Living Up to the Promise: Digitized HIV Advocacy Strategies among Gay Filipinos in Manila

• In Event: Digital Sexualities, Biomedical Practice, and Queer Realities: Culture + Identity

Abstract

Recent scholarship about gay Filipinos on mobile dating apps highlight how these online platforms provide a space for sharing, connecting, and learning more about sexual identities not readily available through offline sources. But technologically deterministic fears and anxieties from various actors link mobile dating app use with the rise of sexually-transmitted infections, primarily HIV, among gay and youth populations in the country. Based on ethnographic data from over 16 months of multi-sited fieldwork in Manila, Philippines and its multiple online ecologies, this presentation focuses on everyday strategies among gay Filipino dating app users and local LGBT community advocacy groups involved in addressing social and moral values in the National Capital Region. From a politics of visibility, online peer education, and offline plans toward changing local public policies, LGBT Filipinos and their community advocates in Manila simultaneously challenge and uphold prevailing ideologies from state, media, and faith-based institutions that insist on the connection between technology, sexual promiscuity, and the spread of sexually-transmitted infections. These strategies are specifically manifested in texts and images generated on dating app user self-making and communication, as well as shared stories that circulate through other forms of media. This project takes its inspiration from studies that examine complex formations between local, national, and global processes of gender and sexual subjectivities among transnational, LGBT Asian collectivities.

Author

• Paul Michael Leonardo Atienza, Department of Anthropology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign