Healing and Homecoming: Identity and Community Narratives of returns and Reconnections among Queer and Trans Diasporic Filipino/a/xs in Montréal

Type of resource
Author/collaborator
Title
Healing and Homecoming: Identity and Community Narratives of returns and Reconnections among Queer and Trans Diasporic Filipino/a/xs in Montréal
Abstract
The author’s thesis is a qualitative study grounded in participatory action research (PAR) approaches through Photovoice and Kuwentuhan (Filipino/a/x talk-story). Her study aimed to document and analyze how gender identity and sexuality relate to migration and diasporic experiences among LGBTQ+ Filipino/a/xs based in Montreal, and their forms of community action and solidarity. The study aimed to expand on queer diaspora and migration, critical Filipino/a/x and queer of colour organizing theories, and contribute to the possibilities of more transformative participatory research methods and social and community work. The author explains that Kuwentuhan is a culturally responsive method grounded in Filipino/a/x epistemologies in which stories are told from collective perspectives. Photovoice as a participatory method uses photography to illustrate the narratives of communities who are often excluded from policy decisions that impact their lives. She points out that to redress extractive power relations in research, these methods aim for the participants and community to be meaningfully involved in the research process. The author’s research study involved a staged process of community feedback, workshops, an art exhibit, individual and group feedback interviews and field notes. Through a combination of participant and researcher-led thematic analysis, this study illustrates how LGBTQ+ Filipino/a/xs in the diaspora navigate normative and discriminatory arrangements and imagine transformative meaning and action shaped by interwoven histories of colonialism in the Philippines and in Canada. The seven queer and trans Filipino/a/x participants’ diasporic subjectivities involve continually returning and reconnecting to cultural, ancestral, linguistic and transformative meanings and actions. Through these reconnections, they seek to empower and heal themselves and others through renewing and reimagining home, belonging, intimacies, collectivity, and, especially, kapwa. Kapwa is an inner spiritual and emotional connection to others and the natural world, thus a reconnection to oneself. The author’s study contributes a notion of seeding kapwa as a queer and decolonial epistemological and ontological questioning of hierarchical and exclusionary forms of being and knowing and reconnections to alternative possibilities through homing (homecoming) practices. Homing involves communities constellating queer diasporic narratives of home and belonging toward more transformative meaning and relations of care and action, which occurred through the Kuwentuhan method. Her study adds to the ongoing relevance of postcolonial, transnational, queer and trans, and feminist theorizing around the lives of queer and trans racialized and Filipino/a/x communities. Researchers, educators and social and community workers can co-construct methodologies and ethics toward homing processes by focusing on decolonial cultural, historical and social specificities of queer diasporic groups related to their regions, diversities and transnational experiences.
Type
Master's Thesis
University
McGill University
Place
Montreal
Date
2025
# of Pages
v-136p.
URL
Language
en
Citation
Stol, Jacqueline. “Healing and Homecoming: Identity and Community Narratives of Returns and Reconnections among Queer and Trans Diasporic Filipino/a/Xs in Montréal.” Master’s Thesis, McGill University, 2025. https://escholarship.mcgill.ca/concern/theses/ws859n44j.
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