Rethinking Bakla: A Keyword in Philippine Conceptual, Sexual, and Social History

Dissertation, University of the Philippines Diliman (2021)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

Bakla signals “effeminacy” and “homosexuality,” which stigma signifies being “weak,” “fake woman,” and “unreal man.” This historical research interrogates the etymology of bakla, which etymology claims that bakla only became a label for gay identity since the 1960s. A newfound evidence, the Bienvenido N. Santos’ “Recollections” (1932), challenges this etymology; as the document used bakla to signify “effeminate” decades before the 1960s. Mobilizing this newfound evidence alongside theoretical, historiographic, and archival data, this thesis asks: (1) How can the 1932 “Recollections” help explain the crystallization of bakla into a label for “effeminate homosexual male” identity since the 1960s? (2) What can socio-historical processes further reveal about the etymology of bakla, and why the word bears so much stigma? (3) How did “effeminacy” and male “homosexuality” become semantically linked with bakla’s historic senses? At its core, the study argues that sexism and political instability coincide in the social history of the bakla. Contextualizing bakla’s semantic shifts reveals that the word’s stigma comes from its earliest meaning; besides “fearful and weak,” it was bakla as “deceptive.” While tracking bakla’s semantic links with the pre-existing terms for gay identity shows that bakla was forged alongside historical biases against women. These biases rendered gay men and trans women undesirable. And archival data uncover five (5) factors explaining why bakla crystallized into a gender label, which also offer insights on how bakla has been reclaimed and reworked, despite its persisting stigma, in more recent years. The thesis exposes bakla’s status as a “keyword” in the Philippine conceptual, sexual, and social history. It undresses bakla, opens it to critique, and recognizes the importance its etymology can play in undoing bakla’s stigma, and its potential in rethinking Philippine history itself.

Links

PhilArchive

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

At skrive queer historie.Niels Nyegaard - 2021 - Slagmark - Tidsskrift for Idéhistorie 83:157-176.
Sexuality.Jacqueline Zita - 1998 - In Alison M. Jaggar & Iris Marion Young (eds.), A companion to feminist philosophy. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell. pp. 307–320.
A sociology of sex and sexuality.Gail Hawkes - 1996 - Philadelphia: Open University Press.
A Critique of Queer Phenomenology: Gender and the Sexual.Jeta Mulaj - 2019 - Studies in Gender and Sexuality 3 (20):189-203.
What is sexual history?Jeffrey Weeks - 2016 - Malden, MA: Polity.
Queer theory: an introduction.Annamarie Jagose - 1996 - New York: New York University Press.

Analytics

Added to PP
2024-04-28

Downloads
140 (#135,332)

6 months
140 (#26,854)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Gregorio III Caliguia
Polytechnic University of the Philippines

Citations of this work

No citations found.

Add more citations

References found in this work

Of grammatology.Jacques Derrida - 1997 - Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Edited by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.
What is history?Edward Hallett Carr - 1961 - New York,: Knopf.

View all 11 references / Add more references