Adolescent Curiosity and Mourning: The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros

In The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros (2005), a young genderqueer Filipinx youth named Maximo or Maxie may be a boy, a girl, or in between the polarities of the gender binary. Their father and brothers, known criminals in their neighborhood slum, love and protect Maxie, who takes on the feminized role of cooking and cleaning their home after their mother dies. But when Maxie aligns with a policeman who seeks to arrest their family, Maxie experiences the threat of fragmenting their family in pursuing their feelings and concretizing them through action. This film privileges the child’s perspective and desire, and it avoids the way in which certain bodies are treated in American cinema—where violence befalls those who present as genderqueer. The film exposes what can be learned from global cinema in terms of queer children’s self-sovereignty, where sexuality is not the primary social category of experience in Maxie’s development.