This essay examines the radical potential of shared living spaces as sites of revolutionary intimacies. Revolutionary intimacies, I argue, are close bonds, relationships, and social practices in the home and other private spaces that foster the creation of new political imaginings for democracy and liberation. Centering stories of activists involved in the US-based anti-Marcos movement during the 1970s and 1980s, I ask: How does one “work” the home, from a place that has traditionally reinforced heteropatriarchal violence, toward a space with liberatory intention?

The literature about Filipina/o American anti-imperialist organizing in the 1970s and 1980s has expanded in the past few years to include the participation of women leaders. Yet, few studies have examined the gender and sexual politics of its groups. This dissertation asks: What was the role of U.S. based women, mothers, and sexual minorities in the transnational anti-imperialist movement against Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos and in the years following his removal? How did these social actors address issues of gender and sexuality within and beyond their groups while also organizing against a dictatorship? Using 100 oral history interviews, archival research, and textual analysis of primary source documents from 24 archival collections from 4 countries, Makibaka! argues that women, mothers, lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and other sexual minorities were instrumental in the creation, sustenance, and evolution of diasporic Filipina/o anti-imperialist activism from 1968 to 1992. Their stories reveal the invisible work, or the typically gendered acts that are routinely erased and devalued, that these social actors undertook to make their interventions. Makibaka! recognizes the interpersonal relationships- in unity and times of conflict- that are critical for catalyzing and creating new forms of liberatory politics.

This essay is an engagement of the dialectics of naming and violence, discussed from the perspectives of the trans, non-binary, and gender non-conforming Pilipina/o/xs whom we interviewed in the Summer of 2020.  Applying a transnational queer diasporic methodology, we center their material realities, which we feel remain missing in both scholarly and popular debates about the term “Filipinx.”  Indeed, it was LGBTQI+ Pilipinxs in North America who were the first to use the term “Filipinx” and “Pilipinx” in online spaces. Instead of positioning the X as our main focus, we use it as an entry point to discuss the violence that LGBTQI+ people of Philippine-descent have historically faced for simply identifying themselves on their own terms. It is toward such violence that the queer, non-binary, and trans people who began using the X and other linguistic innovations were and are asserting themselves. Revealed are perspectives and practices of dignity, self-determination, resistance against cultural homogenization and gender gatekeeping, and self-naming as radical imagination initiated by those facing intensified carcerality and other forms of violence that stretch within and beyond nation-state boundaries.