Year: 2022
Type: article
Abstract: In this short essay, I reflect on representations and themes in trans cinema in the Philippines. I examine the emerging and intersecting themes of precarity and motherhood in two recent films –Rod Singh’s Mamu and a Mother too (2018), and Isabel Sandoval’s Lingua Franca (2020). I look at how economic and social precarity tends to pervade the lives of trans women, and how transness itself becomes a form of precarity under the legal system’s lack of accommodation to trans rights. I also examine trans motherhood and make the argument that while it destabilizes biology as the root of motherhood, it also reifies traditional tropes of Filipina motherhood that center it on self-sacrifice. Finally, I look at how precarity and motherhood intersect in Philippine Trans Cinema.
Author: Mikee Inton-Campbell
Institution: California State University, San Marcos
Language: English
Topic: Gender and Feminist Studies
Subfield: Gender Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4385509232