CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2017
| Author | Suarez, Maria Katrina Isabel Ramos |
|---|---|
| Title | Sakit o Sala: The (Post)Colonial Medicalization of the Filipino Homosexual (1916-1976) |
| Summary | This thesis deals with the history of how native gender variance and same-sexual relations became discursively constructed as Western medicalized homosexuality in the Philippines. Roman Catholicism and Western medicine, two lasting legacies of Spanish and American colonial regimes, worked together in the regulation and reformation of native sexual bodies in the Philippines. While previous scholarship has surmised that the medicalization of homosexuality occurred during U.S. imperial rule, no archival research has been done to explore how and when “homosexuality” became constructed as a disease in the Philippines. This thesis analyzes two of the earliest scientific and medical studies on homosexuality in the Philippines in the 1960s. Using the three intersecting historiographical fields of Filipino (post)colonial medicine, gender and sexuality in Europe and in the colonies, and Filipino LGBTQ+ studies, this thesis, firstly, claims that the process of translating indigenous terms for gender-crossing to Western/Anglo-American constructs like “homosexuality,” “lesbianism,” and “transvestism,” has led to the medicalization of Filipino concepts of gender variance and same-sexual relations. Secondly, this thesis suggests that homosexuality became constructed as a pathological condition, not during the U.S. imperial rule per se, but during the post-1946/post-Independence era. Homosexuality, as an illness, was seen as manifesting itself on the body and in the mind. |
| Supervisor | De Haan, Francisca; Klapeer, Christine |
| Department | Gender Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2017/suarez_maria.pdf |
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