Realizing Rights in Manila: Brokers and the Mediation of Sexual Politics in the Philippines

In recent years, a great deal of scholarly work has focused on global queering and the roles that nongovernmental organizations and activists play in diffusing models of sex and sexuality. With its focus on large-scale phenomena, however, this scholarship has tended to gloss over how those engaged in advocacy actually take up such models. In this essay, I consider the roles that brokers play in shaping LGBT politics in the Philippines: how they engage with transnational frameworks; how this is shaped by history, intersectionality, and heterogeneity; and the extent to which their resulting advocacy might resonate with those it is designed to assist. The introduction of transnational models is not the final stage of the diffusion process; instead, it triggers debates about whether and how to apply those models. While transnational frameworks can drown out local understandings of sex and sexual politics, paying attention to the dynamism of brokerage reveals how they can also be used in powerful and locally resonant ways.