Forming brown commons through queer joy in butiki/baboy: A pride conversation series

Abstract

In June 2023, Bangkô collective and Tambay Times Kids mobilized Filipino cis-heterosexual women and LGBTQ+ individuals to converse in a gathering which they called Butiki/Baboy: A Pride Conversation Series. Butiki/Baboy (literally Lizard/Pig) references a Filipino nursery song that goes “girl, boy, bakla, tomboy, butiki, baboy,” where butiki and baboy pertain to the made-inhuman others—those who are gender nonconforming and do not fit “Westernised” beauty standards. Conceived to discuss mundane queer topics that are the excess of relevant subjects highlighted during Pride Month, the 2023 iterations of Butiki/Baboy held at multiple sites around Los Baños, Laguna in the Philippines included sessions that revolved around narratives of queer intimacies of community development workers, queerbaiting on social media, radical joys in the mundanity of unfinished projects, and messy ecologies formed in the wilderness. This essay is interested in unpacking and understanding how queer joy emanates from this gathering of cisheterosexual women and LGBTQ+ individuals who are primarily cultural and creative workers, artists, and community development workers. It asks how queer joy, through Butiki/Baboy, affords moments of commoning. Taking the cue from José Esteban Muñoz who explains that the multifarious yet shared experience of suffering and hriving forms brown commons, I argue that Butiki/Baboy facilitated a space for engendering queer joy—that thing that is being banished from queer communities by an interlocking web of powers that tags queer bodies as unworthy and inhuman.