Raising Love in A Time of Lovelessness: Kuwentos of Pinayist Motherscholars Resisting COVID-19’s Anti-Asian Racism (original) (raw)
Related papers
White Love and Other Events in Filipino History (Excerpts, Duke Univ. Press, 2000)
In this wide-ranging cultural and political history of Filipinos and the Philippines, Vicente L. Rafael examines the period from the onset of U.S. colonialism in 1898 to the emergence of a Filipino diaspora in the 1990s. Self-consciously adopting the essay form as a method with which to disrupt epic conceptions of Filipino history, Rafael treats in a condensed and concise manner clusters of historical detail and reflections that do not easily fit into a larger whole. White Love and Other Events in Filipino History is thus a view of nationalism as an unstable production, as Rafael reveals how, under what circumstances, and with what effects the concept of the nation has been produced and deployed in the Philippines. With a focus on the contradictions and ironies that suffuse Filipino history, Rafael delineates the multiple ways that colonialism has both inhabited and enabled the nationalist discourse of the present. His topics range from the colonial census of 1903-1905, in which a racialized imperial order imposed by the United States came into contact with an emergent revolutionary nationalism, to the pleasures and anxieties of nationalist identification as evinced in the rise of the Marcos regime. Other essays examine aspects of colonial domesticity through the writings of white women during the first decade of U.S. rule; the uses of photography in ethnology, war, and portraiture; the circulation of rumor during the Japanese occupation of Manila; the reproduction of a hierarchy of languages in popular culture; and the spectral presence of diasporic Filipino communities within the nation-state. A critique of both U.S. imperialism and Filipino nationalism, White Love and Other Events in Filipino History creates a sense of epistemological vertigo in the face of former attempts to comprehend and master Filipino identity. This volume should become a valuable work for those interested in Southeast Asian studies, Asian-American studies, postcolonial studies, and cultural studies.
There is a dearth of knowledge about educationally disadvantaged groups particularly within the Asian American/Pacific Islander (AAPI) population, as research does not adequately provide disaggregated data. As such, this study particularly focuses on the intersecting sociocultural processes and educational experiences of Filipina American (Pinay) students-turned-professors to understand the transformative nature of their epistemologies and its manifestations in their work as scholar-activists. Moving beyond questions of race/ethnicity, this study acknowledges the American classroom as both a fragile and powerful place of becoming; where “emerging identities are being invented within a contestation of dominant discourses of [not just] race, [but also] class, gender, and sexuality.” It extends from the understanding that the exclusion of particular histories, cultures, texts, and ways of knowing in the traditional university has forced the construction of new alternative spaces, wherein the production of knowledge requires creative, critical, and collective thinking towards radical transformation. Thus, through the lens of women-of-color theory, this work employs an intersectional framework, which sees these social categories created by colonialism as mutually constitutive across contexts. Written in the tradition of Moraga and Anzaldúa's This Bridge Called My Back, this study holds conversations with six Pinay scholar-activists. It pulls from memory, breaking long-held silences as it boldly sutures together glimpses of personal confrontations with coloniality (Lugones, 2007; Maldonado-Torres, 2007) across their lifetimes from childhood to womanhood, from within the American classroom and beyond. This critical looking inward of one’s private (and often painful) formations of race, class, and gender reveals the unstable growth of a Pinay scholar-activist’s personal/political identity. By drawing from an assembled, unorthodox framework of decolonized feminist thought and Buddhist philosophy, this study operationalizes the methodology of embodied portraiture to capture, interpret, and illustrate the ways in which transformative moments in these scholars lives shape their work. What surfaces is a shared story of how these women of color come to inhabit their paradoxical position within empire through the experiences and practices of silence, anger, and reconciliation; as well as the creation and participation of resistant socialities; helping to extend the work of Pinayist pedagogical praxis.
Nicole’s Burden: The Chingada in Philippine Discourse
In Spanish, chingada means "the woman who asks for it. " In this paper, I argue that "Nicole" of the controversial 2005 Subic rape case trial, exempli es this Latin American myth in the Philippine imaginary. By looking at blog reposting of news articles and editorials on the Subic Rape Case together with the commentaries and blog discussions that it has spurred among activists, Filipino-Americans, and the general public from 2005-2009, I examine both formal and informal public discourse around the trial, with a focus on Filipinos' gendered and sexualized view of interracial dynamics.
Our Heroic Mothers: The Domestic Helper in Contemporary Fiction from the Philippines
This conference paper examines the representations of the Filipina domestic helper in Jose Dalisay's novel, "Soledad's Sister" (2008). It has since been published as a full paper in 2018: Between Danger and Pleasure: Rethinking the Imperilled Filipina Migrant Body in Jose Dalisay's Soledad's Sister. See: https://www.academia.edu/38028974/Between\_Danger\_and\_Pleasure\_Rethinking\_the\_Imperilled\_Filipina\_Migrant\_Body\_in\_Jose\_Dalisays\_Soledads\_Sister
Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas, 2018
This article focuses on queer Filipino artists who deploy familial memories to produce important knowledge around what it means to be queer, racialized, and diasporic in Canada. Through Patrick Salvani's drag show Sarap (2017) and Casey Mecija's short film My Father, Francis (2013), the author tracks how familial memories expose the contradictions inherent in being sexually and racially marginalized within this multicultural, settler colonial space. Sarap and My Father, Francis activate various scenes of domestic-ity to disturb the teleological tropes with which the private and the public have been institutionally compartmentalized. Both also offer examples of Filipino Canadian critique that resist the assimilationary ruse of respectability through economic value and ideological worth. These works reorganize the meaning of " finding happiness, " not by drawing from overwrought narratives of familial " inclusion, " but by mining the complex affects that often emanate from the histories, burdens, and pains of family members.
Journal of the Motherhood Initiative, 2022
When President Trump called COVID-19 the "Chinese virus," media outlets picked up the term and spread it like wildfire. Many Asian Americans experienced both verbal and physical abuse and an unprecedented rate of discrimination towards them in places that used to be more inclusive. A sixty-seven-year-old Asian woman got brutally attacked in New York City for just being Asian-an incident that revealed to Asian people that the United States (US) no longer welcomed them. These anti-Asian hate crimes combined with postpartum depression (PPD) made me emotionally ill. Desperate for uplift, I took on expressive writing as a therapeutic tool to cope with the childbirth trauma, oppression, and racism I experienced. Through rounds of thematic analysis, I used four different themes to restory the critical events: 1) my earlier racial identity: colourism in Thai and American cultures; 2) (denied) access to spaces: immigrating while Asian; 3) being silenced during labour; and 4) baby love leads to (Asian) self-love. This article examines the role of internalized racism and racial inequity that a Thai mother-scholar experiences while immigrating, settling, and giving birth in the US.
MELUS (Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the United States), 2014
In Peter Bacho’s novel Cebu (1991), Ben Lucero, a Filipino American Catholic priest living in Seattle, makes his first trip to the Philippines to bury his deceased mother. While returning to his roots in Cebu and Manila, Ben witnesses surges of religious and political violence that prompt his quick retreat from the poverty and corruption of the Philippines back to the “order” and “sanctuary” of Seattle (133). Literary scholars such as Elizabeth H. Pisares interpret Ben’s retreat as an escape from his social debt to the Philippines, arguing that Ben “evades what he perceives as a foreign Filipino discourse represented by utang na loob, or reciprocal indebtedness” (80). Yet Ben’s return can also be seen as a way of paying off a different social debt: his debt to the Pacific Northwest for providing a space of liberal tolerance. Throughout the novel, Ben shows gratitude to the Northwest for providing a space where violence, corruption, and poverty are displaced onto the history and geography of the Filipino homeland. Despite Ben’s imagined removal from violence, in the second half of the novel, the Filipino migrants living in Seattle become entangled in cycles of revenge and murder that rupture the distancing of spatial and historic violence in the Philippines. To pay off his debt to both his host country and homeland, Ben performs as the Asian American model minority and encourages his Filipino congregation to do the same by abandoning their diasporic cultural practices, which he reads as gang violence in the case of Filipino men and sexual promiscuity in the case of Filipina women. Ben sees such practices, such as loyalty to one’s barkada (one’s peer group and community), as cultural attitudes that are intolerable to the Northwest’s multicultural social space because they foster religious ignorance and gang violence.