Capably Queer: Exploring the Intersections of Queerness and Poverty in the Urban Philippines

Despite growing attention to identity and intersectionality in the field of development, there is still a dearth of empirical scholarship exploring the ways that being sexually non-normative—or queer —shapes the experience of living in poverty in the Global South. In this paper, I use the ‘missing dimensions of poverty’ framework developed by the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative to explore the ways that queerness and poverty inflect each other in the urban Philippines. I examine the pivotal role that queer people play in household and neighborhood economies, and argue that being queer profoundly affects the ways that low-income Filipinos experience poverty. I suggest that a better understanding of the capabilities that low-income queer individuals are allowed or encouraged to exercise—and the roles that are denied to them—can be used to beneficially integrate those populations into development praxis.