Ferdinand Lopez (she/her)

PhD Candidate

Email: ferdie.lopez@mail.utoronto.ca

Areas of Interest

• Transnational (Filipino) Gender and Sexuality
• Urban Space and Sexuality
• Filipino Migrant Literatures
• Philippine Culture-based Education
• Philippine Literary, Media and Cultural Studies
• Southeast Asian Studies

Biography

FERDINAND M. LOPEZ is a retired Associate Professor in Literature at the Faculty of Arts and Letters and the Graduate School of the University of Santo Tomas, where she taught courses in Literary, Media, and Cultural Studies. Lopez, was the Vice Chair of the National Committee on Cultural Education of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts.(2017-2019) In 2023, she was elected as board member of the Canadian Council for Southeast Asian Studies. She is currently an Academic Council member of the Graduate Diploma in Cultural Education of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA) – Philippine Cultural Education Program (PCEP).

In 2015, Ferdie was listed by 8List Philippines as one of the 8 Iconic Teachers Students Loved in College.

Program: PhD 2019

Collaborative Program(s): Sexual Diversity Studies

Education

MA Literature : University of Santo Tomas – Manila

B.A  Literature : University of Santo Tomas – Manila

Dissertation

Title: LAMYERDA as EKSENA in the Tropical Archipelago: Queer Walking and Scene-Making in Tondo, Manila's Largest Slum

Supervisor: Robert Diaz & Dina Georgis

My project offers a nuanced understanding of how sexually marginalized communities in the Philippine Global South negotiate and resist oppressive heteronormative cultures. Here, I investigate how lamyerda as situated knowledge-making, and world-building practice frames the complexity of Filipnx queer (bakla) – their everyday enactments of leisure and pleasure, their stubborn persistence, and resilience, their affective attachment to beauty and danger, and their propensity for the wild, recalcitrant, and the disobedient desires. In the 70s, the bakla recuperated lamyerda from its colonial mooring (vete a la mierda: go to hell, fuck, shit) and deployed it to denote the multiple ways in which queer walking, cruising, and having fun defy normative institutions of power. Rather than being apolitical, lamyerda with its multiple significations serves as a repository for acts of subversion and resistance against various prescriptions for normalcy, respectability, and decency in Philippine society. As a scene-making practice, lamyerda enables the bakla to fabulate their own necessary fiction and reinvent themselves in precarious situations in Tondo, Manila’s largest urban slum. This form of reverie, and fantasy production does not only provide momentary escape but allows the bakla to comport and confront the harsh everyday reality in shanty town. Through lamyerda, the bakla negotiates the uninhabitable slums of Tondo, refusing stubbornly to be immobilized by their desperate situations. They create conditions of possibility — spawning joy, wellness, exuberance, leisure, and living life well — despite the realities of unrelenting violence, surveillance, social proscription, and intense sexual regulation.

Presentations

Panelist, “Panahon ng Paglalakbay” (Journey Through Time: The Filipino Experience in Canada) Pinoys on Parliament Annual Conference. Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ottawa, February 21-23, 2025

Paper Presenter, Situated Emergences: Concordia University Graduate Students - Media Studies Conference. “Performing Tropical Drag: Marina Summers, Archipelagic Queer” September 20, 2024

Panel Discussant, “Queer and Feminist Historiographies of the Martial Law Period,” Fictions of Dictatorship Seminar, Asian American Studies Program and the Southeast Asian Studies Program, Cornell University, September 2, 2023

Discussant, Round table Discussion on “The Poetics of Filipino/a/x Resilience: Politics, Ethics and Aesthetics of the Everyday.” Canadian Council for Southeast Asian Studies (CCSEAS) National Conference, Laval University, Quebec. October 12-14, 2023

Discussant, Pa’no Yun? What Happens When Theatre Migrates: A Lecture- Conversation. University of British Columbia, Vancouver. October 8, 2023

Selected Works

“Wayward Informality, Queer Urbanism: Manila, Dark and Decadent City” (Book Chapter) in Beauty and Brutality: Manila and Its Global Discontent. Eds. Manalansan, Diaz, Tolentino. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2023. pp 78-105

“Minsa’y Isang Paruparo: A Memoir” (Once a Butterfly: A Memoir) in Alon: Journal for Filipino American Diasporic Studies, vol.2 no.1, p.74-83. March 2022

“Allure of Spectacle,” part of the collaborative essay “Martial Law Now, as Then,” in Social Text 39 (4(149)), 2021. Ed. Neferti Tadfiar. pp 121-147, https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-9408140

Co-author, Asian American Writers’ Workshop (https://aaww.org>fighting-the) Fighting the Aswang: Seeing State Terror and Resistance in Alyx Arumpac’s New Documentary Film on Duterte’s Extra Judicial Killings,” July 9, 2020

“Transitioning as Pedagogy, Transmigration as Performance: Queering Philippine Culture-based Education. In Performing Philippine Pedagogy in the Precarious Pandemic Present. Manila: National Commission for Culture and the Arts, 2021

Honours and Awards