Queering Activism in Southeast Asia and its Diasporas

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In July 2023, Amadeus Fernando Pagente, performing as Pura Luka Vega, danced to a remixed “Ama Namin” in a Manila bar and, on 13 July, told critics on social media that “that performance was not for you to begin with,” a statement made before any arrest. Three non-identical complaints followed; two produced judicial decisions, and the third remained unresolved. Manila RTC acquitted Pagente in June 2025 for want of proof that the performance was unlawful under Article 201. Quezon City RTC dismissed three counts in September 2025 on a demurrer to evidence, citing deficiencies in video authentication and the complainants' lack of standing, while invoking People v. Baes, an Article 133 precedent, to treat religious feeling as collective rather than individual. Philippine obscenity doctrine frames offensiveness by its impact on the public rather than an isolated complainant, yet Quezon City resolved standing without determining the audience Vega had claimed the performance addressed. The paper argues drag's failure to resolve into a legal category, not quite speech, not quite assembly, not quite the obscenity alleged and unproven, becomes political practice rather than adjudicative residue at the point where the performer claims that failure as an act of address, not for courts to resolve. Read through Dean Spade's account of legal legibility as the price of recognition and Édouard Glissant's right to opacity as a decolonial refusal of transparency, that unanswered claim of address is where the paper locates its object, the moment illegibility becomes something Vega withheld from law, not something law failed to resolve. Rather than reading it through the devotional and necropolitical resistance scholarship emphasises, the paper concludes that the two resolved prosecutions settled whether the performance was unlawful without settling what it was for, and that this gap, not either outcome, is where drag's activist labour occurred. Keywords: drag performance, legal illegibility, queer activism, right to opacity, Philippines

Phan Ngoc Gia Bao is an LL.B. candidate at Hanoi Law University whose research centres on international law and the governance of emerging global challenges, with current work at the intersection of human rights and criminal justice.

Tinnaphop Sinsomboonthong: Laughing Beyond Activism: Queering Humor, Laughability, and Political Subjectivities in Thailand’s Nong Community
This paper examines the political possibilities of queering humor in Thailand’s Nong community, an LGBTQ-oriented community organized around memes, parody, ridicule, and embodied gatherings. Beyond examining how humor queers the grammar of activism by destabilizing political vocabularies, as I explored at this workshop last year, I ask a more fundamental question: what happens when politically consequential practices are undertaken by people who neither understand themselves as activists nor recognize their practices as activism? Drawing on online ethnography and in-depth interviews, I interrogate the limits of “activism” as an analytical category. Community members participate through memes, parody, gossip, ridicule, linguistic invention, parties, exhibitions, and other everyday practices that do not resemble recognizable activist repertoires. Yet these practices negotiate norms, contest authority, produce collective belonging, and reshape understandings of rights and queerness. Rather than expanding the definition of activism to accommodate them, I ask what forms of political participation and political subjects become visible when activism is no longer the necessary starting point for understanding queer politics. I argue that Nong’s humor produces queer political participation organized around a politics of laughability. By rendering political identities, moral claims, and speaking subjects available for humorous destabilization, Nong unsettles the coherent subjects presumed by liberal rights-based activism: the LGBTQ citizen, marginalized victim, and activist speaking truth to power. Participants instead shift between positions as jokers, audiences, targets, and critics. Humor thus does more than destabilize political grammar: it reorganizes participation and produces queer political subjectivities. This politics of laughability, however, is not inherently emancipatory. Practices that unsettle activist hierarchies and enable alternative political participation may also produce injury, exclusion, and normative boundaries. Nong thus demonstrates how queer political labor can emerge beyond recognizable activist identities, questioning whether “activism” adequately captures the heterogeneous ways in which queer political life is practiced.

Tinnaphop Sinsomboonthong is currently a visiting fellow at the Harvard–Yenching Institute, a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, National University of Singapore, and an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Thammasat University

Contemporary LGBTQ+ activism in Vietnam has expanded the terms of queer public visibility through marriage-equality advocacy, family-acceptance campaigns, Pride events, community education, digital storytelling, drag, and gender-nonconforming cultural practices. Yet visibility is neither singular nor evenly valued. This paper asks how activist practices negotiate a public moral economy in which queer presence is increasingly recognised while particular embodiments, affects, and political styles continue to be judged as excessive or “too much.” I develop moderated visibility to describe not simply reduced visibility, but its calibration: queer subjects become publicly recognisable through uneven judgments about the acceptable degree, form, affective intensity, and political style of their appearance. Drawing on a comparative visual-discursive and affective analysis of a bounded public archive of campaign materials, organisational texts, social-media content, event imagery, and queer cultural projects, the paper examines family- and marriage-centred advocacy such as Tôi Đồng Ý alongside Pride, drag, performance, and gender-nonconforming initiatives. Rather than positioning these practices along a simple continuum from assimilation to resistance, I examine how different forms of activism may simultaneously reproduce, negotiate, and unsettle thresholds of queer recognisability. Particular attention is given to the vernacular formulation, “I don’t discriminate, but don’t overdo it” (tôi không kỳ thị, nhưng đừng làm quá), through which prejudice is disavowed while regulation is relocated into judgments about dress, voice, gesture, effeminacy, sexuality, anger, and public intensity. I argue that activism does not merely make pre-existing queer identities visible or translate fixed rights claims into culturally familiar language. It also participates in producing the conditions under which particular queer subjects become intelligible as legitimate political subjects. Moderated visibility therefore names a contested process through which recognition is widened while its limits are continually redrawn. By tracing the vernacular politics of “too muchness,” the paper contributes to queering activism as an analytic practice for examining conditional recognition, moral hierarchies, and the unequal distribution of political legibility in Southeast Asia. Visibility, from this perspective, is not simply achieved or denied but continually negotiated as a field of political struggle.

Mai Phuc Thinh is a PhD researcher in the School of Education and Culture at Monash University and author of Queer Aspiration and Emotional Borders in Transnational Education (2026), whose research brings queer studies and affect theory into conversation with questions of visibility, kinship, belonging, mobility, and everyday queer life in Vietnam and transnational Asia.

This paper examines how moral distinctions are produced and negotiated within queer Filipino digital spaces through the experiences of adult content creators. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 12 queer Filipino creators and multimodal analysis of participant-provided digital content, it asks how particular bodies, sexual performances, and forms of labor become recognized as respectable, desirable, or risky. Rather than treating queer digital spaces as inherently liberatory, the paper approaches them as contested sites where sexual agency, livelihood, stigma, and inequality are simultaneously produced. I argue that Filipino adult content creation is governed by a queer moral economy that assigns uneven legitimacy and value to sexual bodies and labor. Creators negotiate this economy through claims to authenticity, consent, entrepreneurial discipline, and responsible collaboration. While these strategies may challenge moral frameworks that render queer pleasure and sexual labor shameful, they can also reproduce hierarchies based on masculinity, cisnormativity, body type, popularity, and access to digital resources. The paper does not assume that adult content creators identify as activists or that sexual commerce is inherently resistant. Instead, it asks under what aspects of their labor become legible as resistant or politically consequential. I suggest that this occurs when creators exercise control over their sexual representation, establish practices of negotiated consent and mutual care, refuse normative scripts of queer desirability, or create spaces in which stigmatized pleasures and livelihoods can be articulated. However, these possibilities remain constrained by platform governance, audience demand, and economic precarity. Using queering as a methodological orientation unsettles the assumption that activism must always be intentional, collective, or organized around recognizable rights claims. It directs attention to the unstable boundaries among labor, survival, and intimate self-production, while remaining attentive to their contradictions. The paper therefore conceptualizes resistance not as an intrinsic property of adult content creation but as a contingent effect of practices that rework—and sometimes reproduce—the moral boundaries governing queer bodies, pleasure, and labor.

John Joseph M. Tablizo is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of the Philippines Diliman, and his research interests include gender and sexuality, digital cultures, and queer space-making in the Philippines

Emerging as a discursive and viral phenomenon in Philippine digital spaces, the baklang kanal marked a disruption of dominant narratives of queerness and is popularly associated with streetwise humor, flamboyance, and subaltern positionalities shaped by class and marginality. Rather than treating baklang kanal as a stable identity category, this study asks what becomes visible when it is approached as a situated way of inhabiting and performing queerness. It examines how practices associated with baklang kanal may constitute forms of resistance that are not always legible through conventional understandings of activism. The study explores how baklang kanal is produced, negotiated, and contested across queer spaces, and asks where, how, and under what conditions its performances challenge homonormativity, respectability politics, classed hierarchies, and normative expectations of queer belonging. Drawing on Winker and Degele’s multilevel intersectionality framework, it examines resistance across structural, symbolic, and individual levels while remaining attentive to the ways these practices may also reproduce or complicate other relations of power. Using a two-phase qualitative design, the study combines analysis of public discourse and representations of baklang kanal with accounts of lived experience. This makes it possible to examine how excess, visibility, language, and embodied performance can operate as vernacular forms of political practice, while also tracing the conditions under which such practices are recognized, dismissed, celebrated, or disciplined within queer communities. By treating baklang kanal as a contested mode of queer practice, the study contributes to efforts to queer activism by expanding what counts as political resistance. It foregrounds forms of political labor that emerge through everyday performance and cultural expression, while showing how resistance itself remains shaped by intersecting hierarchies of sexuality, gender expression, and class in the Philippine context.

Junix Jerald Delos Santos holds a Ph.D. in Psychology from the Ateneo de Manila University and serves as Graduate Program Coordinator for the Psychology and Counseling Programs at Saint Louis University.

Mira Alexis Ofreneo is Professor of Psychology and Director of the University Gender Hub at the Ateneo de Manila University.

Some people working within Singapore’s public health advocate for a zero-suicide goal, yet LGBTQ+ people remain under-accounted for in nationwide surveys and prevention agendas. Through interviews with ten queer and bereaved young adults, I ask: How do queer and bereaved people in Singapore make sense of their friends’ suicidality? What insights for suicide prevention might we gain? I contribute to representing Southeast Asia in critical suicidology literature by applying Berlant’s (2007) concept of slow death—a “condition of being worn out by the activity of reproducing life” (p. 759)—to describe the debilitations of reproducing life in Singapore. If one conceptualises suicidality in the context of being “put on a different trajectory of life and death than those cast as licit and proper through the maintenance of narrow familial and domestic norms” (Oswin, 2019, p. 107), I show how Singapore’s construction of an ideal heteronormative citizen comes into friction with its suicide prevention goals. The Samaritans of Singapore’s Leaving/Living Note campaign on World Suicide Prevention Day 2024 that espouses a man’s desire to stay alive for his wife and kid exemplifies how the nuclear family is mobilised as a site of suicide prevention. However, my interviewees suggest that this mobilisation puts those seemingly rehabilitable by the nuclear family at risk of weakening their social support and being moralised as selfish for leaving their family behind, while alienating many more than just LGBTQ+ people. Instead, I offer a case study of how my interviewees, through their lived experience of loss from exile or bereavement, self-organised their own spheres of intimacy with one another. Thus, they render previously solitary and stigmatised experiences of suicidality as sites for joint learning and healing (Ansloos & White, 2025), ultimately assembling a more effective suicide prevention for more than just queer people.

Ansloos, J. P., & White, J. H. (2025). Critical Suicide Notes: On Witnessing and Prefigurative Politics. Social Sciences, 14(3), 140. https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci14030140

Berlant, L. (2007). Slow Death (Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency). Critical Inquiry, 33(4), 754–780. https://doi.org/10.1086/521568

Oswin, N. (2019). Global city futures: Desire and development in Singapore. The University of Georgia Press.

Yee Ling Lok has an MPhil in Health, Medicine, and Society from the University of Cambridge.

Scholarship on activism in Southeast Asia has tended to locate resistance in visible, outward-facing acts: protest, advocacy, public claims-making. This paper turns instead toward the inside of feminist institutions, asking what counts as political labour when it takes the form of quarterly psychological safety surveys, team agreements about sustainable work practices, org-wide alignments on team norms about Care, Communication, and Conflict, as well as embedding sustainable work habits as a performance review measure. Drawing on Queering activism as a method that refuses to take categories (including "activism" itself) as a given, this paper argues that such organisational care work constitutes a form of embodied and affective resistance that remains largely illegible within liberal-democratic paradigms of political labour, precisely because it does not seek recognition through the state, the market, or public visibility. The paper is grounded in a practitioner case study of Wedu, a regional women's leadership organisation operating across South and Southeast Asia, and its multi-year internal experiment in building a culture the organisation calls "Sustainable Excellence." Reading internal artefacts: team norms, conflict protocols, psychological safety practices, as sites of everyday resistance, the paper traces how care becomes infrastructure for sustaining feminist and Queer work under conditions of burnout, political precarity, and extractive movement cultures shaped by patriarchy, capitalism, and coloniality. It also considers how organisational care can reproduce its own hierarchies and moral economies- who is expected to perform care, whose exhaustion is legible, whose is not- echoing the Call for Papers’ attention to how movements regulate their own subjects even as they resist external regulation. In doing so, the paper contributes to Queering activism by proposing organisational infrastructure itself as a fluid and often invisible political practice, and by asking what everyday conceptions of rights and resistance might look like when the site of struggle is an activist organisation's culture.

Rani Pramesti is the Executive Director of Wedu, a regional organisation working toward a world where half of all leaders are women, through capability development, capital deployment, and community building across South and Southeast Asia.

This paper argues that menopause — which has long been framed as a cisgender women's issue — is a fertile site for queering activism in Southeast Asia. Drawing on queer and trans theory, my research refuses the naturalised equation of menopause with "female deficiency," asking instead how this life stage is produced and regulated through cisnormative medical, legal, and social structures. The analysis centres qualitative material from trans and queer individuals in Malaysia, exploring embodied narratives, peer support networks, and care practices as forms of political labour that do not register within conventional vocabularies of recognition and inclusion. The research is framed by Critical Trans Theory, pulling from Namaste's concept of erasure, which is the institutional and discursive practices through which trans lives are made invisible (Chen‐Hayes & Namaste, 2002). This concept is then developed further through the concept of disjointedness, a term I use for what happens when an embodied experience exists but the social, institutional and epistemic categories through which it could become intelligible either fail to align with one another, as misalignment, or are absent altogether. The paper is divided into three parts. The first locates disjointedness within the queer literature and shows how it relates to the disjointedness at work in this context. The second presents the findings: my interlocutors' accounts of disjointedness in their interactions with healthcare institutions, legal frameworks and even feminist movement spaces, and of the care they rerouted through trans and queer networks and a small number of providers known to be safe. The final part developed the analysis and offers suggestions. The paper contributes to the project of queering activism by making visible embodied and affective modes of resistance usually treated as non-political, and by interrogating the hierarchies that determine whose claims, bodies, and labour are recognised within movements themselves.

Indramalar Satkunasingam is a PhD Candidate Affiliation in the Gender Studies Programme, University of Malaya, Malaysia.

For more than twenty-five years, the Philippine Anti-Discrimination Bill has been filed, debated, revised and stuck in across Congress. This long tumultuous history can be read as a story of failure: the bill has not been a law so the movement has not achieved its goal. This paper asks what becomes visible when the legislative outcome is not treated as the story. Drawing on Jack Halberstam’s (2011) The Queer Art of Failure, this paper asserts that the bill’s non-passage is a failure of the state rather than a failure of the LGBTQIA+ Movement. The bill’s repeated refiling in Congress is one part of the movement whose network built organizations, political language, public visibility, coalitions, local policy gains, and knowledge about organizing towards equality. The paper uses failure here carefully. The non-passage of the bill was not chosen or embraced by LGBTQIA+ organizers, it was produced through political and institutional opposition, delay, and non-resolution. The queer question, then, is not how to celebrate that failure, but how to understand what the movement continues to make possible while living with it. This paper is a single-case interpretative study of the SOGIE Equality Bill’s legislative and organizing history. Evidence used in this study is drawn from Congress records, advocacy organizations’ public statements, and news coverage spanning the bill’s refiling cycles since 2000. Rather than treating this paper as a neutral historical record, the paper reads it through Halberstam’s framework of failure hold or strain against this case. This paper argues that the movement may have not won a national law up to this point, yet it has not been losing on different fronts for the past twenty-five years. The persistence of the movement is part of the process through which gains accumulate, demands survive, and future political victories are possible.

John Erwin “Win” Larosa is an MA Women and Development Student in the Department of Women and Development Studies, College of Social Work and Community Development, University of the Philippines Diliman.

This paper examines how motherhood is reworked as a political subjectivity through digital activism in contemporary Indonesia, focusing on the Instagram-based community Ibu Berisik (Noisy Mothers). While scholarship on women’s activism in Indonesia has expanded considerably, maternal activism in digitally mediated spaces remains understudied. Drawing on Andrea O’Reilly’s concept of matricentric feminism, this study investigates how Ibu Berisik transforms everyday maternal experiences into political critique and collective action during a period of heightened socio-political unrest in 2025. The findings show that Ibu Berisik does not simply mobilise a pre-existing maternal identity but actively redefines what motherhood means in contemporary Indonesia. Through references to food provision, childcare, household expenses, and family wellbeing, the community transforms everyday practices of care into political claims about democracy, social justice, and government accountability. By strategically deploying humour, satire, feminine aesthetics, and domestic symbols such as cooking utensils and lunch containers, Ibu Berisik renders forms of maternal labour that are typically treated as private and apolitical into visible modes of public political participation. In doing so, the movement expands conventional understandings of activism beyond protest and advocacy to include the political work embedded in everyday care. This paper contributes to scholarship on gendered activism, digital politics, and Indonesian political culture in two ways. First, it demonstrates how activism actively produces and reshapes maternal political subjectivities rather than merely expressing a fixed maternal identity. Second, it shows how Instagram enables the politicisation of everyday care practices, making visible forms of labour and resistance that are often overlooked in dominant accounts of activism. By foregrounding the productive and contested relationship between identity and activism, this article contributes to broader debates on how political subjects are constituted through activism and how the boundaries of political participation are negotiated in contemporary Indonesia.

Abdullah Faqih is a graduate student in Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney, Australia, whose research focuses on gender and masculinity, particularly Muslim masculinity and fatherhood in contemporary Indonesia.

In Eastern Visayas, Philippines, a youth political volunteer organization formed in 2021 to support Leni Robredo’s 2022 presidential campaign. A year later, it was formally constituted as a youth group and sustained activism beyond the electoral cycle. This paper examines how non-binary members’ continued participation reconfigured not only the organization’s goals, practices, and identity, but also what activism itself came to mean and do. Using social movement and queer methods, the study treats activism not as the straightforward expression of pre-formed identities but as a site where gender, sexuality, and political subjectivities are produced, negotiated, and made politically legible. The data used came from nine in-depth interviews with consenting non-binary members, along with participant observation and digital ethnography of the group’s Facebook and Instagram accounts. The analysis focused on how nonbinary members participated in gender-inclusive programs, projects, and activities involving communities and partner organizations’ understanding and practice of activism. The findings show that non-binary members’ participation helped expand activism beyond electoral campaigning and candidate support. Extended activism practices also reworked the internal moral economies of the movement by making recognition, voice, safety, care, and mutual support part of political work rather than secondary to it. In this sense, what was queered was not simply the organization’s membership, but the form, content, and conditions of activism itself: who could participate, what kinds of labor counted as political, which communities became its constituencies, and how collective action could be sustained. The study argues that non-binary member’s labor transformed activism from episodic, candidatecentered mobilization into sustained identity-constitutive practice. Their participation did not merely bring queer identities into an already existing activist organization; it helped produce new activist subjects, relationships, repertoires, and political priorities. This advances scholarship on Southeast Asian youth politics by showing how activism itself can become queer: not because it is exclusively about queer issues, but because its aims, practices, temporalities, and forms of collective belonging are reworked through queer participation

Sigmund Fletcher D. Tarrayo is a Philippine electoral politics and gender studies scholar from the Department of Economics and Political Science, University of the Philippines Tacloban.

Across broad progressive movements in the Philippines, cultural workers are a designated profile of activists that are known to advance revolutionary struggles: those who engage in socio-political actions through cultural means. The term and the praxis itself have origins as an operational tactic of progressive movements: art and literature are directed to serve the struggles of the masses, as well as to reorient individualistic aims and dismantle bourgeois notions of art-making. The praxis is in part a legacy of the National Democratic movement (Staal 2013; Leano 2014; Flores 2019; Mercado et al 2025; and more) that emerged in opposition to Martial Law during the 1960s, which continues organizing ‘cultural workers’ through its alliances to this day. Drawing from critical theorist Neferti X. Tadiar’s recent conceptions, cultural workers—like many artists of the Global South—furthermore resist “from the side of remaindered life” that remains a political heuristic challenge in navigating structural entanglements of activism, political organizing, and mass mobilization. The cultural worker is, in other words, a historically constructed and specific way of doing activism in the Philippines. This presentation examines the historical origins of the cultural worker as a specific ideological paradigm and political strategy of National Democratic organizing, and dislodges its reified category in Philippine activism by interposing a class analysis. Informed by my autocritical, artistic-pedagogic project slant school, I assess and argue that the cultural worker is a reified conception of activism that has resulted from the unequal distribution and reproduced hierarchies of metropolitan university education—especially in the epistemic center of Manila’s most prestigious universities. By historicizing and analyzing literature on conceptualizations of cultural workers in the National Democratic movement, I point towards alternative critical pathways for activism borne from complex, social locations of an urban educated middle-class - including an intervention on the Filipino concept of pagkamulat, which translates to political awakening.

Carissa Pobre holds a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Interdisciplinary Art and Regenerative Culture from University of New Mexico, and Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) in Creative Writing from Ateneo de Manila University, and is a writer, interdisciplinary artist, and creative strategist.

Facing diverse postcolonial conditions, Filipina/o/x queer justice activists contend with the nonprofit industrial complex (NPIC), which structures the transnational flow of financial resources from the metropoles to the Southern peripheries. This flow mimics colonial logic, as foreign benefactors set conditions for local queer organizations to access funding, often grounded in neoliberal and imperial logic. The former is positioned as the expert in development work, while the latter is treated as the perpetual student-in-training. These conditions are enforced through disciplinarity, constraining fund allocation and requiring measurable outcomes that serve sponsors' interests. These disciplinary mechanisms reify what Jasbir Puar calls homonational structures that sanction the 'White savior complex' and what Peter Drucker describes as neoliberal structures that endorse the deradicalization of movements by treating organizations as competing entrepreneurs. Drawing on my ethnographic project on queer justice movements in the Philippines, this presentation unsettles the colonial and neoliberal assumptions that undergird funding structures by chronicling Filipina/o/x activists' agency and strategic capacity to negotiate and resist the NPIC. Grounded in various radical ideologies, they deploy translation practices that tactically articulate their demands in ways that resonate with funding agencies. Once funding is secured, many organizations also employ downloading practices to redistribute resources and organizing skills within the movement, countering the imperative to compete and instead promoting collectivity amid neoliberal hegemony. Finally, activists also generate creative, awareness-raising activities at funded events, countering the impulse to depoliticize the movement under the NPIC. Theoretically, I conceive of these practices as queer weapons of the weak deployed in Southern conditions to instrumentalize the same power structures that activists seek to evade, circumvent, and hopefully resist. With the persistent precarity of funding brought about, in part, by the rise of extreme-right governments in the West, insights from Filipina/o/x activists illuminate political praxis for navigating these contemporary transnational conditions.

Dr John Andrew Evangelista is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of the Philippines-Diliman.

In 2022, the Singaporean Parliament voted to repeal Section 377A of the Penal Code, which criminalized private acts of consensual sex between men. The vote was accompanied by a constitutional amendment that reinforced the heterosexual definition of marriage, preemptively foreclosing the possibility of queer futures. Rather than celebrating the repeal as a victory, I draw on Pheng Cheah’s critique of rights-based recognition to read decriminalization as a “violent gift” that stabilizes power while producing the identities of its claimants. This contradictory activist victory reinforces and reconstitutes what Pavan Mano and Natalie Oswin have identified as Singapore’s heteronormative foundations, from which queer subjects are produced as exceptions recognized and captured by technocratic statecraft. Examining joint stakeholder submissions across Singapore’s three UN Universal Periodic Review cycles alongside a close reading of the parliamentary debates of 2007 and 2022, I read the State’s shifting rhetoric through Georges Canguilhem’s theorization of life and “error” and Foucault’s late distinction between practices of freedom and processes of liberation. I track a migration from moral prohibition to normative calibration in the installation of “order before law,” a phrase that Member of Parliament Christopher de Souza recovered from a 1962 speech by founding Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew. I highlight how the repeal of 377A corrects one “error” while the accompanying constitutional amendment reinstalls, at a higher level of legal authority, the parameters that produce queerness as “error.” Through this analysis, I hope to reconsider queer activism in Singapore beyond “pragmatic resistance” (Lynette Chua).

Loo Zihan is a Singaporean artist and performance studies scholar based in Brooklyn, New York. His research examines the etiolated conduct of unpragmatic resistance within restrictive conditions.

In the past five years of doing feminist research among youth, women, and queer individuals from local communities and civil society organizations, I observe how affect and the embodied knowing of unique experiences of gender based violence (GBV) and socio-economic deprivation and of deep desires for intimacy, connection, and belonging reveal the coloniality of the global development sector agenda on sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) - protect the powerless from GBV, prevent risky sexual behaviors, and provide health commodities and services without transforming social power relations. Feminist and queer movements in the Philippines organize independently on a broad range of SRHR concerns, and often engage the development sector for project implementation or policy reform coalitions. While activist groups recognize the value and limits of tactical alliances, there is sporadic attention paid to reifying or challenging the identities of the deserving recipients of development sector interventions: the powerless victim, the sexually deviant, or the uneducated youth.. I am thus interested in exploring how feminist and queer activism make meaning and create space for subjectivities that transcend the marginalized identities that legitimize development sector interventions in the Philippines and how this shapes a shared trajectory for sexual and reproductive justice. To this end, I reflect on how feminist and queer activists center affect and the experience of being fully alive in one’s own body to surface meanings of healing, safety, dignity, and pleasure, and how this frames individual decisions and collective action among communities of victim-survivors of GBV, menstruators of diverse ages, gender identities and sexualities, and youth exploring intimacies and sexualities.

*Colloquial Filipino phrase that loosely translates to ‘deep in (one’s) feelings’

Sabrina Gacad is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Women and Development Studies, University of the Philippines, and is one of three Co-Executive Directors of Lunas Collective, a feminist, volunteer-powered care space for people experiencing gender based violence.

The experiences of LGBTQIA+ individuals in Brunei remain underrepresented in academic literature due to the country’s restrictive legal framework and conservative sociopolitical environment. While existing discussions often focus on criminalisation and human rights concerns, little attention has been given to the lived experiences of Queer individuals actively contributing to civil society. This study addresses this gap by examining how Queer advocates navigate their identities while working across sectors including youth empowerment, environmental conservation, sexual health, think tanks, and community development. Drawing on a qualitative methodology, the study engaged 13 Queer participants through one focus group discussion and eight semi-structured interviews. Owing to the legal and social risks associated with openly identifying as LGBTQIA+ in Brunei, all participants remained anonymous. Thematic analysis was used to examine participants’ motivations for civic engagement, workplace experiences, barriers to identity expression, and aspirations for institutional and societal change. The findings demonstrate that participants’ lived experiences as Queer individuals strengthened their commitment to advocacy through heightened empathy, resilience, and intersectional perspectives. However, participants also described navigating organisational cultures through code-switching, self-censorship, and careful management of their identities due to the absence of formal legal and workplace protections. Although some organisations fostered supportive and inclusive environments through informal practices, participants highlighted the need for explicit institutional safeguards, stronger allyship, and capacity building to ensure safe and equitable participation. Despite significant structural barriers, participants expressed cautious optimism that grassroots initiatives and collaborative engagement could contribute to incremental social change. By foregrounding the voices of Queer civil society actors, this study challenges reductive narratives that portray LGBTQIA+ individuals solely through the lens of persecution. Instead, it highlights their agency, leadership, and contributions to Brunei’s civic landscape while offering insights into how inclusion can be strengthened within restrictive contexts. These findings contribute to broader discussions on human rights, civil society, and LGBTQIA+ inclusion in Southeast Asia.

Kuro Roi is the pseudonym of a Bruneian artist, curator, human rights researcher, andco-founder of Minority Agenda, an initiative that uses art and cultural activism to advocatefor marginalized communities.