Desire lines: Filipina transwomen and black girls’ wayward paths in the imperial city

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This article explores desire, beauty, and waywardness in the narratives of transwomen in the Philippines through the theoretical and artistic intersections between Saidiya Hartman’s book Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women and Queer Radicals (2019) and PJ Raval’s film Call Her Ganda (2018). I foreground how these concepts are collectively imagined and lived out by black girls in early 20th century New York and transwomen in present-day US military bases in the Philippines: where geo-political pressures shape the environment of the city and our paths through public life and intimacy within it. The confluence of transphobia, racial aggression, and military intimidation perpetuated by the presence of US soldiers in Philippine soil, I argue, stems from the same criminalizing and racist logic that the US government has imposed on black communities for centuries. This article traces definitions of the wayward in 20th century New York and how these have developed in and through the environment of the city from the metropole, the United States, and to the neo-colony, the Philippines. Through the narratives that Hartman and Raval foreground in their texts, I argue that the girls’ practice of agency gives rise to a “wayward” figure, one that re-shapes the bounds of the city through her marginal position. Transwomen and black girls’ desirous movements are foundational, not merely marginal, to life in the imperial city. In this light, waywardness resists definition from the law and its agents in its longing for life and stubbornly creates a present and a future otherwise.