Project at HIAS
Bakla, Bading, Beki, etc.: A Glossary of Queerness in the Philippines
“Bakla, Bading, Beki, etc.: A Glossary of Queerness in the Philippines” is a work of creative scholarship, one that adopts a peripheral component of long-form academic titles as its primary form in order to enact its central desire: to foreground the history and lived realities of a minoritized collective in Philippine society. Gesturing toward the formation of a chronicle of Philippine queer presence, the glossary haphazardly covers the precolonial period until the contemporary moment of the project’s milieu, and attempts to redress how effacement and defacement are fundamental historical conditions of queer subjects. To signify the literariness of the project, the glossary would undergo a process of composition that combines rigorous archival research with swaths of storytelling, citational invention, and gossip: The interfusion of fact and fiction is crucial to the project in its attempt to maintain the regenerative capacity of human imagination when grappling with historical loss and personal trauma, while also acknowledging the irreparability of this loss.
Mark Anthony Cayanan’s Tandem Partner is Sophie Witt, Professor of Literary Studies at the University of Hamburg.
Website
Funding
The HIAS Fellowship is provided by the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg and the federal and state funds acquired by the University of Hamburg in the framework of its Excellence Strategy.
Tandem
Univ.-Prof. Dr. Sophie Witt, Literary Studies, University of Hamburg
Biography
Mark Anthony Cayanan is an Associate Professor at the University of the Philippines in Diliman. They obtained an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin in Madison and a PhD from the University of Adelaide, where they received the Dean’s Commendation for Doctoral Thesis Excellence and the University Doctoral Research Medal. They are the recipient of a postdoctoral fellowship from the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry and of writing residencies from Civitella, Villa Sarkia, Art Omi, Ventspils International Writers’ House, and Saari. Cayanan is the author of the poetry books Narcissus (ADMU Press); Except you enthrall me (UP Press); and Unanimal, Counterfeit, Scurrilous (Giramondo, Australian ed.; UST Pub House, Philippine ed.). Their fourth lyric sequence, Miracle Fever, is forthcoming from Northwestern University Press in November 2026. Their poems have been published in, among others, Australian Poetry Journal, Kenyon Review, Indiana Review, Harvard Review, Bennington Review, and Georgia Review.
In ways both direct and oblique, Mark Anthony Cayanan’s research interests are tethered to their work as a poet. Through their creative production, they engage with the intricacies of subject position—the imbrications of sexuality and gender identity, religion, and social class—and examine psycho-geographic demarcations and extensions that may exist along localized, national, and cosmopolitan terrains. The scholarship they have pursued, primarily expressed through theory-inclined poetics essays, displays an investment in tracing the histories of queer Anglophone poets, as well as the systems of literary interpretation, reception, and circulation that these poets find themselves immersed in.
Mark Anthony Cayanan‘s HIAS Fellowship is provided by the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg and the federal and state funds acquired by the University of Hamburg in the framework of its Excellence Strategy.
Image Information
“2 A Token of Our Friendsgip” from the book A Token of Our Friendship: Philippine Photos of Male Affection : First Half of the 20th Century, a collection of vintage photos from John L. Silva and published by Ige Ramos Design Studio in 2011