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Global circulations of cinema produce intimate attachments to subjects located elsewhere, whose different lives across the distance come into proximity. The English title of the Philippine indie film Ang Pagdadalaga ni Maximo Oliveros (Auraeus Solito, 2005), The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros, is quite beautiful yet imprecise in its translation of the original Tagalog in the worldwide release. Ang Pagdadalaga ni Maximo Oliveros literally converts to "the blossoming young womanhood of Maximo Oliveros." The original Tagalog title is gendered: the word dalaga means young woman and the conjugation of pagdadalaga indicates becoming. To translate growing womanhood as blossoming in the sense of flowering goes, beyond developing as an adult woman in the community. Flowering can also be read as a vaginal reference in the sense of burgeoning labia.1 The film is thus so much richer than its English title suggests in its representation of the adolescent child's sexual development and how it is situated in a larger constellation of gendered identities, a complexity that I will parse for this film that circulates widely in Filipinx and queer diasporas today.
Ang Pagdadalaga ni Maximo Oliveros concerns a young genderqueer Filipinx youth named Maximo, or Maxie (Nathan Lopez), who may be an effeminate boy, a boyish girl, or someone in-between. At twelve years old, the adolescent may express themself in an aggressive effeminacy that troubles the spectator's categories, but in their neighborhood slums of Manila, no one is confused or discomforted by their defiance of gender boundaries. There are other children like Maxie, so their gender expression is normalized as one available option among many. That is, they are not alone as genderqueer in this film, so they do not represent a singular anomaly or embody an individual perception of perversity.
While Maxie's gender obscurity makes them vulnerable to harassment outside the home, especially after dark, their family is composed of a kind and doting father named Paco and two protective older brothers, the quietly intense Boy (Neil Ryan Sese) and the lighthearted and flirtatious Bogs (Ping Medina). All are locally known criminals-petty thieves working in the underground economy-selling stolen cell phones or running the numbers. The Oliveros clan, in their cisgendered macho countenance, loves and protects Maxie, who has taken on the feminine role of cooking, cleaning,...