Why Study The Narratives of Women

Feminists have called our attention to the "cultural duality” of women’s lives, to the fact that women often participate in a general male-dominated culture, and the same time, in a women’s culture or sub-culture. This woman’s culture is different from and sometimes critical of, or opposed to, the central dominant system of meaning and values. In short, women frequently exist and operate within two planes which are sometimes compatible and sometimes contradictory.

Simone de Beauvoir, in her pioneering book, The Second Sex (1961), described this paradoxical situation of women who “band together in order to establish a counter-universe, but always… set it up within the frame of the masculine universe.” Behind their docility is rebellion, but behind the rebellion is surrender.

We will look at how this cultural duality is reflected in the literary texts of Filipinas writing in English. we will examine how these writers have managed to “write in the interstices of masculine culture, moving between the use of the dominant language or form of expression and specific versions of experience based on their marginality” (Kaplan 1991). we will try to answer these questions: given their position as women in a post-colonial culture, what stories have they chosen to tell and retell? What strategies have they employed? Have the strategies been effective, i.e., have they resulted in a subversion of the dominant culture and its values? Can these texts be read as a form of empowerment?

Readings for the course are arranged around selected themes and strategies. (Of course the choice of a theme is also a strategy.) And within each group, they are arranged in a roughly, chronological order.

The number of Filipino women writers from the pre-war period to the early sixties is disappointingly small. It is only the mid-sixties that this begins to change. One need only glance at the Table of Contents of Gemino H. Abad’s three volume history of Philippine poetry in English to recognize this. In the first volume, Man of Earth (1989), which covers the period 1905 to the mid-50s, there are only seven women. In the second volume, A Native Clearing (1993), which covers the period from the 50s to the 80s, there are only five. But in the third volume, which brings us into the 90s, there are 30. This is still way below the number of male writers, which is 66, but it is an improvement, and we can take comfort in the thought that more women are finding their voices today. (Feminists will undoubtedly point out that the editor of these anthologies is male – although the first volume was co-edited with Edna Manlapaz – and that a female editor, using perhaps a different set of criteria for including or excluding texts, might have come up with more women poets.)

If someone were to compile a similar anthology of the short fiction by Filipino women, the results would probably not be too different.