Censoring the Sexual Self: Reflections from an Ethnographic Study of Gay Filipinos on Mobile Dating Apps in Manila

Abstract

This paper reflects upon Evelyn Blackwood's 1995 ‘Falling in Love with An-Other Lesbian’ essay on love and desire during fieldwork research as it intersects with the figure of the ‘virtual anthropologist’ in Kath Weston's 1997 essay of the same name. My multiple subjectivities (specifically those nativised) enabled and restricted what I considered bonds and differences between me and others during ethnographic research among gay Filipino men using mobile dating apps. I revisit an experience from four weeks of preliminary data collection between May and June 2015 in Manila, Philippines, where I decided not to include a sexual encounter with a research participant named Wesley. Moving forward with my study, my reflections on censoring sexual encounters with research participants helped me to acknowledge several sources of moral anxieties and ethical considerations that influence how this specific testimony took its shape and to consider how to construct and apply a malleable ethic of honesty for current and future projects especially when intimacies themselves are the focus.

Keywords:

• Sexual Evidence
• Censorship
• Mobile Phones
• Dating Apps
• Manila
• GROWLr
• Scruff
• Path

Acknowledgements

Portions of this essay were presented in part of a panel during the 2016 American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting. I want to acknowledge the hard work of our panel organiser and UIUC colleague Alexander Jong-Seok Lee in bringing us together to discuss our projects reflexively. I lift up the labour of our panel discussants Dr Neha Vora and Dr Jane Ferguson. Both provided generous readings and comments to panel participants and their insights have been helpful in expanding my thoughts and practices since. Special thanks to Carleen Sacris, John Musser, Matthew C. Go and Monica FA Wong Santos for providing additional feedback in the expansion of this essay. I would not be pursuing a doctoral degree without the encouragement, mentorship and support of my advisor, Dr Martin F. Manalansan IV.

ORCID

Paul Michael Leonardo Atienza http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6272-4966

Notes

1 The term ‘cis’ refers to a person whose performed gender and assigned sex at birth are congruent with the way they see their own gender and sex.

2 Wesley is a pseudonym I chose for an informant I met during preliminary fieldwork during my four-week stay in Metro Manila between May and June 2015.

3 I do not mean to invoke the ethic of honesty tied to Freudian psychoanalysis as elaborated by Rieff (1959) or Thompson (2004), but a general sense of honesty that comes from open communication among the people involved in co-creating ethnographic fictions (Battle-Fisher 2010).

4 For a review of scholarship pertaining to ‘intimate insiders’, refer to the literature review from Taylor (2011). I do not consider myself an intimate insider nor a native ethnographer, therefore I construct the complex issues revolving around the relationship between myself and the communities in Metro Manila on the dating apps I study through what Childers, Rhee, and Daza (2013) call ‘promiscuous methodologies’. These are feminist methods particular to studies on education that are contradictory to the researcher's positionalities within academia. Based on anxieties, disappointments and frustrations, such promiscuous methods are constantly shifting and ahead of its constitution.

5 Path is a social network app that launched in 2010. Based in San Francisco, it allows its users to share thoughts, images, videos and links to a maximum of 150 accounts. Wesley explained to me that there are gay Filipino communities using this app to stay connected with one another. He added that gay dating apps are just for people wanting to find a quick sexual encounter. ‘There are tons of liars and people who spread negative energies on those things’, he said. Although Wesley still uses gay dating apps, he explained that Path was another way of keeping in touch with your close gay friends.

6 I thank Dr Krystal Lee for suggesting Wekker's piece to me for consideration as I worked through these arguments.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Departments of Anthropology, Asian American Studies and Gender and Women's Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who provided generous funds toward my doctoral research. I am particularly grateful to the Jeffrey S. Tanaka Asian American Studies Grant that helped fund my air travel to conduct preliminary research in 2015.