Werking (Working) Thru a Hallowed Motherland: 'bearing Witness' As Queer Weapon of the Weak in the Philippines

For activists in a southern country like the Philippines, the rise of what has been dubbed as militant faiths constitutes ideological opposition that constrains political opportunities to legislate queer rights and welfare. Drawing from my ethnographic project on the queer movement in the Philippines, I assert that Filipinx activists arrogate 'bearing witness' as a tactic of narration to confront conservative churches that attempt to block the likelihood of policy successes. As a form of remembering, 'bearing witness' recounts collective traumatic experiences from particular political and ethical standpoints. And, as a form of constructing history, it directs such politics and ethics into projects that recover narratives of the past from the vantage point of the subjugated. Sensing the emergence of militant faiths that seek to expel queer citizens both from Philippine legislation and national history, Filipinx queer rights advocates, deploy both forms of 'bearing witness', first, to illustrate the hypocrisy of conservative morality by revealing the violence it directs at queer citizens and by imbuing their demands with progressive theologies. And second, they appropriate this narration style to recover what some of them argue to be the prominent place of queer people in the spiritual and religious lives of early communities in the islands; queer histories, they continue, that western colonization erased. I further conceive both forms of 'bearing witness' as queer weapons of the weak because they tactically oscillate from the normative language of theology and nation on one hand, and subversive claims for queer justice on the other. These insights intervenes into the current discussion on homonationalism by foregrounding how Filipinx activists produce their own nationalist queer imaginations beyond the imperial and neoliberal sexual politics with which the concept was originally associated.