By Kale Bantigue Fajardo, 2008
Based on ethnographic fieldwork with Filipino seamen in metro Manila (Philippines), the San Francisco Bay Area (California), and the Pacific Ocean, this essay examines how heterogeneous Filipino masculinities (heterosexual and transgender tomboy) are cocreated and coexperienced in local and global sites. Through a queer, immigrant, transgender, and transnational Filipino (American) cultural logics and critique this essay foregrounds encounters with and translations of differently situated Filipino masculinities in ports and at sea, suggesting how specific embodied practices of mobility and movement—sea-based transportation, migration, and travel—are constitutive of racialized and classed Filipino masculinities.
