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Sacred Camp: Transgendering Faith in a Philippine Festival

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2007

Patrick Alcedo
Patrick Alcedo
Affiliation:
Department of Comparative Literature and Foreign Languages, of the University of California, Riverside. He can be contacted at [email protected]
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Abstract

By embodying the paradoxes found in three webs of signification – panaad (devotional promise), sacred camp and carnivalesque during the Ati-atihan festival – Augusto Diangson, an individual of the ‘third sex’, was able to claim membership in the Roman Catholic community of Kalibo, Aklan in the Central Philippines while also negotiating the Church's institution of heterosexuality. The narratives of mischief and the gender ambiguity of the Santo Niño or the Holy Child Jesus, the centre of Ati-atihan's religious veneration, further enabled Diangson to interact with Kalibo's Roman Catholicism. Through an analysis of Diangson and his participation in the festival, this article exposes how ordinary individuals in extraordinary events localise their faith through cross-dressing and dance performance. Seen throughout the Philippines, these processes of mimicry and gender transformation transport individuals into zones of ambivalence and contradictions in which they are able to navigate through the homogenising discourse of their culture and the Church's homogenising myth of Roman Catholicism.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Southeast Asian Studies , Volume 38 , Issue 1 , February 2007 , pp. 107 - 132
Copyright
2007 The National University of Singapore

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Footnotes

Preliminary versions of this paper have been presented at the University of California, Riverside Dance Research Colloquium, 1 June 2005; the Speaker Series for the International Cultural Studies Certificate Program of the East-West Center, University of Hawai'i, Manoa, 7 September 2005; and the Asia-Pacific Arts Forum held at Taiwan National University for the Arts, 8–12 October 2005. The Pacific Rim Research Program of the University of California Office of the President provided the fieldwork funds for this rsearch. For their suggestions I wish to thank Fruto Corre, Michael Feener, Justin McDaniel, Father Alex Meñez, Herminia Meñez-Coben, Linda Tomko, Christine Ward-Gailey and the anonymous reviewers. Many thanks to Ricardo Trimillos for his most thoughtful and incisive comments. I am deeply grateful to Sally Ann Ness for directing the dissertation upon which this paper is drawn, and to Hendrik M. J. Maier for his unstinting mentorship in the writing of this article.