 Mertho ar eich ymddor! Felly, rydw i, rydw i. Rydw i, roeddw i. Mae'n rhaid i'n rhaid i fan i chi i chi, i'r lektor fy nghymru ar y ddweud â Professor Garcia. Yn gweithio, Ben yn llwyster i'r ffaith. Mae'n gweithio'n gweithio i chi o'r gyfarfod yma. Mae'n ddysgu i'r programau. Mynd i ddim yn dweud i chi, ac mae'n dweud i'n ddechrau'n ddysgu yma byddai'n llwyddo mewn ei wneud yn ymgyrsiau'n gweithio'n ddweud i chi. Felly, yma'r sgol ym Mhwyr Asia, mae'r platform ar y LGBTQI ishwys ar ymgyrchydd, ac ar ymgyrchydd diaspres. Won't you tell a to? A half day conference here. This is our final event, and after that we have a closing party which we, which you're all welcome to join us at. We also have a film festival which is run from the 24th till the 29th, so our final day is tomorrow at the British Museum. And all day tomorrow is free and open to all to attend so please do join us there if you can. If you want to tweet us, our hashtag is hashtag QueerAsia2018 and I will hand over to Ben, thank you. Okay, thank you very much. So welcome to this event, it's a joint event so QueerAsia definitely but I should also say the Centre of Southeast Asian Studies here at SOAS is also sponsoring this event. And I guess for me sort of Neil Garcia, I guess we can say he's a big hit of both in Queer Studies and in Southeast Asian Studies and that's why it's nice that these two sponsorships of the events and so on come together. So I met Neil ten years ago but very briefly only for about half an hour at a conference because there were many other important people or wanting to speak to each other. But anyway, so it's very nice this evening that Neil is here. So Neil is a professor in comparative literature and creative writing at the University of the Philippines, Dilaman, and the director of the university's press there as you'll undoubtedly know he's the author of numerous poetry collections, works in literary and cultural criticism of literatures of the Philippines and so on. And so it really is a tremendous pleasure to have you here this evening Neil. We've got a two hour booking. It's the end of a conference. I don't think we'll use as much of that as we need to use so Neil's going to talk for around half an hour, 40 minutes, something like that and then there'll be time for questions afterwards. So I think we'll show the trailer later, just hold it there and I'll basically do the theory part and then when we get to the film just before that we'll run the trailer. Okay. I'll sit down. Is that all right? There's a typo I think in the printing of the program because there's a missing word. The complete title of the paper is Translational Desires, Performing Gender and Sexuality Studies in the Philippines. So there's a missing word called studies. It's not performing gender and sexuality per se, but the study of gender and sexuality. So it's a bit of a meta-criticism in a way in the beginning of it where I'll reflect on what I've been doing. I've been doing the theory and writing about Philippine gay culture for more than a quarter of a century now. My primary research topic having been almost from the very beginning about these fields of inquiry. What's important about this chronological reckoning isn't only the realization of all the important passages that gay and more recently LGBT life in the Philippines has undergone in the last two and a half decades, but also the fact that as my presentation with you tonight will hopefully unpack, I've pretty much written everything that I've written about this topic, not in my first language of Tagalog, but rather in my second language, which as with most Filipinos is English. What does it mean when we render opaque the cultural specificity of the language in which we have been inquiring and theorizing, especially when the location in which they occur and to which they pertain is not monolingual or monocultural, but rather culturally hybrid, syncretic and helplessly mixed. I'm interested hence in the question of interlinguality or translation and how it may prove critically generative to frame our inquiries into the specificities of LGBT critical and theoretical work in all and perhaps other locations in the globe from the perspective of how translational it all is. This is especially the case to the degree that in many different places around the world, LGBT discourse is being conducted in the Anglophonic Register, which of course merely reflects trends in technological and cultural globalization as a whole. I'm going to try to accomplish a few tasks in this lecture. First, I will attempt to describe the linguistic situation in the Philippines as translational, by which I mean that it is constitutively and interlingually mixed or hybrid. In pursuit of this idea, I will refer to my previous study of what may well be the earliest Philippine Anglophone novel about the male homosexual experience, Severino Montanos and published Opus, The Lion and the Fawn. So there's actually much as a film, but also a novel in this paper. I will attempt in my reading to identify this novel's translational moments if only to show the persistence of local, indeed quite possibly untranslatable meanings, despite or precisely because of the textual uniformity of the Anglophone surface. So you read the novel and you think, oh everything's intelligible, it's in English, but there's so much that has been translated that actually did not completely translate, and I will be able to show those. This interpreted procedure then becomes the frame within which to resituate the conceptual issues and debates that I have been grappling with in the area of gender and sexuality studies. In brief, I will argue that what I have repeatedly called out as a moderately nativist position in the study of gender and sexuality in the post-colonial context is nothing if not another register of the critical position that recognizes the translational dynamic between local and translocal, between oral and textual, traditional and modern conceptual histories. Central to these tasks is my contention, not exactly controversial in as much as it's almost an academic commonplace by now, that critical interventions unlike literary or creative writing are by definition supposed to be more self-reflexive, particularly in regard to their presuppositions. Thus, while Anglophone creative writers are not expected to be all that conscious that they are performing cultural translations when they write, this very same indulgence may not so readily be granted the critic or theorist. One of his primary tasks is to examine his or her own logical premises when he or she writes. So there's additional complexity that I'm going to look at. When you're an Anglophone writer and you're writing creative works like novels, et cetera, you may not be that aware that you're translating. But if you're an Anglophone critic and you're supposed to be self-reflexive, then that should be somewhat assumed, right, that you should know that you're translating. And the problem is many of us who are writing criticism are still writing as though we are creative writers. Okay, so there's that. I will then proceed with the reading of a recent independent film about the Thibaut or Tomboy Identity, cited in a province in the southern Tagalog region of Quezon. Cited in actually a town in the province of Quezon. Being creative, this film cares little for theory and is almost autoethnographic in its representational project that's entirely grounded in the local language and its public understandings about gendered identities. New realist in approach, it traffics in the vernacular and local expressions mostly and has no wish to translate itself into the terms of global Anglophonic activist discourse. The problem about translating in the LGBT context is that if it's happening in the activist world, then somehow that sort of creates certain expectations. And so the terms of the language are actually predetermined, like LGBT, right? And the other terms actually have no right to circulate anymore. So there's that issue too. So it's a lot of things. I will conclude by complicating the question of the critical difference that the idea of translation makes. I will briefly flag and take to task recent published attempts to do local gay and lesbian criticism in the Filipino language, which do self-consciously translate essentialist precepts and arguments from international, mostly American LGBT, or queer studies, and yet do so without me dating or translating them critically or self-reflexively enough. Hence, we may call this transliteration rather than translation. So we've seen, of late, attempts to do LGBT theory in Filipino. And it's really ironic that they're the ones who are actually guilty of essentialism, which is ironic, okay? Hence, while seemingly local and oral grown, this form of local theorizing, because it does not question its own assumptions, ironically merely replicates the sexological universalisms that the nativeizing gesture of writing resolutely in Filipino supposedly avoids. So it's a lot of different sort of give and take. In the Philippines, one of Americanization's most enduring effects is the socialization of Filipinos into modern modes of gender and sexual identity formation. This process was naturalized through a variety of biomedical anglophone discourses, and it has resulted in the entrenchment of the homo heterologic in the increasingly sexually freighted lives of educated Filipinos. As we know, it's to this dynamic that the Philippines owes the reality of local gay and lesbian cultures. There are many encouraging narratives that the urban-based sexualization of Filipinos has engendered. And these are the narratives of cultural hybridity and translation, which may also be read as narratives of resistance. The perspective that inquires into the question of translation is different from cosmopolitanism, which I find tends to rely the issue of resistance by and large. So I'm actually not using cosmopolitan theory, I'm going back to post-colonial theory. More specifically, we can say that these narratives include LGBT activism itself, which as Filipinos practice it and despite appearances, is certainly not reducible to the same political thing that it arguably is elsewhere. While it is a rival of sexological thinking that pathologize Filipino LGBTs in the first place, as an example of increasingly politicized Filipinos, gays, lesbians and transgenders illustrates, all of those should be italicized, because they sound like they're the same global thing, but they're not. It was precisely the stigma that enabled them. This is especially so because like modern heteronormativity itself, the stigma has needed to be translated to take effect. Even the stigma went through translation. We need to begin by reminding ourselves that English is a language that continues to occupy an ironic place in the lives of many Filipinos. Hence, to the degree that Philippine literature in English is translational, I'm bringing that idea of Philippine literature in English because the novel I'm going to talk about is in English. It cannot be simply representational or realistic. Realism is a signifying practice that presupposes a monocultural ground upon which the consensus of representational fidelity can happen. And yet much of the criticism of this literature has generally failed to take note of this crucial precondition and acting a category mistake with ruinous consequences. Because realism is a foundational compositional and critical concept, it only follows that the various literary practices encoded in Philippine anglophone writing still need to be post-colonially specified, they're translated or syncretic qualities critically recognized and unpacked. So one of the reasons why it's so difficult to think about Philippine writing literature in English as translational is that realism has been abused naively as a category to describe it. How can it be realistic? You have novels by, let's say, a very well-known Filipino writer and V.M. Gonzales. He wrote about the lives of farmers like Caingeros and their children on the ash-covered loam of Mindoro Island. And they are all talking to each other in perfect English in the middle of the field. That is not realism. But it's perceived as such in Philippine criticism. So that's the issue. The Philippines Anglophone tradition represents local realities by translating them, both in the technical and cultural senses of the word. If within a monocultural context, realism is already the translation from imitation to creation, then in the linguistically plural situations of post-colonial societies, this already fraught process of verbal mimises can only even be more complex and confounding. As translational Philippine literature in English negotiates the plurality of cultural and linguistic registers and ideas of local realities and encodes them in slash as English. The critical task then is to post-colonial interpret its seemingly self-evident themes, images and gestures by translating them back into the specific conditions and situations that generated them. So if you're a real assiduous critic of this literature in English, you have to translate them from the English back to the specificity, which is somewhat lost because the writer actually sacrificed all of that specificity to have a uniform surface that's anglophonic. In the Philippines, the most popular local term for the male homosexual, the pejorative bacla, started out as an ungendered adjective to denote a state of confusion or fear. During the Spanish period, it slowly became synonymous with the local gender terms for womanish men, except that unlike the words that it eventually came to eclipse, words for gender crossroads generally, it carried with it the force of macho insult. With Americanisation upon the arrival of the psychological style of reasoning that, among other things, implanted sexological categories, bacla was slowly but securely homosexualised. So much so that it is now understood as a synonym for male homosexual. Although as it occurs in popular culture, it still mostly connotes the earlier ideas of the feminisey and even transgenderism. The bacla is therefore at best a partially homosexualised identity, partially translated into this new discourse. Partially only because he, and not his love object, the real man, the tunay nalalakai, gets imputed with the orientation, despite their mutual indulgence in an enjoyment of what is technically homosexual sex. In this matrix, gender would appear to be partially yoked to a customary privileging of depth or cornice in Filipino calooban. External acts can be qualified to an extent by this interiority. I'll get back to that idea of interiority later. Now I'll go now to the novel. Severino Montano, the author of the novel, posthumously declared national artist, was the moving force in Philippine theatre before and after the Second World War. His work in Philippine Anglophone Theatre was extensive and in terms of his staging innovations, undeniably significant. He wrote his novel well before his death in 1980. The Lion and the Fhorn is a sprawling melodramatic story about an urbane and globally travelled theatre director who practices psychotherapy and his tempestuous love affair with a much younger and behaviourally bisexual officer of the Philippine army. Written in English, the novel's text problematises the sexual definitions of its main characters and uses the narrative pretext that the director who is the narrator is a psychoanalyst in order to achieve this otherwise doer expository project. So if you want to write a novel in English, the very first one that will talk about homosexuality, you better turn your narrator into a psychoanalyst so he can explain all the things that need to be explained about sexuality and it's supposed to be acceptable. So it's actually a bad novel, a badly written novel, but never mind. Needless to say, this fictive endeavour eventuates in the mooting of the local understandings of gender, namely that the baklai is homosexual while the real man he loves is not and the novel adopts the western essentially's perspective on the issue and basically declares them both as homosexuals. You understand that? So it completely goes western and says, oh, the real man and the baklai are both homosexual. Yeah? One termos attempt to displace prevailing categories and to translate the gender intransitive discourse of orientation into the local setting does not quite succeed and this is where that translation obviously fails. On one hand, it's misogynistic subplot that demonises women, especially the beloveds, plain and uncultured wife, specifies its sexual politics as agonistic and peculiarly gender-inflected. The officer is already a married man and the novel imputes all sorts of awful things to the poor wife. Actually insults her like crazy. So it's very misogynistic. On the other hand, despite the novel's textual insistence on the comparably masculine compartments of the two characters, as well as the mutuality of their same sexual desire, the material inequality between the gentile, well-off, and supremely cultured and married older man, and the economically burdened and married younger one is tellingly familiar, for it calls to mind popular cultural representations of baklai love for the real man as financially transactional and therefore ultimately non-reciprocal. So it's supposed to tell a western gay story, I mean that recognizable one with mutually loving gay individuals, but then you look at the story's plot and it's actually very baklai. The director is older with a lot of money. The beloved is younger, who's behaviourally bisexual, who has no money. And so you understand. And then the novel is so misogynistic. So the politics is not sexual but gender. So it's very clearly a carryover from the local that is not getting successfully translated. Indeed it's easy to see that in this story, the good director invests more in the so-called love between equals. It's so funny. So we're supposed to believe that this love between the two is mutual. But every time we hear the director saying that he loves the officer, we hear it as dialogue. Every time we are presented the idea that the younger man loves the director, it's only reported indirectly in the narration. So it's obviously suffering from a very similitude issue, right? Still in all, the Texcosmopolitan project is gay affirmative. The word gay is mentioned only once, but it's enough to give the reader an awareness of this novel's political agenda. That Montana chooses to play down effeminacy and to focus instead on the gender intransitive aspect of male homosexuality can only be seen as a naive reaction on his part. Indeed, how can a novel about intramale affection setting the Philippines at this time not implicate the discourse and reality of effeminate homosexuality embodied most forcefully in the ubiquitous person of the bakla? How could Montana have even believed he could create a novelistic portrait of the Filipino gay man as masculine and non-bakla when he intended this very same portrait to be at least recognizably Filipino? So he wanted to exile the idea of the bakla from the novel, the bakla returns and haunts it in a very bonga way, a very crazy way, right? So you cannot do that, right? The translation we'll create will have remainder effects and the remainder effects will haunt the translated text. And yes, like all the other mother tongues in the Philippines, the dialogue, the language of the world that this novel is set in is gender neutral. While seemingly inconsequential to Philippine Anglophone criticism, the fact is that realistically these local characters wouldn't have been a he or a she. Thus, genduring these characters' identities and lives from the Tagalog source to the English target is and could only be ironic to the degree that what the latter takes to be fundamentally binary is to the former, to all intents and purposes, unitary. An immense slippage takes place when one translates the pronoun sha, which is Tagalog, to either he or she. And we need to remember that. I'm coming from a country whose 176 languages are not gendered in the pronominal sense. There's no he or she or him or her. There's only one pronoun to refer to a person and yet you write in English about that world and you have to choose a pronoun. That is an immense translational sort of fiction that you're making, you're producing. Hence, despite the anatomical dimorphism of modern biomedicine on which the homo hetero binary rests and is translated into the Philippine linguistic context, this binary is far from coherent and simplistically assured. Montana's ignorance of this translational dynamic caused him to mistakenly believe that erotic equality can only be achieved in the superseding of the Bachla identity, which is to say, its masculinist homosexualisation. As we know, this is a project that can only fail. Even as in this text, it did generate interesting and mostly ruinous effects. So he tried to do it and the text contains the failure of that translation. So the realist project in Anglifhorn Writings, Creative and Critical, requires cross-cultural dialogue, a practice of double translation that involves both the representational movement across cultures and the transcultural movement across realities. As I have attempted to only briefly rehearse here, the post-colonial reclaiming of referential Anglifhorn literary texts by Filipinos requires tracing the trajectories of this double or hybrid movement, with a PD of proposing various modes of post-colonial resistance, as made possible by the metonymic gap between nemesis and poesis that cleans all translational acts, particularly as they involve the reading of seemingly simple and universal representations. The idea of cultural translation bids us to recognise that English and the Philippines is, from the very beginning, a contact or hybrid form of English, and thus a kind of Creole, despite the sound of it. It may sound like it's not a Creole language, but it is. I'm talking to you in, I suppose, intelligible universal-sounding English, but almost all of my reference are actually very hybrid and I cannot make all of those qualities present in English. We must insist that this is the case even in the most subtly localised, which is to say the most universal-sounding of circumstances. Grounded in a memorial orality and permeated by a layering of cultural differences, both Philippine literature and criticism in English are in many ways translational, transformed as they necessarily must be across oral and scriptural systems, as well as across speech varieties and forms. So there is a translation across languages, yes, but in the Philippines, and I suspect other parts of Southeast Asia, the translation across oralities and literacies. Because we're working within cultures that are still, in many ways, residually oral. And orality is not just the absence of a script. It's really a cognitive mode. And so there are those translations that take place, too, on that level. As such, they negotiate the plurality of cultural and linguistic registers and ideas of the Philippine reality and transcode them in this globally plural and pluralising medium. Suffice it to say that acknowledging the translational character of gender and sexuality studies in the Philippines will require the rejection of the universalist accounts of Western biomedicine, yes. However such accounts unfortunately persist even in the writings of contemporary feminists and LGBT thinkers in the Philippines, some of whom have been couching their work in Filipino. To my mind, this interlingual position primarily urges the adoption of a moderately nativist perspective on the issue. And if you've read my books, I've been talking about moderate nativism for a while now. That bids us to critique essentialism and consider the persistence of residual indigenous valuations of gender that modify, that is to say, syncretise the newly implanted sexual order. Indeed, we can say that in the Philippines today, bakla signifies a culturally hybrid or syncretic notion that incorporates both local and translocal conceptions of gender transitivity and homo or same sexuality. Thus, despite the modernising ideologies of gender and sexuality, bakla continues to preserve within itself residues of its pre-homosexual past. For instance, the notion that bakla an is simply a matter of confusion and indecisiveness, which are in the first place the oldest and even strictly genderless denotations of the word bakla. So there is within the concept of bakla a still persisting now this difference that the translation into homosexual does not account for. And that is that bakla was started out as a word to refer to confusion or even fear and cowardice and things like that. So they are all there. When Filipinas keep saying bakla, they're not do dominoma sexual, they're bringing all of that history into that concept. The sexualisation of the Philippines has, in other words, been far from unproblematic or complete and thankfully so, we still have something to celebrate or beware, I don't know. And local variations of gender have simply served to hybridise the newly implanted sexual order. Despite the popularly recognised fact that the bakla has sex with a real man, for instance, still now up to now about rural and urban poor Filipinas, it is only the former who is legitimately homosexualised by the activity. In like manner, the category of bisexual as it is used in the Philippines doesn't strictly imply a bisexual object choice, but rather merely dominates a masculine identifier gender presentation on the part of the fully fledged gay man. Yes, so if you go to Grindr or you go to Planet Romeo, or yeah, Planet Romeo, ha? Yes, which is sweet guys for men. You have Filipino men who call themselves bi, but they're actually not bi. They're just presenting themselves as masculine, identified. And of course, along with that description that they're bi, it also says no chubs, no thams, it's like a whole catalogue of just insults really. Okay. On the other hand, lesbian also tends to be exclusively conflated with a managed identity of the timboi or the tomboy. So understand the genderising of sexuality is an instance of translation. Okay. Well, the stubborn genderisation of concepts of sexuality tells us is that the sexualisation of Filipinas while increasing and expanding in its virulence has thus far not been uniform. Examinating this process more closely, we can in fact see that it has in fact often been skewed toward the further stigmatising of what had already been an undesirable because minoritised identity of the bachla. So there is, okay, the bachla is now going to bear all the burden of this new discourse of sexuality. It means an additional burden to the burden already of being effeminate or identified with femininity. By the same token, we may also say that our local articulations of the gay and or transgender identity do not simply repeat the colonial inflicted stigma of homosexuality as an immorality and or an illness, for they can only be vitally informed by and mixed with earlier and more local conceptions. In other words, they do not only signify exclusively private and sexual concerns. They may also be seen as instances of post-colonial difference as translational sites. This form of resistance isn't volitional, but in years in the structure of colonial domination itself which is always already interlingual in its operationality. The gay and now transgender identities as Filipinos have increasingly come to view, understand, live and champion them as much the descriptions of these histories of cross-gender behaviour and homosexuality as the expressions of the value-syncratic freedoms and desires that the self-same histories have paradoxically conferred. So I think a contemporary gay man actually have translational desires. Their desires also evins that sort of interlinguality and that sort of mixedness that's part of their reality. And so the arrival into the Philippines of LGBT discourse in its attendant identity effects will not amount to a complete supersession of its culture's existing categories for gendered personhood, but will simply demonstrate the same kind of translation that any other Western concept necessarily undergoes the moment and be thereabouts. This is especially true for a residually oral country like the Philippines in which the categorical mentality of modernity has not fully taken root. What this means is that narratives of kabaklaan remain and will continue to remain as a common ground across the gay quote-unquote, bisexual quote-unquote and male-to-female transgender quote-unquote identities that must now increasingly emerge from the new global discourse of LGBT politics. Okay. Now, a film that... I'll talk about the film next, but before that, I'll mention another film which I'm not sure if you've heard of. It's called Die Beautiful. Has anyone heard of it? You should have invited that film here. It's quite amazing, but I'll mention it now. Evidence of the persistence of the local in this translational exchange abound in the new realist and found stories about the baklaan and the tomboy or tibó in Philippine independent cinema. Easily, we can invoke the recently acclaimed film by June Lana titled Die Beautiful in which the category bakla completely eclipses the politically corrupt and in the film entirely non-operative category of transgender and is restored to its empirical and semantic capaciousness embracing the Filipino urban folk spectrum of identities and affects from gradations of the feminine identified to the unremittingly and brutally macho. So, in the film, you have no mention of the word transgender even if the main characters are actually full-fledged quote-un-quote transgender Filipino men. And the word bakla is what they used to understand to call themselves, but it's also the word being used to refer to masculine identified gay men and also to fag hags or also bakla. So bakla is this word that is operating throughout the film to embrace this plurality of realities and the activist discourse of LGBT politics is nowhere to be found at all in the film. And that was deliberate on the filmmaker's part. It's also, I think, empirically more accurate because the LGBT terms are circulating in academia and among very limited sort of like circumstances only. By and large in popular culture, they don't operate at all. Gay operates lesbian operates, but then LGBT as a co-alysional identity and the politics that it be tokens, very, very tenuous existence in Philippine popular culture. Now we will talk about Ned's project and I suppose we can play it. So another film that's rooted in both local nomenclature is Lemuel Warkas Ned's project. Adjudged as the best picture in the cinema Filipino film Festival of 2015, it stars the multi-awarded Angeli Bayani who plays the role of Atibo, Tagalog Slam for Tomboy under another localized anglophone word that Lucie Connode's a masculine identified genital female and resident of two artists of her hometown, Sampalok Quezon. So it takes place in the Quezon province, south of Manila. It's hard not to sit back and takes your notice of Lorca Sleutis film since even in the new movie in the movement, the lesbian topic has not been treated all that often nor all that earnestly. So we've seen a slew of wonderful gay films and transgender films but not enough lesbian films. So this one when it showed it was a big cause for celebration because at last we had another good lesbian film. Ned is the pet name of Henedina and her project in the story is interestingly enough a baby making one after being dumped by her straight and faithless girlfriend and after witnessing the slow decrepitude illness and death of her friend and tibol mentor Max, she decides she doesn't want to suffer the solitary and lonely fate that her conservative older sister keeps warning her about. So it sets out an all too awkward quest to promptly get her self pregnant. This leads her to consider going against her own nature and having sex with the more likeable members of her mostly male and liquor-guzzling barcada or clique. A tricycle driver in one instance and a flamingly sissy and why about beautician in another. She succeeds with neither initially at least. So she actually she likes getting drunk and she's a tattoo artist and her closest friends are all these sort of drunks including a beautician sort of baklau drunk and so she forces them to have sex with her. Will not force us. She urges them and they give in. And so yes it's that kind of movie and it's that kind of world that Ned moves around in rural, lower class and not especially educated and regularly inebriated. Of course, cinematically this is bound to be familiar and interesting territory and indeed convincingly and memorably recreating it is one of Lorca's clearest accomplishments in this charming and altogether memorable film. Nonetheless, we need to disabuse ourselves at this point and remark that these for growing anglophone sentences of mine do not quite capture an essential feature of this world whose language Tagalog like all the other mother tongues in the Philippines is not predominantly gendered. As I previously mentioned in my unpacking of Montana's text, while seemingly inconsequential to the anglophone discourses in which discussions and or debates about Filipino culture are typically institutionally couched, the fact that neither Ned nor the other characters in this world address themselves as she or he is far from unimportant but is already especially in this kind of film the weighty crux of the matter. This is why calling Ned homosexual or even lesbian while easy and ordinary enough in Urbain, cosmopolitan and academic as well as activist discussions such as what we are about to have must remain problematic as the film poignantly shows as illustrated by many similarly themed popular culture texts the homosexualization of the Philippines Bacla and Tibo identities remains incomplete in as much as in such mundane and uncritical accounts they alone bear the oneness of this label and their partners and or objects of affection do not understand themselves as sharing not in the least this orientation like Ned's girlfriend the one who leaves her in the beginning never got sort of called Tibo, she was never implicated in that sort of reality it's only Ned by contrast the very idea of sexual orientation presupposes a kind of erotic self sufficiency within the homo and hetero divides being not true of the Bacla and the tomboy or Tibo mistaken Bacla as homosexual in this unconsciously translation or model who are generally understood as being slavishly fascinated with the Lalaqa and the Bubae or the man and the woman into whose hands they are popularly depicted as being all too willing to commend all their dignity if not their ready cash this is not to say of course that just because Bacla and Tibo are not so much about sexuality as about gender and these local identities no longer suffer from the inflictions of heteronormativity to the contrary and as a matter of fact they are entirely defined by it as Ned's finally exceeding to the reproductive imperative so tragic comically exemplifies although we can easily add here that what we can easily add here is that this plot point isn't entirely around or it's realized come to think of it her fears of growing old and alone aside the urgent maternality of Ned's interior life is simply not present enough in the film so the reason that she wants to get pregnant is that she doesn't want to grow old alone I mean that's a little shallow and the film could have succeeded better in trying to show us a greater portion of her inner life that would have made that kind of decision more inevitable or more more fictionally acceptable nonetheless we need to remark that all over the world there may not be one but many heteronormativities this is my addition in the theory debate I don't think we're facing one heteronormativity really we have to pluralize it and maybe we should pluralize everything else like homosexualities heterosexualities heteronormativities and that perhaps distinguishes the local one or the Philippine one is that unlike modernities discursively rationalize and biomedically define heterosexual matrix to a certain extent local heteronormativity in the Philippines permits of non-alignment between genital sex and gender identity precisely because it's male-female dualism remains oral and customary rather than textually and therefore categorically absolute because it's still a residual oral culture the categories of gender in that heteronormative sense male and female are customary they are not a scripturally absolute as in the West which has been littered for how many centuries and which has created so much literacy around this dimorphism of male-female I was at the British Museum yesterday and there was a guided tour and we were being told about the central dome that had houses how many hundreds of thousands of miles of books in the Philippines everything that's done in Philippine studies by Filipinas will fit in a room like this one we are underwritten up to now unwritten, un theorized oral much of it so there is that lack of categorical commitment really to genitality it can be revised it can be diluted in contrast to the West in the Philippines the woman-hearted that's an expression we use a lot pwso'n babae the heart of a woman is an organ it is a physical thing and a woman can be mind-hearted and as such going by this form of pre-modern and in many ways eminently negotiable heteronormativity the objects of desire must only be the male and the babae or the man and the woman respectively so it's heteronormative but then we have to understand it as a different kind of heteronormativity it has an orality to it that's not very different from the heteronormativity that you did but they had wonderfully impact the matrix that she had described so powerfully that matrix is translated in the Philippines and in translating it it has come to be oralized okay of course the cultural simultaneous everyday Filipino reality bids us to remember that the variety of cultural modes as well as technologies and knowledge systems can and do coexist in pretty much in the same way that in so many Philippine cities and the shanties of the poor can and do blissfully coexist practically side by side with the mansions of the rich so we have to be careful about this reading that I'm making because you are very westernized very obeying very cosmopolitan educated utterly sort of like literate Filipinos and their houses sort of coexist with the shanties okay obviously there are many exceptions here about to any kind of social dogma and misalliances do conceivably happen as this forms uncharacteristic and fairy tale turn toward the melodramatic effect in the enacts she finds another girl love object who is from the city who is very literate who speaks in English now and then but never drops the word homosexual or lesbian okay and there you see that misalliance that sort of different knowledge systems of two people in the Philippines and they are finding a common ground in the experience of tattooing right which is part of maybe the charm of the film it's all about inscriptions on the skin and that's another kind of literacy which I have no time to get into because I have two versions of the paper the one that's long I'm not reading that one talks about the tattoo and I won't do that anymore just as the baby dreaming Ned decides to enter she enters a contest in this film called tibur tibur tibatiba loosely translated as the bike takes it all it's a fictional regional talent contest for masculine looking tiburs obviously inspired by a recent spate of similarly thin shows on national television so into this world of Ned enters the manila race obeying well off and obviously troubled Ashley an androgynus-looking mestiza or half mixed race dance instructor played by the duration actor Maxine Eigenman whos multiple tattoos mark her out as a rebel and misfit and whos friendship and romance with our managed heroine introduces a critical and translocal difference into this resolutely local world by films and Ashley confesses to Ned that she has finally made the decision to accept herself whatever that means since the world lesbian doesn't get dropped in this film at all and to come out to her agas and easily offended upper middle class family while the film ends just at this moment with Ned looking capaciously pregnant so when Ned's project works she gets knocked up thanks to a night of binge drinking with her tricycle driver friends we are encouraged to believe that the relationship between Ned and Ashley will possibly revise the traditional tibaw babae or tomboy real woman model toward a mutually complementary one between adult, gynaethilic and genetically female equals so there is that modernity trajectory that's being sort of introduced towards the end of the film this is actually simply the tomboy or tibaw equivalent of the many bakla films that we've seen of late that basically tell the same culturally transitional and modernizing story of increasing homosexualization as manifested in the dramatic movement away from the customary romantic and hierarchical model to the modern and egalitarian one between two mutually loving individuals whose desires are now at last symmetrical and comparable with one another it's a romance all of these gay film investment filmmakers are enduring this romance mode of winning in what Montana failed to do in the 1950s now they're trying to make it happen and I think it is happening to a certain extent what's different here is that Ned that remains mannish and in the sense gender transitive while in many recent indie gay films in the Philippines the baklas newly achieved erotic self-sufficiency necessitates a masculine self-identification and presentation so Ned's project is slightly better because the local is still there and Ned does not turn into a lipstick lesbian she remains brooch or quote unquote mannish in the many gay films the bakla has to turn brooch alright so there's that going by this contemporary vision the modern bakla can now love other gay men precisely because they are now all gender transitive which is to say similarly and often hyperbolically male sometimes too much obviously despite the seeming progression a symbolic heteronorm holds sway in either case still and all so again that heteronorm activity which we have to localize it's still in this new text now I will skip the part where I talk about Filipino attempts attempts in the Philippines to do theory in Filipino because I basically just bitch in this section most of these attempts are so strange they are merely transliterating the foreign words the English words like heteronormativity becomes heteronormative something they do that kind of and there's no attempt to mediate the theory at all ironically it's the anglophone critics like moi and others here who are really painstakingly trying to pay attention to translation and to all these different sort of slippages whereas the theorizing by Filipinos in the Philippines in Filipino hasn't reached that point yet and also maybe I'll need to say this they don't refer to our works at all they have I think dismissed us as colonial minded as though they're doing is actually better it's so much worse because we're just transliterating the concepts so there's that sort of ironic funny thing happening in LGBT discourse in the Philippines but it goes both ways the thought and this is where I'm gonna take the task the anglophone critics okay I'm not gonna name his name but you probably will recognize him some of you here the thought goes both ways so the thought in the Filipino attempt at transliterating not translating they're merely just coming up with local sounding versions of these essentialist concepts and they're not even mediating the concepts the recent recourse in Philippine anglophone queer criticism to difficult and deconstructive ontological theory ontology we've all heard of that it's the in thing now in order to register the patinacity of bakla locality in the face of gay globality we need not even be necessary if only the question of translation which always already recognizes semantic excess and the impossibility of equivalence were made central to the analysis in other words in the regime of the globalized Filipino gay the bakla will of course forever haunt the scene because it is nothing if not the ground of the former's possibility the ingeniousness of this kind of local queer criticism is that invoking of ontology becomes possible because it decides to exile the bakla unnecessary thing to do in the first place so it now there's this ontology of how this new gay globality we are forgetting the bakla and now it's haunting us again but they were the ones who decided to exile it to begin with it's always been there didn't you say how clever that is right okay but he knows who he is this kind of oversight is unique to Anglophone criticism which by and large has also not been alive enough to the translational dynamic that conditions it thereby suggesting certain class specific over determinations where is that to work with I think if we are addressing the bakla in Manila, the middle class bakla it's so easy to not be that sensitive to these translational problems right but if we actually are probably cited in a more rural location then probably this will be absolutely clear to you okay hence at least to the credit of those doing theoretical work in Filipino the category of kabaklaan may not need to be abandoned at all seeing us how it cannot be entirely superseded in one hand and is a powerful discourse that's certain to persist and inform whatever else they can throw at it on the other we've been doing all sorts of things at bakla like everything from the kitchen sink to the toilet bowl and it has not budged it's still there and so I think I praise the ones working in Filipino anyway because they're always working within the word bakla okay okay last paragraph and I'm done while the translativeness of LGBT critical and political discursive ways in the Philippines is something that Filipino LGBTs themselves may not be conscious about it nonetheless makes sense to suggest that they should study this cultural transformation more self-consciously if only to have some say in its possible directions and deployments unless we are more self-aware about what we're doing when we translate when we do perform cultural translation then we may not be able to control where this discourse goes understand in other words a little more mindfulness a little more sort of rootedness okay but at the same time a commitment to some kind of openness as well so thank you that's the end of my paper and thank you for your patience thank you very much indeed I'm sure we have questions so if you have questions if you can first of all say who you are and then ask your question I'm sure there's one no questions wow or it's when I'm meant to ask the question isn't it so I'm going to try and ask to take this beyond the Philippines I'm going to ask you to take this beyond the Philippines so you're well aware of what everyone's writing about with respect to Thailand and Indonesia not entirely but you're vaguely aware of it can you see how what you've been talking about with respect to the Philippines and the problems that you've got there which is quite I mean the Philippines is much more of a speaking but can you see that these issues are going on elsewhere when we're talking I think even on one hand even probably more severely but on the other hand probably not as bad meaning there's a paradox there English has the Philippines has more than a century of anglophone literature and more than a century of anglophone criticism English is universally spoken and understood north to south of the country but that English is our English and it's creol meaning it sounds intelligible it sounds like it's universal sounding and can be easily sort of understood but there's so much translation that's taking place right I've been to Thailand and I know the queer the ones doing LGBT work there within the SOGI sort of network sexual orientation gender identity and expression activist network we all know each other from the Asia-Pacific region that was where we met Asia-Pacific queer that sort of one network everyone delivers their papers in English no matter which area of Asia they come from and I think this is the first I mean I myself was sort of unwittingly doing that until I realized hey you know what well I turned old and my university gave me a medal for teaching 25 years and then I got invited to talk and then I said I've been doing this for 25 years I thought to myself I've written almost exclusively in English what might that imply so it became a location that sort of like chronological marker in my own career a location to reflect on what I had been doing I realized that this is one way to rethink what I have written actually up until that point but yes you're right I think that in many ways this issue of cultural translation must be taken more seriously and self consciously by everyone doing Anglophone activists and critical and theoretical work in any country in the world actually not just in my country or not just in Southeast Asia right if English is a medium of analysis then you have to be aware of what that's doing to what you're analyzing and whether what you're analyzing is actually entirely capturable in English and whether those things you're not capturing are the important things right you probably have to remember I mean just very simply the pronominal system the absence of a binary pronominal system in our language it changes a lot of things it's possible therefore for the Shah to actually have a little more sort of of the other right because the Shah is unitary there's a unitariness to the concept of the person and there is blindness about gender distinction in a way and we've seen that in the anthropology and the anthropological studies that in fact the gender system at least in our part of Southeast Asia really stress unity rather than duality you know in many ways the way they people dress the way people perform rituals things like that you know it's a carry over right but of course colonialism happened we have been dualized right but the oral persists and you have these sort of proof the evidence you see in the identity of the bakla and the tibo in the Philippines and I think that might explain also the Katori maybe that might explain the Manambali or what's the the one in Buggies the Buggies identity the Waya okay the Bisou you know those things study the language see how ontologically the language divides people if it doesn't divide them according to gender there's already a big thing right and you have a biomedical system that sort of base a pandemic or a fysin how does that get translated in other words more actually more basic work we were too eager riding on the bandwagon I suppose because we've experienced our own conservative traditions but then let's sort of look back and let's sort of analyze things again and look at language Ben's discipline is probably what we all need to try to get into language is important yes we now have a question I would like to ask the question about the pressure on the oral culture because it seems the one thing you didn't discuss but I'm sure you're very well aware of is Christianity obviously not for the oral language and obviously it has had a very big influence in the Philippines yes very big but it's probably I think Catholicism we were not converted to Catholicism Catholicism converted to us ok my answer to that question is an anecdote we have the diversion to the holy child which is universal in the Philippines meaning there are holy child parishes and fiestas north to south of the archipelago the earliest festival actually owes itself to the fact that Ferdinand Magellan had gifted a local queen with an image of the infant Jesus of Prague and it still exists up to now and the diversion exists in many places a very famous sort of district in Manila Estondo it's a depressed district with a lot of poor people living there their patron saint is the Santonino the holy child my friend is and he lives on a street that's very near the church and during the fiesta the day before the actual fiesta they will have a procession and the procession would wind its way all around the streets of this district and the participants would be the different sorts of organizations and even streets and professions within the whole parish of Tondo so let's say the firemen would have their own because there's a fire station they would have their own segment of the parade where they would have their own float the float is required to have a float for each segment of the parade both float should have an image of the holy child on it so I was just this is the Philippines each segment of the parade is the segments are divided according to the street to the profession so there's a street in Tondo with a lot of gyms so the bodybuilders have their own section and then the basketball the boys playing basketball have their own section the boys playing basketball had a float which was like a mini basketball court with images of the holy child dribbling balls and shooting like really like with jerseys I don't know how they have these images commissioned or made but they're there and then the firemen would have their float as a mini firetruck with the holy child with firehorses in a fireman's hat the beauticians the beauticians had a modern rouge Santoninho it was on this big float with a lot of boas and feathers and things like that the bodybuilders had a bath Santoninho what else and of course everyone was dancing it's also a location where the bakla can have what we call booking basically they can have sex so these dancers are handsome some of them are cute they're real men but doesn't mean much really means a little but you basically just have a card and if there's someone you fancy you just give the card and then later on he will text you after the parade is done everyone drinks and a lot of sex takes place so this is a sacred in the profane without any line in between and this is a god as a child ok, you understand? the whole translation of Catholicism is that's it I mean you can't get any more I can't get a clearer piece of evidence in that I really like about it but then the church might get in the way suddenly ban it so I don't want to write about it it was so fun, it was nice and so much sex happening and the church might actually police it because it becomes common knowledge so please don't tweet about this don't write about this don't let this be known anywhere else this is just for us and for us who go to Tando on a pilgrimage that's just an example so yes, the Catholic faith is there the more educated you are the more evangelical you are the worse you are so I really pity my friends who come from evangelical backgrounds some of them are depressed some of them are suicidal because they have been too literate and they memorize passages from Leviticus and the book of the Romans Paul's letter to the Romans and all these other homophobic passages but the normal Catholic does not really have to memorize much only a few prayers and probably has to know how to maybe do the rituals so it's more ritualistic more oral and performative rather than doctrinal so it's also okay so what are the things I've learned when I have to look back on my work first is that there's a lot of translation that I've not taken into account secondly is there's this orality that persists and the orality needs to be theorized by all of us in Asia we're coming from oral traditions many of us and we celebrate that orality but at the same time there are certain things that need to rethink like how do you coheal us a nation right how do you coheal us a nation with 176 languages all of them oral you need a national imagination and that is literate that's the work of Ben Anderson and created the modern nations of Europe so probably there's no alternative way around that you can have an oral nation can we have an oral nation in Southeast Asia no everything is constitutional I mean the tax okay hmm yeah the reason I've been thinking of orality and literacy is that I've been the director of the university press and I have a bodega full of books that are not selling yes Filipinos would rather go to the movies and do something oral like secondary orality movie cinema is secondary orality if there is some literacy there because the actors have to memorize but that's not the final product the product is something you will hear so it's still orality that's what's selling that's what people tell you telenovelas are a big thing so you'd rather pay for the cable the TV cable so that you can watch a lot of telenovelas than buy a book yes and the third thing I've realized is maybe orality is the way to liberation just don't write about it don't invent all these categories LGBTQ, AI, plus or whatever just do it right there's that there's that idea right the more discourse where will the textualizing go more and more words more and more categories when the idea is probably dissolved back into the speechless body that can only moan and groan and you know no syllables mama syllables right like a child thank you, I'm just kind of rambling now sorry next question I saw a hand yes back to biologism right where is if you want to try to intervene in this situation like and you talked about like try not to debate it out but try to go into the field and maybe like actually try to change something but I'm always like getting confused because I feel like some terms are always like misinterpreted and misused and also because all of these issues only came very possibly in Korea in the last few years so a lot of people are there in this for something that's new incoming myself so I don't know how to where to start like intervening or like if I see something that I generally see as excluding the other group rather than something that's being more implicit I don't know how to bridge that well my dilemma was similar in the beginning because I wanted to do I wanted to write the history of sexuality in the Philippines and so I thought it should be as easy as what Fuku did which was to hit the library and I realized the books that I wanted to read have not been written yet and I need to be the one to write them so my own book which someone here bought so I found material written text but for one decade the 80s I've inserted my own my own memoir is part of it because there's very little there was very little I could find from that decade it became my own memories so that's I think probably more unique to us or more the case for us than with Korea which has a longer history of the script the Buddhist script and all of that so probably there's more literacy there than in the Philippines we've had only literacy because of public education of more than a century the Spanish had been there earlier but they basically kept most of us illiterate they didn't have public education they had a parish or parochial education only up until grade 6 which meant memorizing Novinas so Spanish is really not spoken in the Philippines anymore it easily disappeared when the Korea also left the country and went back to Spain then Spanish became such a minority language it's still spoken now by the very old but very few of the very few actually speak Spanish but I think that what's being missed in Asia when we start using these categories is the specificity of the experiences that we're actually trying to make the categories to bear we have such a wonderful plurality of experiences and then these categories are reductions so it would be nice if we could actually theorize in our own language which doesn't mean pure Korean it could be actually mixed like Filipino is very mixed and what happens is that we're being forced in Philippine literature and English to make everything uniform as English and we're sacrificing the mixness so I'm not actually for any kind of pure purism here and for capturing what's really on the ground and the ground is very mixed so probably you can do that kind of work which is the mixness of it and maybe that will in fact represent some of that that wonderful energy that's getting sort of a lot of it is lost actually when we go for just a uniform language which is just English it can't capture everything so make your English shift now and then we call it code shifting in the Philippines it's supposed to be disallowed in the English classroom but in my own English classroom I code shift like crazy that's the way to capture things really maybe when the whole planet is moving towards one language probably which is basically all the languages together maybe we're going to go out there we should try to experiment so I'm all for experimentation understand? I'm all for that a kind of openness but also a rootedness at the same time which is a kind of maybe interesting place to be another question anyone? yep, the back tell us who you are first I realised when I read woman sense to me I realised it meant to survive sense to me because that as a notion makes sense in the land and I guess my question is more of a kind of bringing up a feeling of even in its original language in context I don't like and find I guess I don't know how one would go about challenging ideas within the Europeans and the language and the culture that I find problematic and patriarchal and terrible in many senses so through the journey I went through which was actually to this own that in the beginning myself why did I end up writing in English when I was bilingually educated the option to write in Filipino was always there the reason I chose English is that Filipino had only the word bakla and it sounded so awful it was an insult I didn't even understand what it meant when the first time I heard it being used in the school yard directed at me and I had no idea what the word meant only that it was an insult and it hurt and so English was something I picked up in school and I decided English is a word called gay which is gay happy nice and it opened up a whole world that Filipino could not offer to me but then it's the journey I've taken I wrote that bus the English bus and then I got off and then I wrote it again like now I mean I've been speaking in English all this time right do you understand that paradox do you understand the productive crisis that you have to be in I think if you have to write continue to write in English and yet want your writing to pertain to a reality that is actually not reducible to just any one language probably that's the problem of the writers in Filipino too puristic in that sense right maybe it's the way is actually the middle ground so I would in your case continue on this bus that you've wrote on you're writing on and see where it takes you you know and my journey need not be the same as yours but what's important is that you're having these questions now I wish I had asked these questions earlier actually because probably I would be much more ahead in my journey so now I feel I have to backtrack a bit and kind of do cover some more ground that I should have already covered you know where would I have been had I known about this translational dynamic from the beginning probably I would have been more sensitive and more nuanced in many of the things I had written which I now kind of reread and I'm a little agast well yeah agast and also amused you know and kind of feel tandoly towards that man who wrote those things and almost want to sort of like pat him on the back or kind of rub his shoulders a bit you know kind of tell him it's alright things are going to get better thank you for that Lorenzo were you born in the Philippines raised in the Philippines you grew up in Manila so were you bilingual educated as well that was spoken in the house but you picked a Filipino in school yeah but yeah that's the problem I've been having when you say we have Filipinos my own friends to say my first language was English where would you pick up the language I said well from the Philippines living there you know watching Sesame Street talking to my parents so it's a Philippine English do you understand that it's not American English so it is our English it's as Filipino as Filipino actually it just doesn't feel it for us right but if you talk to Americans they're going to hear it we don't hear it actually what's nice is this if we turn much of what we do into oral audio works then there may be no need to keep reminding ourselves of the specificity of the anglophone context where we come from because on the page that specificity disappears but when I hear you'd say it it's so clear do you understand like Lorenzo you sounded Filipino the whole time to me see so no problem there but that's it right but we bring that specificity in the intonation in the phrasing et cetera those things disappear on the page so maybe this is already my thought because people my students are becoming less and less literate in the print sense and more and more literate in the audio visual sense maybe some day somewhere down the line my students will submit their final papers as videos why not right they're doing it now I'm interested in promoting book reviews there are book reviews that are YouTube videos and they are getting so many hits and people are being affected they help people I think Oprah Winfrey and the book club and all of that everyone wants to be sort of like seen on camera that's one but at the same time it's just better than actually writing it which is if you're lazy but just talking about it might be better so that's it we're going to hear the Englishes of the world and then we're going to see how English is not just in one context but in many and all those Englishes are carrying all sorts of translation or baggage that probably if you're and that's the thing I didn't get to pursue a lot in my presentation no time is I am a little more indulgent of creative writers in English than critics in English because I think creative writing doesn't have to be self-reflexive all the time you're right I'm a little schizophrenic I do both poetry in the morning and at night I do theory I've split myself that way but if you're a critic and doing theory you should be aware of your own presuppositions but writers need not be aware of those presuppositions so a novel by a writer in English in the Philippines may be committing all these mistranslations because he was not aware then the critic will be the one to point those out but that very same critic cannot commit mistranslations because what use is he being a critic right or a theorist if he cannot be that sort of self-critical okay so is that fair I think to spare writers and to just expect more from critics no getting tenure is hard enough huh it's impossible yes but yes it's impossible but I'm thinking it may be possible once we start thinking of a language that has not once we start inventing our idea of critical language and starting again maybe but to get tenure and all of that you have to yeah I understand so well forget my presentation it's useless let's all get our tenure you understand it's a personal paper I mean I didn't know what else to say or do because suddenly I got in when I said yes to this invitation to my friends class because you know Tina one invited me and then the next thing I knew she sent me the invitation to the program and I was the speaker at the very end of it of this conference and I was horrified and he said and then of course good thing I had seen this film that I really liked because it was it was resolutely local you had an upper middle class character who was actually racially mixed but she's hardly talking in English and everyone else speaks rooted language, vernacular local expressions and it's oblivious to activist discourse it's so incorrect a lesbian complying with a reproductive imperative it's so incorrect but it makes you think of translation and then in the end it's the same trajectory towards modernity but then in the end it tweaks it too because she does not turn into a lipstick lesbian unlike the bakla turning masculine like in the novel so there's that interesting things happening in cinema in the Philippines and I hope you have a Filipino film in your festival okay yes yes alright maybe in the end so maybe I should just turn into a creative writer you know but to come to think of it because I'm in London, I'm here in the UK again back in 1999 this was before we met or maybe a little after before like almost a decade before there was a conference in Manchester that I got invited to and it was a very big conference with people like big names doing work in sexuality studies like Gilbert Hart and all these big names they all had keynotes and they did these theory, omnibus theory reflections it was such a big conference and all of us delivering papers in the parallel sessions were reduced to native informants giving bits of data and only they had the right to do the theory I was upset and my panel the parallel one was at the very end of it so what did I do I rewrote my paper I peppered it with so many Filipino words that I didn't translate that it did not communicate already then I think looking back I understood the power of the untranslatable you know and how the limit of theory is the untranslatable the limit of theory reality is the specific the very, very specific the irreducibly specific right yes well I don't think anyone else understood my paper just myself but I didn't mind and in the end I thought I was happy with what I did it was a theoretical point I was making that no one understood except me but now I translated a lot for you guys and I said it somewhere that all of these forgoing sentences in English miss so much and I knew that for a fact film cannot miss because it misses but then it's just you are not shown prepositional statements you are given images and the images contain ideas and they cannot be reduced to one thing so maybe art is it right maybe we should art make art do the theory back to Trenton Minha you know and that kind of hybrid space between creativity and theory probably another kind of realization number five better write that down so forget stick to art stick to creative writing thank you so much Ben it's been a great pleasure it's been a wonderful end to two days of discussion so thank you thank you very much