Part 1

• Made to Measure: Coloniality, Gender and the Valuation of National Scientists in the Philippines Cynthia Grace Gregorio UP Center for Women's and Gender Studies

  This paper examines the persistent gender disparity within the Order of National Scientists of the Philippines through the framework of Anibal Quijano’s “Coloniality of Power”. It posits that “Made to Measure” standards used to evaluate scientific excellence are not neutral measures but are instead deeply rooted in colonial underpinnings that reinforce a patriarchal and elitist definition of expertise. This structural bias is clearly reflected in the national scientist historical roll where male recipients (32) significantly outnumber women (12).

  The study argues that by prioritizing Western-centric quantitative metrics such as H-index, Scopus-indexed citations, laboratory-based hard sciences, and linear career trajectories, the Philippine institutions perpetuate Eurocentric hierarchy of knowledge. The paper contends that the gender gap is not a result of lack of female merit, presence of few women scientists, or the “triple burden” of domestic labor, rather, it is a product of Spanish and American colonial epistemologies that equate “modern” science with urban, male, and elitist intellectualism.

  This paper ultimately calls for decolonial delinking from global ranking systems and advocates for a valuation of science that moves away from the vestiges of coloniality toward an inclusive metrics of national relevance and importance.

• Memories of Movements: Curating Queer Art Exhibitions Eloisa May Hernandez University of the Philippines

  The presentation will focus on curatorial initiatives in curating queer art exhibitions in the Philippines. The Memories of Movements, is a community photo-wall exhibit that gathers images of queer life, queer organizing, and queer survival in the Philippines across the years. It is a major component of the 3rd Philippine Queer Studies Conference.

  In the Philippine context, movement histories are often carried by people rather than institutions. Many moments live in personal archives: phones, folders, Facebook albums, group chats, and family photos. This exhibit starts from the premise that the sustainability of movements depends on shared history and the ongoing work of remembering together. It also insists that there is no single “official” queer history. Memories differ across islands and languages, across generations, across classes and communities, and across the uneven conditions of visibility and safety. Queering history means making room for those differences, allowing many versions of the past to coexist, and honoring how the personal is political in Philippine queer life.

  The exhibition consists of photographs taken through the years that document queer presence, connection, and movement-building, including ordinary scenes that rarely enter formal archives. They include photos of Pride-related activities, queer people doing everyday things together, queer organizing, celebration and joy, and any other queer-related activity, relationship, or moment that helps tell the story of how we live and move. The images were collaged into photo walls to foreground collective memory rather than individual prestige.

  In Memories of Movements, curatorial work is community care and a collective exercise.

• Online de-linking? Feminist praxis and language in Philippine social media spaces Frances Antoinette Cruz University of the Philippines

  The role of social media platforms (such as Facebook and YouTube) in the Philippines as platforms for the functions that the public sphere would otherwise fulfill has been detailed critically in their effects on electoral politics, yet few empirical studies that critically examine the ways in which social media act as amplifiers of algorithmic coloniality, or “of Western dominance in the documentation and interpretation of the world, one that is facilitated by the West’s global material dominance” (Oyěwùmí 1997, 32) in social media spaces in the Philippine context. In this paper, I employ McShane’s (2021) and Lugones’ (2010) framing of intersectionality and gender performativity as methods of feminist decolonial praxis alongside Han’s (2017) psychopolitical critique to critically examine the productive power of the psyche driven by the circulation of political discourses under big tech coloniality. Specifically, this paper examines the ways gender is manifested in the language in a dataset of the Facebook pages of Philippine national newspapers in 2015, 2017 and 2019, determining to what degree online discourse reproduces, obscures, subverts, or questions ways of representing gender in Philippine digital publics. I then frame the findings in terms of a categorization of potentials and limitations for de-linking in spaces where algorithmic colonial mechanisms are evident.
  Han, B. (2017). Psychopolitics. London & New York :Verso.
  Lugones, M. (2010). Toward a Decolonial Feminism. Hypatia, 25(4), 742–759.
  McShane, J. (2021). What does it mean to ‘decolonise’ gender studies?: Theorising the decolonial capacities of gender performativity and intersectionality. Journal of Women’s Studies, 22(2), 62-77.

• When We Gaze Back: De-obscuring the Camera, Illuminating Queer Countervisuality Kukasina Kubaha University of Hamburg

  She stands with her own camera and gazes at the studio where her ancestors had been forced to pose. She points her camera obscura at this space of epistemic violence and snaps a photo. Looking back through the camera, I explore my embodied self in third person, and the spatiotemporal relationship of the gaze through the art of photography, especially from a place which my ancestors were once photographed.

  As a Thai-Malay queer woman, I feel my way through colonial type photos of Malay women and portraits of the Siamese king’s Malay wives made by German photographers in Singapore and Bangkok during the 19th century. I then reproduce these photos from the angle of the former photographic subject, reflecting on these temporal tensions between presence and absence, memory and history. Using photography as a knowledge-finding method, I disrupt the colonial gaze by reshaping these images into a queer archive that (re)claims and (re)defines these women. I attempt to create a counter-archive of Queer women in Patani through Nicholas Mirzoeff’s theory of countervisuality, where I explore the political and affective dimensions of reclaiming visual agency in the aftermath of colonial and epistemic violence. Additionally, I build upon Sing Suwannakij’s theorized role of photography and visual technologies in consolidating state power and kingship in Siam, offering a queered intervention. The shutter’s snap becomes not an act of capture, but of confrontation, of reasserting visibility on one’s own terms. By engaging with photography as both a historical tool of colonial domination and a contemporary medium for decolonial queer expression, I reimagine visual culture reclamation and purpose. Through this photographic process, I not only reimagine the alternative forms of history, belonging, archiving and resistance, but I also embody myself within the frame - as a queer woman gazing at these other women.

Part 2

• City Encounters: An Arts-Based Study of Gendered Everyday Life in Philippine Urban Spaces Marie Aubrey Villaceran University of the Philippines

  This study examines how gender shapes the everyday experience of urban space in Philippine cities, attending to the repeated and often unmarked encounters that constitute city life for women and gender-diverse persons. Drawing on arts-based research methods the study foregrounds embodied and sensory knowledge as legitimate forms of evidence about spatial inequality. The analysis moves from the body to the street, tracing how public infrastructure, mobility patterns, informal economies, and built environments distribute safety and access unevenly across gendered lines. Situated within an intersectional feminist framework and decolonial approach, the findings reveal how gendered city encounters are neither exceptional nor random, but determined by social structures and reproduced through everyday spatial practice. The study offers methodological insight into the use of arts-based approaches for surfacing knowledge that quantitative and conventional qualitative methods tend to miss.

• Embodied Academic Motherhood: The Intersection of Gendered Labor and Institutional Pressures in Asia Cholnapa Anukul Society Research Institute Sayamol Charoenratana Chulalongkorn University

  This research examines academic motherhood as embodied labor within the sociocultural landscapes of Thailand, Japan, Taiwan, and Vietnam. Aligning with the Embodied Knowing panel, it explores how female scholars navigate professional identities within four multi-layered frameworks of expectation. The study employs a mixed-methods approach, centering on qualitative data through in-depth interviews with 12 female academics to capture the textures and tensions of their lived experiences. The analysis reveals that academic motherhood is defined by four primary frameworks: 1) The Filial Framework, as a good daughters and good daughters-in-law, these women bear the embodied burden of care for both biological and marital parents, rooted in regional patriarchal mandates of filial piety. 2) The Domestic Framework, within the nuclear family, they must perform as good wives and good mothers, maintaining primary responsibility for intensive caregiving despite high-level professional commitments. 3) The Institutional Framework, in academia, they are pressured to be ideal workers, often overcompensating to ensure their motherhood is not perceived as a professional burden by colleagues or institutions. 4) The Macro-Social Framework, beyond private spheres, a broader societal gaze demands they be good women in every status, evaluating success by the seamless balancing of these conflicting identities. Findings indicate that while support systems vary across these four countries, the underlying structural pressures remain remarkably consistent. For these scholars, academic motherhood is a continuous negotiation of embodied knowing—a struggle to fulfill ingrained social mandates while maintaining professional excellence. By centering these local experiences, this paper challenges Western-centric models of work-life balance and proposes a decolonial understanding of gendered labor in the Asian academic landscape.

• Consent and Complexity: Gender, Power, and Negotiations Across Places, Non-Places, and Hybrid Spaces in a Supermodern World Teresa Paula De Luna University of the Philippines, Diliman

  This study examines how consent is understood, negotiated, and embodied across places, non-places, and the hybrid spaces that increasingly blur their boundaries within the conditions of supermodernity, as theorized by Marc Augé. Consent is approached not merely as an individual act of agreement, but as a socially and culturally situated practice shaped by spatial relations, institutional norms, and everyday interactions. Supermodernity, marked by excesses of information, mobility, and spatial dislocation, transforms how individuals experience identity, belonging, intimacy, and moral agency.

  Places, understood as spaces embedded in social memory, relational histories, and shared meanings, often frame consent as negotiated through embodied practices, cultural scripts, and communal ethics. In contrast, non-places, such as digital platforms, transient urban sites, transportation hubs, and institutional corridors, are characterized by anonymity, impermanence, and functional interactions, conditions that may obscure accountability and complicate the communication of boundaries and desire. In contemporary life, these spatial forms increasingly converge. Social media platforms, university campuses, and workplaces emerge as hybrid spaces where intimacy and surveillance, personal agency and institutional power, as well as presence and anonymity, coexist.

  This study interrogates how gendered power relations, heteronormative expectations, and intersecting structures of inequality shape the meanings and practices of consent across these interwoven spaces. Particular attention is given to how consent is mediated by power, vulnerability, and socially produced norms surrounding gender, sexuality, and authority. Ultimately, the study aims to contribute to a gender-responsive, culturally grounded, and spatially sensitive framework for consent education that reflects the lived complexities of contemporary social life.

• Looking out from a drug neighbourhood: constructing a decolonialised other/self couple through a film with female drug dealers in an Indonesian city Silvia Vignato Università di Milano-Bicocca

  Why is it so compelling, for me, to listen to a group of active or retired female drug dealers living in marginal neighbourhoods in the city of Medan, Indonesia? Viceversa, why was the film project so enthralling for them? In this presentation, I take the film as a specific ethnographic event and examine how, on the field, the fact that I was shooting a film but not participating in it as an actor sparked a debate on the relevance of specific local knowledge. I use methods and ideas drawn from feminist ethnography (see Ain-Davis) and visual ethnography (as in Pink) to describe the emotional and relational environment that film making both constructed and revealed in some marginal, partly unauthorised neighbourhoods where drug commerce is a common activity among women, and more specifically, single mothers. I shall question life skills and strategies as well as symbolic references that cross through ethnicity and, to a lesser extent, class, but are strongly embedded in gender, and create a specific domestic culture of moral illegality.

Show Paper Abstracts

Abstract

Keywords

• Patani
• Southeast and East Asia
• academic motherhood
• coloniality
• consent
• curatorial work
• decolonial approach
• decolonial practices
• decoloniality
• digital
• discourse
• embodied histories
• feminism
• filial piety
• gender
• gender and power
• gendered labor
• history of photography
• hybrid spaces
• queer art
• queer life
• science
• social frameworks
• social media
• supermodernity
• urban spaces