Precarity and Motherhood in Philippine Trans Cinema

• Main Author: Inton-Campbell, Mikee
• Format: text
• Published: Animo Repository 2022
• Subjects: Trans Cinema; Precarity; Trans Motherhood; Transgender Studies; Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; Film and Media Studies; Pacific Islands Languages and Societies; South and Southeast Asian Languages and Societies
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/akda/vol1/iss3/6; https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/context/akda/article/1023/viewcontent/5_Campbell_Trans_20Cinema_Akda_201_283_29.pdf
• Institution: De La Salle University

In this short essay, I reflect on representations and themes in trans cinema in the Philippines. I examine the emerging and intersecting themes of precarity and motherhood in two recent films –Rod Singh’s Mamu and a Mother too (2018), and Isabel Sandoval’s Lingua Franca (2020). I look at how economic and social precarity tends to pervade the lives of trans women, and how transness itself becomes a form of precarity under the legal system’s lack of accommodation to trans rights. I also examine trans motherhood and make the argument that while it destabilizes biology as the root of motherhood, it also reifies traditional tropes of Filipina motherhood that center it on self-sacrifice. Finally, I look at how precarity and motherhood intersect in Philippine Trans Cinema.