Organizer: Roland B. Tolentino, University of the Philippines

Chair: Nerissa Balce, University of Massachusetts-Amherst

Discussant: Maria Josephine Barrios, University of the Philippines

The panel examines the divergent and dialogical issues in the contest for histories in state violence in the Philippines, specifically emanating from the spectacularization of the Marcosian body and its enforcement as the primordial national body. Integral to the megalomaniac construction of the Marcos’s conjugal body is the accessorizing of other national bodies and sexualities—working class, gay, and emasculated men, among others. Through analyses of various cultural practices representing the period and beyond, the panel foregrounds the issues at stake in the spectacles of body in fascism in the Philippines.
The panel is particularly thinking of fascism as a visual language, how it
operated under Martial Law in the Philippines and how artists, writers, poets, working class performances and others recall or rewrite the history and language of Filipino state violence, and its lasting legacies in the substantiation of the more contemporary nation-state. The panel would focus on spectacles and critiques of fascism.

Balce’s paper analyzes the documentary strategies in the film on Imelda Marcos and its evocation of social issues and practices in the literature on the massacre of farmworkers in Hacienda Luisita in 2004. Santa Ana’s paper examines the heightened heteronormative norms of the Marcos dictatorship as the necessary contextual frame to queer read the Filipino American novels produced about the era. Tolentino’s paper discusses the changing macho dancing style as representative of social shifts in ways neoliberal globalization is experienced from the Marcos to the more recent period in Philippine history.

Fascism’s Filipina Face: Viewing "Imelda: Power, Myth, Illusion"
Nerissa Balce, University of Massachusetts-Amherst

In 2003, Filipina American filmmaker Ramona Diaz released "Imelda: Power, Myth, Illusion," a documentary that featured an interview with one of the Philippines’ most recognized and reviled face, Imelda Romualdez Marcos, widow of the former dictator Ferdinand Marcos who ruled the country (1965-1986) with an iron glove for more than two decades. Theirs was a "conjugal dictatorship," as one journalist described it. As husband and wife, the Marcoses believed that the wealth of the country was their own and was for the enjoyment of their kin. While the Marcoses bled the country’s coffers dry, Imelda Marcos’ legendary spending and lavish lifestyle became the subject of Filipino political exposes, popular jokes, and even camp satire. As Filipino fashion designer, Christian Espiritu described it, "many young (Filipina) women went
blind doing the embroidery for the gowns Imelda wore." The presentation examines the documentary strategies of Diaz and how she negotiates, albeit with difficulty, the historical record of the Marcos dictatorship on the one hand, and Imelda as a historical witness and subject, on the other. What is at stake in this presentation is a critique of the gendered and ethnic ("Filipina American") politics of Diaz’s documentary through an analysis of a female historical subject (Imelda Marcos as historical voice) and the repressed history of the Philippines under fascist rule. The paper concludes with a discussion on current conditions in the Philippines, in particular Filipino poets' responses to the 2004 massacre of peasant farmworkers in Hacienda Luisita, the sugar plantation owned by the family of former Philippine president Corazon Aquino. The presentation thus examines the histories of fascism and Filipino state violence through the medium of the celluloid and poetry.

Jeffrey Santa Ana,Dartmouth College

         On September 21, 1972, Ferdinand Marcos, President of the Philippines, issued Proclamation 1081, declaring martial law. For most of the next decade, his dictatorship effectively criminalized political dissent through many mechanisms, including the arrest, torture and murder of opposition figures. Under the guise of creating a "New Society" in the Philippines, Marcos allowed the military to intimidate, kidnap, beat, and murder innocent civilians, while the president, his wife, and a small group of cronies robbed the nation of its resources and wealth. The atrocities suffered by innocent persons were perpetrated, to a certain extent, by the military under heteronormative gender codes of misogynous violence and hatred of homosexual men.  I argue in my presentation that in contemporary queer Filipino American writings, the depiction of patriarchal and heteronormative violence against women, effeminate males, and gay teenagers bears the legacy of the Philippine military’s brutality during the Marcos dictatorship.
  I examine how Queer Filipino American writers, like Bino A. Realuyo in The Umbrella Country and R. Zamora Linmark in Rolling the R’s, characterize Filipino patriarchy in the domestic sphere as violent repression of women and male homosexuals. In both novels, for example, husbands beat their wives, and fathers terrorize their gay sons.  Both novels take place during the Marcos regime of martial law, providing historical context for their depictions of patriarchal brutality, which is linked to military fascism.   My presentation thus analyzes how the violence of Filipino fathers in Linmark’s and Realuyo’s writings is historically embedded in the Marcos era’s fascist masculinity.

Roland B. Tolentino, University of the Philippines

Macho dancing is referred to the type of dance by macho dancers or young male performers in gay bars. Similar to go-go boys, macho dancers perform for a largely gay audience, and more recently, to women overseas contract workers, specifically, Filipina entertainers in Japan. Unlike go-go dancing, macho dancing has an aesthetics of its own. There are two major developments in macho dancing: first, the snake-like dance, quite effeminate that began with the rise of the gay bars in the 1970s, along with the rise of the Marcos dictatorship; second, the more masculine choreography, with reference to macho cultures, such as cowboys, working class, and fantasy characters, and which development in gay bars in the late 1980s or the postMarcos period.

This paper examines the two major shifts in macho dancing and relates it to how Filipino and Filipina labor are feminized in the Philippines. With limited access to work in the country, some eight million Filipino overseas contract workers, mostly women, are deployed abroad, remitting some US$8 billion annually. Because the demand for global work rests on areas of the service sector, men take on feminine jobs to become "exportable." With the intensification of neoliberal globalization being enforced inside the nation-space, newer social identities in the service of newer types of jobs and services are transformed in high demand. This includes the male guest relations officer (similar to a hostess in a night club), male beauty or bikini contestant, all-male performing groups, male pin-up, and underwear fashion models, among others. The macho dancer is reinvented to include a sleeker and more masculine appeal.

What is being undertaken in macho dancing is symptomatic of the changes the Philippines is experiencing under neoliberal globalization. I will first examine the rise of macho dancing in the Philippines, beginning with its origins in the 1970s to the shift in the 1990s, and whose aesthetics is still being experienced up to now. I then proceed with the investigation of the national development policy that emphasized the export of overseas contract workers as constitutive of the development of macho dancing. How is masculinity performed during the Marcos and in the post-dictatorship era? How is macho dancing informative of rise of neoliberal globalization in the Philippines, especially in the feminization of male labor? How does macho dancing "perform" the emasculated Philippine economy and politics? How is macho dancing integral to the possibility of a global Filipino labor, whose net position in the overseas contract market is somehow earmarked in the domestic industries? How does macho dancing reinforce and critique neoliberalism?