Abstract
This article examines kabaklaan's conflation with biyuti, pageantry, and fabulosity to better understand how such a conflation facilitates complex articulations of transgender lives and aspirations in the Philippines today. While reflecting on the significance of Out Run, a film about Ladlad's unsuccessful bid to win congressional seats during the 2013 elections, and Die Beautiful, a film about the travails of a transgender beauty queen who dies soon after she wins a nationally televised gay beauty pageant, the author gleans examples of transgender resistance that do not acquiesce to the economic demands of respectability politics. Despite their seeming frivolity, beauty pageants and beauty parlors are significant spaces to will capacious forms of transgender solidarity. They animate the vitality of transgender life. Just as they did during the Marcos regime, filmic reimaginings of what the author calls “biyuti from below” index the spectacular forms of disciplining that Filipinos continue to witness with each passing day. These performances of biyuti demand that we animate multiple versions of trans lives worth living.
