Performing Location and Dignity in a Transnational Feminist and Queer Study of Manila's Gay Life

The article offers an analysis of transnational feminist and queer methodologies by reflecting on the ethnography of gay space in Malate, a former sex and current tourist district in the city of Manila, the Philippines. The concept of "limited location" is used to theorize entry and relations in the field, following how spaces and identities mitigate field exchanges, how urban mappings formulate experiential analyses of urban space, and how the spaces of interaction show both desire and emotionality in field research. The article attends to feminist and queer concerns about researching across race, class, gender, nation, and inequalities, issues of "access," gendered work and performance, and the micro-politics of knowledge production wherein a researcher can embrace how informal sexual laborers (gay hosts) perform dignity in field exchanges. A transnational feminist and queer methodology opens epistemology to the visionary lens of lived experience, which in the case of gay hosts shows their labor and place in Malate's emerging gay nightlife.