Tribute to Dean Corazon B. Lamug

I learned about the sudden death of Dr. Lamug yesterday morning from friends back home. I received two text messages and an email while in the middle of reading an article on Sarah Palin and the reality of the political mind. The news was, to say the least, shocking. For a moment I could not concentrate on my reading. For hours, I could not get myself into rewriting a fragment of my research proposal. How could anyone so energetic and brimming with life pass on so suddenly? I knew through my friend, Wengki, who was Dr. Lamug’s advisee and who lived with her for a semester, how health conscious and fit the former dean of the UPLB College of Arts and Sciences was.


Dr. Lamug, UPLB professor of sociology and president of the Philippine Sociological Society, died while swimming off the shores of Coron, Palawan. I am informed that she was on a weekend educational trip with a colleague and students of her graduate class. That she died so suddenly is distressing, but the fact that she died while in action was – as one of her former students would say – characteristic of her.


Dr. Lamug was such an important figure during my early years of teaching in the University of the Philippines at Los Banos. She was a social scientist par excellence, a formidable administrator, and a good person. In solidarity with her students and colleagues in UPLB, I wish to pay tribute to her in this blog.


Dr. Lamug was two-term dean of the UPLB College of Arts and Sciences (CAS) – arguably the ideopolis of UP Los Banos and whose founding in 1972 was instrumental to UPLB’s transformation from a highly specialized agriculture and forestry campus to a comprehensive autonomous/constituent university of the UP System. During these terms (2000-2003 and 2003-2006), I served as instructor then assistant professor in the Department of Humanities – one of the nine units of CAS. Having been under her leadership, I knew Dr. Lamug as a formidable administrator. Like any right-thinking leader, she demanded competence and professionalism from her faculty.


I remember sitting in an ad hoc committee where I together with our department head had to present a proposal for the refurbishing of the speech laboratory. There she pointed out the proposal’s limitations and weaknesses and reminded us to do better in our “homework” during our next meeting.


I also recall that during one of the college-level meetings on the revitalization of the General Education Program, she had some of the sharpest and most cutting comments on the humanities course proposals. I had to defend the proposal for SPCM 1 (Speech Communication) and though it had the mark of approval from discipline experts, it still was subjected to what I perceived then as a scathing scrutiny from the dean. Later, I realized that that very stressful meticulousness was a preparation for more caustic comments in the university level deliberations.


Of course, I could not forget how she, as a member of the UPLB technical panel for the humanities and social sciences, “lambasted” the research proposal I submitted for possible university funding. That was a year after she gave me a warm hug for getting a university teaching award (This reminds me that one is really only as good as his last performance). She minced no words, described my proposal as “sketchy” (a word that would haunt me in the weeks that followed), and reminded me of the exacting research standards that UPLB is known for. The revised proposal was later approved by the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research but when the university administration changed guards it was cut from the list of proposals for funding.


The proposed research might never have seen the light of day in UPLB but it was to transform into something else. Parts of the “botched” revised research proposal were crucial to my application for study overseas. I reworked my proposal and submitted it as part of my application for admission to a PhD program at NUS. And while I was waiting for the results of my application, Dean Lamug so kindly recommended that I apply for the Ford Foundation Scholarship Grant. The grant allowed successful applicants to study in universities of their choice and I was one of two people from the Department whom Dean Lamug identified as potential applicants.  But before I completed my application for a Ford scholarship grant, I received an email from NUS informing me of my admission to the university under a research scholarship.


I decided to accept the NUS offer and informed Dr. Lamug of my decision. She was very encouraging and did not question my decision to resign from the university. Her advice was most heartening and forward-looking: “Immerse yourself in NUS's research and publication culture.” She knew then that should I decide to return to the university or to pursue a career in the academia, a considerable research and publication experience would be most indispensable.


I knew her mostly from our moments of professional interaction. They were significant moments as their consequences were crucial to my development as a young academic. When I think about this, I recognize that beneath what I perceived as Dean Lamug’s tough and stern façade was actually a caring and nurturing person.

Studentship, scholarship, and some musings on surviving in Singapore’s academic jungle

(The following is the full text of a short speech I delivered during the Barrio Fiesta/Meet the Scholars of the University of the Philippines Alumni Association Singapore on Sunday, 31 August 2008. Before I did an oral reading of my typewritten speech - something I would normally discourage in my public speaking classes back home - I clarified that I did not think I was the best person to give advice to new Filipino students on what to do and what not to do when in Singapore. I just couldn't say no when one lazy Friday afternoon while gallivanting at Vivo City with friends I got a phone call from the UPAAS Vice President Minnie Lau requesting me if I could give a very short speech on student life in Singapore. The rest was history. Charing!)

I came to Singapore with the following assumptions in mind:

 

1. That higher studies in a highly rated institution of higher learning (a “global knowledge enterprise”) would enrich and expand what little I k now in my academic areas of interest;
2. That it shall keep me abreast with the developments in these areas;
3. That it shall help me establish contacts/ connections with superstars/ major personalities in the field; and
4. That it would increase my potential for publishing in refereed journals, now a major requirement for tenure and especially promotions in the University of the Philippines.

 

So far, NUS has not disappointed me although I am miles and miles away from being prolific in terms of publication in top tier, international refereed journals.

The library is fantastic – and I mean not just the physical but also the virtual one. It’s actually a haven for researchers in the social sciences and the humanities.

 

It shouldn’t, however, surprise anyone that Singapore as an educational hub in Southeast Asia offers more than meeting the expectations I mentioned earlier.

 

In my one-and-a-half-years in this city-state, I have been immersed in a student culture that is highly competitive and very conscious of achievement. I’m sure most of you have heard of the term “kiasuism” or the Singaporean’s fear to lose. Let me refresh your memories with a classic case: When a local student thinks you are a potential A student, he is going to make sure he is an A plus.  

Kiasuism can be so overwhelming that even if you are already inundated with nine chapters of required readings for the week, you’ll feel that you have to read more and beyond the requirement as your classmates would surely drop foreign sounding names and esoteric issues from their “outside” readings. 

But no worries. My Filipino friends and I have discovered that we are as kiasu as the locals. In fact, we can be so competitive our enthusiasm can get easily dampened by a B+. I was actually told by a Filipino friend who earned his PhD from NUS that most of my predecessors in the English Department got straight A’s for their coursework and that they expect no less from me. So the pressure doesn’t really come from THEM (the locals); it comes from US (the small community of Filipino students in Singapore). So on behalf of the Filipino student community, I am pressuring the new students to get straight A’s. We expect no less. (Of course, do not commit suicide if you fail. Yes, sulk in despair and when you are done, move on.)

 

Getting an A and A+ isn’t easy. It does require the proverbial blood, sweat, and tears, not to mention a lot of hair fall (even if you are using a shampoo with Pro-V treatment).

 

I think I am getting a dose of my own medicine.  Back in Los Baños, I kept telling my students, when they complain about the difficulties of their academic requirements, this:  “You are meant to suffer. Life is not an entertainment; it is a struggle.”  I guess, what goes around comes around. Let me tell you that I suffer a lot and that studying is a struggle. It definitely heightens the stress level.

 

But then again, that is what studentship is all about. There is aesthetics in sufferance as flowers bloom from the rubble or (this one is corny) a phoenix rises from the ashes.

 

So I am not going to tell new students some schmaltzy words of advice. Instead my advice, without meaning to sound more popish than the pope, is: Burn your midnight oil, suffer, kick some ass, go get you’re A’s and A pluses.

 

And it’s always good to remember: We are as good as our last performance.

Photos courtesy of Ms. Angeline "Angie" Wong - dear friend, honorary Filipino, and photographer par excellence

SONA, Rhetoric, and the Invention of Truth

The report on the Pulse Asia survey on people’s perception of the SONA (“Public skeptical over Arroyo speech in Congress”, Philippine Daily Inquirer, 24 July 2008) brings to mind proverbial notions of rhetoric as “mere” embellishment or concealment of “truth”, as “deception”. The SONA, being a rhetorical act, has often been treated by those who oppose or are critical of the administration as a superfluous verbal activity that is far removed from reality. (Manuel Martinez, in his book A Political History of Our Times: Presidential Policies from Aquino to Ramos to Estrada (MFM Enterprises, 1999), comments that “all SONAs, regardless of which President was mouthing them, by their very nature, have suffered in many parts from banality, turgidity, superfluity and insipidity.”)

While it is important to examine and understand whether the rhetoric of the SONA corresponds with the material reality experienced by Filipinos in their everyday struggle, it is also worthy to look into how rhetoric actually constitutes reality.

Arguably, the SONA has been used to justify and legitimize (controversial) government policies pursued not only during the years before the annual delivery of the congressional speech but also in the years that come after. Before the passage of the contested Human Securities Act of 2007, for instance, the president, through her SONAs, had been flagging various articulations that tend to legitimize and rally public support for the passing of the law. She had, of course, made explicit calls for Congress to pass an anti-terrorism law in her SONAs from 2002 to 2004. But curiously her articulations also include the employment of more sophisticated rhetorical devices such as the metaphor of “war on terror” as a curative to the “nation’s ills”. Thus, we heard her speak of the “global war on terror” as “a historical watershed” and of ensuring that criminals “of the common kind and the kind that kills in the name of political advocacies” “feel the full brunt of the arsenal of democracy.”  Later, we realized through the Alston Report that the war on terror frame had been used to target not just these lumped “criminals” or “enemies of the state”, but even members of legal organizations, journalists, and human rights advocates that the military considered as “fronts” of the armed rebels.

Whether we listen to it delivered from the presidential podium via television, radio or the Internet, or read its full text published in major dailies or on the web, or completely ignore it, the SONA – including the metaphors and frames it privileges – will find its way in other contexts and domains as it has been strategically designed to carry sound-bites ready to be embedded or alluded to in journalistic texts, news broadcasts, classroom discussions, political commentaries, and even in everyday small talks or conversations. More importantly, the speech carries passages apportioned to be recontextualized or reformulated into more “authoritative, non-negotiable materialities” like the Human Securities Act and other statutes.

A considerable number of people may not be aware of the SONA (the report on the recent Pulse Asia survey indicates that 40% of the respondents are not aware of the past editions of the congressional speech), and a considerable number of those who are aware of it may find it “untruthful”, but these “facts” do not erase nor reduce the truth that the SONAs like all policy speeches are implicated in our socio-political reality. 

Politics, according to rhetoric scholar Bruce Gronbeck, can be understood as “a symbolic action” and this demands “that we analyze systematically the discourses of political ideology and valuation, of political visions and the places citizens occupy in such visions; of the means by which self-interests are converted into communal interests – into public policies.” It may  therefore, be helpful for us to regard the SONA – including the spectacle that comes with it – with our critical minds.  And it may do us good if we listen to it carefully, study it, write about it, and perhaps, investigate, challenge or negotiate the representations it offers us before they get reformulated by our legislators into authoritative texts and become non-negotiable.

 

Vietnam and the "Universe": Is the Empire Striking Back?

When I think of the documented atrocities the US foreign policy had inflicted on countries in Indochina, I couldn’t help but find the staging of the US-based Miss Universe Pageant in Vietnam suspect and open to several questions. By staging one of the enduring symbols of American popular culture in a land the US imperialist foreign policy had wreaked so much havoc on in the 1960’s and 1970’s but failed to defeat, is America trying to symbolically redeem itself? What does the staging of an American-owned/sponsored beauty contest mean to the freedom-fighting Vietnamese people?

 

If reports that the Vietnamese people are not generally warm to the staging of the international beauty pageant are true, one shouldn’t be surprised at all. It may have been more than four decades since the US-Vietnam war, but gruesome images of the impact of America’s post-World War II imperialist agenda in the Far East still linger. I wonder if the staging of this spectacle is strategically designed to erase the iconic image of a running Vietnamese girl naked and napalmed (Will the image of the very pretty Miss Vietnam Nguyen Thuy Lam eventually replace that of Kim Phuc, the “Vietnam Napalm Girl” photographed by Pulitzer award winner Nick Ut?)

 

When the Philippines first staged Miss Universe in 1974 – several years before I was born and became a beauty pageant fan – there reportedly was so much festivity in the air (at least in Metro Manila). Not only was this due to the internationally well-known/infamous Filipino passion for pageants. The reigning queen, Margarita Moran, was a compatriot making it possible for the former US colony in Southeast Asia to have two Miss Universe title holders in a brief span of five years. And in spite of the renaissance of nationalistic fervor in the 1970’s, Filipinos generally loved/adored anything American. There must have been protests against the staging of the pageant – and I’m wild guessing that one of the staunch protesters was beauty queen-turned-activist Nelia Sancho, Queen of the Pacific 1971, first-runner up to Gloria Diaz in the 1969 Binibining Pilipinas, and I must hasten to add, a University of the Philippines alumna – but they must have been overshadowed by the cacophony of support from Filipino pageant fans and, yes, Marcos supporters. We were not just warm to the idea of hosting Miss Universe back in 1974. We embraced the idea, celebrated the staging, and the rest, as they say, was history.

 
Vietnam’s experience with international beauty pageants is rather more recent. It is only since the early part of this decade that it has been sending representatives to major international beauty pageants. It is quite natural then for the Vietnamese people not to welcome the event with very open arms.

 

But I wonder if there are protests and formidable display of resistance from the locals. I don’t know about the pageant fans documenting the situation in Vietnam, but I believe this is one significant aspect of beauty pageants that shouldn’t be swept under the rug. There is so much to learn from these acts of resistance where tension thrives. To me, they constitute the liminal space that would remind us that beyond the spectacle lie critical issues that we have to confront and address if we do not want to be complicit to the inhumanity that is involved in anything that displays pleasure/entertainment amid atrocities inflicted by the very same people/institutions/transnational corporations that sponsor/support/control these fun factories or enterprises.  And I am not just merely talking about hypersexualized women parading in front of the awestruck public (I think I have made it clear earlier that these are active choices some of the candidates make – and they do not necessarily rely on the male chauvinist panopticon that some feminists claim beauty contestants have in their minds.) I am talking about beauty pageants – yes, Miss Universe, Miss World, Miss International, Miss Earth – being political.

 

Staging an international beauty pageant in a developing country is a political act. More so, if that developing country had been formerly the target of a colonial power’s napalm bombs and other weapons of mass destruction – a (neo)colonial power that is curiously home to the pageant under question.

 

It is perhaps easy to see the pageant in Vietnam as America’s way of striking back, of exercising cultural imperialism in a country whose spirit it never defeated through more-than-a-decade-long exercise of military might and hard power. It is, however, another thing, curious as it may seem, to view Vietnam’s seeming “complicity” as its unique manner of telling the world’s lone superpower that the indomitable Vietnamese spirit is again ready to take another challenge posed by the once formidable foe. Only this time, it shall not face the challenge with its mortars and world-famous guerilla tactics; it shall do so with this thing curiously called “beauty”. And yes, on a stage where (un)fortunately, napalmed bodies won’t be running amok to remind the world what America really stood for in the war. Only nice-looking, beautiful bodies clad in pastel-colored bikinis.

(Note: This is partly inspired by the documentary "Hearts and Minds" available at http://freedocumentaries.org/film.php?id=168)

Images used:

Vietnam Napalm by Associated Press Photographer Nick Ut, 8 June 1972. Available at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4517597.stm

Nguyen Thuy Lam, Miss Universe Vietnam 2008, competing in Beach Beauty. Available at http://www.flickr.com/photos/medoubleq/2543185549/

Miss Universe 1974 with Philippine First Lady Imelda Marcos. Available at http://www.missosology.org/philippines/ ... mited.html

Margie Moran in Miss Universe 1974. Available at http://www.missosology.org/philippines/ ... llery.html

Nelia Sancho as Queen of the Pacific 1971 and now as advocate of women's and children's rights. Available at http://www.balita.com/xshell.php?id=%0A%091608

Miss Landmine.Available at http://www.flickr.com/photos/scraaaaatch/2048150644/

Fascist America by Ryan Brown. Available at http://www.fascistamerica.net/fa-05.html

Misses Australia, Germany and Philippines. Available at http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u ... 2ae3fbf2be

Teachers as Cultural Workers: Letters to Those Who Dare Teach (Part 2)

Rating:	★★★★★
Category:	Books
Genre:	Nonfiction
Author:	Paulo Freire

I finished reading Freire’s ‘Teachers as Cultural Workers’ this afternoon, and obviously, there is so much more to be said about it. The book has ten more letters including letters 3 to 10, the author’s Last Words, and an afterword from Shirley Steinberg, a Freire disciple and Kincheloe’s better half.

I shall only highlight a few points that I was able to jot down or remember while reading the book in several places today (I spent several minutes reading this marvelous work in the MRT going to Orchard Road, then a few minutes on Bus 143 going to the university, about two to three hours in one corner of the stacks section of the Central Library, then several more minutes on my way home via Bus 189. I realize then that when one is enraptured by the printed word, he becomes totally unmindful of a lot of stimuli that normally impinge on the senses while in the public transport system. These stimuli include very attractive local boys in the National Service uniform, the famed multiracial scent wafting in the air-conditioned buses and MRT, the humming sound of the engines of these public transportation vehicles, and aunties to whom I would normally offer my seat when I feel like performing the role of the most chivalrous gay on the planet.)

Now, the points. One that really caught my attention is the term ‘patient impatience.’ I guess it may be regarded as another permutation of the dialectics of theory and practice and a strong reminder for teachers to veer away from the extreme tendencies of anti-intellectualism that invalidates theory, and intellectual elitism that regards theory as an end in itself (In one of his interviews, Henry Giroux, a Freire disciple in North America, admonished the tendency of English departments to do this. I couldn't agree more.). Freire suggests that teachers should strike the balance between getting impatient in a system that denies them of their dignity and exercising patience (reflexivity) so as not to be rash and judgmental and unscientific.

Then there is the author’s call to allow the imagination to flourish. Coupled with a systematic and disciplined study of concrete experience, imagination should help students and teachers – co-learners – rework, re-invent, and perhaps, re-contextualize others’ readings of the word/world so that they become relevant to their lives.

Freire is explicit in saying that ‘teaching is political.’ In his eighth letter, he asserts that ‘education is a political practice’ (129) and immediately restates this with emphasis, ‘[an] educator is a politician.’ To accomplish this, he recommends that educators ‘know what happens in the world of children with whom they work. They need to know the universe of their dreams, the language with which they skillfully defend themselves from the aggressiveness of their world, what they know independently of the school, and how they know it’ (130).

What is good about Freire’s ‘Teachers/Letters’ is that it does not assume that the readers will take everything that it brings to their attention as relevant or applicable or even agreeable to what they actually do. They are given the choice to accept or reject, transport and transgress from its ideas, and that in itself is empowering. After all, Freire has made it clear from the very beginning (his ‘First Words’) that the things that he shares are borne out of the experiences of the oppressed from the time Brazil was ‘invented’. They cannot be transported wholesale in, say, the Philippine classrooms or in any educational site beyond the Brazilian context for that matter.

The relationship of the ‘concrete context’ and the ‘theoretical context’ is definitely a recurring theme in his letters. On this, he elaborates: ‘[It] is impossible to teach content without knowing how students think in the context of their daily lives, without knowing what they know independently of school so that we can, on the one hand, help them to know better what they already know and, on the other, teach them what they don’t know yet’ (140).

The original Portuguese title of the book is ‘Professora Sim, Tia Nao’ or ‘teacher yes, aunt no’ (thanks to Peter McLaren’s preface for this information). I’ll leave it to the future readers to discover why.

Photo taken from this site: http://www.apafec.org.br

Teachers as Cultural Workers: Letters to Those Who Dare Teach

Rating:	★★★★★
Category:	Books
Genre:	Nonfiction
Author:	Paulo Freire

(Part 1)

So far, I’ve only read the first and second letters in Paulo Freire’s ‘Teachers as Cultural Workers: Letters to Those Who Dare Teach’ (2005, expanded edition) and I am already amazed by the wealth of insights that can be derived from the book.

I read Freire’s ‘Pedagogy of the Oppressed’ (1984 translation) back home, and what compelled me to read this classic text was the constant mentioning of his work in my interactions with colleagues and friends in NetWorks and Ugnayan ng Pahinungod, especially those deeply involved in literacy work in the country’s rural areas and indigenous communities. My desire to understand the value of the work was also partly influenced by one of my references in rhetoric which outlines the concepts, definitions and major theorists in the field from antiquity to the latter part of the 20th century. Freire’s name was one of the entries. Apparently, his discussions on the relationship of language, thought, and reality as well as his thesis on the dialectics of reading the word and reading the world (which appears as one of the chapters in the book that I’m currently reading) have earned him a significant place in rhetorical studies in the last century (So much for appropriation and ‘pillaging’ of theorists from allied disciplines – a tendency that rhetorical studies have been unapologetically pursuing.).

So my interest was not so much on how the book (‘Pedagogy’) would influence my philosophy and method of teaching in the university but how I could meander through the discourses of my colleagues who kept on citing ‘praxis’, ‘action-reflection-action’, ‘conscienticization’, ‘banking method’ versus the liberatory ‘pedagogy of the oppressed’, etc. during our interactions. I was also interested in using his ideas and ‘tools’ for the content of the course SPCM 105 (Philippine Public Address). While I had been fortunate enough to have read his work before I began to teach the course, I regret to say that I failed to incorporate his work in my syllabus. I was just too overwhelmed to revisit my notes on analytical frameworks and critical approaches that have mostly emanated from Greco-Roman and European-American traditions.

My interest in reading Freire now is not so much anchored on the need to work my way through the language game of my friends and colleagues or to cover up my insecurity in teaching rhetoric and public address. While I grapple with several ideas, concepts, theories that I need to apprehend well for my comprehensive exams in the middle of this year, I wouldn’t deny that I have been blessed with a little luxury of time to read what I like to read. After all, I am currently not tied to teaching, marking papers, reading both well- and haphazardly written student essays, not to mention regular staff meetings and phenomenal departmental ‘intramurals’ – activities which had taken most of my time for eight years before coming to Singapore to study.

On Friday afternoon, the last day of classes in the university, I headed towards Vivo City, the largest mall in town which houses a favorite bookstore called ‘Page One’. There I was drawn to checking out titles in the humanities and possible additions to my mini-library. I purchased two books, one of which is Freire’s lesser known work. The other book is Michel Foucault’s ‘Archaeology of Knowledge and Discourses of Language’ (thesis related but something I have to grapple with much later. This is only my second Foucault book, the first one being ‘Madness and Civilization’, the author’s dissertation. Quite embarrassingly, I’ve only read a few pages of that ‘critically acclaimed’ work. It is probably now accumulating dust in my bookshelf in Bay, Laguna. I sincerely hope to save it from my superficial display of erudition (a thing I am most guilty of) when I get back home this year.)

Now back to Freire's ‘Teachers’. What is it about Freire’s ‘Teachers’ that is so compelling? In his first two letters (preceded by a foreword by Donaldo Macedo and Ana Maria Araujo Freire, a preface titled ‘Pedagogy for Life’ by Peter McLaren, an introduction by Joe Kincheloe, and Freire’s ‘First Words’), he talks about reading the word/reading the world (the dialectical relationship of theory and practice, of experiencing and critical analysis of experience, of texts and contexts) and grappling with ‘the fear of what is difficult.’

Several points are inspiring from where I stand. One is the need to discipline oneself to reflect on his readings quite regularly. Freire suggests that one who professes to teach reading/writing the word/world should be able to write quite regularly and to critically examine what he has written, that is, to scribble down his reflections ‘at least thrice a week’ and to examine them after some time.

Another interesting point has to do with performing one’s capacity for radical love. Here are lines from the book whose significance is underscored in the preface by Peter MacLaren (in Freire 2005:xxx-xxxi):

'We must dare in the full sense of the word, to speak of love without the fear of being called ridiculous, mawkish, or unscientific, if not antiscientific. We must dare in order to say scientifically, and not as mere blah-blah-blah, that we study, we learn, we teach, we know with our entire body. We do all of these things with feeling, with emotion, with wishes, with fear, with doubts, with passion, and also with critical reasoning. However, we never study, learn, teach, or know with the last only. We must dare so as never to dichotomize cognition and emotion. We must dare so that we can continue to teach for a long time under conditions that we know well: low salaries, lack of respect, and the ever-present risk of becoming prey to cynicism. We must dare to learn how to dare in order to say no to the bureaucratization of the mind to which we are exposed everyday. We must dare so that we can continue to do so even when it is so much more materially advantageous to stop daring' (Freire 2005:5-6, emphasis added).

The ‘radical love’ thesis is further explained in the fourth letter (which I have not read as of this writing) but which MacLaren liberally quotes in the preface (xxx-xxxi)

'[To] to the humility which teachers perform and relate to their students another quality needs to be added: lovingness, without which their work would lose its meaning. And here I mean lovingness not only toward the students but also toward the very process of teaching. I must confess, not meaning to cavil, that I do not believe educators can survive the negativities of their trade without some sort of ‘armed love,’ as the poet Tiaglo de Melo would say. Without it they could not survive all the injustice or the government contempt, which is expressed in the shameful wages and the arbitrary treatment of teachers, not coddling mothers, who take a stand, who participate in protest activities through their union, who are punished, and who yet remain devoted to their work with students.
It is indeed necessary, however, that this love be ‘armed love,’ the fighting love of those convinced of the right and the duty to fight, to denounce, and to announce. It is this form of love that is indispensable to the progressive educator and that we must all learn' (Freire 2005:74-75).

Having read only a few pages of Freire’s work, I can already glean that there is so much passion, so much soul in his writing about teaching. There is, however, a caveat to merely adopting this ‘armed love’ thesis without much reflection. I think this is the point most often abused by people who profess to ‘fight for what is right’ when in fact they only fight for their personal interests. I have been witness to this abuse and arrogant display of dissent in the name of ‘academic freedom’ and ‘collegiality.’ I choose not to spell out the details. Because of this tendency, there is so much reason to heed Freire’s call for social praxis in teaching – to engage in the dialectics of action and reflection so as to avoid both intellectual elitism and uninformed/uncritical ‘reading of the world.’ That engagement, at the very least, requires the humility to accept that our assumptions about ourselves and about the world are tentative, to listen to what others (usually from the opposite end of where we stand) have to say, and to constantly engage in the negotiation of meanings.

Beauty pageants: subversions, reaffirmations

This is somewhat a rejoinder to the post I made on March 11. The issues that I am going to raise are actually a bit marginal to the main issues I foisted earlier.

Thanks to Aileen for taking special notice of the idea that beauty pageants can actually become a site to challenge linguistic dominance. Now, I’m beginning to seriously consider the idea that the pageants do more than that. Pageants can actually be seen as a contested site, a site of struggle between social actors including the so-called elite and the marginalized (This may sound contrived – and please pardon me on this – but this is helping me rehearse my mind for the paper I am writing for my graduate module – not related to pageants, though.).

My point is that pageants cannot just be seen from a monolithic standpoint or be viewed simplistically as anti-women (usually by critics of post-feminism) or  pro-female empowerment (by delusional owners of beauty pageant enterprises and a lot of post-feminists of course). Somebody has raised in one of the forums that the Philippine’s crazy passion for beauty pageants is a ‘subversion of the semi-feudal society’ – which may be the case – but the analysis needs to be ‘complexified’ (I’m afraid Lorie and Angie will raise their eyebrows for this word!) as there are a lot of nuances involved in the pageant arena. The case of Janina San Miguel winning a crown may be a case in point (notice the hedging as I cannot be categorical at this point).  She comes from a simple family (she says in a TV interview that her father is a jeepney (or is it taxi?) driver), perhaps a marginal group who may have little access to public platforms where members can articulate their own views about themselves and their relation to their immediate and remote contexts. The beauty pageant, though produced, owned, and controlled by the social elite (e.g., Madam Stella Marquez de Araneta and company, corporate sponsors, Ambassadors and popular public personalities as judges) and though driven by elitist interests (the dole out mentality euphemized as charity is just screamingly obvious), becomes a venue where young women from ‘ordinary’ backgrounds can create small but ‘revolutionary’ steps to redefine their identities and articulate/express (in a variety of ways – mangled English, native tongue, grace under pressure, self-affirmation in the face of mockery) their often muted/silenced viewpoints or perspectives.  

There is no denying though that the pageant is largely controlled by elitist/dominant discourses – hyper-sexualized women strutting on stage, formulaic questions and answers that reaffirm social hierarchies, dominant beliefs and values – but the women who participate in this arena can not be simply regarded as unthinking subjects that are duped to reproduce dominant perspectives. In fact, the answers of candidates 8 and 18 to their respective questions (one on the most difficult problem she has faced and the other on her concept of a perfect family) were answers that challenged the prevailing idealized notions of family in the Philippine context. Both girls come from ‘broken families’ and have been very honest about how they see or appreciate such condition in a different way.  They have somehow broken a type of essentialism and this makes them less pageant patty.

Janina San Miguel’s victory, because of her inelegant English (I find her answer “My family is the most important persons (sic) in my life" acceptable. At best, it is indirect and enthymematic if seen through the lens of classical rhetoric. In other words, she allows her audience to infer from her utterance which is a mark of a genius! Hahaha. Of course, this is contrived, because I have become a fan and staunch supporter of Janina), has disturbed quite a number of people, especially members of the so-called intellectual elite who perpetuate the language ideology that English is a superior language or that knowledge of English makes one intellectually superior. Her victory was seen not just as a fly in the ointment but as a subversion of idealized notions of ‘beauty and brains’, of the perfect female representative of the Filipino race. Janina somehow represents the subject position of the marginalized – young, ordinary, vulnerable.  How can she possibly snatch a crown previously worn by English-speaking mestizas or morenas (think of Ruffa Guttierez, Karla Bautista, Mafae Yunon) trained from the elite schools of the country or overseas? She is the subversion of the idealized Miss Philippines-World candidate and that is utterly unacceptable to some members of the intellectual elite (not that a lot of them care about beauty pageants.).

This is not to downplay the idea that asymmetrical power relations exist in beauty pageants – the elites like Donald Trump, Julia Morley, and Madam Stella own, produce, dictate the ideas that ought to circulate in their respective (business) enterprises. This does not however mean that the candidates, their trainers, the noisy and vibrant communities of pageant fans driven by communal/consensual dreaming, and the audience at large do not have the power to redefine (in the words of Homi Bhabha, ‘insinuate, interrupt, interrogate, and antagonize’) the dominant discourse/s of the elite. They have the power, and although they may be constrained to use it, they pose a welcome threat that makes the play messy, dynamic, and definitely exciting!

Photo credits: Boyet Blas for mabuhaybeauties.com