default interpretive position in making sense of representations of relationships, domesticity, desire, even nature and life itself, is heteronormative. The prevailing humanist perspective in the reading—and the creation—of the arts in the typical Filipino school room dismisses the difference that the question of queer desires and identifications makes to the creative process and output.  Such a perspective either vilifies queer desires and subjectivities outright, or ignores and subsumes them into an oppressive ideology of universalist sameness, which deceitfully privileges the hegemonic model of cis-gender embodiment and the heterosexual matrix that it conceptually and ethically enables.

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Affirming queer life as it is being lived by queer people is one thing, and is truly important. However, we also understand that dignifying and sustaining this life in the world in which it must assert itself to exist is another thing altogether, and that task is just as vital. Our creative writing workshops themselves were designed as occasions of pedagogical intervention and repair.  That is to say, by enabling and recognising queer lives and identifications within and through the in-depth exegeses and discussions of creative texts, workshop fellows and participating panelists were able to challenge, supplant, and transform the prevalent heteronormative literary, ethical, and political educations that they had previously received and been subjected to. Rather than relegating to the backdrop the experiential life-ground, the workshops centralized and dignified it. As such, they enabled the holistic, as opposed to strictly formalist, appreciation of creative texts, and provided a nurturing, rather than constraining and oppressive, artistic environment for aspiring LGBTQ+ writers (and readers). 

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As our culminating activity, and in partnership with the Likhaan: UP Institute of Creative Writing, GlobalGRACE is sponsoring this Teaching Training Seminar—a webinar titled “Teaching Philippine Queer Literature”—in recognition of the fact that the kind of educative environment and safe space that our workshops have offered, is not shared by the vast majority of Philippine classrooms, in which formally attuned, respectful, and context-sensitive close readings of queer work are simply not to be found. While we offer, as open access, our archive of queer literary materials, a queer-affirmative pedagogical approach needs to be utilized in the classroom for these materials to be properly understood and aesthetically appreciated, especially by the senior high school and early tertiary student. As exemplified by the various workshop sessions we have conducted, a queer-affirmative pedagogical approach is one that recognises and enables, rather than elides or stigmatizes, the diversity of desires and the plurality of subject positions among both writers and readers.

The seminar, to be held online on December 9 and 10, is addressed to literature educators in the senior high school and early tertiary levels in the Philippines, who wish to make use of the online archive of LGBTQ literary texts produced by the Philippine Work Package of GlobalGRACE. This archive may be accessed freely at www.pinoylgbtq.com

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The modules that comprise this seminar will utilize the idea of intersectionalities—the complex and mutually implicating layers of realities and circumstances, the complexity, that necessarily attends the truth of LGBTQ life. Because the oppression suffered by LGBTQ individuals is multiple and intersecting, so are the resources of LGBTQ agency, so are LGBTQ lives. It is the intention of these modules to suggest—and not exhaust—pedagogical possibilities in the teaching of these fictional, nonfictional, and poetic texts, written by young Filipino queers. Facilitating, explaining, and demonstrating the teaching of these modules will be a panel of senior Filipino LGBTQ literature professors, who have had extensive experience in the fields of (queer) creative writing and literary pedagogy and tutelage.

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The modules’ interpretive approach will be broadly thematic, tackling the texts through their representational content, as embodied in characters and plots, personae and dramatic situations, although formal qualities will also now and then be flagged, particularly as they may enrich the textual analysis. Queerness will form the central thematic, and it will be fleshed out and appreciated as being always already implicated in—that is, intersectional with—the sociocultural determinations in and through which queer lives must assert themselves, fecundate, and exist.