SOURCE: Lee, Rachel C. “Transversing Nationalism, Gender, and Sexuality in Jessica Hagedorn's Dogeaters.” In The Americas of Asian American Literature: Gendered Fictions of Nation and Transnation, pp. 73-105. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999.

[In the following essay, Lee argues that Hagedorn's unique Filipino perspective on American spectatorship and cinematic archetypes in Dogeaters creates a powerful critique of neocolonialism and late capitalism.]

[Hagedorn's novels are] the kinds of novels that will be written in the next century. They make the typical American novel look very gray.

—Ishmael Reed

Dogeaters begins in the air-conditioned darkness of Manila's Avenue Theater where the American release “All That Heaven Allows” plays in Technicolor and Cinemascope. Like the narrator, Rio, and her cousin Pucha, Hagedorn's readers sit enthralled to the movie's “perfect picture-book American tableau, plaid hunting jackets, roaring cellophane fires, [and] smoking chimneys” (3). Not until the second paragraph is the reader momentarily interrupted by the sound of noisy lovers stealing kisses in the theater's darkness; yet quickly the focus returns to “Jane Wyman's soft putty face, Rock Hudson's singular, pitying expression … [and] the virginal, pastel-pink cashmere cardigan draped over Gloria Talbott's shoulders” (3). The screen stretches across the audience's imagination until Hagedorn pans back to remind them that they are also voyeurs in this scene—both observers of and participants in the seduction of American film.

It is this enticing quality to Hagedorn's narrative reproductions of American film that critics of Dogeaters find both captivating and irksome: the representation of American movies—symbols of the United States' colonial legacy—ought to instruct the reader on the continued cultural imperialism being effected in the Philippines rather than delight him/her with reproduced, spectacular details. In so effectively portraying the allure by which cultural imperialism operates, Hagedorn's text itself undergoes scrutiny as to whether it is “Filipino” or “American” (Gonzalez 1991, 191), expression of indigenous talent or the rearranged debris of an American entertainment industry. The author's emigration to the United States (in 1961) almost three decades before Dogeaters's publication fuels charges that she misrepresents Manila by overemphasizing a colonized mentality and by not portraying a nonbourgeois nationalist counterculture adequately.¹ One might answer such critiques on the grounds of representation alone: while the author's putative subject is Filipino society during the Marcos regime, her book might be better read as a creative document from a Filipino American perspective that emphasizes America's cultural dominance on the islands in order to critique that dominance, even as the author reinscribes it. Yet, I would further argue that it is through the attributed “weakness” of Hagedorn's novel that her narrative conducts such a powerful critique of neocolonialism and late capitalism. By illustrating the seductiveness of American film, Hagedorn challenges her audience to sympathize with the journey toward political “awakening” and the colonial mentality that both precedes and coexists with it. Like Fanon, she refuses to rank her Filipino characters according to their degree of revolutionary consciousness and instead legitimates the perspectives of colonized peoples in their various aspects (i.e., in their rejection and embrace of Western artifacts and technology).²

Moreover, for Hagedorn, “revolutionary consciousness” in a postcolonial context involves not only nationalist but also feminist and gay awakenings.³ Yet critics of Hagedorn have left unremarked the fact that Hagedorn depicts the Marcos years, not from the perspective of elected officials and their military henchmen, but from the perspective of these leaders' mistresses, sisters, daughters, and wives. (The large exception to this rule is the gay male character, Joey Sands, a half-“black American” prostitute.) That such stories are deemed repetitive rather than radical has implications for our assessments of radicalness on the whole.

In this chapter, I survey the specific debates around Hagedorn's novel and place these debates in the context of the postcolonial, feminist, and spectatorship theories which they inform and by which they are informed. First I explore the issue of Hagedorn's style of narration, specifically how critics have negatively responded to what they construe as the novel's regressive politics by focusing on her “postmodern” writing practices—that is, her nonrealist mode of narration. A major plank of my argument is that a gendered subtext underlies these representational critiques, especially those that find fault in Hagedorn's “repetitive” aesthetic. Therefore, I deconstruct the multiple (feminist and gay) subject positions that lend “originality” to Hagedorn's “cinematext of the Third World” (San Juan 1992, 118). In placing women at the center of her narrative, Hagedorn contributes to an evolving tradition of literary works that detail Asian/Pacific feminine postcoloniality, such as Wendy Law-Yone's The Coffin Tree, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictée, Ninotchka Rosca's State of War, Lois-Ann Yamanaka's Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers, and Sara Suleri's Meatless Days. The final part of this chapter attends to Hagedorn's portrait of the constrained choices offered to postcolonial female subjects, whose sexual desires are too often channeled into programs of good citizenship. Hagedorn probes the ways in which the unruly sexual desires of Filipinas are nationally disavowed.

With this discussion of Dogeaters, I also shift focus somewhat toward a work set beyond official U.S. territorial borders—yet not beyond the reach of American and Asian American imaginings. While Bulosan's, Jen's, and Hagedorn's novels are all ostensibly concerned with cultural institutions exemplifying “Americanness,” they nevertheless differ quite substantially in their choice of settings and forms of political critique. Both Bulosan's and Jen's novels alert their readers to the perils of exclusion on a domestic terrain by critiquing, to varying degrees, the gendered and racial terms of the United States' social, political, and cultural institutions. By contrast, Hagedorn's narrative concerns itself with the perils of “inclusion,” so to speak—of U.S. territorial encroachments upon sites outside its borders. Becoming legitimate members of the U.S. nation-state is not necessarily the goal of postcolonial subjects.

THE POLITICS OF POSTREALISM

Though Dogeaters ostensibly portrays Filipino society during the Marcos regime (c.1965-1986), its recollection and restaging of American cinema suggests that the author's concern is not so much with the varied and complex communities inhabiting the Philippines as much as with a particular encounter between U.S. popular culture and Manila's metropolitan society. In this respect, the novel appears to underscore city resident Paul Dumol's sentiment that “the strongest single influence on the Philippines is that of mass culture. … We are the province, the outlands for the big city which is across the Pacific” (Denton and Villena-Denton, 180).⁴ The encounter that both Dumol and Hagedorn describe, rather than overtly condemn, is one in which Manila residents take pleasure in and identify with icons of U.S. popular culture.⁵ In that identification, Filipinos alter the significance of these iconic acts, making it difficult to determine where the American cultural markers end and the Filipino ones begin.

That blurring of Filipino and American identities has a genealogical corollary in the ancestral backgrounds of the novel's first-person narrators, Rio Gonzaga and Joey Sands. American bloodlines and the persistent allure of the U.S. entertainment industry overdetermine both their identities. For instance, the opening chapter introduces Rio's maternal grandfather, an American named Whitman Logan. Almost an icon of the United States, Rio's grandfather sports the famous American poet's name and hails from the heartland of that nation, the Midwest. However, Rio knows relatively little about her grandfather and has to “invent [her] own history” from a mosaic of Hollywood clips (259). When her comatose grandfather yells in his sleep, “Chicago, Chicago, Chicago,” a “movie projector goes off in [Rio's] head. … June Allyson descends from a winding staircase, wearing a ball-gown made of gold-flecked, plastic shower curtains” (16). Through cinematic iconography, Rio makes sense of her familial relations. Scripts of American entertainment thus provide Rio with a syntax—an enabling and constraining structure—with which to understand her midwestern past.

Joey's American ancestry likewise reminds the reader of the United States' lingering presence on the islands. Only by indirection does the narrative reveal Joey's paternity. The German filmmaker Rainer inquires of the narrator: “‘Your father—he was a black American, yes? Andres told me.’ ‘Andres talks too much,’ I say, though I don't really mind. ‘He was stationed at Subic Bay—that's all I know about him. Not his name. Not anything’” (146). Only half way through the novel does Hagedorn reveal that Joey's father is a guardian of the U.S. military bases on the islands. This textual submergence of the militia's presence mimics the subdued infiltration of the islands by an American neocolonial presence.

Though Joey knows little about his paternity, he strives against national anonymity by proposing his own American last name. When Joey's former lover Neil returns to the United States, he sends Joey a postcard from the “Sands” Hotel: “That's where I got my last name. … ‘The Sands.’ A casino in Las Vegas” (72). The choice of surname both memorializes Joey's relationship to Neil and represents a prospective avenue of escape: “It's gonna be good. I know how to get to Neil. He'll send for me: We can live in Vegas or L.A.” (77). Naming himself after a monument of American entertainment, Joey locates his origin and destiny in U.S. celluloid space.

As these examples indicate, Rio's and Joey's ties to the States are both “real” and imagined. “Reality” seems to inhere in the body—in one's bloodline. Imagination, by contrast, remains a surreal exercise in recalling and repeating what are themselves reproduced images—postcard photographs and movie clips. Yet in accepting these labels unquestioningly, one is in danger of locating the “real” in America and of privileging a Western site of “production” over and against an Asian (and Asian American) site of “reproduction.” The fixing of the “real” in bloodline suggests that reality rests in an (American) patriarchal dissemination of national identity. Reality springs from Western seeds rather than from native self-invention. That both practices yield an American(ized) identity illustrates Hagedorn's use of the West as determining text of her novel (i.e., after colonialism, there is no “outside” to the text of Westernization). Yet, the difference lies in whether reality is to located in a Western implantation of genetic material—in a historical past—or whether it is to be located in the native's interpretation and performances of Western images—in a postcolonial, performative present.

Hagedorn tacitly questions the reductiveness of oppositional politics that couch any signs of Americanness as evidence of the ethnic, minority, or Third World subject's co-optation (that measures resistance in terms of “pure” native identity, or by the purity of one's native sources). The Americanness of her protagonists' identities is something they cannot avoid, making their desire for America all the more complex. Does this desire indicate their consent to dominant ideologies, or is it an inevitable effect of their ancestry? Clearly, for the two first-person narrators of American extraction, the United States, its cinematic imports, and its cultural modes for ordering the world are concepts they cannot entirely reject. But even for those characters not directly descended from American stock, the narrative suggests an overwhelming magnetism toward the brutality and seduction of America. As one character, Senator Avila, puts it, “[We are] a complex nation of cynics, descendants of warring tribes which were baptized and colonized to death by Spaniards and Americans. … [We are] a nation betrayed and then united only by our hunger for glamour and our Hollywood dreams” (101). America is not only an enticing entertainer but also a possible, though suspect, ground for the collective identity of Filipinos. That is, the commonalty of American “betrayal”—violent conquest, that is—is one definitive experience that the disparate archipelagic peoples share.⁶

If, in Bulosan's narrative, America was the promise of brotherly equality and the reality of capitalist exploitation, and if, in Jen's text, America is the promise of an economic and subjective limitlessness that is undergirded by gendered violence, then, in Dogeaters, America is both the imperial power that colludes with native leadership and the cultural wash that forms Filipino/Filipina subjectivity and desire. It is this contradiction—that America can comprise both an oppressive enemy as well as a formative component of Filipino identity and desire (most emphatically through the influence of Hollywood film)—that fuels much of the controversy surrounding the novel as to whether it “sets back the race,” misrepresents and exoticizes Filipinos, cleaves to a regressive socioeconomic message and style, or even tells a well-written story.⁷ In fact, it is oftentimes difficult to separate critical disdain directed at the entertainment industry and, by extension, at Hagedorn for peopling her novel with celebrity personas, from political critiques aimed at the novel's supposed exoticization of Filipinos that might also be derivative of Hollywood stereotypes. I take as a fundamental premise of this chapter, then, that in the assessment of several of Hagedorn's critics, scenes, tropes, and stylistic innovations borrowed from the American film and broadcasting industries are integrally linked to—even serve as synecdoches for—the evils of the United States (i.e., in their readings, “cinema” stands in for imperial dominance and/or capitalist ideology).

In his review of Dogeaters, Leonard Casper expresses an implicit desire for a more realist narrative that hinges on believable characters and narrators that will demonstrate class conflict in Philippine society so as to propel and resolve the narrative in an affirmation of the ideal of “communitarianism” (Casper, 153).⁸ The literary critic objects to the superficial wash of dreams, desires, and images that comprise Dogeaters's style and that, moreover, parallels a thematic focus on “loss of memory, a loss of destination and direction, and then … a loss of reality altogether” (Casper, 153). Both Casper and E. San Juan Jr., two critics vastly different in their political stances, share a highly critical view of “postmodern” writing of which Hagedorn's novel is only one example. From an aesthetician's perspective, Casper comments on Hagedorn's risking “what many a postmodern author risks: negligible characterization; discontinuity, in place of causality” (157), “the impression of drift and shapelessness” (154), and a puzzling “lack of accurate, sequential chronology in the narrative” (154). Despite his quarrel with Dogeaters's flaws, Casper avoids dismissing the narrative's politics wholesale, as San Juan does in his Marxist evaluation of the novel's repetitive style, upon which I will elaborate.⁹ Both critics seem to desire a greater degree of realism, if by realism one means a style of writing committed to the representation of contemporary social issues, where “characters develop in relation to entrenched institutions and the struggle between classes” (A. Kaplan 1988, 2), as opposed to a tradition of romance, where “the creative power of the mind [shapes] its own reality within the limits of moral ambiguity rather than the field of social relations” (A. Kaplan 1988, 4).¹⁰ In tracing the historical context of this literary movement in America, Amy Kaplan characterizes realism as an idiom or cognitive principle of ordering a world made somewhat “unreal [by] intense class conflicts which [produce] fragmented and competing social realities, and [by] the simultaneous development of mass culture which [dictates] an equally threatening homogenous reality” (A. Kaplan 1988, 9). Thus, realism confronts a chaotic (unreal) world of social upheaval by promising a transparent vision of the material world and a spectatorial position from which one can “control and produce the real world by seeing it without being seen in turn” (7; emphasis added). Though Kaplan is describing a body of texts and mode of writing particular to turn-of-the-century America, her observations on realism's politics that lie precisely within its representational capacities can be most illuminating to the type of narrative mode that Dogeaters violates and that critics of the novel hold up as an implicit standard of comparison.

Dogeaters's postrealist style is not “post-” because it avoids limning social relations but because it defies conventions of objective recording. Rather than conveying the upheaval of the Marcoses' rule through a panoptic, godlike vision, Hagedorn steeps her narrative in questionable recordings and skewed looks. She continually highlights the subjective viewpoint from which one observes an event, constantly switching perspectives and, in doing so, suggesting that social relations also inhere in who looks, who writes, who represents—determinations that are plural rather than singular. Several critics have remarked on Hagedorn's calling into question the veracity of the primary storytellers' narratives, those of Rio and Joey, through the contesting voice of Pucha Gonzaga in the penultimate chapter of the book (Balce-Cortes and Nguyen). Pucha demurs, “Rio, you've got it all wrong. … You like to mix things up on purpose. … I'm no intelektwal as you've pointed out loud and clear, but my memory's just as good as anybody's.” (248). Pucha insists on the legitimacy of the nonintellectual's perspective, the perspective of those who are often the observed rather than the official observers, those whose memories are characterized as too subjective or to be valuable.¹¹

Rather than adopt a third-person “intelektwal” narration that constructs an observing subject position that is not observed, in turn, by others, Dogeaters proceeds from narrative perspectives that stress the positions of both the anthropological “pure native” who is habitually seen through the lens of Western expertise (see Trinh 1989) and the urban “native” or Third World celebrity constructed by media reports and gossip, whose reality is part lived, part made up, but always under view. Both types of “natives” share the quality of “to-be-looked-at-ness,” a phrase coined by feminist film scholars to describe the spectatorial position women occupy on the screen (Mulvey, 33). Hagedorn takes seriously the perspectives of the watched, the gazed upon, the icons of spectatorial pleasure (and contempt) who offer counternarratives to the official “information” produced about Filipinos by political and intellectual authorities such as the nineteenth-century French traveler Jean Mallat and the American president William McKinley. Rather than offering a single perspective on “reality,” Hagedorn presents several conflicting and simultaneous narratives that exist in a horizontal relationship to one another.

Narratives like Pucha's effectively jolt the reader, taking him or her out of the story and into a consideration of who is telling the story, whether the story is “true,” and what economic and political ends motivate the story's construction. The “jump-cuts” from one perspective to another that Hagedorn employs effectively halt the narrative—a strategy, as detailed in the last chapter, that opens that narrative up to critical reflection. The impression of “discontinuity” that Casper discerns in the sequential unfolding of events might register precisely this critical awareness in the narrating subject not just of seeing but of being seen, a pause where the speaker considers his or her subjective space and its difference, as well as relation to those other social actors and forces in view. Rather than dismissing this discontinuity as an aesthetic glitch in the story line, we might consider it a critical juncture, allowing one to question the ideological narrative by which one unconsciously operates, whether that be faith in Western progress or faith in transparent discursive access to the “real.”

It is this innovation of reproducing well-worn screen images from the position of the nonintellectuals, those people “to be looked at” rather than thought also to be looking back, that critics of Hagedorn's postmodern style seem to miss in their dismissal of how it recycles cinematic staples. The novel's style of narration—its heterogeneous presentations of an event from one perspective and then picking up the story from another perspective—comes under direct criticism from E. San Juan Jr., whose review of Hagedorn's novel is part of his broader enunciations of Filipino identity politics and U.S. racial politics.¹² Driving the essay is San Juan's critique of liberal pluralism and its celebration of cross-cultural contact and hybrid identities. Emphasizing the imbalances of power that structure such exchanges, San Juan claims that one cannot define hybrid identities, such as “the Filipino American subject-position” without “elucidating what the problematic relation is between the two terms which dictates the conditions of possibility for each—the hyphen or nexus which spells a relation of domination and subordination” (San Juan 1992, 125). In other words, transnational, hybrid identities such as the exiled Filipino or the American-born Filipino, must be articulated as a problem, a vexing allegory of international policies and America's global hegemony, rather than a dual heritage that can be remembered with pride. While agreeing with San Juan's critique of a facile pluralism and identity politics, I would demur from several other of his points, most emphatically the leaps his argument takes from pluralism to postmodernism to Jessica Hagedorn's Dogeaters, in order to condemn the latter two through guilt by association. Three sentences testify to these leaps, but I quote the preceding sentence for clarification:

[It is easy to take] pride in the fact that we are beneficiaries of both cultures, East and West, and that our multicultural awareness, our cosmopolitanism, enables us to partake of the feast of humanity's accomplishments—from Egyptian funerary art and Plato's ideas to the latest IBM computer. This is in fact the fashionable axiom of postmodern theorizing. The postmodernist technique of pastiche, aleatory juxtaposition, virtuoso bricolage carried to its logical culmination, is what presides in the first part of Dogeaters—a flattening of heterogeneous elements approximating Las Vegas simultaneity—until the introduction of Joey Sands, symbol of what is actually meant by “special Filipino American relations,” forces the text to generate a semblance of a plot (cause-effect sequence, plausible motivation, etc.) whereby the scenario of sacrifice—Joey's slaughter of [the dog] Taruk, iconic sign for the surrogate father who also functions as castrator/betrayer, and for all the other patriarchs upholding the code of filial piety—is able to take place and the discourse to end in a prayer to the Virgin “mother of revenge.” But that vestige of the traditional art of storytelling, in which irreconcilable victims of a neocolonial regime end up in a revolutionary camp plotting retribution, finds itself embedded and even neturalized by a rich multilayered discourse (exotic to a Western audience) empowered by what Henri Lefebvre (1971, 1976) calls the capitalist principle of repetition.

(San Juan 1992, 125)

I would first contest San Juan's characterization of liberal pluralism (i.e., “our multicultural awareness …”) as “the fashionable axiom of postmodern theorizing.” San Juan focuses purely on formalist symptoms of postmodernity rather than connecting discursive tools such as “bricolage” and “pastiche” to the political critique of which they are a part. By contrast, David Harvey paraphrases this “positive” account of postmodernism given by the editors of the architectural journal Precis 6:

[P]ostmodernism [is] a legitimate reaction to the “monotomy” [sic] of universal modernism's vision of the world. “Generally perceived as positivistic, technocentric, and rationalistic, universal modernism has been identified with the belief in linear progress, absolute truths, the rational planning of ideal social orders, and the standardization of knowledge and production”. … [By contrast,] fragmentation, indeterminacy, and intense distrust of all universal or “totalizing” discourses (to use the favoured phrase) are hallmark of postmodernist thought.

(Harvey, 8-9)

“Fragmentation,” which Dogeaters exhibits in quantity, is not merely the sign of Hagedorn's “virtuoso” writing skill, but an expressive tool through which the author contests absolute truths and narratives of progress such as they are exhibited par excellence in McKinley's speech justifying the “taking” of the Philippines as an act of Godly inspiration (71). In other words, Hagedorn's novel, though sharing some stylistic hallmarks of postmodernism, might be better characterized as “‘decolonizing’ writing,” as defined by Lisa Lowe: “‘[D]ecolonizing’ writing, which may include features associated with postmodernism (such as nonlinear, antirepresentational aesthetics), emerges not from a terrain of philosophical or poetic otherness within the West but out of the contradictions of what Bipan Chandra has called the ‘colonial mode of production’” (Lowe 1996, 108). Hagedorn's thwarting of traditional linear, realist narratives that purvey the “truth” stylistically parallels her text's thematic critique of U.S. imperialism.

Digging deeper into San Juan's rhetoric, one discovers the critic's reluctant concession of “a semblance of a plot” that stars the hero, Joey, symbolically killing the father and then joining “a revolutionary guerrilla camp plotting retribution.” Leaving aside the argument that “killing the father” cleaves to its own principle of repetition, one might raise an eyebrow at San Juan's finding the only residual plot in the story that features one of Hagedorn's few male protagonists. The dozen or so story lines that feature female protagonists clearly do not qualify as “semblances of plots.”¹³ Moreover, in San Juan's estimation, Joey's narrative isn't quite “plausible” until he becomes an enemy of the state (i.e., when he is forced to become part of the underground resistance movement). Thus, the narratives of Joey's homosexual desire, his objectification by Western johns, and his capitalizing on Western tourists' curiosity about native sexuality are also merely distractions from the “traditional art of storytelling.”

A gendered subtext drives San Juan's critique of Hagedorn's “repetitious” narrative: the traditional story featuring a nationalist politico is “embedded” and “neutralized” by the pastiche of the novel's first part, which precisely focuses upon female desires and homosexuality. Gender and sexuality mediate for San Juan what counts as a story and what registers as “trivia” (118). His critique of Hagedorn's pastiche, then, remains blind to the revisionist qualities of her several stories: they may be re-limning the frame of a postcolonial, transnational culture but they are doing so from the perspective of the perpetual nonsubjects of history. Dogeaters thus retells the story of the Marcos years, not from the perspective of political and military leaders, the Western press, or subaltern historiographers, but largely from the viewpoints of Filipina mistresses, sisters, daughters, and wives. (Thus, turning Jen's strategy on its head, Hagedorn text returns to women quite literally, placing them in the protagonist roles.)

That the predicament of such women cannot be “resolved” solely through native, nationalist liberation becomes clear upon examining Hagedorn's portrait of bomba star, Lolita Luna. Though she is the object of mass audiences' adoration, Lolita Luna possesses relatively little power and agency over her body as “exploded” to watchers around the nation. In his article “Patronage and Pornography,” Vicente Rafael examines the circumscribed role of the bomba star by correlating her emergence with the rise of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos's politics of spectacle. According to Rafael, bomba—literally meaning “bomb”—became synonymous with impassioned political rhetoric where the speaker would “reveal something about another politician that the latter would have preferred to keep secret (291). Associated with scandal, bomba came to refer to the spate of soft and hard-core pornographic films produced in the Philippines during the late sixties and early seventies. The bomba star, like Imelda, represented a new sort of ambitious female who aspired to what seemed a powerful position in the limelight. However, according to Rafael, these women were the vehicles through which government leaders and film producers “taught” the viewing audience to enjoy their passive recipient position. Attending campaign rallies became an opportunity to hear Imelda's singing performance rather than to assess Ferdinand's political promises. Women thus emerged as both a lure and a tool through which male agents could enact their “larger intentions.”

Though a leading actress in Manila's celluloid industry, Lolita Luna, clearly suspecting her circumscribed lot, desires “her own ticket out of the country” (177). This ticket presents itself in two highly suspect forms: Lolita can appeal to her sexual patron, General Ledesma, to secure her a visa to the States; failing his help, Lolita “has one more option”—to accept an offer to star in an “experimental art film” which “would involve lengthy close-ups of Lolita Luna's vagina … teased by the gleaming blade of a knife, for example, or perhaps a stubby black pistol” (177). “Beauty” excuses the explosion of bodies on screen as it later justifies the implosion of bodies off screen. That is, this aestheticized violence repeats itself in the form of Imelda Marcos's beautification campaigns designed to make the country more hospitable to tourism and cinematic culture. In her efforts to render Manila a mecca for filmmakers, the First Lady announces the construction of a privately supported thirty-five million dollar cultural center. When the partially erected structure caves in, the Iron Butterfly orders the building to continue: “More cement is poured over dead bodies; they finish exactly three hours before the first foreign film is scheduled to be shown” (130).¹⁴

Whereas colonialism designates an era of overt violence that ostensibly “ends” with the withdrawal of occupying troops, “imperialism lingers,” as Edward Said suggests, in the bodies of formerly occupied peoples:

Imperialism … lingers … in a kind of general cultural sphere as well as in specific political, ideological, economic, and social practices. … Although that era [of empire] clearly had an identity all its own, the meaning of the imperial past is not totally contained within it, but has entered the reality of hundreds of millions of people, where its existence as shared memory … still exercises tremendous force.

(Said 1993, 9, 12)

The most obvious aspect in which empire lingers is through neocolonialism, a repetition of imperialist strategies by “native” agents. Thus, violence, economic exploitation, and civil rights abuses, though condemned when perpetuated by foreign powers, become sanctioned as necessary components of a native nationalist program. In the same way in which art-house directors recuperate pornographic violence in the name of “art,” neocolonialists reframe violence as necessary to the interests of nativism. These recuperations of violence leave women somewhere in the middle; their bodies become the terrain across which colonizers and neocolonialists alike ruthlessly represent themselves.

Who is the enemy and who the savior, then, between the art-house producer and Lolita's lover, General Ledesma, highest-ranking member of the nation's military cadre? The former wishes to confer her greater currency in the European market, while the latter wishes to confine her to his personal use at home. At the mercy of the cinematic imperialist on the one hand and the nationalist military leader on the other, the bomba star bears a striking resemblance to Gayatri Spivak's subaltern woman. Describing the symbolic use of women around the issue of sati (widow immolation), Spivak writes “the abolition of this rite by the British has been generally understood as a case of ‘White men saving brown women from brown men.’ … Against this is the Indian nativist argument, a parody for lost origins: ‘she wanted to die.’ The two sentences go a long way to legitimize each other. One never encounters the testimony of the women's voice-consciousness” (Spivak 1988a, 297).¹⁵ In the imperialist portrait, women are the objects of male protection. In the native nationalist's description, women are indeed the subjects of the sentence but only by virtue of their sacrificial capacities (i.e., they come into subjectivity only by embodying native tradition). In neither discourse are women speaking.

Lolita Luna, by contract, does speak, and given Spivak's formulation, she is not properly subaltern. However, one might characterize her as sharing the postcolonial female subject's peculiar position—caught between two patriarchal discourses (the imperialist's and the nationalist's). Both narratives take her up as a symbolic banner while depriving her of subjectivity.

When politics is conceived in terms of a struggle between the nation and its imperialist invaders (or its variant, the nation versus transnational corporations), women's issues run the risk of being marginalized as subordinate points, or of being curiously evaporated (only symbolically attended to) through the mechanism above, whereby women are both seemingly present yet apparently absent(ed) from nationalist and imperialist agendas. The problem becomes how to acknowledge that the nation is a suspect category in a transnational age, while not losing sight of issues regarding gender and sexuality.¹⁶ While these imperatives are not inherently incompatible they are often ranked in importance, with gender and sexual oppressions configured as a subset of the more salient and widely appealing subject of postnationality.¹⁷ If one doesn't remain vigilant against this binary framework of nation and empire, then one risks interpreting events that dispute national rhetoric—or that critique the exclusions of women from native, nationalist programs—as efforts to augment a new transnational imperialism. Such vigilance in Hagedorn's case translates into her local practice of constructing narratives of what might seem inconsequential quotidian events (watching movies, having dreams, gossiping, having sex) that are clearly imbedded in national and transnational frameworks and that simultaneously focus upon female and gay subjects.

In the depiction of Lolita Luna's domestic relations (her affairs with General Ledesma and, before him, an Englishman with “colonial obsessions” [170]), the novel further suggests that in the most intimate of spaces and the most mundane of life's events (e.g., who one chooses as a lover), one finds the traces of a political history that is simultaneously gendered and (trans)nationally mediated. Getting the scoop on Lolita's boudoir activities offers anything but a retreat from politics; rather, claims upon her “vagina” by nationalists against imperialists and vice versa show politics writ large on a zone of femininity no longer separate from public power regimes, if it ever was. In focusing on the daily lives of her characters and the arena of gender relations, domestic interactions, and sexual intimacy, Hagedorn's narrative commits itself to topics, spaces, and times conventionally thought to be trivial and shallow—decidedly, outside the realm of grand, “intelektwal” schemes and narratives for either changing or mapping (dialectical) changes in the world. As we have seen in the case of Gish Jen's work, focusing on the daily lives and domestic spaces of her characters corresponds to a blurring or setting out of focus grand historical events, such as “kingdoms [rising] up, kingdoms [collapsing]” (Jen 1991, 22). Hagedorn takes a slightly different tack. Though the preponderance of Hagedorn's narratives are about women as sexual subjects, she also wishes to tie those stories to a particular moment of national crisis, hence the roman-à-clef references to Marcos's regime and the assassination of Benigno Aquino Jr. in 1983. As Casper points out, the novel does not explicitly unfold during the time period of Marcos's rule (both Rio and Pucha set the narrative in the fifties), even as the novel's incorporation of events from that turbulent period of martial law would suggest otherwise. Where Casper finds this a lapse in chronological consistency, I would construe it as a further development of Hagedorn's negotiating with her stories of gendered and sexual subjects at the same time she wishes to highlight how the lives of female and gay characters intersect with “world events” such as decolonization, the siting of international military bases, tourism, and trade agreements. In other words, these chronological slips might be the trace of Hagedorn's choice both to link her stories of female embodiment to national questions (as in the story of Daisy Avila, upon which I will elaborate at length) and yet not to concede all forms of topical legitimacy to questions of nationalism and national allegory. Rather, she also explores as a bona fide political theme in itself the issue of women constrained within wombs/tombs (Dolores Gonzaga) or in country clubs—sites supposedly of protective wealth, revealed as sites of violent homosocial bonding (see my later discussion of Girlie Alacran).

Ultimately adopting a narrative strategy quite different from the one employed in Typical American, whereby the chronology of the family overshadows historical time and whereby spaces of politics are quite hidden and separate from domestic spaces of the house and suburbia, Hagedorn's novel continually stresses how politics—the legacies of colonial power relations, machismo, and patriarchal sentiment—impinge upon the intimate venues of sex, seduction, and family, and the narration of those part-public, part-private events over time. For instance, in Joey Sands's narration of the sexual overtures of his American lover, Neil, Hagedorn reveals a thorough embeddedness of sexual relations in global politics and culture:

“Call me Neil,” he said. …

“NEIL. What kind of name is that?” I loved making fun of him.

“Good sport,” he'd laugh with me, jabbing at his own chest with one of his large hands.

I spit on the floor in contempt. “Man, you don't have to talk to me like I don't know anything! Puwede ba—good sport,” I mimic, rolling my eyes. “What do you think this is? The Lone Ranger and Tonto? … Man, I'm no savage.”

(73)

A simple pick-up line, hallmark of daily life, becomes an occasion mediated by global cinema and marked by a history of American imperial violence. That Joey uses a film reference makes this instance particularly illuminating, not only for Hagedorn's endorsement of politics as inseparable from the erotics of the everyday, but also for those critical concerns over Hagedorn's postmodern, cinematic representational style. That is, Joey throws into the American's face the image of both Neil's and America's colonizing obsession—the Lone Ranger and Tonto. Joey capitalizes on the offensive image to violate Neil's Western superiority, even as he, himself, enters a relationship (most likely one of explicit hustling) that effectively reinscribes him as sexual servant. The filmic allusion thus provides the colonized with a means to signify on and radically reverse the colonizer's position; yet it also dangerously normalizes this imperial relationship for easy (and unconscious) imitation.

This repetition of cinematic references speaks to Hagedorn's own practice. In denouncing their illusions is the author inadvertently reinforcing these movieland tropes? To respond in the affirmative is to ignore the oppositional effects inflecting repetition. While the relationship between the Lone Ranger and Tonto is encoded as a model of race relations to be emulated, Joey decodes and redeploys the couple's iconography to other ends. No longer does Tonto accompany the Ranger because of the latter's beneficence and civilized superiority or because of their interpersonal friendship. Rather, what holds the pair together is a commodified sexual transaction. Colonial ideology has been stripped bare of its lofty trappings to reveal its essence in bodies and trade.

In the foregoing instance, then, Hagedorn illustrates the translation of media images and challenges notions of direct, unmediated communications. As an alternative to the linear model of sender/message/receiver, Stuart Hall describes mass communications as a process “sustained through the articulation of linked but distinctive moments,” where the translation of the media image into some form of social practice is necessary to the completion of the communications circuit (Hall 1980, 128). Hall also emphasizes the discontinuities between the moments of “production and reception of the television message [which] are not … identical, [even as] they are related. … What are called ‘distortions’ or ‘misunderstandings’ arise precisely from the lack of equivalence between the two sides in the communicative exchange” (Hall 1980, 130-31). In the example above, we can think of Hall's “social practices,” then, as Joey's translation of the Tonto image. He reproduces the stock character to remind the American of several fictions, most formidably the fiction of the brown man as savage, as well as the fiction of amicability between colonizer and colonized. Clearly, the Lone Ranger and Tonto hold oppositional possibilities despite their producers' intentions.

Hall's revised notion of mass communications requires our further reassessment of the role of Hollywood iconography in Hagedorn's text. Certainly the pervasiveness of Tinseltown images testifies to the United States' cultural dominance in the Philippines. Yet, the fact that Hagedorn exposes cultural imperialism does not then imply that she portrays Filipinos as passive recipients of American artifacts, who, furthermore, lack a culture of their own. In this respect, my argument diverges from Rafael's analysis of spectacle, wherein viewing remains an exercise in passivity. This is indeed the common mistaken perception of Hagedorn's book—that it mutes its revolutionary potential by repeating Western cinematic images. Such an argument both ignores that moment of transformative possibility on the reception side of mass communications and denies the capacity of oppressed peoples to transform the possibilities of their oppression. It also limits the appropriate content of oppositional texts to “pure native” materials. Yet as Hall's analysis suggests, the degree to which a text is resistant is not just a matter of assessing how culturally or politically pure a particular discursive material is, but of seeing that assessment, itself, as moot because the process of reception always already “taints” or transforms the “original” material.¹⁸

The transformative effects of decoding are redeployed by Hagedorn herself. Not only does she show her characters reworking the intended effects of various exported narratives, but the author herself uses the penetrating force of cinematic gaze to reverse the usual power relationships between spectator and spectacle. I would recall here Laura Mulvey's characterization of classic cinema as the male gaze taking pleasure at the female space of the screen. Out of this conception emerges the “feminist” possibility of only disavowing pleasure, for instance through the filmmaker's use of fragmented narratives and disynchronous sound and visual effects designed to thwart the male gaze. However, critics of Mulvey suggest that cinematic illusion “should not be thought of as the exclusive property of dominant codes, serving solely the purposes of ‘oppression’” (De Lauretis, 68). Such critics wish to dislodge illusion and pleasure from their immediate associations with falsehood and to interrogate instead how illusion and pleasure take hold of their spectators.¹⁹ Such a dislodgment, in Rey Chow's formulation, would also lead to a retheorizing of the ethnic spectator; instead of condemning the ethnic, in her case Chinese, spectator for experiencing viewing pleasure at Western, orientalist film images, one would have to examine how such persuasion works, and how cultural artifacts—that may not be pure or that may in fact sustain normative oppressions—are transformed by native agents.²⁰

Hagedorn's transformation of Western artifacts, then, are not in the last instance circumscribed by Mulvey's disavowal of pleasure. Instead, the author dissects cinematic seduction by scrutinizing spectacle as a social relationship wherein the spectator's pleasure rests on the disavowal of the commodity transaction. In her narration of two types of live “sex shows,” Hagedorn zooms in on this disavowal. Both scenes depict the Westerner's desire to see native “savagery,” and the subsequent breakdown of the native as useable, visual object in this setting.

The first episode begins with the German filmmaker, Rainer's, interest in the “shower dancers,” which elicits a somewhat exasperated response from Joey, his “native informant” and prostitute for the evening:

“What are shower dancers?” he wants to know. They all want to know. Then they want to see it for themselves. … [I] tell Rainer about Boy-Boy and his job at Studio 54. … Hungry young boys crowd the stage, lathering their bodies with soap while an audience watches. …

“Are they hungry or greedy?” Rainer asks. I look at him, perplexed by his question. “There's a difference, you know,” he adds, gently.

What a pain in the ass. “Hey, man. How should I know? Boys are hungry, so they perform. Audience pays to sit there, greedy to watch—” …

“Do they do it slowly? … Are they hard? Do they come onstage? … What about your friend, Boy-Boy? Does he like it?”

I hope I'm getting paid for this interrogation.

(141-42)

The dynamics of spectatorship, in this instance, are displaced. Rainer doesn't actually watch the shower dancers, and Joey mostly recounts this performance through what Boy-Boy “has told [him]” (142). Yet Rainer's questions drive home what is at stake in this exchange: who gets to represent the “native's” desire. Is that desire to be construed as extravagant or as necessary?

Sau-ling Wong's thematic survey of Asian American literature along the paradigm of necessity and extravagance proves instructive here: “The terms Necessity and Extravagance signify two contrasting modes of existence and operation, one contained, survival-driven and conservation-minded, the other attracted to freedom, excess, emotional expressiveness, and autotelism” (S. Wong 1993, 13). Extravagance remains associated with privilege, yet also with autonomy, agency, and self-determination. Necessity, by contrast, remains the condition of the nonautonomous, the underprivileged, the native rather than the imperialist, the woman and slave rather than the man and master. Returning to Joey's and Rainer's assessment of the shower dancers, then, one sees the double-edged effects of stressing extravagance in the context of neocolonial relations. If the native extravagantly has pleasure, his desire exceeds the framework set up by the gazer. This pleasure, as testament to the native's self-sufficiency, has dual implications with respect to the spectator. First, the onlooker might be relieved at how this pleasure appears to absolve him of guilt. That is, the possibility that the shower dancers enjoy themselves—that is, ejaculate, have pleasure—implies a complicity in their own commodification. Secondly, the spectator may fear the native's pleasure unrelated to his gaze (i.e., the native doesn't need the Western audience to fulfill his desires). These dual implications suggest the perils and liberations of pleasure, not unlike the mixed benefits Hagedorn and the reader get from cinematic images.²¹

Both a titillating fear and a desire for absolution, then, inspire Rainer's question “Are they hungry or greedy?” Joey's perplexed response underscores Rainer's formulation as too simplistic to account for the issues of spectatorship at hand. Even though he counters that the shower boys are hungry and the patrons the ones who are greedy, Joey cannot shake Rainer's verbal voyeurism and more importantly, this verbal voyeurism as a way to deflect Rainer's own guilt at having watched or wanting to have watched. Seeing pleasure absolves the spectator of his pleasure at seeing, which becomes the very means through which the commodification of the native is transacted. Pornographically, then, the represented pleasure cancels the violence of objectification, and the spectator does not have to acknowledge the humiliating effects of his own gaze. By focusing so intently on the native's body (in the questions, Is he hard? Does he come onstage? Does he do it slowly?), Rainer avoids looking at himself. He highlights the content of the spectacle rather than the context of the gazing. He therefore denies the power differentials and sexual exploitation that produce such conditions for gazing.

Significantly, the verbal voyeurism ends when Joey says, “Shit. You wanna go there and see for yourself? I can arrange it” (143), an invitation which Rainer declines. If he hadn't, one could imagine the spectacle playing itself out along the lines of an earlier narrated “live show,” where Joey, upon request, takes two American tourists to see a boy and a girl copulate on a dance floor: “When it is over, the young man looks up at the white men while the girl tears off some toilet paper, dabs it in alcohol, and wipes herself off. ‘Okay, boss?’ the young man asks eagerly, grinning at the stunned Americans. ‘You want us to do that again?’” (75). Greedy or hungry? The questions are almost superfluous in this scene, where the commodity relationship between gazer and gazed, Western tourists and sexualized natives, overdetermines the entire encounter. The sex show becomes a representation, not of the pure sexuality of natives, but of what money can't buy—the erasure of the imperial relation.

Hagedorn, then, does not negate pleasure as much as multiply it by reflecting and refracting pleasure back upon itself as in a hall of mirrors. Her feminist practice involves scrutinizing the gaze that is not just male, but imperial. In effect, Mulvey's gaze theory and its progeny are decoded or hybridized by Hagedorn and transformed into a critique of the colonizer-colonized relationship that has taken on a new “spectacular” form in the dynamics of tourism. At the same time, Hagedorn's special attention to specularized bodies allows the author to place at the center of her narrative the predicament of entertainment workers, beauty queens, bomba stars, prostitutes, and mistresses—in short, subject positions often, though not exclusively, associated with women. These positions are often silent images, ones looked at rather than looking back. Yet, in Dogeaters, these objects of touristic and male gazes take on lives of their own, becoming the privileged perspectives from which multiple stories are narrated.

THE GENDERED AND HETEROSEXIST TRAPS OF NATIONALISM

While the gendered dynamics of looking-relations has emerged as a focal point for much of feminist film theory, the imperial dynamics of looking-relations has had its own elaboration in the field of postcolonial studies.²² Yet until recently, the temptation in this latter field has been to discard the term “feminist” because it tends to prioritize a collective identity that cuts across the colonizer-colonized divide.²³ Despite the pressure to shy away from the term, I have found it strategically necessary to name Hagedorn's practice as feminist. This naming, while informed by my own commitment to antisexist politics, more importantly identifies the novel's deconstruction of gender oppression made ever more remarkable by the text's simultaneous assertion of a postcolonial nationalist agenda.²⁴ As Cynthia Enloe notes, nationalism—often central to decolonization efforts—rarely takes “women's experiences as a starting point for understanding how a people becomes colonized or how it throws off the shackles of that material and psychological domination. Rather, nationalism typically has sprung from masculinized memory, masculinized humiliation and masculinized hope. Anger at being ‘emasculated’—or turned into a ‘nation of busboys’—has been presumed to be the natural fuel for igniting a nationalist movement” (Enloe, 44). Though the putative goal of nationalist movements is to recover native manhood, the immediate agenda of such movements often involves policing women's behavior.²⁵ Thus, Muslim women's wearing the veil or Indian women's practicing sati become signs of nationalist devotion to an extent unparalleled by similar male practices.²⁶

Clearly, feminism has a stake in exposing the male bias of nationalist agendas. This exposure has often taken the form of condemning nationalism on the assumption that the oppression of women is immanent to nationalism. To a certain extent, Dogeaters puts forth such a gendered critique of nationalism, representing neocolonial elite society as offering few choices for Filipinas. Yet, at the same time, Hagedorn takes another route. She also constructs a nationalist, feminist subject-position through her portrait of Daisy Avila, who comes into her nationalism through feminism. This path toward politicization stands in stark contrast to normative notions of postcolonial identity, where one typically subordinates women's issues to the primacy of anti-imperialist causes.²⁷ Instead, Hagedorn presents a character who first comes into her feminist consciousness, and from this political awakening she proceeds to become a nationalist leader. Moreover, it is under her leadership that Joey, San Juan's nationalist hero, is introduced to the guerrilla brigade camped in the hills.

Daisy represents a feminist alternative within nationalism, which counters not only the obvious military nationalism of General Ledesma but also the implicitly masculine “opposition” of her father, Senator Avila. Whereas Daisy's father attacks the government's collusion with the West, Daisy herself criticizes the Marcoses' leadership from a different perspective. She upbraids the president and his wife, not because of their devotion to American movies and televisual culture, but because of their systematic deracination of women to serve male-agented ends. Moreover, her counterhegemonic practice relies upon the very broadcast media that have sought to treat her as a visual object.

Having won first place in the national beauty contest, Daisy convalesces at home, overcome by a great depression. The postponement of her “whirlwind tour of the provinces” and the canceling of her cameo appearance in a feature film have cost the sponsors of the pageant “millions of pesos” (106). The First Lady responds to this national crisis by appearing on the TV show Girl Talk, where she announces that “Daisy Avila has shamed me personally and insulted our beloved country” (107). The telecast media remains crucial to the construction of the national drama: the camera closes in on “the First Lady's anguished face … [She] sobs. She blows her nose. The camera discreetly pulls away” (107). Viewing this spectacle, Aurora Avila calls out to her older sister, “Daisy! Come out and see! You're going to hell for sure—you've made the Iron Butterfly break down and cry!” (107). Yet Daisy has only hidden away in her family home, refusing to be seen by reporters.

The media's reaction to Daisy's behavior, while seeming out of proportion to the event, hints at the salience of the beauty queen's actions. Her reclusion becomes a national crisis because it defies the traditional role of the Filipina to serve her country through self-exhibition. The First Lady's actions, by contrast, exemplify this unquestioned tradition. Even as Imelda's dramatic appearance fosters a critique of the beauty queen's behavior, it also puts itself forth as a model for Daisy's future emulation. Through her own televisual display, the president's wife both verbally indicates and visually performs women's “patriotic duty” to be a spectacle for national viewing.

Daisy's “insult to the nation” thus centers upon her refusing to be seen. However, this refusal only fuels nationalist fervor: the Iron Butterfly successfully recuperates Daisy's obscene (literally, off-scene) actions into her own visual display of patriotism. Daisy's only choice is to become a spectacle herself, even as she uses the televisual apparatus to subversive ends. On a nationally broadcast talk show, she denounces the beauty contest as “a giant step backward for all women”: “She accuses the First Lady of furthering the case of female delusions in the Philippines. The segment is immediately blacked out by waiting censors” (109). Censorship indicates the failure of the First Lady's efforts to win Daisy over to the presidential notion of feminine patriotic duty. The coercive overtones of censorship suggest that the Marcoses govern less through popular consent than through oppressive strategies. Daisy's dissent from the ideology of women's duty, however, requires her strategic consent to be an object for national viewing. Thus, her actions contesting women's oppression also affirms, even exploits, the hegemony of the televisual apparatus and the way in which it exacerbates a hunger for spectacle.

While contesting the national government's collusion with the West, Daisy's father, Senator Avila, fails to oppose as vigorously the state's representation of itself through women's bodies. The narrative underscores this blind spot in the Senator's oppositional stance by decrying the “supreme irony,” whereby “an otherwise wise man [such] as the Senator allows his gullible daughter to participate in a government-endorsed beauty contest run by the First Lady” (101). It is as if the beauty contest is too frivolous a matter to demand the senator's attention. Yet the beauty contests, and more importantly, the gendered ideology that relegates women to be objects for display, circumscribes the female subjects of Hagedorn's text; their patriotic function is to serve as symbolic embodiments of the nation or as helpmates to male, nationalist leaders. Instead of recognizing the integral function of beauty pageants in staging national unity, the senator ignores the political stakes of such contests. Thus, in his overall project to undermine the Marcos government's authority, Senator Avila overlooks the importance of framing women's subordinate status as a nationalist issue.

His daughter Daisy, by contrast, who Hagedorn also portrays as a traditional nationalist heroine (i.e., preparing for battle in the hills), critiques the underlying logic of these pageants, which relegates women to a symbolic effect. Daisy precipitates a country-wide crisis by exposing a national reliance upon the objectification of women. In doing so, Daisy successfully negotiates between nationalist and feminist agendas and counters the notion that they remain mutually exclusive political commitments. By reasserting a feminist component to nationalist movements, Hagedorn responds to two myths: on the one hand, the fiction that women's concerns are not indigenous to emerging nations (but only an import from the West), and on the other, the myth that Western feminism is the only originator of antisexist theory and practice. As Enloe puts it, “Coming face to face with a Vietnamese feminist of the 1920s not only makes it less possible for British or American women to imagine that their foremothers were the creators of feminist ideas; it also subverts nervous local men's attempts to write off Third World feminists in the 1980s as nothing more than unwitting dupes of foreign imperialism” (Enloe, 61). Hagedorn thus creates nationalist guerrilla characters (Daisy and Clarita) who come into nationalist consciousness through feminist awakening. It is through these characters that Hagedorn crafts an identity that conjoins feminist and nationalist commitments.²⁸

At the same time, Hagedorn doesn't render her novel a complete national allegory,²⁹ where every tale of female embodiment becomes a parallel commentary on national questions. Only in the two instances cited above does Hagedorn make her stories centrally about female embodiment congruent with a postcolonial nationalist narrative of liberation. Hagedorn also depicts women whose preoccupation with their own female embodiment (oftentimes articulated as bodily disgust mixed with bodily vanity) is homologous with a neocolonial nationalist narrative (the First Lady) and with a lesbian/queer liberation narrative that has a tenuous standing in both neocolonial and postcolonial nationalist agendas (Rio Gonzaga).

To illustrate, the First Lady uses her own good looks and the tropes of Western cinema to offer a fatuous proof of her husband's “just” regime:

People talk about corruption. … Okay, you say. We are a corrupt regime—a dictatorship. Dios ko! … I wouldn't look like this if I were corrupt, would I? Some ugliness would settle down on my system. You know the common expression—‘ugly as sin?’ … There's a truth in common sayings, di ba? If I were corrupt, I would look like that other movie, Dorian Gray. Di ba, he got uglier and uglier because of all the ugliness in his life?

(220)

Again, encouraging spectatorial interest in herself, the First Lady asserts the bodily health of women under Marcos—herself as exemplar—and, by extension, the health of the nation. That the First Lady, and not the president, himself, offers such a proof (however unconvincing in its particulars) ought to alert the reader that, though the major players in national politics during this era are men, Hagedorn is committed to exploring how women mediate and yet do not remain the primary beneficiaries of this power.

In addition to this vignette where the First Lady comments expressly on a national question—the ethics of her husband's government—the narrative depicts scenes from the First Lady's imaginative life that are more disconnected from public policy, though still concerned with gendered and sexual embodiment. For example, the chapter entitled “The President's Wife Has a Dream” recounts her pleasurable fantasies about the Pope, her “[opening] her legs” just as the Pope metamorphoses into “her Ilocano husband leering at her with those painted lips she's enraged by his intrusion” (123-24). The unpunctuated narrative, mimicking the sudden mutations in dreams, associatively connects the “intrusion” of the president's gaze with a startling change in the tenor of the entire dream: “[S]omething's wrong. … [S]he sits up in terror. … [S]he is aware of the weight of her pendulous breasts” (124). The dream ends with the First Lady's unfocused rage at her husband's playing a trick on her (124). The narrative's devotion to depicting such scenes askew from national questions suggests that textual interest in the Iron Butterfly derives, not first and foremost from her position in national politics, but from her role as a gendered social actor whose function is “to be looked at” both by the voting populace and in the not-so-private realm of her bedroom and her dreams. In short, Dogeaters's narratives about gendered subjectivity do not always intersect with nationalist narratives of saving the postcolony.³⁰

Those narratives of nationalism, themselves, have undergone much critical scrutiny as to whether they apprehend the global, transnational systems in which nationalist politics are embedded. For instance, Arjun Appadurai urges readers to think “beyond the nation” (Appadurai, 411), while also considering the residual and resilient appeal of the nation as a collective form of postcolonial mobilization. He describes growing up under this persuasion:

For those of us who grew up male in the elite sectors of the postcolonial world, nationalism was our common sense and the principal justification for our ambitions, our strategies, and our sense of moral well-being. Now, almost half-a-century after independence was achieved for many of the “new” nations, the nation form is under attack, and that too from many points of view. As the ideological alibi of the territorial state, it is the last refuge of ethnic totalitarianism. As important critiques of the postcolony (Mbembe 1992), its discourses have been known to be deeply implicated in the discourses of colonialism itself. It has frequently been a vehicle for the staged self-doubts of the heroes of the new nations—[Sukarno, Kenyatta, Nehru, Nasser]—who fiddled with nationalism while the public spheres of their societies were beginning to burn. So, for postcolonial intellectuals such as myself, the question is, Does patriotism have a future? And to what races and genders shall that future belong?

(Appadurai, 412)

Initially conceived as a tool to liberate colonized people from foreign domination, nationalism emerges as an excuse for ethnic-driven violence and lapsed political leadership.³¹ Moreover, as Appadurai makes clear in his limning of the personal appeal of nationalism, only a specific gendered class of society primarily benefited from political programs claiming the primacy of the nationalist movement, namely, the male elite sector of the postcolonial world. Though Appadurai queries “to what races and genders shall [a postnational, patriotic] future belong,” his focus is less on the ambivalence with which women are ensconced in nationalist movements and more on the prospects for imagining a “language” to encompass nonterritorial, exilic identities (418).

Hagedorn, by contrast, is also concerned with the violence undergirding nationalism, but she focuses on the peculiar predicament of women in the postcolony who have not been the prime beneficiaries of nationalism yet who have nevertheless been implicated in its violence. Particularly, Hagedorn explores how a fiction of autonomy traps women in a prison of neocolonial complicity from which there is no escape (i.e., where escape itself is deemed co-opted or the terms of escape are so self-violating as to be no escape at all). In her portraits of Girlie Alacran, Leonor Bautista, and Rio Gonzaga, Hagedorn questions the presumptions of autonomy underlying these characters' choices, by revealing their constrained roles in a sex/gender system of which they are neither the beneficiaries nor the “partners.”

These issues are most overtly taken up in the narration of Girlie Alacran's dream. In this subconscious vision, Girlie imagines an uprising of the serving class (the golf caddies) against their elite Filipino rulers (the golfers):

When they attack, the caddies are armed with golf clubs. … “I GONNA KILL YOU WID YOUR OWN SHIT! …” the dark boys roar in unison. The leader grabs Girlie by the hair. … “You must be mistaken,” she says, meekly. … “I don't even like golf!”. … An even younger caddie … threatens her with a set of Ben Hogans. “It's my brother you want!” she cries. “Not me! Not me!” She is a coward and a traitor, she doesn't want to die. In a final pathetic attempt at saving herself, Girlie arches her back and thrusts her hips in the air, offering her body to the surly boys.

(180)

The passage highlights the offering of sexual services as a normative survival strategy for women in a sex/gender economy that “trafficks in women,” to use Gayle Rubin's phrase. According to Rubin, this traffic in women underpins kinship networks, which are not “list[s] of biological relatives” but are “system[s] of categories and status markers which often contradict actual genetic relationships” (Rubin, 169). Kinship between men, that is, their social organization beyond the family unit, is secured by the exchange of women as gifts. Yet as gifts, women are not partners to the “quasi-mystical … social linkage” created by this exchange but only “a conduit” through which men solidify their relations with other men—relations that have as much likelihood of being antagonistic as of being friendly (Rubin, 173-74). Thus Rubin lists as examples of such traffic “women given in marriage” and “[women] taken in battle” (175; emphasis added). Though the essay focuses more on the reciprocal side of this equation, Rubin's argument might well be extended to account for the position of women in hostile interactions. Just as women are not partners to the social linkage established in friendly trades, they are likewise not the parties uncoupled in a hostile breach, though such a rupture would likely involve unauthorized “takings” of women. Girlie's nightmarish anticipation of rape reminds the reader of her status as a (sexualized) transactor of male relations—the vehicle through which male rivalry or alliance is expressed.³² Any discussion of complicity, then, must take into account the difference between being a partner in an exclusive club and being impressed into serving as a conduit for the formation of that club.

Despite her graphic powerlessness in this dream sequence, Girlie interprets her actions as treacherous and scandalous: she betrays her brother, naming him as the real golfer, the one who impresses the caddies into service; and she entertains being raped as a means to save her life. Escaping death requires her self-violation, her consent to be a sexual object. Yet Girlie cannot ultimately “escape” in this fashion not only in a literal sense (the caddies “aren't interested”) but also in a more critical sense: this escape requires her acceptance of constraints that render her an object; hence it is no escape at all.

Girlie's dream is juxtaposed to a waking nightmare in which she lounges at the country club with four male peers, observes their ogling other women, and hears them telling of their sexual and military exploits. She stands both inside and outside these accounts of appropriation: her “unspoken contempt for what [the men have] said” suggests an observable distance, but her being groped under the table by one of the conversants, Tito Alvarez, insinuates how easily she might slip from being an auditor to being a theme of his tale (182-83). Despite her “disgust” and “fear,” Girlie finds it is difficult to “just get up and leave. … [I]t is as if her body has grown heavy with fatigue and become part of the chair; she cannot move” (183). As with the earlier image of her bound and blindfolded by the president and his wife, Girlie finds herself stuck, wanting to escape yet knowing that running away will also confirm her male cohorts' power.³³ She is merely a tolerated presence, acceptable in her capacity to register the salience of sexual machismo.

When Girlie finally exits, the golfers must look for another object through which they can bond. Erotic encounters with tortured bodies provide the alternative premise for male collusion:

Boomboom Alacran is happy, content to listen to his friends brag about real or imagined exploits. He hopes the afternoon goes on forever. The identity of the man who confessed, the confession itself are inconsequential to Boomboom. All Boomboom craves are the details: the look on the man's face as Pepe's meticulous agents or Pepe himself prodded and probed in their search for answers, the exact number of seconds, minutes, or hours before the man finally succumbed.

(185)

The language her mirrors the substance of the men's earlier boasts regarding their speed and frequency in getting women to sexually “succumb.” The combination of disgust and fear immobilizing Girlie might be understood, then, as a semiotic sedimentation of a feminized vulnerability to be prodded and probed—to be treated as a carcass or prize trophy.³⁴ In contrast to the homosocial pact of Bulosan's depiction that is threatened by the presence of sexualized women, the homosociality to which Hagedorn alludes requires sexually violable bodies, both male and female. The elite male bonding of Boomboom and his friends counterpoises itself not solely to sexualized women (who succumb) but to an impoverished class of men and women who contest Marcos's neocolonial rule.

The men's violent partnership depends upon sexualized scenes of objectification, such as the one quoted above, where the smallness (inconsequentiality) of the exchanged woman's and prisoner's worlds wins for the male partners and torturers their “swelling sense of territory” (Scarry, 36). Detailing the structure of torture, Elaine Scarry calls attention to the inverted logic whereby pain becomes power:

Within the physical events of torture, the torturer “has” nothing: he has only an absence, the absence of pain. … [T]he absence of pain is a presence of world; the presence of pain is the absence of world. Across this set of inversions pain becomes power. The direct equation, “the larger the prisoner's pain, the larger the torturer's world” is mediated by the middle term, “the prisoner's absence of world”: the larger the prisoner's pain (the smaller the prisoner's world and therefore, by comparison) the larger the torturer's world.

(Scarry, 36-37)

It is through such inversions, then, that “interrogation is … crucial to a regime” (36). Interestingly, it is through a dreamlike sequence that Hagedorn narrates General Ledesma's torture of Daisy Avila, which is both the narration of her gang rape and the spectacle of a previously tortured man (perhaps her husband), whose testicles have been mashed, eyes gouged, and brain replaced with a Styrofoam cup (215). The loss of bodily integrity speaks for the loss of the prisoner's world and self, a loss unquestionably not of the prisoner's making even though the prisoner's “confessions” insinuate his or her self-betrayal (i.e., a mock consent or admission to purported crimes).³⁵ The extreme deprivation of the situation clarifies how consent, which presumes an autonomous position, cannot make sense (or only perverts the sense) of the prisoner's relation to violence. The tortured person's proclamations are exacted from him or her; codes of necessity rather than extravagance determine the prisoner's “confessions,” which cannot be read as autobiography—the assertions of an autonomous self. The confession merely confirms the loss of autonomy that extreme pain (or necessity) induces.

The stickiness of female consent to male violences is amplified in Hagedorn's depiction of the general's wife, Leonor Bautista Ledesma. Her religious piety, expressed through tortuous acts of self-privation, simultaneously blinds her to and relieves her of her spouse's failings:

A former piano teacher and distant cousin of the General, Leonor Bautista was forced to marry Nicasio Ledesma by her elderly parents. After much initial resistance and the intervention of her parish priest, Leonor Bautista succumbed and married the General. …

Every few months, the General's wife retreats to a Carmelite nunnery in Baguio for rigorous silence. The General encourages her spiritual odysseys and asks her to pray for him. “The Lord Listens to you and only you,” he tells her. “Beg the Lord's forgiveness on my behalf.”

(67-68; emphasis added)

When not in Baguio, Leonor locks herself in a narrow room, “fasting on water and praying prostrate on the cold cement floor” (68). Her self-torture would seem a surrogate payment for the tortures conducted by her husband. Not unlike how filmic, feminine beauty “excuses” pornographic violence, Leonor's spiritual asceticism, her prayer and masochism, expiates the General's perversities. In this scenario, where one female bodily violation (Leonor's self-privation) pays for another (Daisy's torture), the general remains the only beneficiary. Both sides of the equation are expendable to the underlying condition that enables and requires this equivalence—a specifically masculine power to violate.³⁶

The question of Leonor's complicity in the general's neocolonizing oppressions is further complicated by the fact that she is forced into her marriage. Like Girlie, she is kept in the dark regarding her husband's violent exploits and has no idea who the strangers are that “frequently troo[p] in and out of her house” (68). As the narration of her banns suggests, Leonor has been unable to “just get up and leave,” although she has put up “resistance.” She therefore gets “as far away from [her husband] as possible,” even though she remains within the “fortress” (read prison) of married life (68). The only escape for Leonor is death, also construed as heaven—the utopian site of opulence and perhaps feminine self-determination: “[S]he waits for death to claim her every night. This yearning … is her most selfish desire, her greatest sin. Father Manuel has warned her about this many times in confession” (70). Female escape emerges as an extravagant “sin” for so much depends on women's remaining in the economy of exchange. As Father Manuel will not let Leonor fulfill her suicidal desires, so General Ledesma will not allow Lolita Luna's “escape” to that imaginary heavenly place, America.

One female protagonist who does escape is Rio Gonzaga, and in this final part of the chapter, I will examine how native nationalist suspicion of the “transnational class” contributes to the construction of this escape as “sinful.” My analysis focuses upon Rio's transnationalism (her escape from native nationalist constraints) as the simultaneous realization and suppression of other “sinful,” transgressive identities. I have already rehearsed the gendered, nationalist trap whereby women's emigration to Western geographies is seen as a betrayal of nativity and nation. Under this thinking, the alluring “freedom” seemingly open to women in these sites is merely a false temptation—the white man's plastic carrot. The barb of betrayal, then, lies not so much in female election as much as in foreign men's appropriation of native men's possessions. A presumed heterosexuality, it would seem, presides over this “threat” of women's transnational passage.

Dogeaters frustrates the language of women's betrayal, first, by crediting the United States as a place where women can more easily move about, uninhibited by chaperones.³⁷ Film, once again, mediates this gender-specific notion of American freedom, with Jane Wyman, as cast in Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows (1956), seeming to embody such female independence:

The cashmere scarf is gracefully draped around Jane Wyman's head to keep her warm. In her full-length, mahogany sable coat, she drives her dependable dark green Buick, the color of old money. It is how I remember the movie: a determined woman alone in the winter driving a big green car on a desolate country road, on the way to see her young lover. Pobre Rock, indeed. A woman like Jane Wyman baffles Pucha. Why does she choose to drive her own car, when she can obviously afford a chauffeur? Pucha wants to know.

(6)

Douglas Sirk's film focuses on the sterility of social conventions that would doom a wealthy widow (played by Wyman) to lifelong celibacy.³⁸ Interestingly, the part Rio remembers from the movie is the suggestive scene where Wyman escapes her tomblike household for the promise of sexual fulfillment. The young narrator's fascination with this scene expresses not only her desire for Wyman but her desire for sexual control and sexual choice.

In contrast to Wyman's driving alone to meet the lover of her choosing, Rio sits, watching her cousin Pucha being ogled by a gang of teenage boys. One of them, Boomboom Alacran, “starts making kissing sounds with his fat lips. I am disgusted by his obscene display and the giggling reaction of my flustered cousin. … His friends are laughing. I am powerless” (5). Rio longs to exit this scene circumscribed by the noises and needs of Boom-boom and his cronies. Hagedorn constructs the United States as the site for women's escape from this male authoritative gaze.³⁹ Jumping ahead in time, the first chapter reveals Rio's mother leaving her husband for North America, as well as Cousin Pucha's pronounced intention to get “a US divorce” from a husband who “beats her frequently,” Boomboom Alacran (6-7).

It is not just the place (geography) and society of America but the very apparatus of Hollywood film that tempts Rio. She aspires to the camerawoman's position rather than to that of a desired screen object like La Luna or Wyman. For instance, Rio announces to Tonyboy Sanchez, “When I grow up, I'm moving to Hollywood”:

[Tonyboy replies with sarcasm,] “I can see it now … giant billboards in Quiapo advertising Inday Goes to Hollywood, starring Rio Gonzaga. We'll get Tito Severo to produce it as a musical—” We are slow-dragging expertly. … Tonyboy makes a clumsy attempt to fondle my nonexistent breasts. I slap his hand. “Stupid—you don't believe me? I'm going to make movies, Tonyboy. Not act in them!” I look at him angrily.

“What an imagination!” Tonyboy laughs, sticking his tongue in my ear.

(240-41)

Rio differentiates, here, between acting and making—participating in a spectacle whose terms are already set by someone else—that is or possibly changing the terms of spectatorship. Her statement thus underscores the United States as a place where women's desires might exceed the terms set up by male producers and where women can both produce themselves and inappropriately choose their lovers.

The narrative constructs Rio's long history of challenging her proper (hetero)sexual place in the sex/gender system. These challenges are as much about same-sex desire as they are about resisting a sex/gender system where women are exchanged to fortify male alliances. The impropriety of Rio's desires is figured quite early through her “homospectatorial looks” aimed at Hollywood actresses (Fuss 1992).⁴⁰ For Rio, the appeal of Jane Wyman and Gloria Talbott remains unquestionable and direct, in contrast to her cousin Pucha's distaste for these female stars as mediated by projections of male (heterosexual) preference:

[Pucha and I] compare notes after the movie. … “I don't like her face,” Pucha complains about Jane Wyman, “I hate when Rock starts kissing her!” “What's wrong with it?” I want to know, irritated by my blond cousin's constant criticisms. …

“What about Gloria Talbott? You liked her, didn't you? She's so …”—I search frantically through my limited vocabulary for just the right adjective to describe my feline heroine—“interesting.” Pucha rolls her eyes. “Ay! Puweda ba, you have weird taste! … [I]f you ask me, prima, Gloria Talbott looks like a trapo. And what's more, Kim Novak should've been in this movie instead of Jane Wyman. Jane's too old, Pucha sighs. “Pobre Rock! Everytime he had to kiss her—” Pucha shudders at the thought.

(4)

Comparing the cousins' reactions reveals their differences of desire. While Pucha fawns over “Pobre Rock” and wants to know what new heartthrob plays Jane Wyman's spoiled son, Rio finds the latter actor “completely forgettable” (6). Instead, her attention is all for the “strange and interesting” feline heroine and the details of Jane Wyman's figure.

The impropriety of Rio's sexuality spills out in other ways. The scene with Tonyboy is narrated with other accounts of “romantic” interludes that, by contrast, culminate in heterosexual validation—marriage. Rio's brother Raul marries his first love, Belen Garcia, and Pucha weds Boomboom in a “storybook” ceremony (241, 243). The absence of such confirmation in Rio's case becomes noticeable. Furthermore, Rio's desire for Wyman and Talbott, her practicing tongue kissing with Pucha (236), her close-cropped haircut that makes her look “like [the cross-dressing] Joan of Arc” (236), and her blushing assertion to Pucha that “[Audrey Hepburn] is beautiful” (237) all hint at this impropriety. Though neither Rio's homo- or heterosexuality is clearly delineated (in contrast to Joey's), one might further read Rio's Western drag (Audrey Hepburn-style haircut) as a Third World lesbian expression of “acting out.”⁴¹ Yet the prescriptions of nationalism encourage us to overlook such an interpretation. If Rio remains in the nation, she either risks being complicit in the exploits of her male cohorts or is in danger of being tortured and raped. If she escapes these double binds by subversively “acting up” and “acting out” in Western masculine drag, she betrays her nation, emasculates its men, and commits a “sin.” These formulations return one to the dilemma of defining a subversive practice for the Third World woman whose conditions of necessity (her abjectest of abject identities) take her out of “radical” consideration. That is, female subjects moving from necessity to extravagance are not considered to be making a “radical” choice but are considered passive objects moved by constraining circumstances. Extravagant and gendered notions of autonomy that underlie the mechanics of radicalness thus collaborate to produce the co-optation of female pleasure, agency, and desire.⁴² And it is precisely because of this dilemma that Hagedorn negotiates with the (nationalist) structures of violence by crafting a feminist and heterosexual nationalist protagonist and by displacing “queer” radicalness onto the gay nationalist character, Joey, rather than by wholly embodying it in her transnational female subject, Rio. Though queer subjectivity is seemingly allotted a privileged space in Hagedorn's text, I would assert that it is only gay male subjectivity that enjoys this privilege. The language of nationalism cannot brook Rio's lesbian identity but validates Joey's gay identity, and then, only briefly. That is, once Joey becomes a nationalist hero, his homosexuality also goes “underground.”⁴³

One could also make a similar case that Hagedorn renders the nationalist overtones of the novel compatible not with female identity in general but with heterosexual female identity in particular. Though Daisy and Rio both respond to the strictures of the neocolonial elite society that offers few choices for Filipinas, their pathways toward liberation diverge precisely over the centrality of female embodiment. In becoming a nationalist leader, Daisy appears to transcend her concerns with a specifically feminine vulnerability, attempting to build a nationalist underground movement despite being raped and continuing to receive threats of being raped. Rio, by contrast, renders her gendered and sexually desiring body the very site of her revolution. She refuses to give up her “sinful” bodily inclinations to fight the nationalist cause, since the prospects of her benefiting from the success of that revolution is questionable. Will nationalist revolution allow her to make movies about self-determining women who desire other such women? This is perhaps a question that Hagedorn indirectly poses to her readers who, in their determinations of this novel as a betrayal of Filipino progressive nationalism, only prove that this is not the case. Ultimately, Hagedorn both negotiates with nationalist constructions of hero(ine)ism, through her portrait of Daisy, and exposes the way in which that same nationalism affords limited opportunities for the expression of female sexual desire, through her portrait of Rio.

Thus, even while capitalizing on nationalist narratives and popular American curiosity about Marcos's rule to garner interest in her tales of gendered subjectivity, Dogeaters carefully refrains from portraying nationalism as the definitive balm for all Filipinas. The novel's multiple and heterogeneous tales of female embodiment, though individually and sporadically intersecting with nationalist issues, as a whole, exceed those frameworks. This critical insight importantly amends foregoing evaluations of the novel that have dismissed as politically trivial the gender and sexual content of the novel or have taken those matters seriously only when they can be renarrated as a national allegory:

[O]ne steady inference from Dogeaters is that the typical Filipina, well-fed, well-dressed and housed, well-educated, has betrayed Filipinas-the-nation and the pre-Spanish tradition of the babaylan priestess, by being so vacuous. Marriages in the novel … are rarely durable. Even under colonial rule, Filipino women had more rights, more empowerment, more equality (outside the sexual double standard) than their European and American counterparts. But the descent of conversation … into endless tsismis [gossip] is indicative of the infertility, the immaculate contraception, among these female characters. … Communitarianism is lost to “What will people think of me?” … There is little evidence of fulfillment, of health restored, even in [the novel's] several exceptional females; they are escapees, more neutered than counterforceful.

(Casper, 156)

Though apprehending the importance of Filipinas to the narrative's plots and themes, Casper gauges these characters by the degree to which they revitalize the nation. Moreover, the implication that Filipinas cannot invigorate the nation except through their fertility and heterosexual attachments to men leaves no way to conceive of either a postcolonial or neocolonial nationalism that would suffer childless women, lesbians, or gay men.⁴⁴

Casper's criticism does capture well the novel's refusal to offer an unambiguous avenue of salvation for either Filipinas or “Filipinas-the-nation.” Hagedorn suggests that there is no singular place of “return” to female/national wholeness, assuming that such a utopian site or subjective state existed in the first place. And this may be partly a function of the multiple varieties of Filipinas—some, whose gendered awakening will coincide harmoniously with the role of heterosexual revitalizer of the nation, and others, whose sexual desires and identities will place them out of any such notion of national healing. Moreover, to assert the earlier point, Hagedorn remains less concerned with positing a way for women to mint anew a widely discredited nationalism (to give nationalism a shiny new gloss) than to focus on the peculiar predicament of women in the postcolony.

Circling back to my initial characterization of Dogeaters, then, I would recall the pair of first-person protagonists, Rio Gonzaga and Joey Sands, whose cross-referenced stories provide the scaffolding for the narrative's multiple plots. If one were to schematically summarize “what happens” to Rio and Joey, it would be easy to produce two narratives of liberation, one tailored for Filipinas, the other for Filipinos: Rio, the daughter of an elite, mestizo family escapes to the utopian site of female self-determination, the United States; Joey, a “hungry” male prostitute (also of mixed American ancestry), escapes the hustler's life for the utopian site of male self-determination, nationalist politics. Both plots overlook the narration of these characters' sexual identities and therefore cannot being to account for the subtleties, whereby queer subjectivity “goes underground” when Joey escapes to the hills and lesbian desire—because it is attached to and allegorized by transnational feminist subjectivity—cannot “out” itself in a nationalist context. Thus the dichotomous frameworks of colonized/colonizer, nation/transnation, and to a certain extent masculine/feminine fail to narrate postcolonial women and gay men as desiring subjects. Yet in that failure to narrate (as elaborated in chapter 2 of this book), one finds the seeds of a differently defined “radical” practice that subscribes, not to a positivist counterhegemonic representational strategy, but to a negative critical practice that clears the space for alternative, as-yet-unrealized identifications to emerge.

By refraining from a style of transparent transmission, Hagedorn's narrative operates on a metacritical level, in which aspects of transmission and communication (the pleasures of watching, the production of movies, the redeployment of film images) are framed and reframed. Instead of seeing and being persuaded of, or won over to, a universalizing hegemony cemented through the dissemination of Western film, the readers witness the differentiated social strata, the “impossible fragment[ation]” of the nation, and the multiple locations (gendered, sexual, economic, racial, national/transnational) of Asian American postcolonial subjects. In effect, Dogeaters points to the ways in which simultaneously operating hegemonies impinge unevenly upon various subjects, requiring an array of counterhegemonic responses that are, likewise, multiple and uneven.

One hegemony in critical practice that this chapter aims to disrupt is that of reducing the gendered and sexual content of the text to a singular national allegory. Hagedorn's novel takes as its primary topic the desires of Filipinas. Its “semblances of plots” do not rotate on the epiphany of nationalist awakening but on the constraints of female embodiment (e.g., Baby's sweating; Lolita's and the First Lady's spectacular bodies “to be looked at”; Girlie's nightmarish rape; Leonor's asceticism; and so forth). At the same time, Hagedorn offers individual hero(ine)s, such as Daisy and Joey, whose political awakening as a function of their gender and sexual identities is portrayed in harmony, rather than at odds with, a Filipino, postcolonial, national, and communitarian mission. Because Hagedorn does not propose one way to save the world, the novel ultimately does not propose female or gay leadership as the only avenues of collective salvation. Rather, the novel highlights that leadership as legitimate as any other, even while never endorsing this leadership as the final word, the one and only path toward liberation. That stance against the final word—assigning a totality of righteousness on behalf of any segment of the population—is the radical revisioning that Hagedorn offers to her readers, as Viet Nguyen has persuasively argued. However, equally important to that ultimate concession to no single vision are the particular counternarratives (or nonhegemonic narratives) that Hagedorn steers her readers toward considering as equally legitimate alternatives to those hegemonic ones of male leadership, Western imperialism, and native purity. That the subject formation of a female rape victim and a gay son of a prostitute can be in harmony with collective anti-imperial struggle is the radical counternarrative that Hagedorn has her audience consider and upon which her ultimate deconstruction of representational truth hinges.

What many critics implicitly seem to desire of Hagedorn's novel is an affirmative ending—either one that poses a revolutionary solution or one that affirms, at the very least, the representational truths of its foregoing narrative. However, Dogeaters refuses to offer such realist affirmations, refraining from positing a harmonious collectivism or a reassuring vision of representational and spectatorial capacity. Moreover, it is questionable whether positing such utopian possibilities fosters, rather than quells, social change. Contemporary reevaluations of realism's utopian impulses argue the reverse: “[R]ealistic novels often share an impulse with their utopian counterparts to project into the narrative present a harmonic vision of community that can paradoxically put an end to social change. Realistic novels have utopian moments that imagine resolutions to contemporary social conflicts by reconstructing society as it might be” (Kaplan, 12). Hagedorn's novel resists this utopian impulse, perhaps subscribing to the philosophy that immersing the reader in outrage—in an unfulfilled desire for justice—serves social change to a greater degree than a conflict that has been resolved through fiction. Significantly, Dogeaters does not portray either Daisy's successful revolution or Rio's “acting out” abroad. Leaving these as moments of desire, Hagedorn places them outside her audience's (re)view, thus outside the space of critique. Ultimately resisting the scopic framework of spectatorship, Dogeaters encourages our yearning for the revolutionary movements headed by Daisy and Rio—movements to which we can remain enthralled precisely because they have not yet come.

Notes

1. Alluding to the general tenor of this criticism, Nerissa Balce-Cortes writes, “[Dogeaters] has also been criticized by some Filipino critics in Manila as a racist and fetishistic project of a Filipino-born writer claiming exoticism for her acceptance into the U.S. literary mainstream” (Balce-Cortes, 102). Balce-Cortes further attributes these critiques to the high representational demands made of Filipino American literature: “[T]he burden on these breakthrough novels to be ‘perfect’ or ‘authentic’ vehicles of Filipino ethnicity and culture will continue to be great as long as there are so few of them” (Balce-Cortes, 102). As for charges that Hagedorn's novel does not represent a postcolonial counterculture adequately, I would point out that the novel does in fact portray nationalist guerrilla characters, and one might argue, moreover, that they are the heroes and heroines of the novel. Acknowledging their presence, E. San Juan Jr. directs his critique of Dogeaters at its “capitalist principle of repetition” (which he equates with postmodernist aesthetics) that effectively “neutralize[s]” the novel's subversive “storytelling” (i.e., the representation of revolutionary forces) (San Juan 1992, 125).

2. I am thinking here specifically of Fanon's characterization of radio in Algiers—its first being rejected as an instrument of the oppressor and its later crucial function in forging and mobilizing a native nationalist movement. (See Fanon's A Dying Colonialism, originally published in 1959—the fifth year of Algerian revolution, two years before liberation.)

3. In a moment of self-characterization, the author states, “[I]dentity for me is not only racial, but sexual. I cannot think of myself as addressing the multicultural issue without including gender culture within the framework” (Hagedorn 1994, 178).

4. Another Manila resident, Girlie Garcia, expresses similar views on the influence of American pop culture; she claims that “because of the mass-media, because of the foreign things coming in to the Philippines, the youths, they're very inclined to go American, you know. … You look around you and you have Madonnas and Cindy Laupers walking around on the streets. And I think every Filipino's dream is to go to America and just to see the place because we've heard so much about it” (Denton and Villena-Denton, 180).

5. Hagedorn has made clear her intentions to avoid any overtly didactic content: “What is literature for? … You don't go to literature and say I need to feel good about my race, so let me read a novel.” She adds, “I hate preaching. It puts me to sleep.” (Sengupta, C1).

6. Lowe underscores the complex racial and national sedimentation of Filipino society that renders questions of purity and authenticity virtually unresolvable: “In a country with seventy-one hundred known islands and eighty dialects and languages spoken, as well as a cultural and racial hybridity that has mixed Spanish, Malayan, Chinese, Arab, Hindu, North American, and others with ‘native’ groups over the course of four centuries, the distinction between the ‘authentic’ and the ‘inauthentic’ may be less salient than the turn around different kinds of ‘seeming,’ the cultural, racial, and linguistic admixtures that are the contemporary expression of a history of colonial and commercial encounter in the Philippines” (Lowe 1996, 118).

7. Hagedorn herself has commented on the controversy her novel inspired (Sengupta). See also Casper, San Juan (1992), and Gonzalez for critical views of Dogeaters's social-political practice and aesthetic accomplishment.

8. Realism has so many charged meanings, as Amy Kaplan points out, that it is imperative to note that Casper never explicitly uses the term. However, Casper does express his desire for Dogeaters to cleave more to qualities of narration that the realist narrative enshrines, such as an emphasis on character, on social relations, and on a utopian resolution wherein some common ground between divided classes is posited (see A. Kaplan 1988).

9. Casper never definitely states, but does suggest, that Dogeaters cannot be “written off as a negligible scrapbook of colorful eccentricities and absurdities” (Casper, 155).

10. Realism, however, has had a changing fate in literary criticism, as to determinations of the degree of its resistance or collusion with capitalist forces: “Changes in the historical understanding of realism have accompanied the reevaluation of realism's political stance, from a progressive force exposing social conditions to a conservative force complicit with capitalist relations” (7). Realism might “[express] consumer culture” and be a “form of social incorporation” rather than a call to arms (Kaplan 1988, 7).

11. For instance, Casper finds fault with Rio as a narrator, calling her teenage perspective “defective”; moreover, he finds her later mature recollections also lacking: “[H]er capacity for critical understanding has not grown” (154). Casper finds fundamentally flawed Hagedorn's lack of adult narrators with intellectual capacities for “critical understanding”; adolescents and street persons and other nonintellectual types, in this estimation, cannot narrate to either aesthetic or political effect.

12. The review of Dogeaters appears in the second half of San Juan's essay entitled “Beyond Identity Politics,” which has divisions “A” and “B,” the latter subtitled “Toward the Production of a Filipino Racial Discourse in the Metropolis.” Because the notes for Part A appear at the end of that part, and not after the conclusion of both parts, one might be encouraged to view “Beyond Identity Politics” as two distinct essays, rendering Part B more of a review essay than a contemplation of Filipino racial discourse in the United States. However, because San Juan links the two “halves” under a single title, it becomes impossible to read his review of Dogeaters without contemplating Part A's account of a symposium where Asian American writers and critics came head-to-head over who could speak of and for Asian American collective identity. By San Juan's account, writers “found themselves privileged … as the fountainhead of answers to questions of Asian American person/collective identity,” while critics were eschewed for using theory and for being ensconced in elite institutions (San Juan 1992, 104-105). San Juan laments the event's missed opportunity to scrutinize problems of racial representativeness in preference for “a theater of naive and pathetic self-congratulation … another day swallowed up in the mise en abime of ghetto marginality and ethnic vainglory. Liberalism and identity politics have conquered again” (San Juan 1992, 109).

13. Out of fourteen story lines in Dogeaters, three feature male protagonists and eleven feature female protagonists. I have distinguished story lines based on the number of first-person and third-person over-the-shoulder perspectives through which Hagedorn narrates events. See appendixes.

14. There is a factual testament to this aestheticized violence: as part of her beautification campaign, the First Lady hosts “an International Film Festival for which the Folk Arts Theater was hastily built at the cost of many workers' lives” (Evangelista 1993, 52).

15. For further discussions of sati, see Lati Mani (1990a and 1990b) and Rajan.

16. Both Masao Miyoshi (1990) and Arjun Appadurai (1990 and 1993) delineate the limited usefulness of “nation” as a category of analysis, proposing transnational and postnational frameworks in its stead.

17. See the introduction for a more detailed account of the ways in which issues of gender and sexuality take a backseat to debates over the nexus of nationalism-transnationalism in Asian American cultural critique.

18. Along similar lines, Hagedorn critiques narratives of “pure” identity by depicting Rio's father's rejection of his mestizo ancestry. Freddie Gonzaga, to the chagrin of his wife, Dolores, decodes his bloodline as Spanish rather than Filipino: “I don't understand,” she exclaims. “You are definitely Filipino! A mestizo, yes—but definitely Filipino” (8). How Freddie's genetic material is encoded remains decidedly less important than how he “feels” (8) (i.e., how he narrates his ancestry). Moreover, that decoding—however false or contested—has more influence on the way in which Freddie lives his life than does the supposed genetic codes he inherits. The transformative effects of decoding, then, can be subversive (as in Joey's reversal of the Tonto stereotype) as well as nonsubversive (as in Freddie's translation of his bloodline into pure Spanish stock).

19. According to Gaylyn Studlar, Mulvey's theory of spectatorship and much of feminist film theory that follows in its wake are based on male psychic mechanisms “which inscribe pleasurable (and power-laden) patterns of looking between spectator and screen” (Studlar, 2-3). As an alternative to this model, based on the psychodynamics of the castration complex, Studlar investigates “pleasures of male spectatorship that are beyond mastery,” that are based on the psychodynamics of the oral (mother-centered) phase where pleasure is associated with submission, passivity, and dependence—with masochism, in short. Studlar goes on to define a “masochistic aesthetic,” based on suspended desire and linked to strategies of concealment, that remains the hallmark of film: “Masochism obsessively recreates the movement between concealment and revelation …, seduction and rejection, in emulation of the ambivalent response to the mother who may either abandon or overwhelm the child. In masochistic fantasy, seduction offers the promise—and the danger—of symbiosis” (Studlar, 21).

20. See chapter 1 of Chow's Woman and Chinese Modernity, especially pp. 19-25.

21. I will return to this discussion of necessity (dependence) and extravagance (autonomy) in the final part of this chapter. For more on the politics of pleasure, see the volume edited by Jameson, Formations of Pleasure.

22. To cite but a few such studies, I would refer the reader to Said (1979); Alloula; Li; and Moy.

23. Feminist interventions into postcolonial studies owe a great debt to the work of Gayatri Spivak who critiqued the shunting of women aside in subaltern revisionist histories (see Spivak 1988b). Other critics interrogating the masculine bias of postcolonial nationalism and the Western bias of feminist studies include Chandra Mohanty, Jenny Sharpe, Trinh Minh-ha, Deniz Kandiyoti, Sara Suleri, Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan.

24. This is not to suggest that feminism and nationalism are inherently at odds. Rather, it is to acknowledge the way in which “national identity [has] serve[d] the interests of patriarchies in multiple locations” (Grewal and Kaplan, 22).

25. The manhood to be “recovered” by nationalist leaders is thus a specific brand of masculinity premised upon phallocentric notions of male dominance over women.

26. Enloe finds the issue of Muslim women's wearing the veil remarkable precisely because of the importance men in these communities assign to it: “One is hard pressed to think of an equally heated debate in any national community about men's attire—or diet or linguistic style—in which women have had so predominant a role to play. Sikh men's wearing of customary turban is important to Sikh communal solidarity. … Yet one doesn't see Sikh women acting as the chief proponents or enforcers of this male ethnic practice” (Enloe, 53-54).

27. See Enloe (60) for a deconstruction of this “not now, later” tabling of women's issues by nationalist leaders.

28. There are several Filipina nationalist political groups that precisely work to dismantle both the obvious neocolonial structures (military bases, transnational corporations, single-crop plantations) and the less obvious oppression of women upon which such foreign exploitation rests (as witnessed in the prostitution around military bases, the cheap female labor servicing transnational industries, and the gendered division of labor and wages in farm work). See Brenda Stoltzfus on GABRIELA, a Filipina organization that joins “the struggle for justice as Filipino people with their struggle for justice as women” (Stoltzfus, 310). See also Lilia Santiago, for a history of the women's movement in the Philippines since the Spanish colonial era.

29. In 1986, Frederic Jameson coins the term “national allegory” to describe Third World texts, those emanating from countries that “have suffered colonialism and imperialism”: “[T]hird-world texts … necessarily project a political dimension in the form of a national allegory: the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third-world culture and society” (Jameson 1986, 69). Aijaz Ahmad critiques Jameson, in short objecting to the reduction of all Third World texts into a unitary response to (capitalist, Western) imperialism.

30. As the portrait of the First Lady reveals, the multiform expression of female embodiment to which Dogeaters gives voice are cross-cut by class privileges. Only women of the upper classes survive in the narrative, either through escape, or through joining the nationalist guerrilla movement, or through adopting the position of the neocolonial exploiter. By focusing on the spectatorial gazes to which all women and gay men are subject, Hagedorn does, indeed, understate the class stratification amongst these varied “objects to be looked at.”

31. Appadurai's (1992) response to the many “attacks” on nationalism is to call for the construction of a “language” that will encompass nonterritorial, exilic identities (418).

32. Moreover, the threat of rape and torture comes from both sides of the class struggle—the male elite and the “dark, barefoot boys” (the caddies), though opposed in economic and nationalist matters, have in common this trafficking in women.

33. Clearly preoccupied with the issues of class privilege, women's complicity, and the consequences of escape, Hagedorn crafts a similar scene in her 1981 novella Pet Food. In this earlier work, the Filipina protagonist, George Sand, envisions a group of guerrillas coming to her father's house and killing everyone but her grandmother: “I hear them in the next room, killing the nurse. … I lie in my bed, sweating and staring at the door. Should I try to escape?” (Hagedorn 1993, 108).

34. Biddy Martin both emphasizes the association of the feminine gender with “subjection to a bodily vulnerability” and the ways in which—in a U.S. context—“the construction of race as subjection to a body” coexists with this gendered vulnerability (Martin, 117). In Hagedorn's novel, gendered vulnerability coexists not so much with racialized vulnerability but with class vulnerability, with the impoverished more likely to be buried beneath hastily constructed buildings. My main argument, however, is that in their defensive reactions to gendered vulnerability, Hagedorn's Filipina characters are too often construed as betraying their country—escaping to the United States and so forth. In the terms of this argument, resisting gender subordination is seen as a revolution of lesser importance, even a fractious uprising that must be put down, in order to wage the main war against imperialism and neocolonialism.

35. Scarry also reflects upon the idiom of “betrayal,” where the tortured person is made to assume responsibility for his/her own destruction (i.e., pain). Scarry counters “world, self, and voice are lost, or nearly lost, through the intense pain of torture and not through the confession as is wrongly suggested by its connotations of betrayal” (Scarry, 35; emphasis added).

36. Interpolating Deleuze, Studlar remarks on how “rituals of suffering show the masochist's contempt for the superego's expectation that punishment could prevent forbidden pleasure” (Studlar, 17-18). Since the superego's punishing logic is coded male—that is, the superego represents the internalization of the father's law held in place by the threat of castration—then this masochistic contempt might be construed as a feminized resistance to the punishing male order (i.e., it refuses punishment as punishment, thus transcending its logic). As Studlar claims in a later section, the fantasy goal of masochism is “expiation of the father and the symbiotic reunion with an idealized maternal rule” (Studlar, 26). One might view Leonor's masochistic suffering, then, not merely as sign of her circumscribed position but also as sign of her perversion of punishment—her contempt for the general's torturing tactics.

37. Hagedorn herself has commented on the “profound sense of ‘freedom’ as a woman—a freedom of movement and choice” that she associates with Western culture, particularly in her recollection of arriving in San Francisco and being able to “ventur[e] out … alone,” without older relatives or paid chaperones (Hagedorn 1994, 175).

38. In an interview with Jon Halliday, Sirk characterized the picture as “about the antithesis of Thoreau's qualified Rousseauism” (Halliday, 99). Elaborating on the film, Halliday writes, “[I]t is a tough attack on the moralism of petit bourgeois America. Within the story, and the [melodramatic] genre (and the cast), Sirk has constructed a film which historicizes the lost American ideal of Thoreau and situates the barren ideology of bourgeois America in class terms. He does this by showing the relations between people whose roles are already specified—for example, at the country club” (Halliday, 10). Also commenting on Sirk's use of melodrama, Michael Stern states, “Sirk more frequently turned to family structure or small-town stratification as a microcosm of the broader issues [such as the failing social order]” (Stern, 26). Like Sirk, Hagedorn uses the petty tragedies of quotidian life in order to comment upon the national and transnational social forces inscribing Filipinas' everyday politics which include sexual choice and sexual desire.

39. In this respect, Hagedorn's novel appears to abide by “the classic tenets of dominant Euro-American feminism,” to use Inderpal Grewal's words. Such feminism privileges the “antagonism between men and women as the primary source of exploitation” and naively celebrates Third World female protagonists' becoming “‘free’ individual[s],” with “the West as the site for such ‘freedom’” (Grewal, 63). Yet, only Rio's story follows the trajectory preferred by Euro-American feminism. As noted earlier, Daisy challenges Western feminists' presumptions that the West is the sole site of feminist liberation.

40. The phrase is Diana Fuss's, from the title of her article “Fashion and the Homospectatorial Look.” However, my allusion to this phrase is indebted to Kim Rowe's excellent undergraduate paper, in which she deconstructs the formation of Pucha and Rio's gendered subjectivity—their learning how to be women—through “homospectatorship”: “When they are older, Rio is the only one comfortable with the underlying homosexual meaning of that construction [of womanhood]. Pucha affects a heterosexual identity, while Rio more accurately sees the effects of female homo-spectatorship on the construction of gender” (Rowe, 104). My thanks to Katheryn Rios for bringing the essay to my attention.

41. I allude here to works by Apter, Boone, and Sedgwick (1992) that record the way in which Western enclaves of gays and lesbians at the turn of and early part of the century used Oriental drag to perform queer subjectivity. Yet one cannot simply read the native's crossing into Western identity and space as sign of a similar (queer) performance, since such crossings are often the result of necessity and constraint. One might question, then, the Western exclusiveness of “acting out” and the Orientalism it perpetuates in its celebration of a specifically Occidental queer strategy against a likewise Occidental compulsory heterosexuality.

42. Autonomy and self-determination are themselves privileged notions which spring from Enlightenment philosophies regarding the natural rights of rational men—claims that did not extend to emotional women or superstitious savages. This is not to suggest that women and dark-skinned peoples are irrational, but that the idea of rational autonomy is produced through the (en)gendering of its (female and dark-skinned) Others. See Cora Kaplan for her explication of Enlightenment rationality as disabling to articulations of female pleasure and desire.

43. I am indebted to Viet Nguyen for helping me clarify this nuance. In a previous draft of this chapter, I implicitly argued that Joey's nationalism renders him the only gay hero; however, as Viet argues persuasively, once Joey becomes a nationalist, “[his] sexuality is erased—he either becomes heterosexual or his sexuality is erased as an issue” (personal correspondence).

44. I would further contest the gendered nationalist message that Casper attributes to Hagedorn: that women betray the nation. While Hagedorn most emphatically does focus on Filipinas (and on their at times unendurable marriages), as well as on the compromised nationalism of the Philippines, she does not link them causally in the way that Casper suggests.