Yourterno's draggin

Fashioning Filipino American performance

Datos Bibliográficos

ID4517153
AutoresLucy Mae San Pablo Burns (0000-0002-5787-4441, Center for Asian American Media, autor de correspondencia)
Año2011
Volumen21
Número2
Páginas199-217
Fecha de publicación2011-07-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaWomen & Performance a journal of feminist theory (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0740-770X • E-ISSN: 1748-5819
EditorialInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/0740770x.2011.607597
OpenAlexW1970165542
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas2
Referencias citadas15

In this essay, I explore the semiotics of the terno, the Philippine national dress, creatively interpreted by diasporic artists as a dense metaphor for the proper and improper Filipina. These artistic deployments of the terno lay bare unquestioned notions of Filipina femininity and nationalism to be fabrications of colonialism, militarization and globalization. The reconfigurations of the infamous “butterfly dress” by multimedia artist groups Barrionics and Mail Order Brides (M.O.B.) take center stage in my discussion. The genealogy of the terno I focus on in this article emphasizes alteration and transformation, to resist facile binaries of the nation as traditional and the diaspora as the site of modern and innovative modifications. My historicization of the terno underscores it as an emergent form in which to situate the uses of the terno in Filipino American performance projects within the history of the terno itself. Specifically, the essay focuses on the defamiliarization of feminine constructs that operate both in the nation and the diaspora, as well as to foreground the imbrications of colonial histories and our neocolonial present in the current global circulation of Filipina bodies. I highlight how these artists in the Filipino diaspora spectacularize the inchoateness of categories of gender, race and sexuality. Their performance works delink the dressee from the dress, the terno from the Filipina, the dress from the girl and the boy, the dress from the straight and from the queer, the dress from the diasporic and from the national. Within such figurations, the terno emerges as an overprivileged icon – of ideal womanhood and of the mother nation – whose iconicity is re-routed through bodies that do not belong

Aesthetics · Art · Colonialism · Diaspora · Metaphor · Militarization · Nationalism · Political science · Queer · Sociology · Visual arts · Fashion and Cultural Textiles · Gender Studies · Historical Gender and Feminism Studies · History · Philippine History and Culture · Philosophy