Abstract
Indigenous Panay Bukidnon people of the Philippines have chanted long narrative poems called sugidanon since at least the sixteenth century. These poems were traditionally performed by binukot (secluded) women and feature binukot women as active characters. This article examines three sugidanon epics alongside two Hiligaynon-language Catholic devotional poems written by Spanish missionaries. These writers appropriated selectively from Panayanon poetry forms, idioms, and gender categories to create a new Christianized Visayan model woman with comparatively lower prestige than her precolonial counterpart. Fashioned after Mary, this new feminine ideal elevated a Hispanicized view of the binukot as a pious and domesticated foil to Indigenous Panayanon religious practitioners (babaylan) who were most often women but also effeminate men or intersex individuals. Panayanon people also adapted to Spanish colonialism by incorporating Mary alongside Indigenous figures such as the babaylan and female ancestors depicted in sugidanon epics.
