicated by their gender identity. Parreñas details the methods by which transpinay hostesses in Japan subvert both the law and the norms of compulsory heterosexuality that constrain their ability to marry. Under Japanese law, transpinays are legally recognized only as “men,” and thus must marry with a Japanese individual designated as a “woman” to be granted citizenship. As such, transpinays choose to marry with female-to-male transgender men or cisgender women, in a practice that Parreñas terms “mimicking heteronormativity.”72 These sexual relations thus not only challenge the assumed gender roles upheld by the institution of marriage, but also reveal and subvert the heterosexual underpinnings of citizenship. Aside from legal factors, negative stereotypes about both Filipina migrant women and transgender women also limit the upward mobility of transpinays. As stated before, Laude’s visa was denied “because of the prejudices the German embassy had against her,”73 as “the embassy suspected her to have illegal and criminal acts in mind.”74 As a body Otherized on the basis of both race and gender, and more specifically as a Filipina woman, Laude is always-already viewed as “inherently promiscuous” and “a symbol of the moral order turned inside out,” threatening the sanctity of family and nation.75 Moreover, as a transgender Filipina woman, Laude is cast as “not only sexually available, but deceptive and criminal,” only fit for dirty and degrading jobs like prostitution. 76 With all these constrictions on their social advancement, it is not surprising that many transpinays are unable to marry to attain First World citizenship. However, that leaves very few other options for their continued survival and existence. Among the Paper Dolls, Cheska was deported upon termination of her employer visa. Given that their visas that left them unable to

67. Brennan, What’s Love Got to Do With It?, 96. 68. Parreñas, Illicit Flirtations, 182. 69. Johanesson, The Amazing Truth About Queen Raquela, 4:57-5:22. 70. Brennan, What’s Love Got to Do With It?, 30. 71. Parreñas, Illicit Flirtations, 209. 72. Ibid., 209-210. 73. Talusan, “How the Killing of a Trans Filipina Woman Ignited an International Incident.” 74. Sueselbeck, “READ: Jennifer’s German Fiancé Reacts.” 75. Constable, “Sexuality and Discipline Among Filipina Domestic Workers in Hong Kong,” 547, 540. 76. Aizura, “Trans Feminine Value, Racialized Others and the Limits of Necropolitics,” 135. Frial 35 qualify for Israeli citizenship, four of the other Paper Dolls decided to move to London where they became British citizens, one of them by marrying a (male) German doctor.77 For those who are unable to leave the Philippines, the case of Raquela’s friend Aubrey indicates that some are forced to relinquish their transgender identity. Aubrey dreams of providing for her family by graduating from school and becoming an engineer, upon which she states she will be “surrendering her hair to the company.”78 By this, Aubrey understands that her employment within the “company” is contingent on her “proper” gender identification as a “man.” Before finding employment through the “ladyboy” webcamming site, Raquela attempts to apply for nursing school, presenting as a “man” under her birth name of “Earvin.” However, she is denied entrance and instead told by her interviewer to “get married, have children and a family,”79 implying that “the school will not admit her unless she presents as more gender normative.”80 As evidenced by both Raquela and Aubrey’s experiences, class mobility (like citizenship) is premised on heteronormative understandings of gender. Marriage requires heterosexuality, and employment requires gender conformity. Outside of attaining First World citizenship or finding long-term stable employment, there are virtually no other options for transpinays to advance socially. They instead become trapped within the death-worlds of the transnational economy, either shuttled from one low-skill job to another or forever waiting for a “rich guy who is handsome” to take them to the First World. As demonstrated by Jennifer Laude’s fate, if a transpinay is unable to find a permanent fix to their condition, this form of (non)existence can only result in death.

Conclusion: Desiring Life, Desiring Death:

As proven throughout this chapter, neoliberal global capitalism “continually and flexibly finds ways to extract surplus from bodies the nation-state itself wants to exclude.”81 Unable to conform the demands of heteronormativity required for citizenship and class mobility, the bodies of transpinays are understood as “only of value within the transnational market for reproductive labour,” and for many transpinays, they find that means that “sex work is the most lucrative employment.”82 Following Aizura, it is crucial to understand that the “modes of subjectivation that stage exclusion from the social [are] merely another way to include bodies in the structural grind of capital.”83 Using the case of Jennifer Laude as an example, it was precisely the possibility of ascension to citizen-wife that brought about the conditions that led to her murder. It was her desire for economic stability that led her to find Sueselbeck through an online dating site, but that also left her a victim to Pemberton when she sought out male clients to make money for the night. Inversely, it was also (male/heterosexual/Western) desire to “save” the impoverished Third World woman that granted Laude visibility within transnational markets of sex, but also

77. Philip Himberg, “Boys, Boas and a Big Issue: Writer Philip Himberg on His New Play Paper Dolls,” EveningStanford, last modified February 20, 2013, https://www.standard.co.uk/ go/london/theatre/boys-boas-and-a- big-issue-writer-philip-himberg-on-his-new-play-paper-dolls-8502557.html. 78. Johannesson, The Amazing Truth About Queen Raquela, 10:14-10:16. 79. Ibid., 19:10-19:20. 80. Aizura, “Trans Feminine Value, Racialized Others and the Limits of Necropolitics,” 142. 81. Ibid., 132. 82. Ibid., 135, 137. 83. Ibid., 133. Frial 36

(male/heterosexual/Western) desire to exploit the sexualized Third World woman that led Pemberton to seek a sex worker like Laude for the night. Whichever way it is framed, transpinays and other feminized bodies remain constrained to the “beck and call” of structures of desire commanded by the neoliberal global economy and cisgender men of the West. However, how were these death-worlds created in the first place? What structural forces condemn transpinays to “slow death” in the Philippines? In the next chapter, we will examine how the Philippine came to be viewed as a “nation of prostitutes,” as well as the necrocapitalist practices that continue to subject transpinays and Filipina women to masculine/neocolonial domination.

Frial 37

CHAPTER 3: Jennifer Laude-as-“Collateral Damage”

In December 2005, U.S. Marine Daniel Smith was charged with raping a Filipina woman (alias “Nicole”) while other soldiers cheered him on. The two had met at a bar near the former U.S. naval base at Subic Bay, while the soldiers were granted “liberty” privileges to go off-base for leisure. Throughout his trial, Smith was held at the U.S. embassy, and despite being sentenced to 40 years in the city jail, he was quickly turned over back to the embassy.1 The “Nicole” incident was important in that it was the first case to be tried under the Visiting Forces Agreement, which allowed the U.S. military “access to Philippines ports for fueling, repairs, supplies, and rest and recreation, in effect continuing the military relations between the two nations” despite the U.S. being evicted from these bases in 1992.2 However, the greater significance lay in how the Subic rape case set a precedent for the United States’ disregard of Philippine law and sovereignty. The Supreme Court of the Philippines ordered Smith to be returned to the Makati city jail in February 2009. However, before he could be moved, the Court of Appeals acquitted Smith just two months later, having received a letter from Nicole retracting her accusations, calling the incident a “spontaneous, unplanned romantic episode.”3 As this directly contradicted her earlier testimony describing the incident as a “live rape show,” it was widely speculated that Nicole was pressured to recant through a backdoor deal in which she was granted a U.S. immigrant visa and monetary compensation.4 In an appeal to the Supreme Court separate from the Nicole case, former President of the Senate Jovito Salonga and law professor Harry Roque filed to abrogate the VFA. Upon hearing about the recantation, they issued the following as part of a joint statement:

“The lessons learned from the case of Nicole is very clear: unless abrogated, the VFA treats Filipinos as second class citizens in their own country. The message should be very clear to all Filipinos: under the VFA, American Servicemen committing non-service related offenses such as rape, could be accorded impunity as their punishment could consist of alleged detention in airconditioned facilities complete with a gym and internet access, and by Manila bay at that!”5

Professor Bobby Tuazon of the Centre for People Empowerment in Governance gave a similarly biting analysis of the VFA and the unequal relations it fostered between the U.S. and Filipino citizens, stating that the U.S. views “the Subic rape case and other crimes that may be committed by U.S. troops [as] inconsequential to America’s overall security interests in the Philippines and the region as a whole. Pentagon calls these ‘collateral damage’.” He added that he did not think

1. Carmela Fonbuena, “EDCA, Olongapo Murder, and the Old Case of Daniel Smith,” Rappler.com, last modified October 28, 2014, https://www.rappler.com/nation/71871-edca-olongapo-daniel-smith. 2. Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez, Securing Paradise: Tourism and Militarism in Hawaii and the Philippines (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 85. 3. Fonbuena, “EDCA, Olongapo Murder, and the Old Case of Daniel Smith.” 4. Paul Watson, “Philippine Women’s Groups Say There’s a Plot to Free U.S. Marine Accused of Rape,” The Los Angeles Times, last modified March 19, 2009, http://articles.latimes.com/2009/mar/19/world/fg-philippines- rape19. 5. “‘Nicole’ a Scapegoat to Save VFA – Lawmaker,” ABS-CBN News, last modified March 19, 2009, http://news.abs-cbn.com/nation/03/18/09/nicole-scapegoat-save-vfa-lawmaker. Frial 38 the U.S. and Philippine government would think much of the case, considering it merely “an isolated aberration” in their long-standing relationship.6 However, just a short nine years later, this relationship would be yet again challenged by another eerily similar “isolated aberration” with the murder of Jennifer Laude by a U.S. Marine in the town of Olongapo, just outside of the former U.S. naval base at Subic Bay.

Liberty and Liability:

According to Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez, under the Visiting Forces Agreement:

“[the] new soldier-tourist subject is the ultimate protected subject: at the cost of the Philippine government’s sovereignty, American soldiers committing crimes in the Philippines are not under the jurisdiction of local laws. As the new ‘rescuer’ – providing not only tourist dollars for a struggling Philippine economy, but also a protective force to guarantee ‘stability’ – the soldier-tourist becomes a new privileged subject of both states. Tragically, the potency of such masculinized narratives of military suffering also submerges contemporary moments of gendered and racialized violence committed against Filipinas, who register most keenly the collateral damage of these new military maneuvers. Against this backdrop of military-tourist modernity, the ‘incidental’ stories of base-related sexual violence become footnotes.”7

Indeed, under the Visiting Forces Agreement, U.S. soldiers like Smith and Pemberton are quite literally guaranteed “liberty” on Philippine shores, free to consume goods and services offered in the special economic zone of Subic Bay and to satisfy their voracious sexual appetites with bargirls from the Barrio Barretto district of Olongapo. In contrast, the victims of their gendered/sexual violence (i.e.: Nicole and Laude) are rendered “liabilities” that disrupt the image of “paradise” that enables local Filipino business and foreign investors to profit off of these “militourist” masculine fantasies. As seen in the previous chapter, desire motivates the inclusion and movement of transpinays in transnational economies, namely male/heterosexual/Western desires for her racialized/gendered difference and transpinays’ own desires for escape. In this chapter, we will explore how the desires of other transnational actors – particularly the imperialist, the foreign industrialist, and the tourist – indelibly lay the groundwork for the necropolitical extermination of local Filipino workers (particularly sex workers). The necrocapitalist practices of tourism and militarism enable a sort of necronationalisms to arise, producing unholy alliances between masculinist nation-states, transnational investors, and local (male) business owners who profit off of the sexual exploitation of local women (including transpinays). As we will see, the Subic Bay Freeport Zone (SBFZ) – formerly Subic Bay Naval Station – functions as a prime example of this military-tourist-industrial “playground”: a locus of (gendered) human rights abuses marketed under the name of “paradise” and justified in the name of “security.”

6. Stella Gonzalez, “PHILIPPINES: Rape Case Won’t Dent US Military Presence,” Inter Press Service, last modified March 30, 2007, http://www.ipsnews.net/2007/03/philippines-rape-case-wont-dent-us-military- presence/. 7. Gonzalez, Securing Paradise, 113. Frial 39

The Sexscapes of Subic Bay:

According to the Subic Bay Metropolitan Authority (SBMA), Subic Bay was chosen by the U.S. Navy as a location for a repair and supply depot because of its “strategically located safe and natural deep harbor.”8 However, amidst a growing anti-bases campaign led by Filipina nationalists and the destruction of base facilities following the eruption of Mount Pinatubo, the Philippine Senate rejected the renewal of the 1947 Military Bases Agreement, prompting the closure of the Clark U.S. Air Force Base and Subic Bay U.S. Naval Station.9 Upon withdrawal of U.S. forces, the Senate created the SBMA and Clark Development Corporation to transform the bases into “self-sustaining, industrial, commercial, financial and investment center[s] to generate employment opportunities in and around the zone, and to attract and promote productive foreign investments.”10 Gonzalez writes that:

“As a haven for an intensified neoliberal economy, Subic Freeport brings in international investors who have taken advantage of the modern infrastructure established by the U.S. military, as well as domestic and international tourists wanting to holiday in the leisure centers that have cropped up around former military recreation centers such as beach resorts, golf, casino hotels, duty-free shopping, or even a safari tour. Filipinos are welcome as long as they provide the cheap labor that attracts foreign investment or become tourists who identify with a cosmopolitan leisure class.”11

Following the return of U.S. naval ships (and “visiting” soldiers) to Subic Bay after the signing of the Visiting Forces Agreement in 1998, more than just the leftover infrastructure recalls the military history of the base. The names Subic and Clark remain “infamous bywords for licentiousness for their off-case ‘entertainment’ economies and patterns of military sexual violence.”12 As is evident by the cases of Nicole and Jennifer Laude, Subic Bay retains its steamy reputation as a sexscape – both for soldiers on “rest-and-recreation” and foreign tourists looking for exotic sexual pleasures. Drawing from the five landscapes of global flows mapped by Arjun Appadurai (ethnoscapes, technoscapes, finanscapes, mediascapes, and ideoscapes), Denise Brennan proposes a sixth landscape of the “sexscape” to describe

“the tremendous effects of global capital’s disruptive and restructuring activities: its redirection of development and local employment into the tourist and sex- tourist industry, especially women’s work and migration choices; its creation of powerful images, fantasies, and desires (both locally and globally inspired) that

8. Subic Bay Metropolitan Authority, “About SBMA,” Subic Bay Metropolitan Authority, accessed April 13, 2018, http://www.mysubicbay.com.ph/about-us/brief-history. 9. Cynthia Enloe, Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000), 76. 10. Subic Bay Metropolitan Authority, “About SBMA.” 11. Gonzalez, Securing Paradise, 201. 12. Ibid., 84. Frial 40

are inextricably tied up with race and gender; and its generation of new transnational practices from which foreigners extract more benefit than locals.”13

The neoliberalization of Subic Bay following the withdrawal of U.S. forces served to maintain the imperialist (sexual) designs of the U.S. military project. By establishing Subic as a tourist destination and free-trade zone, the Philippine government hoped to recuperate the loss of revenue that the U.S. military’s “visits” sustained through Subic Bay’s location as a “rest-and- recreation” stop. In other words, the Philippine government not only expropriated the existing military infrastructure present in Subic Bay, but appropriated the existing network of images that had already established Subic as a sexscape and prime “militourist” sex destination. Gonzalez locates a continuity between imperialist and tourist desires. Whereas U.S. imperialism is “imagined as an enterprise that is significantly held in place by a kind of virulent masculinity performed by soldiers in the entertainment areas near US military bases, where they are understood to seek domination over the local population via the bodies of women,”14 she claims tourist acts are “always already refracted through desires to identify with [these] masculinities that have been mobilized in the service of extraterritorial domination.”15 In short, both militarism and tourism “rely on sedimented notions of colonized land and people (especially women) as passively there for the taking.”16 It is not coincidental that militarism and tourism are linked through these (masculinist) colonial desires for the “exotic” feminine, materialized in land or bodies. These desires become legitimized through state-sanctioned systems of prostitution; within militourist economies, this system of organized prostitution is euphemistically referred to as “rest and recreation.” Before proceeding further, it must be made clear why I have chosen to use the word prostitution as opposed to sex work. The term sex work carries with it “individualist and valorizing connotations” which detach this form of labor from the specific “raced, gendered, militarized, and globalized political economy” that defines (neo)colonies like the Philippines.17 In contrast, built into the term prostitution are notions of “inherent coerciveness and structural violence” – an “institutionalization of sexual violence via commercialization” that oppresses women and other feminized bodies “belonging to an underclass and often a racialized population.”18 I follow Jin-Kyung Lee in conceptualizing prostitution as a form of necropolitical labor, or the “extraction of labor from those ‘condemned’ to death, whereby the ‘fostering’ of life, already premised on an individual’s death or disposability of her or his life, is limited to serving the labor needs of the state of empire and capital.”19 Thus, I use prostitution to refer to the particular conditions of necropolitical violence by which women are processed as commodities of sexual desire and pleasure in neo/colonial economies.

13. Denise Brennan, What’s Love Got to Do With It? Transnational Desire and Sex Tourism in the Dominican Republic (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 31-32. 14. Elisabeth Schober, Base Encounters: The US Armed Forces in South Korea (London: Pluto Press, 2016), 111, accessed April 13, 2018, http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1bh4b1d. 15. Gonzalez, Securing Paradise, 7. 16. Ibid., 6. 17. Bronwyn Winter, Women, Insecurity, and Violence in a Post-9/11 World (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2017), 156-157, accessed April 13, 2018, http://www.jstor.org/ stable/j.ctt1ht4w3s. 18. Jin-Kyung Lee, Service Economies: Militarism, Sex Work, and Migrant Labor in South Korea (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 81-82. 19. Lee, 82. Frial 41

According to Cynthia Enloe, there are four conditions that promote organized prostitution:

1. “When large numbers of local women are treated by the government and private entrepreneurs as second-class citizens, a source of cheapened labor, even while other women are joining the newly expanded middle class. 2. When the foreign government basing its troops on local oil sees prostitution as a ‘necessary evil to keep up their male soldiers’ fighting morale. 3. When tourism is imagined by local and foreign economic planners to be a fast road to development. 4. When the local government hosting those foreign troops is under the influence of its own military men, local military men who define human rights violations as necessary for ‘national security’.”20

As has been already discussed, Subic Bay – as both naval station and freeport zone – perfectly fits the bill. With its economy “hampered by a huge debt to the IMF-World Bank,” the Philippines depended on base tourism as its fifth most important source of revenue.21 At the height of the Vietnam War, Subic Bay hosted up to 190 U.S. navy ships each month, or around nine thousand servicemen per day, who would daily pump $150,000 in the local economy.22 This revenue does not even include the compensation that the Philippine government received in the form of military, economic, and housing assistance. By the time of the base closures in 1991, this amount was estimated to be $408 million per year, on top of the $344 million earned through the “rest and recreation” industry.23 Because of the huge economic losses the Philippines would suffer as a result of U.S. withdrawal from the bases, it took the combined efforts of a nationalist anti-bases campaign and the devastation wrought by the eruption of Mount Pinatubo to convince the Philippine Senate to vote to expel the U.S. from Clark and Subic Bay.

The Other Side of Paradise:

In order to exploit the highly militarized circuits of transnational capital that had already solidified Subic Bay as a sexscape, the Subic Bay Metropolitan Authority was tasked with transforming the former base into “one huge playground, a unique mix of high quality resorts, first-class beaches, wildlife, and industrial parks.”24 In a video released by the SBMA, Subic Bay Freeport Zone is described alternatively as the “No. 1 Tourist Destination in Central Luzon,” the “Theme Park Capital of the Philippines,” a “Top Bird-Watching Site in Central Luzon,” and the “Premier Convention Capital of Central Luzon,”25 directly appealing to the leisurely and consumerist tastes of (upper- and middle-class) Filipinos and international tourists. Despite being

20. Enloe, Maneuvers, 70-71. 21. Anne-Marie Hilsdon, Madonnas and Martyrs: Militarism and Violence in the Philippines (Quezon City, Philippines: Ateneo de Manila Press, 1995), 97. 22. Ibid., 96-97. 23. David E. Sanger, “Philippines Orders U.S. to Leave Strategic Navy Base at Subic Bay,” The New York Times, last modified December 28, 1991, https://www.nytimes.com/1991/12/28/world/philippines-orders-us-to- leave-strategic-navy-base-at-subic-bay.html. 24. “It’s More Fun-tastic in Subic Bay! (Full),” YouTube video, 1:22-1:32, posted by Subic Bay Freeport Zone, January 5, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eKzERxVKuM. 25. Ibid., 1:35, 1:49, 5:05, 6:23. Frial 42 said to “cater to everyone’s needs,”26 the hotels, casinos, golf courses, and duty-free shopping centers of Subic lie far out of the budget range of most local Filipinos, affordable only to Filipino citizens who are financially able to “identify with a cosmopolitan leisure class.”27 As Gonzalez reminds us:

“Paradise is by no means natural – it is conjured through imaginative labor, sustained by such economic apparatuses as plantation and tourism industries and the hierarchized societies they engender, secured through the threat and reality of violence or the promise of rescue, and continually contested by the people who live there.”28

The specific form of “exclusive” development that takes place within Subic Bay capitalizes on the “softer discourses and mechanisms of tourism to help mitigate the historical violence and reality of military occupation in the islands.”29 Just as the American military before them, foreign investors are able to imagine themselves as “saviors of the unemployed masses,”30 providing local Filipinos with jobs in the manufacturing and leisure industries that have cropped up. As a special economic zone (SEZ), Subic Bay Freeport Zone functions as an economic enclave for production, consumption, and leisure – a “spatially distinct, globally connected space for elites which aim[s] at distancing [itself] or ‘escaping’ from the immediate national or urban surroundings through referencing globality, modernity, and exclusivity.”31 As a hub of export- and tourism-led development, SEZs like Subic Bay carve out “literal geographic spaces of exceptionality, wherein the management of sovereignty and sovereign bodies does not sit within the nation-state but rather is co-managed by the nation-state and capital investors.”32 Since it has always been used as “a vehicle to prevent land reform and secure the power-position of elites,”33 SEZ creation can be imagined as a necrocapitalist “practice of organizational accumulation that involve violence, dispossession, and death,” in line with other such biopolitical reformations of space as gentrification and settler colonialism.34 As evidenced through the Nicole and Laude cases, within Subic Bay and Clark, SEZ creation is inextricably tied to another necrocapitalist practice: prostitution.

26. Ibid., 6:25-6:27. 27. Gonzalez, Securing Paradise, 201. 28. Gonzalez, Securing Paradise, 7-8. 29. Ibid., 14. 30. Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez, “Military Bases, ‘Royalty Trips,’ and Imperial Modernities: Gendered and Racialized Labor in the Postcolonial Philippines,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies 28, no. 3 (2007): 53, accessed April 13, 2018, http://muse.jhu.edu/article/224088/. 31. Jana M. Kleibert, “Exclusive Development(s): Special Economic Zones and Enclave Urbanism in the Philippines,” Critical Sociology (2017): 2, accessed April 13, 2018, http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/ 0896920517698538. 32. Elijah Adiv Edelman, “‘Walking While Transgender’: Necropolitical Regulations of Trans Feminine Bodies of Color in the US Nation’s Capital,” in Queer Necropolitics, ed. by Jin Haritaworn, Adi Kuntsman, and Silvia Posocco (New York: Routledge, 2014), 177. 33. Kleibert, “Exclusive Development(s),” 6. 34. Subharata Bobby Banarjee, “Necrocapitalism,” Organization Studies 29, no. 12 (2008): 1543, accessed April 13, 2018, http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/ 0170840607096386. Frial 43

Making Way for Paradise:

The borders of “paradise” at Subic Bay and Clark are demarcated and protected through a series of checkpoints. At Clark, guards at these checkpoints permit private automobiles to pass through, allowing “modern subjects of transnational capital and leisure…to enter and exit [the SEZ] with ease.” In contrast, “those using public transportation must wait in the dusty area allotted for buses and jeepneys just outside the gates. The few jeepneys permitted inside carry mostly hotel and resort staff, groundskeepers, and factory workers.”35 However, while these workers are permitted inside the SEZs, the “safety and security” of the two freeport zones depends most crucially on the displacement of the population most associated with names “Subic” and “Clark”: prostitutes. Outside the exclusive zones of Subic and Clark are the urban locales of Olongapo and Angeles City, where one is greeted by “older sites and sights of U.S. militarism: the ubiquitous twenty-four-hour-a-day girly bar catering to visiting servicemen and tourists, the significant numbers of fatherless mixed-race children around the bases, the quiet but deadly presence of HIV, and the radioactive and chemical waste slowly seeping into the land.”36 Near Subic, Baloy Beach is a “popular spot for retirees from places like Australia, England and the U.S. who stroll hand-in-hand with Filipina wives and girlfriends young enough to be their daughters or even granddaughters,” while the Barrio Barretto neighborhood of Olongapo unironically hosts a Veterans of the Vietnam War post in the midst of its bars and gentlemen’s clubs.37 Despite prostitution – as a “symbol of national humiliation”38 – being a primary reason for the “transformation” of Subic and Clark into special economic zones, the women who had worked as prostitutes were entirely left out of these economic developments. According to Cynthia Enloe, these women “did not uncritically accept male activists’ and male planners’ assurances that the tourism and light industry profile being heralded as their salvation were devised with their best interests in mind – especially after the government had rejected a plan created by a women’s group that built in explicit programs for retraining women in prostitution.”39 However, without proper skills training, many former bargirls continued to work in the prostitution industry, as it continued to remain the “most realistic opportunity to earn enough money to support themselves and their children and to send money each month back to their rural families who had come to count on the remittances of a working daughter.”40 Some were shuttled into the mail-order bride industry which was “heralded as an unemployed Filipina’s salvation,” and others were shipped as “entertainers” and exotic dancers to hostess bars in Tokyo and Osaka or to the U.S. bases in Guam, Okinawa, and South Korea.41 The failure of the Philippine government to reintegrate the former prostitutes of Subic and Clark is indicative of the “necrocapitalistic reformation of space” inherent to the

35. Ibid., 36-37. 36. Ibid., 37. 37. Seth Robson, “Baloy Beach, Philippines: A Paradise for Tourists and Old Salts,” Stars and Stripes, last modified April 23, 2015, https://www.stripes.com/travel/baloy-beach-philippines-a-paradise-for-tourists-and-old- salts-1.341851. 38. Enloe, Maneuvers, 76. 39. Idem. 40. Ibid., 77. 41. Ibid., 77-78; Lee, Service Economies, 130. Frial 44 neoliberalization of the former military bases.42 As sites of transnational production, consumption, and leisure, the creation of these enclave spaces “renders bodies that stand in the way of capital productivity as pathological and malignant tumours in an otherwise healthy expansion of capitally productive landscapes.”43 As summed up by Jana M. Kleibert, the “construction of these new ‘world-class’ exclusive developments” at Subic and Clark are only possible through the “simultaneous dispossession and exclusion of population groups based on class and race, exacerbating existing socio-spatial inequalities.”44 Just as during the base closures, local Filipina women continue to lack economic opportunities outside of prostitution. For instance, at Hanjin Shipyard, as of 2010, only 10% of the workforce (approximately 2,000) were women. Hanjin’s rationale was that they did not “want female employees to be ‘mistresses’ of the Korean foremen who tend to use the power differential of their top-down domination to coerce sexual favors out of female employees.”45 Clearly, the “reputation” of Filipina women as “easy” continues to haunt and shape foreign perceptions of them. However, it is precisely this exclusion from Subic’s development projects that forces these women to enter into the sex trade. Because (male) workers are not properly compensated by Hanjin, prostitution remains the most lucrative option for women to supplement the income of their husbands and support their families. Nevertheless, as “bodies that fail to be capitally productive (e.g. engaging in the formal economy),”46 these women are thus marked as threats to the “security” of (masculine) neoliberal interests within Subic. While border checkpoints and gender-based discrimination block the passage of feminine Filipina bodies into the enclaves of Subic and Clark, elite foreign men are permitted to freely traverse the various transportation networks that connect these sexscapes to other (desti)nations of international business and leisure. Clark’s International Airport connects the SEZ to the economic hubs of Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Seoul, and Hong Kong, as well as offering a direct flight to Bangkok and its infamous bars, brothels, and massage parlours. By land, the government-owned Subic-Clark-Tarlac Expressway (SCTEX) links the base sites with Metro Manila, “facilitating road travel between Luzon’s main business and (sex) tourism sites.”47 Even outside of the freeports, elite foreigners retain their economic privileges as transnational subjects, capitalizing off of the prostitution industry created by their own (masculine) desires for sex and profit. Within Olongapo and Angeles City, “the bigger resorts are increasingly owned by Japanese and Koreans, with many of the smaller bars in both areas owned by Western men from various European countries, the United States, and Australia.”48 Thus, the majority of the money made through prostitution is not even earned by the women who sustain it with their labor, but instead accumulates in the hands of the very foreigners who displace them. As First World subjects, the sex tourist, the soldier, and the foreign investor are able to “claim citizenship-like entitlements and benefits, even at the expense of territorialized citizens.”49 Within sexscapes of Subic and Clark, global capital is redirected from local

42. Edelman, “Walking While Transgender,” 177. 43. Idem. 44. Kleibert, “Exclusive Development(s),” 10. 45. Jabola, “A Killing Field in the Philippines.” 46. Edelman, 176. 47. Winter, Women, Insecurity, and Violence in a Post-9/11 World, 158. 48. Ibid., 159. 49. Aihwa Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and State Sovereignty (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 16, accessed April 13, 2018, http://my.ilstu.edu/~jkshapi/Ong_Neoliberalism%20 as%20Exception.pdf. Frial 45 economies in service of masculine desires, with foreigners profiting off of the bodies of women excluded from the development of these enclave spaces. However, local Filipino men are granted limited access to the SEZs (though without the tremendous economic privileges afforded to transnational capitalists). So long as they “cooperate fraternally with international capital in the stimulation and regulation of trade flows,” Filipino men can become what Neferti X. M. Tadiar calls, “the supervisors and pimps of the nation.”50

“Pimps of the Nation”:

The signing of the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) in 2014 heralded the return of U.S. naval operations to Subic. Whereas the VFA allows U.S. soldiers to “visit” and conduct joint military-training exercises with the Philippines, the EDCA guaranteed the U.S. military the right to re-access facilities at its former military installations, including those at Subic Bay and Clark. While Subic Bay Metropolitan Authority chairman Roberto Garcia thinks it unquestionable that U.S. presence at Subic has “improve[d] the national security posture of the Philippines,” he believes the real benefit of the EDCA to be its “addition to the economy, especially to the local businessmen who supply the ships with water and other services. And when the servicemen come on shore, they go to the restaurants, hotels or shopping malls.”51 After the murder of Jennifer Laude – instead of raising concerns about the “safety and security” of local Olongapans, especially (transgender) women working in the sex trade – Olongapo City Councilor Aquilino Cortez Jr. lamented the loss of an estimated 20 million Philippine pesos (approximately US $425,000) after the U.S. military suspended off-base “liberty” privileges for its soldiers.52 Again, (capitalist) masculine desires were privileged over the well-being of women exposed to the gender violence of neocolonialism and neoliberalism, except this time, these (capitalist) desires belonged to Filipino, rather than foreign, men. Laude’s death exposed the biopolitical mechanisms that enabled necronationalist sentiment to arise among local Filipino men at Subic and the nearby city of Olongapo. According to Elijah Adiv Edelman, necronationalism refers to the ways in which the “erasure and death of the bad (queer) citizen-worker body carves out the ideological and physical space for the good (queer) citizen-worker body to emerge.”53 Despite largely being excluded from the economic developments taking place in Subic Bay Freeport, local (male) Olongapo residents are able to strategically fold themselves into the U.S. (neo)colonial project by fostering conditions that allow for the literal deaths of transgender women. Within the racialized-gendered hierarchy of Subic Bay, all Olongapo residents are unable to access the financial privileges of transnational investors or the leisurely activities available to the cosmopolitan elite. However, despite seeing the women of Olongapo as “fellow Filipinos” shut out and displaced from the enclave, local male businessmen instead perceive them as gendered Others whose bodies provide a means to make profit. In fact, these business owners view themselves in a “savior” role, averting what could be an uncontrollable outbreak of sexual violence among the soldiers, an argument summed

50. Neferti Xina M. Tadiar, Fantasy-Production: Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Consequences for the New World Order (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2004), 55. 51. Ronron Calunsod, “A Look at Subic Bay After EDCA Signing,” ABS-CBN News, last modified May 8, 2014, http://news.abs-cbn.com/nation/regions/05/07/14/look-subic-bay-after-edca-signing. 52. Meredith Talusan, “The Aftermath of a U.S. Marine’s Conviction in the Death of a Philippine Trans Woman,” BuzzFeed News, last modified January 3, 2016, https://www.buzzfeed. com/meredithtalusan/the- aftermath-of-jennifer-laude-and-joseph-scott-pemberton?utm_term=.sgp5dPKaj#.bryeD1vXP. 53. Edelman, “Walking While Transgender,” 174. Frial 46 thusly: “Instead of endangering our decent and respectable women to the possibility of rape and other forms of sexual abuse, better provide an outlet for the soldiers’ sexual urge and at the same time make money out of it.”54 It is precisely these unholy alliances that Filipino men form with (male) U.S. soldiers – enabled by their identification with the masculine/capitalist/neocolonial – which lay the groundwork for the “slow death” of transpinays and other feminized bodies. As discussed in the previous chapter, many Olongapans were unforgiving toward Laude’s death and the consequent court battle. One resident exclaimed: “Transgenders need to be kicked out of Olongapo.” A local taxi driver angrily asserted that he “would have killed her too.” He criticized the Laude case, saying that “[the Laude family] should take their money and stab it down their throats. So many families that have gone hungry because of their greed,” referring specifically to the dramatic loss of revenue due to the liberty ban. Nonetheless, in response to these harsh comments, one Olongapan did defend the existence of transgender women, replying that “[their] words hurt too much. Those are our fellow Filipinos.”55 These statements exemplify the precarious position of transpinays within the national body. Already marked as “unproductive” and thus “immoral” and “criminal” for participating in the sex trade, the transgender status of Laude and other prostitutes in Olongapo further contribute to their marginalization, unworthy of protection or inclusion within even local economies. Thus, as a “sexually pathological and deviant population,” the death of Jennifer Laude and other transpinays becomes acceptable.56 Through the provision of services to U.S. soldiers (by supplying corner store goods, jeepney/taxi transport to and from the red-light district of Barrio Barreto, or the bodies of women themselves), male Olongapans position themselves as “productive” subjects worthy of U.S. military protection, in contrast to the numerous transpinays and other feminized bodies sold as commodities for masculine desire and pleasure. As “pimps of the nation,” these local businessmen conspire with U.S. military officers to procure prostitutes for servicemen. As such, these fraternal alliances allow the U.S. military to rationalize and legitimize its presence by appealing to the (necro)capitalist desires of Olongapans and to thus escape ramifications for the acts of gendered violence its servicemen incite.

Conclusion: Finding Feminist Resistance:

The suspicious recantation of Nicole’s testimony in the Subic rape case and the general sweeping-under-the-rug of other military abuses (including the suspension of 52 investigations of physical and sexual abuse upon the U.S.’s exit from Subic and Clark57) evince how silence, death, and erasure are necessary to the necropolitical projects of economic development at Subic Bay. Any form of vocal opposition is crushed or defused in order to seamlessly “hook up [the Philippines] to the US desiring machine through a system of flows of labor and capital in the guise of free exchange (export-oriented, capital and import dependent).”58 Moreover, upon viewing the conditions of poverty and displacement that prompt women to enter the sex trade,

54. Enloe, Maneuvers, 73. 55. Talusan, “The Aftermath of a U.S. Marine’s Conviction in the Death of a Philippine Trans Woman.” 56. Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 24. 57. Gonzalez, Service Economies, 113-114. 58. Tadiar, Fantasy-Production, 47. Frial 47 one understands how the “paradises” located within the enclaves of Subic and Clark are predicated on the (both physical and symbolic) removal of the former bases’ seedy pasts. Though death and disposability of transgender bodies are built into the necronationalist/necrocapitalist machine, the Jennifer Laude case remains interesting precisely because it caused this machine to malfunction. Whereas cases of are routine for sex workers in Olongapo (and, quite frankly, in all sexscapes), because the case of Jennifer Laude garnered international attention, it provoked a response on the behalf of the U.S. military to suspend off-base “liberty” privileges. In this way, “Justice for Jennifer” was served not because she was killed, but rather because she became visible. As with the closure of the bases at Subic and Clark in 1991, feminist voices remain necessary to expose the numerous instances of gendered and racialized violence committed against Filipina women as a result of continued U.S. military presence in the Philippines. Whereas the original movement to expel the U.S. failed to “ensure that nationalist ideas [did] not trump feminist ideas,”59 new coalitionary movements like Stop VFA! closely link the “rights of women and the need for demilitarization…with claims of national sovereignty against US neoimperialism.” Stop VFA! condemns the Philippine state as much as it does the U.S., for the “state is clearly the enemy for having signed the VFA in the first place and more generally for being elitist and corrupt.” Stop VFA! thus sees itself as a movement not only “for national sovereignty but against the national state,” both radically disidentifying from the necronationalist paradigms that fold Filipino “pimps” in the U.S. neocolonial project and recognizing the heteropatriarchal underpinnings of nationalism and neocolonialism.60 However, how do the “prostituted” women of Olongapo and Angeles City continue to survive in these necropolitical conditions? What are their daily lives like, and what forms of resistance do they cultivate? In the following chapter, we will examine the “zones of alternative being” that allow these women to carve spaces for themselves in spite of the odds stacked against them.61

59. Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics, 2nd ed. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2014), 170. 60. Winter, Women, Insecurity, and Violence in a Post-9/11 World, 161. 61. Aren Z. Aizura, “Trans Feminine Value, Racialized Others and the Limits of Necropolitics,” in Queer Necropolitics, ed. by Jin Haritaworn, Adi Kuntsman, and Silvia Posocco (New York: Routledge, 2014), 143. Frial 48

CHAPTER 4: Jennifer Laude-as-Breadwinner

The death of Jennifer was particularly devastating to the Laude family. Like many other young women engaging in base and tourist prostitution in the Philippines, Jennifer migrated from the outlying province of Leyte in the Eastern Visayas.1 As previously discussed in Chapter 2, Jennifer used the money she earned through webcamming, gifts from foreign boyfriends, and local sex work to support her family. As the breadwinner for her family, Jennifer’s earnings helped pay for the expansion and maintenance of her family’s small home (particularly after the roof was lost during Typhoon Hagupit)2 and for the education of her youngest sibling.3 In contrast to queer and transgender individuals in the West, many low-income queer and gender non-conforming Filipinos earn the respect of their families through their ability to provide. According to Ryan Richard Thoreson, his interviewees who identified as bakla or tomboy “frequently spoke of their duty to be a primary breadwinner, to send siblings, nieces, and nephews to school, or to assume caretaking responsibilities for their aging parents.”4 Moreover, it was actually an expectation for bakla and tomboys to “provide material support for parents, siblings, and members of their extended family as long as they remained unmarried.”5 In fact, this intimate relationship between financial interdependence and kinship networks was witnessed through the music video for Gloc 9’s “Sirena” (previously discussed in Chapter 1). In the final verse of the song, the lyrics narrate how “Lumipas ang mga taon, nangagsipag- asawa / Aking mga kapatid, lahat sila'y sumama / Nagpakalayo-layo ni hindi makabisita” (Years passed, one by one my siblings got married, all of them went far away and can’t visit). On screen, we see the whole family at the dinner table, and one by one, each of the siblings fades from frame until only the father and bakla are left.6 In the following shots, we observe the bakla serving the father food and helping him walk.7 These caretaking responsibilities are the catalyst that finally prompts the initially homophobic father to accept his bakla child. Within the video, this moment is communicated through the lyrics, “Anak, patawad sana sa lahat ng aking nagawa…minsan mas lalaki pa sa lalaki ang bakla” (Son, forgive me for what I have done…at times bakla are manlier than men), paired with an image of the bakla crying tears of relief.8 The examples of Laude and the bakla protagonist in the music video for Gloc 9’s “Sirena” demonstrate how there is possibility for gender roles within the family to be renegotiated, in spite of (or rather because of) conditions of overwhelming poverty and violence. In his analysis of trans necropolitics, Aren Z. Aizura cites Fred Moten’s talk in Baltimore in 2011, in which he declares his interest in “understanding the life of communities that are

1. Anne-Marie Hilsdon, Madonnas and Martyrs: Militarism and Violence in the Philippines (Quezon City, Philippines: Ateneo de Manila Press, 1995), 102. 2. Meredith Talusan, “How the Killing of a Trans Filipina Woman Ignited an International Incident,” Vice News, last modified February 26, 2015, https://www.vice.com/en_us/ article/avyd4z/how-to-get-away-with-murder- 0000602-v22n3. 3. “Used Condoms Found Near Murdered Transgender, ABS-CBN News, last modified October 14, 2014, http://news.abs-cbn.com/nation/regions/10/13/14/used-condoms-found-near-murdered-transgender. 4. Ryan Richard Thoreson, “Realizing Rights in Manila: Brokers and the Mediation of Sexual Politics in the Philippines,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 18, no. 4 (2012): 550, accessed April 13, 2018, https://read.dukeupress.edu/glq/article/18/4/529-563/34837. 5. Ibid., 539. 6. “Gloc-9 feat. Ebe Dancel – Mermaid [Sirena – Eng. Sub],” Youtube video, 4:07-4:14, posted by jstasimplesub3, August 24, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtE9adF8iZQ. 7. Ibid., 4:10-4:18. 8. Ibid., 4:39-4:48. Frial 49 considered to be zones of death, social death, or bare life,” specifically how these “zones of non- being are in fact already zones of alternative being, where people have already figured out ways to live.”9 This chapter strives to answer Aren Z. Aizura’s “call to honour the zones of alternative trans being emerging under the duress of impossibility and to remain open to not knowing what they look like in advance.”10 Though these “zones of alternative trans being” constitute locations in which family structure and gender roles are reimagined, it must be recognized that these “zones” are only possible because of the necropolitical practices of the Philippine state. For instance, state-led transnationalism – mediated through the state’s role in brokering migrant labor – produces conditions through which the family and the care labor that sustains it becomes “trans-ed” (simultaneously transnationalized and transgendered). State sanctioning of prostitution-based economies functions as another necropolitical practice that destroys the family as a primary kinship network and necessitates its reconstruction. In this chapter, we will examine “zones of alternative trans being” that arise among Filipina mothers working abroad in Hong Kong, transpinay caregivers in Tel Aviv, and women and children affected by the prostitution industry in Angeles City. As we will see, actors do not necessarily need to “transgender” in order to inhabit these “zones of alternative trans being.”

Circulating Family Care:

The Philippines has become globally known as a source of cheap labor, supplying migrant workers primarily to the Middle East and East Asia to work in sectors ranging from construction and transportation to nursing, entertainment, and domestic labor. In 2015, according to the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA), over 1.8 million Overseas Filipinos Workers (OFWs) were deployed abroad, joining the already estimated 10 million Filipinos (10% of the total population of the country) living and working overseas. Since 1992, women have outnumbered male migrants among new OFWs deployed yearly, and domestic work accounted for 38% of these new hires – the most out of any occupation.11 As domestic helpers, Filipina women become swept up in what is known as the “chain of care,” which Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild define as:

“a linear concatenation of bodies and feelings propelled by the migration of Third World women to the First World. Third World women are torn away from their biological families and forced to leave their children in the care of poorer women in the homeland, to take care of the progeny of modern working mothers of the first world. Therefore, the authors suggest, Third World women take on the burden of First World women’s liberation from domesticity by providing emotional and physical labor needed at the homes of the latter. This situation, they argue, causes a ‘care drain’ and a ‘global heart transplant,’ where the global

9. “Fred Moten - Race in 21st Century America - Thursday Oct 20, 7PM @ 2640 (2640 St. Paul St.),” audio recording, 3:03-3:28, posted by tonelada, October 24, 2011, https://archive.org/details/FredMoten- RaceIn21stCenturyAmerica-ThursdayOct207pm26402640. 10. Aren Z. Aizura, “Trans Feminine Value, Racialized Others and the Limits of Necropolitics,” in Queer Necropolitics, ed. by Jin Haritaworn, Adi Kuntsman, and Silvia Posocco (New York: Routledge, 2014), 143. 11. Maruja M. B. Asis, “The Philippines: Beyond Labor Migration, Toward Development and (Possible) Return,” Migration Policy Institute, last modified July 12, 2017, https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/ philippines-beyond-labor-migration-toward-development-and-possibly-return. Frial 50

domestic labor market siphons off affective energies away from the poor countries of the world as Third World women fracture households and leave families motherless and wifeless. Therefore, this ‘chain’ is forged primarily through affective links constituted by biologically reproducing women of the First and Third Worlds and the displacement of their affective and physical labor from their biological families. The glue that keeps this chain together in a linear fashion is the heterosexualized bodies of both First and Third women while the fuel for the global dispersal of migratory domestic labor is normative maternal love. Therefore, the chain of care framework foregrounds the pathos of dislocated biological motherhood.”12

Within this paradigm of “care drain,” because migrant Filipinas are imagined as “being taken out of or leaving their home country and selling the labour which properly belongs within that ‘home’,” this triggers a “hegemonic national anxiety over the global status of the Filipino people.”13 These anxieties produce a need on behalf of the state to re-absorb migrant women into the national body through the production of heterosexualized discourses which reinstall these “unattached” women as dutiful wives and mothers. As discussed in the “Keywords” section, the export of migrant labor is a strategy that the Philippine state itself created to cope with the “dislocations of neoliberal globalization,” pursuing labor brokerage in order to mitigate the failure of structural adjustment polices advocated for by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. The Philippine state effectively uses migrant remittances as a form of ‘trickle up’ development, as migrant earnings are used to pay off the enormous debts owed to the IMF and World Bank.14 Moreover, transnational movement of people, goods, capital, media, and ideas (mapped through Arjun Appadurai’s “-scapes”) expose vulnerabilities within the state apparatus and creates a “partial denationalization of territory.” Anna Romina Guevarra writes that “state-led transnationalism” is one solution through which the state tries to “accommodate the transnational movements of its people and the formation of deterritorialized nation-states, by trying to reincorporate its transmigrants into its nation-building projects.”15 By regulating the flow of migrants (and remittances) through labor brokerage, the state is able to not only secure more sovereign power over its transmigrants but re-incorporate them and deploy them in service of the nation. To stimulate ties between nation, family, and migrant, the Philippine state has created the discourse of bagong bayani, “new national heroes,” whose “duty is to work overseas to support their loved ones and their home country through remittance earnings.”16 Needless to say, these discourses of heroism are highly gendered. Whereas men are “recognized as the primary breadwinners of their families” and their overseas migration “understood as meeting the need to

12. Martin F. Manalansan IV, “Queering the Chain of Care Paradigm,” The Scholar and Feminist Online 6, no. 3 (2008), 1, accessed April 13, 2018, http://sfonline.barnard.edu/immigration/manalansan_01.htm. 13. Neferti Xina M. Tadiar, Fantasy-Production: Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Consequences for the New World Order (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2004), 127. 14. Robyn Magalit Rodriguez, How the Philippine State Brokers Labor to the World (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 142, xvi-xvii. 15. Anna Romina Guevarra, Marketing Dreams, Manufacturing Heroes: The Transnational Labor Brokering of Filipino Workers (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010), 6, accessed April 13, 2018, http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5hj188. 16. Rodriguez, How the Philippine State Brokers Labor to the World, 143. Frial 51 fulfill this role and obligation,” women are expected to “present an economically competitive and entrepreneurial attitude at the same time as they are summoned to model an image of femininity and motherhood.”17 By connecting remittances to family and nation, the Philippine state is able to recuperate “lost” reproductive labor displaced as a result of transmigration. In these ways, the Philippine state is able to manage the gendered anxieties produced through the “trans-ing” of the Filipino family via migratory pathways. But how does this “trans- ing” manifest on the level of the family itself? Instead of empowering women by allowing them to be breadwinners and/or economic independent, we will see that migration can in fact reinforce existing gender roles, as care labor simply relays to other women within the kinship network, rather than it distributing equally between (heterosexual) mothers and fathers.

Trans(national) Motherhood:

According to Nina Glick Schiller, transmigrants are immigrants whose “daily lives depend on multiple and constant interconnections across international borders and whose public identities are configured in relation to more than one nation-state.”18 With their reproductive labor transplanted from (home) nation to (desti)nation, domestic workers-as-transmigrants are forced to adopt transnational modes of mothering to care for their own biological children: establishing a virtual presence through “texting, chatting and skyping,” sending home remittances to demonstrate love (and appease guilt), and finding female surrogates to provide childcare.19 However, while transnational mothering may “radically rearrange mother-child interactions and require a concomitant radical reshaping of the meanings and definitions of appropriate mothering” by separating mother and child across international borders, it hardly upends the traditional expectations of gender relations.20 In her study of transnational Filipino families, Rhacel Parrenãs found that “men resist the reconstitution of gender instigated by women’s migration.”21 Even though women were largely absent from the household, men’s participation in household chores and emotional caregiving did not increase as a result. Instead, fathers left behind refused to engage in traditional “women’s work” like cooking, housekeeping, and helping children with homework. Parreñas also observed how children also expected greater emotional investment and involvement from their migrant mothers – a gendered bias exposed when compared to the demands made of children to migrant fathers, in which sending remittances was viewed as enough to demonstrate their love.22 Under these arrangements, definitions of mothering expand to “encompass breadwinning that may

17. Guevara, Marketing Dreams, Manufacturing Heroes, 84. 18. Nina Glick, Schiller, Linda Basch, and Cristina Szanton Blanc, “From Immigrant to Transmigrant: Theorizing Transnational Migration,” Anthropological Quarterly 68, no. 1 (1995): 48, accessed April 13, 2018, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3317464. 19. Ninna Nyberg Sørenson and Ida Marie Vammen, “Who Cares? Transnational Families in Debates on Migration and Development,” New Diversities 16, no. 2 (2014): 93, accessed April 13, 2018, http://newdiversities. mmg.mpg.de/?page_id=1742. 20. Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo and Ernestine Avila, “‘I’m Here, but I’m There’: The Meanings of Latina Transnational Motherhood,” Gender and Society 11, no. 5 (1997): 557, accessed April 13, 2018, http://www.jstor.org/stable/190339. 21. Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, “Transnational Mothering: A Source of Gender Conflicts in the Family,” Globalization, Families, and the State 88, no. 5 (2010): 1844, accessed April 13, 2018, http://scholarship.law.unc. edu/nclr/vol88/iss5/13. 22. Ibid., 1853. Frial 52 require long-term physical separation,” while fathering remains relatively static.23 In short, “mothers can ‘mother and father,’ but fathers can only be breadwinners and cannot take on mothering roles, such as nurturing and caring for children.”24 As a result, most of the responsibilities of child-rearing shift onto other women in what Aihwa Ong terms the “transnational relay of family care”25 and Rhacel Parreñas calls the “international transfer of caretaking.”26 Cultural expectations of women as caregivers pressure grandmothers, aunts, and eldest daughters to contribute their labor without financial remuneration, thus freeing fathers of the burdens of housework and childcare. However, if extended female family members are unavailable, migrant women themselves may turn to hired help from “women unable to afford the high costs of seeking employment outside of the Philippines.”27 Thus, aside from maintaining racialized/classed hierarchies between Third World and First World women, migration also fosters classed hierarchies among women in the Philippines itself, as “Filipina domestic workers perform the reproductive labor of more privileged women in industrialized countries as they relegate their reproductive labor to poorer women left in the Philippines.”28

Creative Excess:

With the Philippine state disciplining migrant women to uphold restrictive norms of femininity, and transnational mothering stretching their responsibilities to include breadwinning and caregiving, is there any potential for “zones of alternative trans being” amongst transmigrants and their families? Absent thus far have been discussions of how the “chain of care” can be disrupted by queer bodies that do not follow the “rather static formula that reads as follows: domestic = family = heterosexual woman = care and love.” With this knowledge in mind, we can reframe our question to ask: What happens to the global care chain when we include others beyond the “heterosexualized bodies of First and Third World women” assumed to be natural and logical to the chain?29 As part of this queering/trans-ing of the global care chain, we can include the Paper Dolls (discussed in Chapter 2), whose presence within the eldercare economies of Israel demonstrate how care labor is not solely performed by bodies designated female at birth. Additionally, heterosexual men are also hired as carers and cleaners, demonstrating they are also capable of “working like a woman” as they negotiate the “tensions inherent in doing what is commonly considered ‘women’s work.”30

23. Hondagneu-Sotelo and Avila, “I’m Here, but I’m There,” 562. 24. Parreñas, “Transnational Mothering,” 1839-1840. 25. Aihwa Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and State Sovereignty (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 16, accessed April 13, 2018, http://my.ilstu.edu/~jkshapi/Ong_Neoliberalism%20 as%20Exception.pdf. 26. Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, “Migrant Filipina Domestic Workers and the International Division of Reproductive Labor,” Gender and Society 14, no. 4 (2000): 561, accessed April 13, 2018, http://www.jstor.org/ stable/190302. 27. Ibid., 570. 28. Ibid., 577. 29. Manalansan, “Queering the Chain of Care Paradigm,” 2, 1. 30. Majella Kilkey, “Men and Domestic Labor: A Missing Link in the Global Care Chain,” Men and Masculinities 13, no. 1 (2010): 134-135, accessed April 13, 2018, http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/ 1097184X10382884. Frial 53

However, aside from proving that the categories “domestic helper” and “caregiver” are flexible enough to accommodate non-heterosexual women, the reproductive labor of these “queer” transmigrants is still instrumentalized to serve the needs of global capitalism. What “excess” labor then fails to be absorbed into the systems of biopower that manufacture family, nation, and state? Martin Manalansan points to the “care labor” that the Paper Dolls perform through their drag shows as an example of “the messy conjunctions of gender and care work [that] do not clearly follow normative lines”31 (i.e., the international transfer of caretaking). Whereas the care they provide for their elderly Jewish employers secures them legibility within the Israeli state apparatus (via their worker visas), the Paper Dolls’ drag performances constitute “care of the self,” a “space where the subject may feel a sense of exuberant freedom.”32 The Paper Dolls, through these acts of communal bonding (both with each other and with their Filipino audiences), are able to derive pleasure in spite of their marginalization as transgender brown women and tenuous status as undocumented workers. Thus, their drag shows comprise a “zone of alternative trans being” within the transnational circuits of reproductive labor in Israel and the Middle East, an excess that fails to be captured for the purposes of state/masculinist desires. To deny the role that domestic helpers and other care workers play as “active producers and creative mediators of the world in which they move” – such as through art and performance – would be to erase the “subjective potential” of these migrants, thereby reducing them to wholly commodified “corporeal objects for the use of others.”33 According to Nerferti X. M. Tadiar,

“the gatherings of domestic helpers on their days off in parks, shopping promenades and prayer meetings…create new contexts for overseas Filipino women, contexts which foster their desires for connection to other women and which mobilize their subjective extendedness and being-for-others, that is, the conditions of their experiential labour, in ways that go beyond ‘necessity’ and their value for commodity exchange.”34

One such “new context” is the “Unsung Heroes” choir, made up of domestic workers in Hong Kong who meet on Sundays – “their only day off each week” – to sing for the children they left behind in the Philippines.35 Gathered together as a result of their collective desire to mother, the women’s singing functions not only as a transnational expression of love, but as a “cathartic experience” that allows these women to mother each other and themselves.36 According to one of the choir members, Joy Carbonnell,

“Music is the language of my heart and soul. So if I feel sad, I sing. If I feel sad, I’ll sing a happy song.”37

31. Manalansan, “Queering the Chain of Care Paradigm,” 3. 32. Idem. 33. Tadiar, Fantasy-Production, 131-132, 120. 34. Ibid., 142. 35. “Migrant Filipina Mothers Sing for Their Distant Children,” YouTube video, 0:02-0:08, posted by Rappler, September 30, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQoqwouXYCk. 36. Ibid., 0:08-0:12. 37. Ibid., 0:19-0:28. Frial 54

Aside from constituting a form of “care of the self” for the women who participate in it, the choir also serves a platform for acknowledgement of the roles domestic helpers play in Hong Kong society. Along with performing at numerous outlets including Hong Kong’s largest music festival, Clockenflap, the choir features in the documentary The Helper, which screened in Hong Kong’s main central cinemas, as well as in Singapore, another major employer of domestic helpers.38 Like the Paper Doll’s drag shows, the “Unsung Heroes” choir provides a context for the “making of new social relations and therefore of new subjective becoming,” fostering community among migrant workers and providing spaces of recognition.39 Rather than classify this communal artistic space for the women of “Unsung Heroes” as a zone of either alternative trans or even queer being (though it does constitute “excess”), I would in fact characterize it as one of alternative lesbian being. In her seminal essay, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” Adrienne Rich coins the terms “lesbian continuum” to describe a “range of – through each woman’s life and throughout history – woman-identified experience.” She writes,

“as we delineate a lesbian continuum, we begin to discover the erotic in female terms: as that which is unconfined to any single part of the body or solely to the body itself, as an energy not only diffuse but, as Audre Lorde has described it, omnipresent in ‘the sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic,’ and in the sharing of work; as the empowering joy which ‘makes us less willing to accept powerlessness, or those other supplied states of being which are not native to me, such as resignation, despair, self-effacement, depression, self-denial’.”40

As a profoundly woman-centered and joyful space, “Unsung Heroes” has allowed its director, even though “it’s a not a paid job,” to feel “paid in so many ways.”41 As a “liberating exercise of their creative power,” the choir allows these women to be seen as subjects beyond their value as “warm-body exports.” 42 Thus, the examples of “Unsung Heroes” and the Paper Dolls allow us to locate “zones of alternative being” within the lives of Filipino transmigrants that escape the instrumentalization of biopower – an excess that has not been co-opted by and reabsorbed into the nation-state and which produces value outside of transnational capital flows. We will now move to drastically different context: the sex economies of Angeles City. As we will recall from the previous chapter, Angeles City, like Olongapo, is a sexscape which subordinates women and other feminized bodies to the imperialist desires of the U.S. military presence at neighboring Clark Air Base and tourist desires of Western men who sustain the local prostitution-based economy. However, the documentary Fallen Angels reveals that the necropolitical environment that consigns sex-working single mothers and their Euro-American- fathered children to bare life or near life enable “zones of alternative trans being” which defy heteronormative family structures

38. “In Hong Kong, Migrant Filipina Mothers Sing for Their Distant Children,” Rappler.com, last modified October 1, 2017, https://www.rappler.com/world/regions/asia-pacific/183938-hong-kong-filipino-migrant-mothers- sing-for-children. 39. Tadiar, Fantasy-Production, 142. 40. Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” Signs 5, no. 4 (1980): 648, 650, accessed April 13, 2018, https://www.jstor.org/stable/3173834. 41. “In Hong Kong, Migrant Filipina Mothers Sing for Their Distant Children.” 42. Tadiar, Fantasy-Production, 142, 120. Frial 55

Becoming “Both Mother and Father”:

As discussed in the previous chapter, within Olongapo and Angeles City, it is not uncommon to be greeted by the “older sites and sights of U.S. militarism.” Because of the numerous continuities between militarism and tourism in the areas surrounding the former U.S. bases at Subic and Clark, dozens of “fatherless mixed-race children” are born (and abandoned) to European and American sex tourists each year, who appease their sexual appetites at the “ubiquitous twenty-four-hour-a-day girly bar” just outside of the freeport zones. 43 The documentary Fallen Angels follows the lives of six women involved in the sex trade in Angeles City and their mixed-race children. For virtually all of the mothers of these children, pregnancies are entirely unplanned and unwanted. In Sarah’s case, she was taken advantage of by a client who raped her while she was drunk. Sarah’s aunt Naylee became pregnant with her daughter after her client refused to use a condom, claiming that he had had a vasectomy.44 Just like the women of Sosúa in Denise Brennan’s study, low-income mothers of Angeles City continue to work in the sex trade in order to not only provide for their children’s basic needs, but to also “send their children – sons and daughters – to private elementary schools, and in a few exceptional cases to college,…to ensure that the next generation had more opportunities to get ahead.”45 However, for Naylee, she was unable to find at work at the bar once she “lost” her youth, forcing her to work odd jobs like cleaning houses or doing laundry in order to feed her and her daughter as well as help “pay the rent on the home that [she] share[s] with [her] cousins.”46 As evidenced in the above quote, like migrant families, families affected by the sex tourist industry must depend on extended kin and neighbors to make up for the reproductive labor displaced from the home and refigured toward the (sexual) needs of First World subjects. Like the migrant women in Parreñas’ study on transnational mothering, Sarah depends on a female relative, her aunt Naylee, to take care of her newborn baby girl while she is away earning money to feed her child. The mother of the child Isaac relies on one of her neighbors to watch over her kids while she meets with her clients.47 In families where there is a male figure present, the majority of childcare and housework duties fall to them. Jennifer and her daughter Mary-Ann live with a local Filipino man named Arnold, whom Mary-Ann considers as her stepfather. Unlike the fathers left behind by migrant mothers who refused to perform household duties, Arnold “cook[s] them [Jennifer and Mary- Ann] lunch before leaving for work. This way they have food while [he is] away, and can eat any time they want.”48 As the documentary explores the dynamics of Isaac’s household, in the background of several shots, we can see a boy – Isaac’s eldest brother, around 5 or 6 years old – performing chores like sweeping, taking out the trash, and cleaning dishes. When asked by the

43. Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez, “Military Bases, ‘Royalty Trips,’ and Imperial Modernities: Gendered and Racialized Labor in the Postcolonial Philippines,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies 28, no. 3 (2007): 37, accessed April 13, 2018, http://muse.jhu.edu/article/224088/. 44. Alyona Simikinda, Fallen Angels. True Cost of Sex Tourism: Philippine’s Fatherless Kids of Angeles City Streetwalkers (Moscow, Russia: RT Documentary, 2016), 3:48-4:15, 6:34-6:41, accessed April 13, 2018. https://rtd.rt.com/films/fallen-angels/. 45. Denise Brennan, What’s Love Got to Do With It? Transnational Desire and Sex Tourism in the Dominican Republic (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 123. 46. Simikinda, Fallen Angels, 5:27-5:52. 47. Ibid., 5:16-5:26, 39:56-40:17. 48. Ibid., 29:59-30:08. Frial 56 documentary host about the boy’s roles, his mother replies that she “teach[es] him how to clean even though he’s a boy.”49 This particular quote reveals how gender expectations in the Philippines place the burden of reproductive labor largely on girls and women. However, through these two examples, we can observe how the necropolitical conditions of extreme poverty faced by families in Angeles City force a regendering of masculine roles out of necessity. For Westerners who go to Angeles City and other sexscapes to retire, the most common reason they give for their relocation is “to find a woman who would take care of me.”50 As previously discussed in Chapter 2, because of the prevalence of (neo)colonial and neoliberal discourses surrounding Filipina femininity, care work and domesticity become “universalit[ies] inscribed onto the Third World woman's brown body.”51 In short, Filipinas are seen as ideal caregivers. The emotional (and sexual labor) of these women serve as “embodied practices that ‘extend the lifetimes’ of these men’s masculinities, augmenting their value of and senses of what it means to be a man.”52 For Irish-Australian Patrick, meeting and marrying his wife allowed him to feel “happy to be loved again because [he] didn’t love for maybe two years…or maybe three years.”53 Thus, within these retirement landscapes, reproductive labor is still siphoned away in service of First World (masculine) desires, as Filipina women’s emotional care works to re- invigorate the virility of foreign white men. However, in reversal of expected racialized/gendered roles, Patrick has become the caretaker of his wife. Jenn suffered a stroke, leaving her unable to speak or walk. Thus, out of necessity, Patrick has taken on the duties of caring for their three children (two of whom were fathered by different men before Patrick and Jenn’s marriage), feeding them and teaching the youngest to read and write.54 Thus, following the argument of Michael Hawkins, Patrick and Jenn’s relationship exemplify how transnational marriages serve as a “conduit to new experiences, new opportunities and new spaces of belonging”55 – in other words, “zones of alternative trans being.” Perhaps the most interesting of the six vignettes from Fallen Angels is that of Pia and Jean-Lester. Abandoned by his German father before he was even born, two-month-old Jean- Lester was left by his mother as well, given to her bakla neighbor Pia. Pia became “both mother and father” to Jean-Lester, running a hair salon to provide financially while also performing devoted acts of maternal care. Pia details how she would allow Jean-Lester to sleep on her stomach when he was a baby, provide him with vitamins, prevent bugs from biting him, and check up on him at school. Jean-Lester describe Pia as the “opposite of a woman.”56 While Jean-Lester’s statement can be seen as problematically equating “womanhood” with weakness (as Pia is “unafraid” to express her bakla identity), it establishes Pia as a figure who disrupts and queers the “static formula that reads as follows: domestic = family =

49. Ibid., 38:09-38:44. 50. Michael Hawkins, “Liberty Call at Sunset: Belonging, Ageing Masculinities and Transnational Marriage in Subic Bay, Philippines” (master’s thesis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2017), 98, accessed April 13, 2018, https://cdr.lib.unc.edu/record/uuid:3646bc96-a435-48c3-9401-bd02e4414be4. 51. Manalansan, “Queering the Chain of Care Paradigm,” 3. 52. Hawkins, “Liberty Call at Sunset,” 71. 53. Simikinda, Fallen Angels, 43:16-43:25. 54. Ibid., 44:00-44:22, 45:38-45:47. 55. Hawkins, “Liberty Call at Sunset,” 116. 56. Simikinda, Fallen Angels, 13:28-18:18. Frial 57 heterosexual woman = care and love.”57 Pia, though bakla, demonstrates that she is perfectly capable of tending to all of her son’s needs, which prompts Jean-Lester’s teachers to “say that [her] son is lucky to have [her].”58 Pia’s acts of motherhood even garnered her recognition in a special Mother’s Day episode in the drama anthology series Maalaala Mo Kaya (Will You Remember?).59 Manalansan sees the value in recognizing “alternatives narratives” of care like Pia’s that “prevent us from falling into the violent trap of regarding married and reproductively active women as natural nurturers,”60 especially as circulating Pia’s story will help other bakla and transpinays carve out “zones of alternative being” as mothers.

Conclusion: Engendering Trans Being:

As indicated by the examples above, the role of “breadwinner” is flexible enough to accommodate people of all gender and sexual identities. However, the role of caregiver remains feminized, and men often resist the partaking in what is seen as “women’s work,” to the expense of women and gender non-conforming individuals. The Philippine state plays a large role in maintaining these gendered divisions, tying motherhood (and maternal care) to national duty and thereby privileging the nuclear family as the primary kinship network. As Manalansan suggests, it is necessary to expand our definitions of care labor to include “care for the self” so we can disrupt the (heterosexualized) linear linkages created through Hochschild’s theory of the global care chain. Such an exclusion forecloses the possibility of discovering “zones of alternative being” that characterize spaces like the Paper Doll’s drag performances and the “Unsung Heroes” choir. While we should celebrate the “zones of alternative being” that arise out of the necropolitical conditions afflicting families affected by transmigration and the sex trade, we must be careful not to overlook the daily oppressions and hardships that these families face as well. Pia’s motherhood was enabled only because Jean-Lester was abandoned by a mother who could not afford to take care of him. Additionally, non-traditional families are engendered in spaces that are neglected by the state. For instance, the retreat of the welfare state, coupled with rising poverty and unemployment rates exacerbated by neoliberalization, have led low-income families to more heavily depend on their bakla and tomboy breadwinners for survival, causing them undue stress.61 As Parreñas stresses, there is a need to locate a “middle ground” that recognizes the creative potential of families affected by migration or the sex trade “without dismissing the severe structural constraints that could hamper their freedom and autonomy.”62 In the final section, before closing this paper, I will examine how the necropolitical climate in the Philippines has drastically changed as a result of President Rodrigo Duterte’s drug war, and adjust the delineation of trans necropolitics presented throughout this thesis accordingly.

57. Manalansan, “Queering the Chain of Care Paradigm,” 2. 58. Simikinda, Fallen Angels, 17:00-17:02 59. James Patrick Anarcon, “How Did Hero Angeles’s MMK Comeback Fare in AGB Ratings?”, Philippine Entertainment Portal, last modified May 14, 2017, https://www.pep.ph/guide/agb/26072/how-did-hero- angeless-emmmkem-comeback-fare-in-agb-ratings. 60. Manalansan, “Queering the Chain of Care Paradigm,” 4. 61. Thoreson, “Realizing Rights in Manila,” 550-551. 62. Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, Illicit Flirtations: Labor, Migration, and Sex Trafficking in Tokyo (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), 7. Frial 58

Epilogue: Trans Necropolitics in the Age of Duterte

In January of this year, Duffel Blog published an article entitled “Progress: Transgender Marine Straight Filipina Prostitute.” While in the Philippines, transgender marine Corporal Jenny Waller was charged with murdering a female sex worker, whom she had “allegedly assumed was male based on her female appearance and proximity to a Manila nightclub.” Hailed as a “milestone for the Marine Corps and the LGBTQ community,” a Marine Corps press release on the murder case stated that the “killing was a welcome departure after over 200 years of only straight Marines murdering transgender prostitutes” and proved “no matter your race, color, or creed, you can all be arrested for chasing a hooker around some seedy motel and bludgeoning her to death with a chair leg.”1 Duffel Blog is a “news” outlet that publishes satirical articles related to national security and the U.S. military. Though the information contained in the above article is not based in any degree of truth, the celebratory response to the “murder” illuminates the biopolitical mechanisms of homonationalism that Jasbir Puar describes as “erecting celebratory queer liberal subjects folded into life (queerness as subject) against the sexually pathological and deviant populations targeted for death (queerness as population).”2 In the fictitious article, when asked to give a statement on the murder, Jenny Waller – her name most likely an allusion to Jennifer Laude – replies: “Ten years ago I might have been killed just for being who I am, stabbed and left to bleed out in a men’s bathroom off the Interstate. But thanks to the Marines, the LGBTQ community can finally say #WeGotThis.” The idea of “progress” espoused in the article mirrors (and critiques) how the participation of white American LGBT subjects in (homo)nationalist and imperialist projects of the United States are lauded as “milestones” for the LGBT community. Namely, the repeal of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy – forbidding LGBT soldiers from serving openly in the U.S. military – and the legal battle for marriage equality have served to enable the legibility of (white) LGBT subjects within the nation-state as “acceptable US citizens.”3 According to Mehlab Jameel, marriage equality and inclusion in the military

“conveniently takes attention away from privileged LGBT people who contribute to racism and , who are at the forefront of gentrification, who run corporations that incarcerate people and make profit from it, who enlist in an army that kills innocent civilians for sport and collects their body parts as trophies.”4

Within the Duffel Blog article, the murder of the straight Filipina sex worker by the transgender white woman illustrates how the “progress” promoted by the liberal LGBT movement folds white transgender women (and other race-/class-privileged queer and trans subjects) within the gendered and sexualized violence inherent to U.S. militarism abroad. In other words, the inclusion of (white) LGBT individuals into nation-building projects does nothing to combat the

1. G-Had, “Progress: Transgender Marine Straight Filipina Prostitute, ” Duffel Blog, last modified January 8, 2018, https://www.duffelblog.com/2018/01/progress-transgender-marine-murders-straight-filipina-prostitute/. 2. Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 24. 3. Mehlab Jameel, “Rainbows and Weddings: The Neoliberal and Imperialist Politics of LGBT Rights,” Solidarity, last modified July 6, 2015, https://solidarity-us.org/rainbowsandweddings. 4. Idem. Frial 59 structures of oppression (such as white supremacy) that privilege them as subjects. In fact, Puar argues that this subjecthood is enabled only because of the racial exclusion of queer people of color and the imperialist extermination of the homophobic (Muslim) Other. As discussed in Chapter 1, homonationalism is manifesting and producing its own set of biopolitical divisions in the Philippines. While their movement lacks the (neo)colonial dimensions that fold white LGBT subjects into U.S. imperialist endeavors, class-privileged LGBT Filipinos have adopted the same liberal strategies for enabling their subjecthood, namely by fighting for the passage of the Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and Expression (SOGIE) anti-discrimination bill. As a form of hate crimes legislation, the SOGIE anti-discrimination bill “contributes to a broader biopolitical imperative to manage poor people and people of color by channeling them into a massive carceral project.”5 These necropolitical developments have become extremified in the current climate due to President Rodrigo Duterte’s drug war, which disproportionately criminalizes and targets poor communities, including transgender and bakla individuals who sell drugs as the primary form of income for them and their families.6 In this concluding chapter, we turn to discover how the landscapes of trans necropolitics have shifted in this post-Jennifer Laude era. With the rise of Duterte, what new death-worlds are emerging? In the words of Jasbir Puar, what “celebratory queer liberal subjects” are being “folded into life” by the continued neoliberalization of the Philippine economy, including the rapid growth of the business process outsourcing (BPO) industry? And what “sexually pathological and deviant populations” are being “targeted for death” through state-sanctioned violence, particularly the War on Drugs?

Virtual Migrants:

Since the turn of the millennium, the business process outsourcing (BPO) in the Philippines has exponentially expanded, growing from just 2,000 workers in 2001 to 700,000 in 2013. With call-center agents making up the majority of BPO jobs, the Philippines surpassed India as the leading employer of call center workers in 2010.7 As the Philippines “grapples with a potential shift from a labor-export economy to an outsourced-labor economy,”8 the burgeoning call-center sector has enabled Filipino youth to pursue employment opportunities at home instead of having to migrate abroad to support their families.9 For mothers like Bheng, working as a call-center agent from the comfort of her own home allows her to not only “raise her two sons but finance their extracurricular activities,” in

5. C. Riley Snorton and Jin Haritaworn, “Trans Necropolitics: A Transnational Reflection on Violence, Death, and the Trans of Color Afterlife,” in The Transgender Studies Reader 2, ed. by Susan Stryker and Aren Z. Aizura (New York: Routledge, 2013), 68. 6. “If You Are Poor, You Are Killed”: Extrajudicial Killings in the Philippines’ “War on Drugs”, (London: Amnesty International Ltd., 2017), 42, accessed April 13, 2018, https://www.amnesty.org/download/ Documents/ASA3555172017ENGLISH.PDF. 7. Emmanuel David, “Outsourced Heroes and Labor Incorporations: Labor Brokerage and the Politics of Inclusion in the Philippine Call Industry,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 22, no. 3 (2016): 382, Accessed April 13, 2018. https://read.dukeupress. edu/glq/article/22/3/381/35028/Outsourced-Heroes-and-Queer- IncorporationsLabor. 8. Ibid., 397. 9. Drew Ambrose, “Phoning from the Philippines: Outsourcing to Manila’s Call Centres | 101 East.” YoutTube video, 5:09-5:29. Posted by Al Jazeera English, January 18, 2013. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hv3lipHyxiw. Frial 60 contrast to Filipino migrant mothers who work as domestic helpers abroad, separated from their children.10 In addition to these benefits, Emmanuel David writes that call-center work also

“promises upward social mobility and entrance into a new professional and consumer class. These workers’ relatively high wages help drive urban growth in glistening minicities and techno hubs where call centers are open day and night to coordinate with foreign business hours.”11

A full exploration of how BPOs are restructuring labor (along with the social lives of youth, educational prospects, and family) in the Philippines would warrant its own essay. However, I would like to focus here on the relationship between call centers and LGBT Filipinos. Formerly relegated to finding employment solely as hairstylists, beauticians, designers, entertainers, and wedding planners, call centers have allowed LGBT Filipinos – transpinays in particular – to escape the “occupational ghetto” of the entertainment, beauty, and fashion sectors.12 Meredith Talusan reports that within call centers,

“[s]ince most of the labor takes place over the phone, employees assigned male at birth may adopt traditionally feminine names, take on a ‘female voice,’ or wear women’s clothing while talking to customers, a freedom that would be impossible in most other industries in the country.”13

Like the transnational markets of reproductive labor discussed in Chapter 2, call centers – as global “contact centers” – become sites to extract value from transgender and other gender non-conforming Filipinos. While not requiring workers to “move in physical space” like traditional conceptions of migration, David writes that “[t]hese technologically mediated, global call center encounters have the potential to reconfigure workers’ axes of identities” through a form of virtual migration.14 To management of the leakages posed to its sovereignty by these “virtual migrants,” the Philippine state has attempted to reincorporate call-center workers into the national body as bagong bayani (“new national heroes”). While for transmigrants (especially migrant mothers) the role of the bagong bayani is to “work overseas to support their loved ones and their home country through remittance earnings,”15 the framing of transpinay call-center workers as bagong bayani functions as a way for the Philippine state to “include new forms of difference as productive and respectable.”16 According to Dan Irving, the legitimizing of the transsexual worker

10. Ibid., 19:10-19:22. 11. David, “Outsourced Heroes and Labor Incorporations,” 382. 12. Sam Winter, Sass Rogando-Sassot, and Mark King, “Transgendered Women of the Philippines,” International Journal of Transgenderism 10, no. 2 (2007): 87, accessed April 13, 2018, https://www.tandfonline. com/doi/abs/10.1080/15532730802182185. 13. Meredith Talusan, “Answering the Call,” Buzzfeed News, last modified April 10, 2016, https://www.buzzfeed.com/meredithtalusan/the-philippines-call-center-revolution. 14. David, “Outsourced Heroes and Labor Incorporations,” 390. 15. Robyn Magalit Rodriguez, How the Philippine State Brokers Labor to the World (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 143. 16. David, ““Outsourced Heroes and Labor Incorporations,” 397. Frial 61

“does not offer serious challenges to heteronormativity, nor does it illuminate the conditions of hyperexploitation that structure neoliberalism. In fact, these narratives dovetail with hegemonic discourses concerning the upstanding citizen and the necessity of entrepreneurialism.”17

By propping up a “model minority” of productive LGBT subjects, Jasbir Puar writes that the nation-state is able to simultaneously “maintain its homophobic and xenophobic stances while capitalizing on its untarnished image of inclusion, diversity, and tolerance.”18 As “upstanding citizens” newly folded into neoliberal projects, transpinays in call centers “reorient their loyalty to the nation through market privileges” while at the same time distancing themselves from low-income bakla and other gender non-conforming individuals.19 State discourses like the bagong bayani which prop up privileged transpinay subjects risk “leaving others behind, particularly those without access to formal education (which provide advanced English language skills and possibilities for class mobility and thus distance from the bakla category).”20 Talusan noted that one of her informants, Angel, was “particularly critical of trans women who do sex work and spend their earnings on luxuries like Louis Vuitton bags or fancy clothes.” Angel termed these financial choices as “[u]seless extravagance, just to buy something expensive.” Talusan attributes this dismissal of sex workers to be a reflection of Angel’s anxieties about her own tenuous status as a newly-incorporated citizen within Filipino society.21 The ascension of a new upwardly-mobile class of transpinay subjects has led to a “factioning, fractioning, and fractalizing of identity” that Puar defines as a “prime activity of societies of control.” In this way, the homonormative (or in this case, the transnormative) “aids the project of homonormativity through the fractioning away of queer alliances in favor of adherence to the reproduction of class, gender, and racial norms.”22 It is precisely these class fractions that leads to the formulation of separate agendas among LGBT groups, pursuing different sets of needs stratified on the basis of socioeconomic status. While class-privileged LGBT Filipinos focus exclusively on achieving sexual rights as their goal (embodied in the SOGIE anti-discrimination bill), groups consisting largely of low-income individuals pursue a broader vision of socioeconomic justice. This division becomes markedly evident when comparing two cases of transphobia that received media attention during the month of June in 2015, celebrated annually as Pride Month by the international LGBT “community.” In the first incident, transpinay fashion designer Veejay Floresca was denied entry into the “high-end” luxury bar Valkyrie on account that the establishment’s dress code does not allow for cross-dressing “men.” Naomi Fontanos of Gender and Development Advocates (GANDA) Filipinas was one among many to use this case to advocate for the passage of a SOGIE anti-discrimination bill, as the Valkyrie incident demonstrated “how widespread the discrimination that transgender Filipinos face [is], not only in

17. Dan Irving, “Normalized Transgressions: Legitimizing the Transsexual Body as Productive,” in The Transgender Studies Reader 2, ed. by Susan Stryker and Aren Z. Aizura (New York: Routledge, 2013), 26. 18. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, 26. 19. Idem. 20. Emmanuel David, “Purple-Collar Labor: Transgender Workers and Queer Value at Global Call Centers in the Philippines,” Gender and Society 29, no. 2 (2015): 189, accessed April 13, 2018, http://journals.sagepub.com/ doi/abs/10.1177/0891243214558868. 21. Talusan, “Answering the Call.” 22. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, 28, 31-32. Frial 62 getting access to public accommodations such as restaurants, gyms, malls, trains, et cetera, but also to education, employment, and social services including healthcare.”23 In the second incident, transpinay Claire led a five-month long strike against Tanduay Distillers, Inc., after being unexpectedly dismissed from work alongside 96 other workers without explanation. Among the demands of the Tanduay workers were regularization of contracts, in order to allow workers to have “security of tenure (to start, be paid as regular employees – i.e. not just P315 or less per day), and – with that – the benefits (such as medical or sick leave, vacation leave, and bonuses) that come with being regular employees.” According to Claire, “Hindi na ito naging usapin lang ng pagiging LGBT; usapin na rin ito ng kawalan ng karapatan maging LGBT man o hindi.” (This is no longer just an issue of being LGBT; this is also an issue of the lack of rights for LGBT and for non-LGBT people). However, because it was not strictly an LGBT issue like the SOGIE anti-discrimination bill, only one LGBT group, Kaperasyon, extended support for the Tanduay workers’ cause, calling for “lahat ng LGBT na nakakalat sa iba’t ibang sektor para makiisa sa pakikibaka ng mga manggagawa” (all LGBT people in different sectors to join the struggle of the workers). 24 As evidenced by the response garnered by the two incidents, the one-issue focus of many class-privileged LGBT subjects distances them substantially from the struggles of low-income queer and gender non-conforming individuals whom they purport to represent. These biopolitical divisions are the direct result of neoliberal developments like the rise of BPOs that have allowed certain transpinays to be folded into “productive commercial activities and nation-building projects,”25 at the expense of working-class bakla and sex workers who continue to struggle for basic rights and access to resources.

“Rich Person VIP, Poor Person RIP”:

On May 19, 2016 – the same day Rodrigo Duterte won the presidency – Geraldine Roman made history as the first transgender woman elected to the Philippine Congress. Born into a family of politicians, Roman attended an all-boys Jesuit Ateneo de Manila High School and graduated from the University of the Philippines. After completing two master’s degrees in Spain, Roman worked as a Spanish-language journalist and editor, where she met her current partner of 18 years. During this time, Roman also flew to New York City in order to receive gender affirmation surgery.26 Roman’s life of tremendous privilege not only informs her politics – Roman has become the leading champion in the Senate of the SOGIE anti-discrimination bill – but marks her as an “active/proper/worthy/deserving neoliberal citizen, a construction that disrupts and further

23. “Valkyrie Cited for Alleged Transphobia,” Outrage Magazine, last modified June 22, 2015, http://outragemag.com/valkyrie-cited-for-transphobia/. 24. Michael David dela Cruz Tan, “‘Ang Usaping Manggagawa Ay Usaping LGBT’ – Claire,” last modified June 22, 2015, http://outragemag.com/ang-usaping-manggagawa-ay-usaping-lgbt-claire/. 25. David, “Outsourced Heroes and Labor Incorporations,” 397. 26. Wilson Lee Flores, “Geraldine Roman on Being the 1st Transgender in Congress, Beauty Secrets, Love, Duterte, Pope Francis & Pacquiao.” The Philippine Star. Last modified May 29, 2016. https://www.philstar.com/ lifestyle/sunday-life/2016/05/29/1587856/geraldine-roman-being-1st-transgender- congress-beauty-secrets-love-duterte-pope-francis-pacquiao. Frial 63 devastates the lives of trans people for whom the systemic barriers to emulating these ideals are insurmountable.”27 Roman describes her “life philosophy” as such:

“Regardless of our personal circumstances, whether we are rich or poor, our civil status…regardless of our ethnicity, religious beliefs…regardless of all of these external circumstances, because we are children of God and because we are citizens of this country, we deserve equal opportunities…opportunities to be our best selves, to develop our full potential, and to become productive members of society.”28

By emphasizing “productivity,” Roman – like the call-center worker Angel – positions herself and other “upstanding” transpinay citizens as “creative-class member[s],” in contrast to “those whose unproductiveness and excessive reproductiveness mark their intimacies as disposable in the current diversity regime”29 – namely, sex workers and other marginalized queer individuals. Given that she sponsors a hate crimes bill that will “enact specific forms of disciplining and control” through increased policing and punishment,30 it is unsurprising that Geraldine Roman voted in favor of reinstating the death penalty. She hopes that the death penalty will “indeed serve as a deterrent to crimes,” and reasoned that “[i]f you do not want to be meted with death penalty, then don’t commit any of the punishable crimes.”31 Extending this logic, it is not hard to see why Roman also “applaud[s] the President on his sincerity to fight and eradicate the drug problem and criminality in the country.” With Duterte’s rise to power and subsequent drug war, these biopolitical divisions between LGBT Filipinos have only heightened, as bakla and gender non-conforming individuals involved in the drug trade have now become targets for extrajudicial killings (EJKs). As of January 2018, Duterte’s war on drugs is estimated to have claimed more than 12,000 lives.32 According to one police officer in an anti-drugs unit, killing alleged drug offenders can earn one up to 8,000 pesos (US $161) to 15,000 pesos (US $302) per head, based on the notoriety of the drug pusher.33 Because they are the most vulnerable and have the least access to legal resources, most drug-related killings overwhelmingly target the urban poor, “taking key breadwinners from families already in an economically precarious position.”34 Such was the case for Heart de Chavez, murdered in the seventh month of the drug war. For low-income transpinays like Heart de Chavez living in the urban slums of Metro Manila, selling drugs is necessary to supplement the family income. As discussed in Chapter 4, bakla and gender non-conforming Filipinos are expected to be the primary breadwinners of their

27. Dan Irving, “Elusive Subjects: Notes on the Relationship between Critical Political Economy and Trans Studies,” in Transfeminist Perspectives: In and Beyond Transgender and Gender Studies, ed. by A. Finn Enke, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012), accessed April 13, 2018, http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt14bt8sf.14. 28. “Rep. Geraldine Roman in the Spotlight,” YouTube video, 4:15-4:47, posted by Manila Bulletin Online, March 13, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnacG5mcXyg. 29. Snorton and Haritaworn, “Trans Necropolitics,” 73. 30. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, 24. 31. Rosette Adel, “Geraldine Roman Cites Politics in Backing Death Penalty Primary Tabs,” The Philippine Star, last modified March 8, 2017, https://www.philstar.com/nation/2017/03/08/1677720/geraldine- roman-cites-politics-backing-death-penalty-primary-tabs. 32. “Philippines: Duterte’s ‘Drug War’ Claims 12,000+ Lives,” Human Rights Watch, last modified January 18, 2018, https://www.hrw.org/news/2018/01/18/philippines-dutertes-drug-war-claims-12000-lives. 33. “If You Are Poor, You Are Killed”, 29. 34. Ibid., 42. Frial 64 families. After the death of her father, Heart began selling drugs so her family “could have food on [their] table.”35 On January 7, 2017, Heart was detained by the local police. Despite being found with no drugs in her possession, Heart’s mother Elena recalled being demanded 50,000 pesos (US $1010) for her daughter’s release, of which she was only able to pay 7,000 pesos (US $141). Three days later, seven armed men in civilian clothing burst into the family home. Elena and Arriane were held at gunpoint as the other men dragged Heart down the street. After the men left, Elena and Arriane later found Heart’s body in an empty house, shot four times.36 In response to the unjust death of her sister, Arriane stated: “When you’re a rich person, you’re treated like a VIP. But when you’re a poor person, the treatment is RIP.”37 As a “rich person,” Geraldine Roman stands to have the “security” of her citizenship protected by the passage of a SOGIE anti-discrimination bill, as more resources are redirected to an already enormously corrupt police force. Since “[t]hose injured in the event of violence benefit the least from the remedies offered by a traumatized citizenship model,”38 the SOGIE anti-discrimination bill will undoubtedly lead to the (monetized) deaths of more impoverished and “unproductive” queer Filipinos like Heart de Chavez at the hands of anti-drug units and paid mercenary killers.

Conclusion:

Throughout this thesis, I have explored how trans necropolitics manifests within various environments in the Philippines, including the sexscapes of Subic Bay and Clark Freeport Zones, transnational circuits of reproductive labor, and political organizing of class-ascendant LGBT Filipinos. Within this concluding section, I have “updated” our discussion of trans necropolitics to the present day, focusing particularly on how BPOs fold “productive” transpinays into citizenship and Duterte’s drug wars target “criminal” transpinays individuals for death. As the necropolitical climate in the Philippines continues to intensify, further research on necropolitics should focus not only on how extrajudicial killings (EJKs) have transformed conceptions of death, justice, nation, family, and the relations between them, but on how these processes of death-making have directly enabled the subjecthood of class-privileged (LGBT) Filipinos like Geraldine Roman. This is not even to touch upon how the humanitarian crisis in Marawi and subsequent declaration of martial law in Mindanao have allowed for increased state violence against queers of other marginalized groups, such as in the indigenous Lumad peoples. As the second year of Duterte’s reign of terror comes to a close, and with another four years remaining, only time will tell what new biopolitical technologies and (necrocapitalist) practices of death-making will be invented in Duterte’s relentless quest to “cleanse” the Philippines of drugs, crime, and corruption, and what new Jennifer Laudes and Heart de Chavezes will haunt the necropolitical landscapes of the Philippines in the years to come.

35. “Killed in the Philippines: CASE 2,” YouTube video, 0:16-0:20, posted by HumanRightsWatch, March 1, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72FTaFoM3Dk. 36. Patricia Evangelista, “Impunity: Welcome to the End of the War,” Rappler.com, last modified April 28, 2017, https://www.rappler.com/newsbreak/in-depth/158886-impunity-end-drug-war. 37. Paolo Villaluna, “Impunity: Alias Heart,” YouTube video, 5:06-5:13, posted by Rappler, February 6, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQFlwcWAyXQ. 38. Snorton and Haritaworn, “Trans Necropolitics,” 73. Frial 65

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