Durham; London: Duke University Press, 2012. xii, 295 pp. (B&W illus.) US$24.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-8223-5316-4.
Working with a rich archive of fiction, newspapers, journals, cartoons and blogs written in English by Filipina/os from 1915 to the present, this book traces an extraordinary genealogy of the entwined relations between elite constructions of the transpacific Filipina woman and Philippine nationalism, in the context of Spanish, US and Japanese imperialism. Constructions of modern Western-educated transpacific Filipinas and Philippine nationalism have been haunted by and circulated within, around and through other iconic representations of Filipinas: the loyal and self-sacrificing Maria Clara (Spanish-Filipino) mestiza; the indigenous pre-colonial Malay; and the provincial barrio girl. As a scholar of contemporary migration of Filipina caregivers, I found this book absolutely captivating: today’s vast global Filipina labour diaspora of nurses and caregivers is rooted in the history told in this book. The migration of Filipinas as care workers has been nurtured by a century-long celebration of the modernizing value of a Western education, a central feature of the US “civilizing” mission in the Philippines. The significance of education for Filipinas should not be underestimated: in the early years of US colonial presence, elite “Filipinas were thought [by Americans] to be more amenable to the civilizing influence of the United States than the men” (43).
The contemporary migration of Filipina care workers is also haunted by Cold War anxieties about Western-educated transpacific femininities, which fostered a reactive sentimental rhetoric about Filipina’s loving heart and capacity for care. As the author states, “the Cold War rhetoric of the caring Filipino heart gives life to the contemporary overseas Filipina worker, a woman glorified as her country’s most valuable export” (222).
The genealogy is staged in five parts, in relation to three empires and five moments in history. The complexities of the Maria Clara stereotype, framed within Spanish Catholic rule, is explored through a nuanced reading of José Rizal’s landmark novel, Noli Me Tangere. The production and circulation of transpacific femininities within debates about women’s suffrage and Philippine nationalism through the 1920s and 1930s are examined through periodicals and romance novels written by Filipinos in Manila and the United States. With the Japanese occupation from 1942–1945, new femininities emerged that were rooted in norms of domesticity: New Order Filipinas who practice “practical patriotism” and the “Guerilla Wife.” A rhetoric of domesticity and sentimentality infused Cold War discourse and the book examines novels written by Filipino and feminist Filipina authors to consider both how Filipinas came to be “pigeonholed into the role of caring for Filipinos abroad” (204) and feminists attempted to resist this. Transpacific femininities ends with a short epilogue that considers David Byrne’s 2010 album constructed around Imelda Marcos and predictable stereotypes of Filipina femininity, alongside contemporary feminist bloggers’ attempts to disrupt the femininities that are so closely examined throughout the book.
This is a rich and highly readable historical account that makes a number of important conceptual and empirical interventions. The book certainly disrupts conventional histories of the Philippines told through the figure of a male migrant or guerilla hero in which Filipinas are “only present as an absence” (146). The book not only considers how femininities are deployed in elite masculinist discourses of empire and nation; it recovers a rich archive of Filipina writing that brings women alive as agents of that history. At the same time the book disrupts conventional feminist readings of gender and nation, especially feminist understandings of the way that the figure of woman often works within nationalist discourse by being aligned with nature and the land. Though central to debates about Philippine independence and nationalism throughout the twentieth century, the transpacific Filipina is a troubling and transgressive figure precisely because she is mobile and unfixed. She threatens to destabilize class and race boundaries and heterosexual norms and has a vexed relationship with both the US empire and Philippine nationalism.
This book also brings to feminist scholarship and activism an important and rich history of thinking about the potentials and limits of global “sisterhood.” The Filipina women’s movement has had a long and productively uneasy relationship with the United States, in the first instance because the women’s movement in the US often has not been anti-imperialist. Many Filipina writers and activists since the 1920s also have recognized and been troubled by the deep structures of racial inequality in the United States. Cruz uncovers a century-long history in which Filipina authors have uncovered their own history of gender equality in their Malay past and attempted to imagine political coalitions and transpacific networks that look and work differently than romanticized notions of global sisterhood. Another fascinating strand of this analysis unravels the complicated relationship of Filipinas to other Asian women; Filipinas in the early decades of the twentieth century, for instance, often defined their exceptionalism in relation to their own orientalizing notions of Asian women.
Cruz is a generous reader who deftly negotiates the political subtleties of the writers and writing that she analyses. For instance, critical of the way that the practical patriotism of the Japanese occupation romanticized women’s role as the nation’s heart, she nonetheless notes the importance of this period for re-orienting Filipinas to Asia and creating a productive distance from the influence of the United States. Few of the writers or pieces of writing that she examines fit easily into the categories of radical or conservative, subversive or compliant; they are muddied and muddled by the complexities of gender, race, nationalist and imperial politics.
This book will be of interest to a wide range of scholars in Asian, American and Gender Studies, and across the disciplines of Sociology, Geography, History and Anthropology. It is a rich historical account that does a lot of conceptual work with great subtlety. Transpacific femininities is written to be widely accessible and could be easily used in a wide range of undergraduate and graduate classes.
Geraldine Pratt
The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
pp. 191-193