Capably Queer: Exploring the Intersections of Queerness and Poverty in the Urban Philippines

Abstract

Despite growing attention to identity and intersectionality in the field of development, there is still a dearth of empirical scholarship exploring the ways that being sexually non-normative—or queer—shapes the experience of living in poverty in the Global South. In this paper, I use the ‘missing dimensions of poverty’ framework developed by the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative to explore the ways that queerness and poverty inflect each other in the urban Philippines. I examine the pivotal role that queer people play in household and neighborhood economies, and argue that being queer profoundly affects the ways that low-income Filipinos experience poverty. I suggest that a better understanding of the capabilities that low-income queer individuals are allowed or encouraged to exercise—and the roles that are denied to them—can be used to beneficially integrate those populations into development praxis.

Keywords:

• Gender and Development
• Queerness and Development
• Missing Dimensions of Poverty
• Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative
• The Philippines

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Sabina Alkire, Emma Samman, and Anna Hiltunen at OPHI for their support and partial funding of the survey described in this paper; Celia Reyes, Engineer Lagmay, Joel Bancolita, Erica Sioson, and everyone at CBMS for their helpful insights; Grace, Mhel, Denis, Roxanne, and Bong for their assistance with the interviews; and the many activists who met with me for related projects while in Manila. Any oversights or omissions are, of course, mine alone.

Notes

In addition to LGBT subjectivities, there are a number of queer subjectivities in the Philippines that are indigenous or specific to the archipelago or its regions—for example, the bakla, bayot, bading, tomboy, silahis, and transpinay.

The full questionnaire is too lengthy to discuss in this analysis, but a list of the indicators and discussion of their development is available through OPHI.

The Philippines is divided into 81 provinces, which are composed of cities and municipalities. Each city and municipality is divided into barangays. A barangay is akin to a ward or district, and functions both as a unit of governance and as the primary unit of village or neighborhood life.

The relative youthfulness of the sample is most probably due to the snowball sampling technique.

Only 35 of the 37 who had recently been employed could estimate a weekly income.