Locating the Ilokano Baglan in the Gender and Sexuality Continuum

• Main Author: Agcaoili, Aurelio Solver
• Format: text
• Published: Archīum Ateneo 2024
• Subjects: baglan; sexual dimorphism; gender and sexuality continuum; ritual healing; Native epistemology
• Online Access: https://archium.ateneo.edu/budhi/vol27/iss1/3; https://archium.ateneo.edu/context/budhi/article/1010/viewcontent/01_20Agcaoili_20v4.pdf
• Institution: Ateneo De Manila University

The article is an attempt to recover the baglan tradition of ritual healing among the Ilokano people. Currently, only pejorative comments exist about this baglan tradition whose practices represent the continuum of sex, sexuality, and gender among these groups of people in the Northern Philippines. The argument presented leads to a critique of knowledge formation in colonial Ilocos and unmasks the problem of reproduced versions of the truth about the baglan and their role in the definition of the healthy human being and the healthy community. The ungendered baglan, is, in fact, the person that is all-gender, all-sex, and all-sexuality, the person that refuses to be pigeonholed by the birthed biological sex of the male and female. Field and archival data all point to this baglan as no different from the ritual healer all around the country and perhaps in many parts of the world.