Announcements  Presentation on Bulosan – Th 2/21: Courtney & Tanya  6pm Wed night = 1-2pg write up of individual contribution  Grading rubric = brief summary, analysis, relation, and style (25 pts each)  Short paper #2 Due Thurs 2/21  Office hours:  Today CCC  Wed SSB 245

Filipino/American Sexualities The Hypersexuality of Philippine Independence

Filipino/American  : Philippines = unincorporated territory  Filipinos considered noncitizen nationals of US  : Philippine Commonwealth = preparation for independence  National status of Filipino revoked – immigrants become subject to racist national quota of 50/year  July 4, 1946: Philippine Independence  1965 Immigration Act: revokes racist national quotas & allows for immigration via preference categories  1965 – 1986: Presidency and dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos

The Manong Generation  = “manong” generation  “manong” – Ilocano term of respect for elder male relatives  94% male, agricultural peasant class and under the age of 30  Factors of immigration:  Increased land dispossession due to transition from Spanish to American governance  Agricultural depression due to drought – particularly in Ilocos  Ilocano tradition of inter-regional cultivation  Contract-labor system and sojourner mentality  Spanish Catholic gender norms  American educational system

Trans-national Laborers  Large influx of immigrants – almost 150,000 nationally (including HI) by 1920; 30,470 in CA alone  “pensionados”  Laborers in Hawaiian plantations – 110,00  “Alaskeros” – about 3,500  Domestic help/Service labor – about 10,000  Mainland stoop and migrant farm labor – about 30,000  Presence of Filipino immigrant laborer embodies contradictions of white love  3 vectors of anti-Filipino sentiment:  Destruction of wage scale  Public health threat  Sexually rapacious

Racialized Sexuality  Taxi dance halls  sites of racial mixing, class alliances, violation of gender norms  EX Watsonville Riots  “You can realize, with the declared preference of the Filipino for white women and the willingness on the part of some white females to yield to that preference, the situation which arises… California in this matter is seeking to protect the nation, as well as itself, against the peaceful penetration of another colored race” (V.S. McClatchy)  Sexualized primitivism comes to define Filipino raciality in the US

Hypercorporeality (Koshy, 101)

Filipino/American Sexualities The history of the formation of “Filipino” and “Filipino American” identity formations, from a U.S. perspective, is also a history of sexuality. It is a history that registers how sexuality coordinates the relationship of the U.S. nation to race, gender, and class, as it shapes the relationships of individuals to the nation-state. Read in this way, “Filipino American” may be recognized as posing a radical challenge to paradigms incapable of addressing the intersectionality of the operations of nonequivalent but inseparably linked identificatory categories. (Chuh, 35)

Carlos Bulosan Nov 24, 1913 – born in the province of Pangasinan, Philippines July 22, 1930 – arrived in Seattle 1935 – started involvement in workers movement and labor organizing UCAPAWA – United Cannery and Packing House Workers of America 1936 – hospitalized for tuberculosis 1944 – Laughter of my Father 1946 – America is in the Heart 1950 – blacklisted for membership in CPUSA 1956 – died of tuberculosis in Seattle 1990s – re-discovery by Fil Am scholars

Koshy’s Critique: master’s tools & master’s house  “The emphasis on intimacy and interiority in Bulosan needs to be understood as a passionate outcry against the raw exposure and relentless publicity to which Filipino sexuality was subjected within colonial regimes of biopower and the immigrant surveillance apparatus of public health, census enumeration, and law enforcement” (94)  “However, although Bulosan’s work anatomizes the effects of biopower on Filipino Americans, his reliance on the heterosexual romance to naturalize his claim to America undercuts the radical potential of his revolutionary politics” (96)  Purity of Filipino’s desire for white woman works to “naturalize and normalize a deviant subject” (116)  Colonial family romance is replaced by revolutionary brotherhood with women relegated to realm of ideal (117)

Chuh’s Reading: queering the manong  Bulosan offers an “’alternative’ sexuality… in terms of an alternative to the demands of heteronormativity” (36-37)  Rejection of racist heteronormative masculinity for embrace of feminine ideal, not possession of women (39)  “Allos’s idolatry of white women does not translate into a desire for miscegenation per se, but for the conditions that would make it unremarkable for Allos to be seen in the company of a white woman. Bulosan thematizes the historical anxieties over miscegenation, yet his narration, more than critiquing the racism of antimiscegenationist logic, also interrogates the presumptive desire for heterosexuality that underwrites that logic.” (40)