Trafficked woman, sex worker, mail-order bride, and domestic worker. These are some of the dominant images of Filipino women that circulate in global popular culture. Filipinas are constructed as ideal workers and wives and as sexual fantasies. At the same time, many diasporic Filipinas organize toward the liberation of women and the Philippine nation-state from imperialism and global capitalism. In her book Queering the Global Filipina/o Body, Gina K. Velasco explores these contradictions and seeks to understand the political potential of the global Filipina body.
The book offers important contributions to Filipina/o/x studies, feminist studies, and queer studies through its transnational and diasporic approach. According to Velasco, the global Filipina body “signifies the subjection of Filipina/o bodies to the gendered and racialized effects of neoliberal globalization” (p. 3). Velasco draws from ethnography in the Philippines and the United States and from Filipina/o American cultural productions, including film and video, performance, and websites. In focusing on diasporic Filipina/o culture and its serious engagement with popular nationalism, Velasco makes a compelling case that queer and feminist studies should not dismiss nationalism outright. She argues that queering the Filipina body disrupts heteronormative discourse of Philippine nationalism, while still investing in national liberation struggles against US imperialism.
The book is structured to examine the limits of heteronormative and masculinist representations of the global Filipina body, and to show how Filipina/o American cultural workers queer the global Filipina body. Chapter 1 examines the diasporic politics of the balikbayan, a term referring to Filipinos abroad returning to the homeland. Through ethnography of heritage language programs at the University of the Philippines, Diliman, Velasco highlights personal narratives and testimonies of Filipina/o American balikbayans and language instructors who are part of the National Democratic Movement of the Philippines, a fifty-year-plus grassroots movement for national sovereignty. The testimonies reveal how queer balikbayans negotiate the contradictions between heteronormative forms of Filipina/o American cultural nationalism and their investment in anti-imperialist movements. In this context, Velasco defines diasporic nationalism as “the ways in which the nation is invoked as a mode of solidarity and belonging among Filipina/o Americans” (p. 37).
Chapter 2 tackles the conflation of human trafficking and sex work in feminist Filipina American cultural productions and political campaigns. The film Sin City Diary follows its director, Rachel Rivera, and her return to the Philippines, specifically Olongapo City, a former US military base. Though intended to critique the legacies of US imperialism, the film constructs the trafficked woman/sex worker as a “damaged Other” and a threat to the heteropatriarchal family in the Philippines. Similarly, the Purple Rose Campaign of Filipina American feminist organization Af3irm (previously GabNet) sought to address sexual and domestic violence experience by Filipinas in the diaspora, but in Velasco's loving critique of this campaign, she observes that Af3irm conflated sex work with sexual violence.
Chapter 3 follows a queer Filipina American performance and video art group called Mail Order Brides, or M.O.B. The group satirizes the commodification of same-sex marriage and the Filipina body in its piece “Always a Bridesmaid, Never a Bride.” Using feminist camp and ethnic drag, M.O.B. “markets” Filipinas as the ideal laborers to serve a newly married white same-sex couple. Velasco contends that the exaggeration of racialized and gendered affective labor in M.O.B. points out how the queer Filipina body remains both outside the norms of homonormativity and the respectability politics of Filipina/o American cultural nationalism.
Chapter 4 analyzes with the performance and video art piece, Cosmic Blood, and its depiction of the queer cyborg. The artist Gigi Otálvaro-Hormillosa, a mestiza of Filipina and Colombian descent, reframes the colonizer/colonized relationship through the lens of queer desire and imagines the cyborg as the embodiment of aeromestizaje. Inspired by Gloria Anzaldúa's work, Velasco explains that aeromestizaje is Otálvaro-Hormillosa's own concept, which presents the queer Filipina body as “neither a figure for the nation nor a passive victim of colonial violence” (p. 98). Also engaging with Afrofuturism, Velasco shows that the cyborg in Cosmic Blood reconceptualizes the colonial past to present a future in which the global Filipina body is no longer constrained by imperialism and neoliberal globalization.
Velasco's book is published at a critical time in Filipina/o/x studies and diasporic movement building. The human rights violations under Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte have motivated scholars to reexamine nationalist movements. On the ground, more Filipina/o/x Americans have linked state violence in the Philippines and the United States. Velasco's book asks us to not only recognize that LGBTQ+ activists exist, but to ask, how does a queer diasporic framework create new sites of coalition and imagine new types of freedoms? This book is a thought-provoking and important read for scholars and students of Filipina/o/x studies, Asian American studies, queer studies, and feminist studies and those invested in queer and feminist anti-imperialist politics.
