UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO Banal Spectacles: On the Production of the ʻFilipinoʼ Subject through Performance and Display A Thesis submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Master of Arts in Ethnic Studies by Thea Quiray Tagle Committee in charge: Professor Denise Ferreira da Silva, Chair Professor Rosemary Marangoly George Professor Sara Clarke Kaplan 2010 © Thea Quiray Tagle, 2010 All rights reserved. The Thesis of Thea Quiray Tagle is approved, and it is acceptable in quality and form for publication on microfilm and electronically: Chair University of California, San Diego 2010 iii DEDICATION Para sa mga kababayan ko, maraming salamat sa inyong lahat sa inyong pagtuturo ng pinakamahalagang aral sa aking buhay: Makibaka! Huwag Matakot! iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Signature Page.……………………………………………………………........ iii Dedication.……………………………………………………………………….. iv Table of Contents………………………………………………………………... v Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………. vi Abstract……………………………………………………………………………. viii Introduction ……………………………………………………………………….. 1 Chapter 1 Literature Review …………………………………………………… 27 Chapter 2 At Home in the Nation / The Nation as Home: The Limits of Filipina/American Feminist Discourse …………………………. 65 Chapter 3 Domesticating the Carceral, Incarcerating the Domestic: American Disciplinary Projects in the Philippines……………………………... 98 Chapter 4 Electric Dreams and the Queer Undead: Disciplining the Filipino through Banal Spectacles……………………………. 134 Some Thoughts in Conclusion…………………………………………………... 172 Works Cited………………………………………………………………………... 176 v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This thesis was a labor of love that, many times, I loved to hate. Many thanks go out to those that helped give life to this project. Thank you to Denise Ferreira da Silva and Sara Clarke Kaplan, first and foremost, for the guidance necessary to see this through. Great thanks as well to Rosemary George, who must have wondered just what she signed up for when she agreed to sit as an outside member of my committee. Special appreciation to the other UCSD faculty members that have helped shape this project, oftentimes without their knowing: Patrick Anderson, Lisa Lowe, Pal Ahluwalia, K. Wayne Yang, Jody Blanco, Meg Wesling, and Yen Le Espiritu. Many thanks to the staff of the UCSD campus community centers, for your sage advice and strong hugs, especially Edwina Welch, Nancy Magpusao, Marnie Brookolo, Jan Estrellado, and Anthony Nunez. To my colleagues and friends in the Ethnic Studies department at UCSD, thank you for listening to my nonsense in seminars and helping me procrastinate in coffeeshops all these years, especially José Fusté, Michael Lujan Bevacqua, Traci Brynne Voyles, Jewels Smith, Angela Kong and Marilisa Navarro (best officemates ever!), and Stevie Ruiz. Ευχαριστώ to Theo Verinakis for sending me that silly YouTube video—itʼs all your fault that it came to this. To new but dear friends, who have made this last leg bearable, thank you: Ashvin Kini, Brandon Curry, Davorn Sisavath, Anthony Kim, Anita Huizar-Hernandez, and Oliver Ting. vi Strength and love for my cohort, for surviving this, together: Candice Rice, Eugene Gambol, Kit Myers, Rashné Limki, Ayako Sahara, and Angelica Yañez. To my kasamas Grace Duenas, Elisa Armea, Josen Diaz, Amanda Lee Solomon, Candice Custodio-Tan, and Patricia Guevarra. Thank you for being my sisters in struggle, for being fierce queer Pinays in the belly of the beast. I offer this thesis as one whisper in our collective shout for liberation. Makibaka! I hope this thesis is of some use to the next generation of Filipino/American warriors, even if it is just as a doorstop. Gracelynne West, Carmela and Fatima Capinpin, Red Galura, Janice Sapigao, Frida Pineda, and Chris Datiles— Iʼm looking at you to start the revolution. Nicholas Oliver Mitchell and Anna Schwartz, you keep me grounded. Thank you. To the Quiray family, for birthing me, feeding me pinakbet and adobo when I was hungry (and even when I wasnʼt), and shuttling me between home and the homeland: Maraming salamat sa inyong lahat. Mahal kita. Finally, the most love and appreciation to Eric, Inez, Kali, and now Orby. Our little family makes my burden less heavy. Thank you for keeping me sane, happy, and healthy. I hope I do the same for you. vii ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS Banal Spectacles: On the Production of the ʻFilipinoʼ Subject through Performance and Display by Thea Quiray Tagle Master of Arts in Ethnic Studies University of California, San Diego, 2010 Professor Denise Ferreira da Silva, Chair My thesis makes a critical intervention into both scholarship and activism that privileges a heteronormative Filipino/American subject at the center of its political and ethical claims. Using the historical cases of the Iwahig and Bilibid prisons, the Culion Leper Colony, the 1904 St. Louis Worldʼs Fair, and the contemporary YouTube videos of Filipino dancing prisoners, I explore the ways that all Filipino subjects have been produced as queer or non-heteronormative through the technique of banal spectacles of viii performance and display by both the colonial and the contemporary neoliberal regimes. This history, I believe, has been disavowed by leftist Filipino/American scholars and activists, who instead focus their human rights appeals on explicitly heterosexual, feminized ʻvictimsʼ—the trafficked women, the mail-order bride, and the self-sacrificing overseas migrant worker—to the exclusion of any and all others. I argue that due to their reliance on heteronormative notions of the family and the nation in their political discourse, liberal and radical political activists and scholars are stymied in their ability to imagine a Philippine nation-state that is not economically and politically dependent on the United States and on global institutions such as the World Bank and the IMF. Rather than claim the heteronormative Filipino/American subject as the only one deserving of rights and recognition, how can we as committed scholars and activists develop a radical queered politics of liberation for all? ix INTRODUCTION The 'primitive' body as object reaffirms the cultural supremacy and authority of the viewing subject, the one who is free to come and go (while the native stays fixed in place and time), the one who sees, interprets, and records. The native is the show; the civilized observer the privileged spectator. We, those viewers who look through the eyes of the explorer are (like the explorer) positioned safely outside the frame, free to define, theorize their (never our) societies. The 'encounters' with the native create us as audience just as much as the violence of definition creates them, the primitives.... Domination depends on maintaining a unidirectional gaze and stages the lack of reciprocity and mutual understanding inherent in discovery. —Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire This is what America has been longing for: a Jailhouse Rock which they only saw in Elvis Presley. —Byron F. Garcia, Special Security Consultant for the Cebu Provincial Rehabilitation and Detention Center, the Philippines On July 17, 2007, a man using the handle ʻbyronfgarciaʼ uploaded a short, four minute-long video onto the popular video file-sharing website, YouTube. Within a week, his clip, dubbed the “Philippine Prison Thriller Video,” had been viewed over 1.9 million times, gained the attention of the international media, and had even broken a world record. The question that begs to be asked is: what was so exceptional about the “Philippine Prison Thriller Video” that garnered this frenzy of popular attention, and why is it significant? The novelty of the video was simply this: featured in the video were over 1,000 orange-clad inmates from the Cebu Provincial Rehabilitation and Detention Center (or the CPDRC) in the Philippines, dancing in perfect synchronization to a recording of Michael Jacksonʼs 1982 hit song, “Thriller.” Beyond the technical feat of choreographing 1 2 the large number of dancers, the performersʼ identities as incarcerated subjects also served as an intriguing draw: a recurring comment by average viewers and the press noted surprise at this fact as well as favorable comparisons of this ʻhappyʼ spectacle to the violence occurring within Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, and other notorious carceral spaces. Responses to the video from YouTube viewers ranged from amusement (“That is sooooo freaking fabulous. That is a reallly realllly cool prison want to go there”) to approval (“I think this is a great performance...looks professional. Nice to see them doing something other than sitting around”) to flippant (“I think I shall go to Cebu and kill some people to dance”); yet very rarely do they elicit concern from the casual viewer or even from those of us who are actively involved with fighting for womenʼs and human rights in the Philippines.1 Moreover, the ambiguous gender and sexual identity of the main ʻfemaleʼ character of the performance, played by a bakla male prisoner named Wiendjiel Resane, also elicited a mix of ire and confusion from spectators, most evidenced in the running commentary on the YouTube page where the video is hosted.2 These factors, together, contributed to the initial surge of interest in this video and the continued popularity of the subsequent videotaped dance performances to other American, European, and Asian pop songs. As of May 2009, there were thirty-five performances on byronfgarciaʼs YouTube page, with new videos being produced and disseminated on a near-monthly basis, making this phenomenon enduring rather