Born and raised in Naga, the Philippines, I was educated in Manila where I trained in poetry and studied literature, and in New York, where I earned my doctorate in comparative literature. My early work was on metaphor as an ethic of tropicality as well as on the novel of manners in the colonial 19th century. I was also a film critic writing with a group of scholars based at the national state university for more than a decade. Since working with queer artists in Southeast Asia, among young LGBTQ writers in collectives and communities across the Philippines and alongside travestis and transsexual women in Brazil, my practice of aesthetic critique has empathised more with all manner of artevistic resistance against systemic oppression and the inequalities it produces on the lives of women and queer people. My current scholarly pursuits rest on the eloquence of trans autoethnographies and their attendant vernaculars of gender diversity.

I am a trans woman of colour from the global south. My work is grounded in comparative literature and culture studies, attuned to theory and pedagogy, and committed to a decolonial and feminist interpretation of the lives of transgender and transsexual women and gender-variant people on the planet.

Austronesian philology, tropical poetics, planetary modernisms, contemporary art, literary and critical theory, cultural criticism, critical pedagogy, transgender and transsexual women's experience, art and activism