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Making Home

This text delves into the interplay between culture, politics, and identity among the Filipino American community, with a focus on the role of women and their bodies as symbols of national culture. It examines the complexities of beauty pageants and palengke-style politics, highlighting the ways in which these alternative spaces of collective action have allowed for transnational connections and resistance against exclusion.

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Making Home

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  1. Making Home Palengke politics & transnational Filipino American identities

  2. Woman & Nation • Woman’s body as synecdoche of national body • Synecdoche – when a part comes to symbolize a whole • Possession of woman’s body & possession of land • Examples: Miss Lien & Ika • Interlocking systems of colonial/militarized domination and patriarchal domination • Woman as bearer of national culture & reproducer of nation • Protection of women parallels protection of land – anticolonial yet patriarchal nationalisms • Burden of women as symbol of national & cultural purity

  3. aodai pageants & politics • aodai as counter-symbol of Communist uniform and symbol of alternate Vietnamese nationalism • aodai pageant: • as celebration of Vietnamese feminine beauty in opposition to white beauty standard • as tool for shaping 2nd generation ethnic identity • Aodai pageant contradictions  “hybridized beauty”?

  4. Cultural Politics & Imaging National Identities • What is “cultural politics”? • culture (n) – the set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterize an institution, organization or group • How are those shared attitudes, values, goals and practices created? How do people come to identify as belonging to a common culture? • Primarily through symbolism, narrative, ritual and creative productions you come to imagine yourself in community with others that all share the same culture • Cultural Politics as tool to imagine/enact ethnic identity in US

  5. Palengke Politics • What is “palengke-style politics”? • “Filipino American ‘politics’ is constituted in and through maps of historical memories of immigration and settlement, of links between original homeland and new destination, of mainstream and informal/alternative political practice, and of ‘Filipinoness’ and ‘Americanness’” (94) • Seeming chaos of hybridized political and cultural practice

  6. Palengke & Pageants • How do beauty pageants in the Filipino American community compare/contrast with the aodai pageants? • Emphasis on “bonds of caring” & “common goals” • transnational connections – damayanand bayanihan • “alternative spaces of collective action” given racist exclusion from mainstream politics (94)

  7. Palengke Politics and Gender • “Some of them told me about feeling exploited as women, although they also said such pageants do have a redeeming value in the ways they support local and Philippine-based communities” (125) • Multiple meaning of beauty (kagandahan) • aesthetic value vs moral value • “manok” – fighting rooster

  8. Questions, Chs 1-4 of Homebound What does it mean to say that” home is both an imagined and an actual geography” (2)? What are the macro and micro forces that influence Filipino immigration into the US (24)? What does YLE mean when she states that the position of Filipinos in the US is one of “differential exclusion”47? How do transnational ties sustained by Filipino immigrants resist this position of “differential inclusion” (71)?

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