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In "Queering and Transing the Great Lakes: Filipino/a Tomboy Masculinities and Manhoods across Waters," I use a Filipino/a queer trans (transnational/transgender/transwaters) and postcolonial approach to examine Nice Rodriguez's semiautobiographical fiction in his/her collection of short stories, Throw It to the River (1993). Based in Toronto, Canada (on Lake Ontario), from 1988 to 2004, Rodriguez, a self-identified Filipino/a tomboy writer, addresses themes of migration, immigration, displacement, and class/poverty; the US-Marcos dictatorship; queer desire, love, sexuality; and tomboy masculinities and manhoods in his/her stories. By critically reading Rodriguez's stories, in this essay, I also theorize how the Great Lakes or Great Lakes region functions as a transnational water-based border zone or crosscurrents space in the "(Upper) Midwest" that links Filipino sites in the diaspora such as Duluth, Minnesota, and Toronto, as well as how these waters also connect with other waterscapes in the Philippines such as the Pasig River and Manila Bay.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork with Filipino seamen in metro Manila (Philippines), the San Francisco Bay Area (California), and the Pacific Ocean, this essay examines how heterogeneous Filipino masculinities (heterosexual and transgender tomboy) are cocreated and coexperienced in local and global sites. Through a queer, immigrant, transgender, and transnational Filipino (American) cultural logics and critique this essay foregrounds encounters with and translations of differently situated Filipino masculinities in ports and at sea, suggesting how specific embodied practices of mobility and movement—sea-based transportation, migration, and travel—are constitutive of racialized and classed Filipino masculinities.