Lamyos New LGBTQ Fiction from the Philippines

While the relatively new fangled category “queer” is now the political “marker” for LGBTQ, it doesn’t invalidate these other signifiers of being and becoming—including the ideas, practices, and, indeed, lives that these more familiar and hard- won names represent. It merely puts these self-identifications on edge, rendering them more open, more self-aware, and ultimately more critical of the assumptions that it will do all of us—lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transgenders, queers, intersexuals, or whatever else—well never to leave unexamined. However else it can be embodied into being, at this point in our history, to be queer is to possess excentric forms of desire and/or to identify outside conventional categories of cisgendered maleness and femaleness.

Written in three Philippine languages by a variety of young Filipino authors from across the archipelago, the twelve stories in Lamyos: New LGBTQ Fiction from the Philippines seek not only to present a variety of sexually dissident, gender-nonconformist, and/or queer subjectivities but also to problematize heteronormative gender and sexuality— and their privileging of het-conjugal and cisgendered sexual bonds—as well as the appropriations of these and all other “global” forms of desire in our country, where they can only exist as syncretisms of local and translocal conceptions.

As exemplary instances of imaginative queer literacy, these stories may be seen to exhibit the idea of “intersectionalities”: the intricate and mutually implicating layers of realities and circumstances—the complexity—that necessarily attend the materiality of LGBTQ being…. As these stories so memorably demonstrate, because the oppression suffered by queer individuals is manifold and intersecting, so are the resources of queer agency, so is the dignity and the luminous truth of queer lives.

—from the Introduction by J. NEIL C. GARCIA

Author: J. Neil C. Garcia
ISBN/ISSN: 978971542961-0
Category: Literary; Fiction
Copyright: 2021
Pages: 336pp
Size: 6x9
Type: PB/SP