The Rainbow Rights Philippines
Compendium on LGBTQIA+
In the Philippine context, books on LGBTQIA+ proffer insights from art and anthropology to law and literature to history and health. They serve as critical archives, offering a glimpse into the lives and experiences of LGBTQIA+ people in the Philippines. For their length and depth, they are the best sources for multi-layered narratives, complex ideas, and expanded analyses.
More prominent among the books in this section are academic texts, narratives, collections, and anthologies that give a glimpse of what it is to be an LGBTQIA+ person, scholar, or ally in the Philippines. They are social documents, personal stories, and evidence that can inform history, advocacy, and policy.
Book chapters are contributions within edited volumes that address specific themes. In LGBTQIA+ studies, these chapters are essential because they respond not only to inquiries within established disciplines but also to fresh perspectives, emerging thought, and practices. From these chapters stem more extensive outputs, such as books and monographs, that help foreground ideas and identities that are frequently overlooked.
The book chapters in this section provide in-depth analyses of LGBTQIA+ issues across fields as education, law and policymaking, health and wellbeing, society and culture, literature, and diaspora studies. They are context-specific and creative and can serve as entry points for scholars and students to understand key concepts and debates within LGBTQIA+ studies.
Journal articles are the building blocks of evolving knowledge. They introduce readers to key concepts, current debates, and methodological approaches. In LGBTQIA+ studies, articles shape discourses and offer analyses and evidence-based insights by identifying and addressing gaps, proposing new frameworks, and advancing emerging areas of inquiry in gender and sexuality studies.
The rigorous peer-review process that journal articles undergo before publication enhances their value. Experts in the field assess methodologies, ethical considerations, theoretical grounding, and the soundness of analyses. Indexed and widely cited, journal articles shape LGBTQIA+ studies by providing empirically grounded data that can be used in various spaces, from education to litigation, history to health.
The technical reports in this section are produced by institutions such as international and government agencies, NGOs, and academic and advocacy groups. Even when they do not usually undergo peer or academic review, they are closely tied to the rigor of the bodies that produced them. From data gathering to reporting, these reports observe ethical standards, research protocols, and accountability mechanisms. These reports are also usually made in partnership with institutions and LGBTQIA+ scholars and practitioners.
Technical reports are practical tools for internal use, as they inform programs, plans, and advocacy priorities within the implementing organization. Externally, especially with these reports’ focus on fieldwork and reach in far-flung communities, these are used by policymakers, journalists, legislators, and educators as sources of evidence.
For most allies and LGBTQIA+ studies scholars and practitioners, their undergraduate and/or master’s theses and doctoral dissertations were their first formal academic foray into the field. These sources, even when not widely circulated, follow a rigorous evaluation process that includes proposal defense, ethics review, data collection, analysis, and academic writing.
Aside from surveys, the theses and dissertations in this section include rich qualitative materials: oral histories, ethnographies, interviews, and textual and contextual analyses. These academic texts can serve as documentation of localized, even indigenous, experiences, intersectional realities, and context-specific insights that are not always available in other published forms.
This section compiles outputs produced outside the traditional scholarly forms sectioned in this compendium. The sources are categorized as: a) conference papers, b) documents, and c) encyclopedia articles. The conference papers represent early stages of research, preliminary findings, or studies pending publication, while the documents are written to inform policy or decision-making, advocacy, and project implementation. The encyclopedia entries legitimize terms related to LGBTQIA+ within larger sociological studies.
These sources help expand the academic and advocacy for LGBTQIA+ by complementing published or formal scholarship with other forms. These outputs also inspire scholars and researchers to discover other forms of writing, knowledge production, and sharing.