Transvestites and transgressions: Panggagaya in Philippine gay cinema

Philippine cinema has long afforded spectators constructions of queerness not only deviating from Western queer theory but also from other continentally Asian homosexual traditions. Using as my primary text Lino Brocka's 1978 film My Father, My Mother, I examine how indigenous ideas of transsexuality and transgender are not only constructed by alternatively sexual images manufactured and appropriated by the Marcos regime, but how those sexual images construct and perpetuate class divisions as criteria of an ongoing Philippine sexual economy.