A Love that Burns Hot Enough to Last: Scenes from Trans Tropical Love

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.25120/etropic.23.1.2024.4057

Keywords:

trans womanhood, trans tropics, trans love, queer tropics, queer desire, tropical nature, Brazil, Philippines

Abstract

This essay meditates on a time spent in the Brazilian tropics, as part of one’s journey into womanhood. Titled after a line from Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance with Somebody,” it reflects on a trans woman’s experience of queer desire in the tropics, in light of her own womanhood that remains a tenuous argument for some people who still believe that their bodies have been named to precede and prevail over those of trans, queer, and nonbinary folx. In quiet lyrical turns, the essay, invoking tropical nature, explores the possibilities of queer relations, as well as the opportunity to teach the world about beauty, so as to recreate the world and reexist in it as a woman proud and confident of her own circumstance—to “become it. Love.”

Author Biography

Jaya Jacobo, Coventry University, UK

Jaya Jacobo is a Lecturer in Gender Studies at Coventry University, where she currently does work on trans feminist pedagogies in literature, art and performance. She has worked alongside travesti and transsexual women artists, academics and community workers in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, as well as with trans, queer and nonbinary Filipina/x/o performers from the Philippines and its diaspora. Jacobo was a former Board Member of the Society of Trans Women of the Philippines (STRAP), a former President of the Film Desk of the Young Critics Circle (YCC) of the Philippines, a Founding Co-Editor of Queer Southeast Asia: A Transgressive Journal of Literary Art and Co-Editor of BKL: Bikol/Bakla, Anthology of Bikolnon Gay Trans Queer Writing. Jaya has also just released Arasahas, her debut volume of poetry in Filipino from Savage Mind Publishing House.

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Published

2024-08-14

How to Cite

Jacobo, J. (2024). A Love that Burns Hot Enough to Last: Scenes from Trans Tropical Love. ETropic: Electronic Journal of Studies in the Tropics, 23(1), 18–24. https://doi.org/10.25120/etropic.23.1.2024.4057

Issue

Vol. 23 No. 1 (2024): Queering the Tropics, Part 1: Tropical Materialisms, Queer Ecology & Spectral Tropicality

Section

Essays

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Copyright (c) 2024 CC-BY

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