buntong-hininga para sa kabataang nanghihinayang

Kahapon, ako at ang ilan sa aking mga estudiante ay nakapagproseso ng aming pagdanas ng nakaraang eleksyon pati ng mga resulta nito. Marami sa kanila, nagsabing parang nawawalan na sila ng pag-asa. Pakiramdam daw nila ay wala silang kakayanang hubugin ang mundong pinagkakaitan sila ng inaasam nilang pagbabago. “Hopeless” at “helpless” — ito ang mga salitang paulit-ulit nilang ginamit sa pagpapahiwatig ng kanilang pananaw sa kinabukasang magulo, alanganin, at tila wala nang sense. Ang iba sa kanila, sumama sa pangangampanya at inuna pa ang sorties at house-to-house campaigns kaysa sa acads. Kaya lalo silang nanlulumo sa kinalabasan. Sabi ng isa, ginawa naman namin ang lahat ng makakaya sa pangangampanya, hindi naman kami nagkulang sa effort. Pero talo pa rin? Bakit pa kami nag-aaral, kung ang pinapabuyaan ng lipunan ay mga magnanakaw lang din. Sayang lang ang lahat ng pagsisikap namin.

Naalala ko ang unang beses na lumahok ako sa elektoral na pangangampanya. Nag-campaign volunteer ako para kay Nicanor Perlas noong 2010, at sumama sa mga social development at cultural workers — dancers, filmmakers, visual artists, musicians, writers — na mag-organisa ng mga music nights at educational discussions sa campaign sorties at makipag-usap sa mga tao sa mga maralitang komunidad sa Metro Manila. Huling semestre ko na sa UP noon, at dahil dati-rati, Marso nagtatapos ang semestre, may oras akong pumunta sa campaign headquarters sa Cubao at sumamang mangampanya. Siempre, natalo si Sir Nick; sa pagkaka-alala ko, siya pa nga ang may pinaka-kaunting nakuhang boto kahit na yung plataporma niya para sa just, equitable, and sustainable development ang pinaka-may saysay sa aming paningin. Ang lala din ng disillusionment ko noon, nang napagtanto kong sa elektoral na pulitika, kailangan ng maraming pera at malaking makinarya. Hindi sasapat ang track record ng serbisyo, talino, kakayahan at tapat na pagnanais na makapaglingkod sa iba. Pagkatapos ng kampanya, naghiwa-hiwalay din kaming mga volunteers at bumalik sa kani-kanyang mga pinagkakaabalahan.

Source: Nicanor Perlas FB page

Sabi ko sa mga bagets kahapon, sana huwag ninyong masyadong personalin ang kinalabasan ng kampanya lalo na kung nagsipag naman talaga kayo na makipag-ugnayan at makipag-usap sa inyong mga komunidad. Tandaan natin na maraming mga pwersa na labas sa ating kontrol at pagpapasya, na ang mga istruktura ng lipunan na humuhubog sa huwisyo at layon at nais ng mga tao ay deka-dekada ang pagyari, at ang mga iyan ay hindi bigla-biglang mababaliktad sa loob ng pitong buwan, gaano man kagilas-gilas ng mga palabas at kabongga at kakulay ng mga galawan. Ilang taon na rin tayong binabagyo ng mga paninira at dis-impormasyon sa araw-araw, at pinag-aaway-away ng mapanghating retorika, kaya hating-hati talaga ang mga palagay at pagkakakilanlan ng mga tao. Tandaan na ang rehabilitasyon ng mga Marcos ay matagal na ring nagaganap. Hindi ba’t si Imelda ay nakabalik sa Pilipinas noong 1991 pa? Mantakin mo yun, ang pinalayas ng taumbayan noong 1986, nakabalik agad sa loob ng limang taon! Hanep. Hindi pa nga kayo pinapanganak noon. Tanungin n’yo kaya ang mga magulang ninyo kung anong ginawa nila nang pinayagang bumalik ang mga Marcos.

Sana huwag n’yo ring isipin na sayang lang ang pagsama ninyo sa mga kampanya, kasi mahalaga ang karanasan na yan. Siguro naman may mga napagtanto kayo tungkol sa klase ng lipunan na meron tayo. Siguro may mga napansin din kayo tungkol sa mga limitasyon ng elektoral na pamumulitika, lalo na kung may malakas na mayorya sa pamahalaan at bilyones na panggastos sa makinarya ang naghaharing elite na koalisyon. Hindi sayang ang inyong pakikilahok, dahil natuto kayong lumabas sa inyong mga comfort zones at makipag-usap sa iba, natuto kayong umugnay at makiisa, marami kayong bagong mga nakilalang kasama. Panghawakan ninyo yan kasi kakailanganin ninyo ang mga ugnayan na yan pag lalong lumala ang panunupil dito. Ang ibig kong sabihin, sa totoo lang kung magka-crackdown sa mga karapatan dito, madali mo namang maililigtas ang iyong sarili. Tatahimik ka lang, yuyuko, tutungo, huwag papalag, huwag mag-iisip, o kaya’y huwag maghahayag ng iniisip. Basta sumayaw ka lang sa kanilang tugtugin, sumunod ka lang. Ngunit kung gusto ninyong huwag mamatay ang pagkatao n’yo, kailangan ninyo ng mga kasamang magpapaalala sa inyo kung bakit mahalagang manlaban.

Para huwag mawalan ng pag-asa, ipako ninyo ang inyong pag-iisip sa kung anong maari ninyong gawin sa saklaw ng inyong impluwensya at paggalaw. Kasi kung ang titingnan lang natin ay yung mga panlipunang istruktura ng inhustisya at di pagkakapantay-pantay, talagang magiging “helpless” ang pakiramdam natin kasi parang ang laki-laki nila di ba, at wala naman tayong kontrol sa kanila bilang mga indibidwal; tayo nga ay hinuhubog ng mga istrukturang ito. Pero yang mga construct na iyan, hindi rin naman inevitable, kasi mga tao din naman ang nagpapanday at nagpapaandar niyan. Kaya humanap lang kayo ng pagkakataon — ng pagbubukas, ng panimula — tapos doon kayo gumalaw tungo sa pagbabago sa lipunan na gusto ninyong makita (corny man pakinggan).

Sa huli naman, ang eleksyon ay sintomas lang ng kasalukuyang kalagayan ng lipunan. At ang tao, bumoboto batay sa kanyang materyal na kalagayan. Kaya ang eleksyon ay hindi magiging tunay na demokratiko, patas, at malaya hangga’t ang lipunan natin ay hindi demokratiko, patas, at malaya. Kaya tanungin ang sarili, ano kaya ang maari kong gawin bilang kabahagi ng lipunan upang tumulong na gawing mas demokratiko at patas ito? Anong maaari kong gawin para palayain ang sarili at ang iba? Kailangan mong hanapin ang sagot diyan, tapos kailangan mong magtrabaho para maging klase ng tao na may kakayanang gampanan ang papel na pinili mo. Kaya kayo nag-aaral, kaya kayo nagtatrabaho at naghahanda ng sarili. Hindi para “manalo” kundi para gampanan nang may kakayanan at integridad ang napili ninyong tungkulin sa mga komunidad ninyo. Ako, gusto ko lang bawasan kahit kaunti ang kamangmangan sa paligid ko, kaya ako nakiki-alam, nag-aaral, nagtuturo.

Kaya sana huwag ninyong bitawan ang mga hangarin ninyo noong magdesisyon kayong sumama sa pangangampanya. Huwag ninyong bitawan yung mga natutunan at nakilala at nakasama ninyo. Kasi kinabukasan ninyo iyan, kinabukasan ninyo ang nakataya. Huwag ninyong hayaang iba ang magdikta kung anong klaseng hinaharap lang ang bukas sa inyo. Dahil kayo, ‘di tulad ng marami sa lipunan natin, ay maraming mga mapagpipilian sa buhay.

Retropost: Notes on the 2019 Hong Kong Film Festival

The Crossing

March 20, 2019. Watched Bai Xue’s The Crossing (2018), about a high school girl who lives in Shenzhen and studies in Hong Kong, and who gets drawn into smuggling high-end phones across the border, as she herself crosses other borders in the process of growing up.

It’s a quiet film that subtly paints various modalities of alienation from one’s family, community, even oneself, and the ways in which transgression becomes belonging and connection. It’s a primarily character-driven story, and for me the greatest pleasure was watching PeiPei (played by Huang Yao) awaken to complex and discordant emotions, relationships, situations, in the fluid interstices between borders, belongings, betrayals.

Giovanna Fulvi from TIFF put it well:
“Bai Xue’s captivating debut uses Peipei’s precipitous slide into illegality as a platform upon which to consider numerous kinds of crossings: the traversal of national boundaries; the line that separates the law-abiding citizen from the criminal; the frontier that divides childhood from adulthood.”

While watching the film, I thought about Brilliante Mendoza’s Amo, and better understood the ways in which the latter, too certain in its certainties, feels tired, exploitative, adamant.

Sa Palad ng Dantaong Kulang / In the Claws of a Century Wanting

23 March 2019. I watched Jewel Maranan’s Sa Palad ng Dantaong Kulang / In the Claws of a Century Wanting (2017). The documentary, which runs for two hours, depicts residents of Tondo in various stages of life (childhood, parenthood, old age), and explores their relationships to the place (as a religious community, a neighborhood, a source of livelihood) in the midst of the government project of reclamation and relocation. Maranan said that she started filming Sa Palad from 2010 to 2016, and that she would stay in Tondo for three to four months at a time, embedding herself in the community and the daily lives and spaces of her subjects. Thus her approach was ethnographic, and she also treated the protagonists of her documentary as collaborators. Prior to making the film, she was also a social worker in the community for two years. My impression is that it presents not so much a narrative but an atmosphere, a situation, a context for action.

The most striking scene for me was when the residents who opted for relocation were gathered for a briefing by officials from the National Housing Authority. The meeting began with a prayer, led by one of the women residents. She prayed, Lord help us take responsibility for our lives, despite our weakness and vulnerabilities. Help us be responsible for this your gift of life, though we are not worthy of your love.

Civil society often blames the poor for being irresponsible — for reproducing beyond their means, for “squatting,” for “not paying” taxes (hello, everyone who has to eat and drink and bathe pays taxes, ang taas kaya ng consumption taxes sa Pilipinas) — without considering that they are perhaps trying to act as responsibly as they can in their situation, despite the lack of social safety nets and government assistance.

During the Q&A with the filmmaker I asked, Films made about Tondo and other urban poor communities seem to have become a subgenre of Philippine independent filmmaking. Did you make any conscious choices to distinguish your cinematic approach from films about the same themes that are charged as being exploitative?

Maranan answered that she made no such decision to “distinguish” her work from other films that tackle poverty in the Philippines. But she did try to show how poverty in many areas is a corollary of economic development and “progress” in other areas in the age of globalization. That was why she chose Tondo, the busiest global trading port in the country, yet also one of the poorest districts in the capital city. She also said that she sought not to merely represent the condition of the poor, but to show this bigger narrative of systemic injustice.

She also said that it’s a pity that there’s a stigma attached to films about poverty, because she believes that it remains salient for us to continue interrogating the persistence of poverty in the Philippines, which may reveal something of the underlying conditions in many other places in the world, whose stories are left out of certain other narratives about progress and globalization.

A Land Imagined

26 March 2019. Watched Yeo Siew Hua’s A Land Imagined (2018), about Singapore’s ceaseless land reclamation program (with sand sometimes illegally obtained from Malaysia, Cambodia, and Vietnam, with environmental repercussions for coastal communities) and the migrant workers who toil in construction sites. The film opens with a police officer’s search for a missing migrant Chinese worker named Wang. His search proceeds through immersion in the little he could find out about Wang’s life: sleepless nights in the cramped barracks for laborers, dancing, singing, and drinking with the “blackskin” Bangladeshis, playing shooter RPGs in a nearby 24/7 cybercafé minded by a tattoed punk femme fatale who gives handjobs for extra cash. In the process, the detective, Lok, learns about the migrant workers’ plight — occupational hazards and no access to welfare, delayed if not withheld wages, debt bondage, confiscated passports, possible murder. That even a veteran policeman should have little prior knowledge of these occurrences suggests that the average Singaporean has no idea about the kind of struggles faced by those who work on these reclamation sites. At some point the facts of Wang’s disappearance become unimportant in the face of the whys. The film closes with dreamlike sequences of existential crisis, leaving the realities of the reclamation site behind.

Alpha: The Right to Kill

March 28, 2019. Watched Brilliante Mendoza’s Alpha: The Right to Kill (2018), about the dynamics of the illegal drug trade in a slum community around Mandaluyong. “Alpha” initially refers to a small-time drug dealer named Elijah, who’s also a police asset/informer, working for a sargeant named Espino, who is himself engaged in drug trade. Espino uses Elijah to collect intel for buy-bust operations. After a bust, Espino steals a bag full of shabu from the dead body of a drug lord. He then has Elijah resell the contraband. Gawin mong pera yan ah, Espino says as he hands Elijah the packs of shabu. Elijah makes very little money off this; the policeman takes almost all of the profit. Elijah does as he is told because he has to buy milk for his infant daughter, and Espino threatens every now and then to put him back in jail. In a few days, Elijah is able to deliver a hundred thousand pesos to Espino. Espino deposits the money in a bank, goes to the house of his police chief, discreetly, to deliver a small crate of something. Like the garbage recycling facility where Elijah lives with his wife and kid, there is a lot of recycling going on in this film, of goods, of narratives, of situations. There are many parallels too, like the way Elijah and Espino mirror each other in their “sins” and “pieties.” But I don’t as yet know what else the film is saying aside from that everyone in this cinematic world is implicated in crime, corrupt, vulnerable, that everyone down the chain of power can be killed by those above.

Varda by Agnés

Agnés Varda: “Nothing is banal if you film it with empathy and affection.” Art, she also said, is a triptych of inspiration, creation, and sharing.

31 March 2019. Watched Varda by Agnés (2019). I haven’t watched any of her other films, but I felt so welcomed by her onscreen presence and “cinema-writing” process, both warm and heartfelt and generous. And very smart and reflective, without sounding at all self-involved, because she reveals herself obliquely, by talking about and to other people.

Pájaros de Verano / Birds of Passage

1 April 2019. Watched Pájaros de Verano / Birds of Passage (2018), directed by Cristina Gallego and Ciro Guerra, a “narco-drama” set in the 1960s-80s, about a family from the Wayúu tribe, an indigenous people native to the Guajira region in northern Colombia. Traditionally ranchers and herders, the Wayúu had resisted Spanish colonization and assimilation into the modern nation-state.

Trouble begins when Raphayet, an orphaned Wayúu who grew up among alijuna (Spanish-speaking Colombians), seeks to marry Zaida, a girl from a prominent Wayúu family. To afford her dowry (of 30 goats, 20 cows, and two precious stone necklaces for protection) Raphayet and his alijuna best friend Moíses begin to trade marijuana with Americans from the Peace Corps (who were there in Colombia in the ’60s to spread the gospel of capitalism and smoke weed, apparently). Thus, marijuana, which had been used for medicinal and ceremonial purposes by the indigenous tribes, becomes a valuable commodity, whose trafficking is paid for in blood feuds and the severance of “primal” ties among friends, family, community. Raphayet, Zaida and their clans gradually discard or forget cultural traditions, what it means to be Wayúu, and their spiritual connection to the land of their ancestors.

I like that Wayúus, who collaborated with the filmmakers, are here not depicted as exploited innocents. They are a proud and prosperous people who value their traditions, and for the longest time resisted the allures of the new market economy. But to a large extent, it is also the rapaciousness of the focal characters, combined with their commitment to family above all, that led them to compromise their principles and traditions for greater personal wealth, to the detriment of the rest of the community.

on teaching as praxis

Part of the requirements for the Learning and Teaching Development Programme (LTDP) I’m obliged to take as a PhD student is the submission of a teaching portfolio, the centerpiece of which is a statement of one’s teaching philosophy. Below is what I wrote.

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“Liberation is a praxis: the action and reflection of men and women upon their world in order to transform it.”
– Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, translated by Myra Bergman Ramos (1970)

What is the university for?

In a 2003 essay for Times Higher Education, then Brunel University Vice-Chancellor Steven Schwartz reflects on the “higher purpose” of the university and concludes, “By providing avenues for social mobility, universities make it possible for students from deprived backgrounds not only to move up to better jobs but also to participate more fully in society. … [Thus] universities can do more than almost any other institution to improve social mobility and justice … [making our society] a more open, more just and fairer place to live.”

Several factors seem to belie this optimistic claim: the inaccessibility of higher education in many parts of the world is one, and the scarcity and precariousness of academic jobs is another. And then there are the difficulties of doing locally relevant, collaborative, and socially engaged research in the context of the professionalized, commercialized, and metricized structures of academia in the age of globalization and informationalism. Many institutions struggle with the demands of global competition, research productivity, and operational excellence vis-a-vis a lack of public funding, physical facilities, technological infrastructure, and ideological support. Meanwhile, the incessant pressure on untenured faculty to “publish or perish” or to teach over a hundred students per semester without job security dampens enthusiasm and energy for intellectual work.

Even so, the possibility of contributing to greater social justice through knowledge production, teaching, and public service continues to spur young scholars into academic careers. Professors persist in forging spaces of criticality and interdisciplinarity, activism and care, in their classrooms and educational institutions, with the aim of teaching individuals not only to become competent professionals, but also ethical citizens—aware of the networks of power, violence, and dispossession underlying their social positions, active in public life.

The moral role that Steven Schwartz ascribes to the university—that of propelling national economic development as well as promoting responsible citizenship and social inclusivity—may sound romantic, comfortable, even naive, but it expresses some of the hopes that animate my teaching philosophy and practice.

What teaching means to me

I found myself teaching because learning lends meaning, wonder, and value to my life, and teaching allows me to make a living by learning endlessly. What I have come to realize, though, since I faced my first class years ago, is that not a lot of people feel this way, and so, part of my role as a teacher-learner is to make students feel like all the time that they have to spend sitting in classrooms, poring over texts, and stressing over grades is for something more than just landing a nice-paying job.

Economic survival is, of course, a fundamental concern. Nevertheless, to think of an education as just another requirement for homo economicus to get over with so s/he can go into the proper business of earning money is to do learning and our manifold human potential a great disservice. Learning—thus, also teaching—ought to be transformative: it should transform the self, it should transform relations, it should transform society. Figuring out in what ways and for what ends these transformations must occur is why we learn and teach and learn—in context and in concert, seeking to imagine and shape futurity while remaining conscious of history.

To Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, I owe much of my understanding of what emancipatory teaching consists in: self-reflexivity, dialogical inquiry, moments of cognition, mutual humanization.

How I teach

As a teaching assistant, I defer to my research supervisor’s instructions: start the class exactly on time, take attendance—this fosters discipline. Spend ten to twenty minutes revising the previous lecture to aid in recall and scaffolding. Spend the next hour listening to the students’ presentations, and the last thirty minutes moderating discussions about them. About midway through the class, take a short break—attention is limited, and so is the urinary bladder’s capacity. Try to ensure that student participation is more or less evenly distributed; don’t talk with just two or three articulate people. Ask the students if they have questions. If they do, answer them. Be prepared to stay beyond the official class time, should they need further clarification.

To these practices I add: having everyone (myself included) sit in a circle in the classroom, and asking each student to pose a question or problem about the subject at hand. This is a strategy I got from my favorite professor in philosophy, who believes that students learn best when they are encouraged to pursue their own inquiries. From that professor I also learned how a circle evokes both community and governmentality, for it is a form of mutual surveillance, but also of mutual engagement and accountability.

A circle looks democratic, non-confrontational. It is a balanced shape. The teacher is but one part of this formation, and though she may initiate and integrate various interactions within the circle, she does not stand apart of or above everyone else. The teacher is also a student, and each student, as a link in a circular chain, is integral to the collaborative activity of knowledge-building and problem-solving.

The circle’s cyclical movement says: questioning can be never-ending, for every answer births new inquiries. We can stop our investigations at a point designated by necessity (due to limitations of time, of energy), but not necessarily with finality. This isn’t arithmetic, or a multiple-choice test; the questions we ask need not be answered once and for all. What matters is the questioning—and, afterwards, how we act, armed with our facts and interpretations, our inferences and judgments, our desires and our doubts about our continually shifting realities.

by Bryan M. Mathers

That is not to say that all classes should run as a free-flowing community of inquiry, concerned only with the exercise of imagination and analytical thought. Often, a more rigorous structure, a definite outcome is required; yet, one can design an architecture for learning that still asks of all participants to play an active role.

On the first day of classes, I show the students my course outline (including the schedule, readings, requirements, rubrics for assessment, and house rules), and ask them if they would like to change anything, short of violating university regulations and prescribed class objectives. I tell them, the syllabus is a contract, so I want to ensure that all of us know what we’re getting into, that the terms of our agreement are negotiated and accepted, and that we all cooperate to uphold what we agreed upon. Seldom do the students recommend substantial changes to the syllabus, but by inviting them to participate in agenda-setting, I aim to make them feel more involved.

Most of the classes I’ve taught are general education (GE) courses for freshmen and sophomores. As my colleagues and I like to joke, teaching GE is janitorial work—a great part of our duty as teachers is to help students clean up all the dirty learning habits they might have developed in high school. For example, a propensity for plagiarism, done out of ignorance or laziness or lack of foresight. Other common problems: not reading the readings, spacing out or texting their friends instead of participating in class discussions, cramming for exams, believing that grades are the ultimate gauge of capability. The list goes on. I like to append study tips to my syllabuses, to set a certain tone for the class and to clarify expectations.

I see the classroom as a space for critical inquiry, connection, and meaningful dialogue. The students’ readiness and willingness to participate in thoughtful and dynamic conversations about the readings are of paramount importance in my classes, so I enjoin them to come prepared, keep focused, and behave with courtesy. This means, among other things: listening when someone is talking, not checking WhatsApp or Facebook or Twitter or Instagram; being thoughtful and sensitive about giving feedback, especially during writing workshops; not chatting at length with one another about matters unrelated to the class.

I begin my classes with questions, either from the students or from myself, about the assigned readings, which I assume everyone has read. We spend much of the class time on discussions of the readings, individual and small-group activities (such as writing exercises, focused group discussions, debates, games), and workshops. These activities, which are spread throughout the semester and are thematically and procedurally linked, build on each other and culminate in paper and poster presentations in a mini-conference I organize with students at the end of the course.

In all these activities, I try to take the role of facilitator rather than present myself as the source of knowledge. Youthfulness can be an asset in this regard: I find that students are more likely to critically assess and interrogate your pronouncements (and thus think independently) if you do not look like an esteemed and wizened scholar.

Why I teach the way I do

I believe in discipline and consistent (even if slow) work, in the value of that which is hard-won. I see no contradiction between self-discipline and the practice of freedom; I think discipline enables freedom.

I always tell my students that in the world outside their CVs, high grades, certificates, and titles are meaningless if they hardly have the knowledge, skills, and personal convictions to show for them. That there is no other way to develop knowledge and skills and convictions but in practice, in questioning and trying to make sense of things, in thinking and trying and trying again on their own and with each other, in seeking challenging experiences, in the constant striving to grow. This is why my approach to teaching and learning is process- rather than product-oriented. Though final exams, papers, and projects constitute a significant part of their grades, much of the work of knowledge-building happens when students prepare for every class, annotate the readings, participate in discussions, write rough drafts, and give feedback to their peers during workshops.

When it comes to learning—as in other matters of import, from effecting social change, to cultivating lasting and meaningful relationships, to honing competencies and building character—there are no shortcuts, no quick and easy purchase. I tell my students, You get out of your education only as much as what you put into it.

So I make them put a lot of work into it, hoping that in the process of asking difficult questions and looking for answers, after weekends spent on writing, shooting films with groupmates, or marching in mass protests, they find the Something More that they feel is worth striving for.

Ultimately, what I wish for students, including myself, is for us to gain confidence in our capacities to understand ourselves, our relations with other people, and our life-worlds, so that we may act with ethical intention and a sense of meaningfulness and social responsibility on the basis of such understanding.

beauty labor

“… never let on that you went through great pains to get your lipstick just right; lines should break like kamikazes; you should be beautiful in your slovenliness; you should be enticing in your near-suicide.”
– Jenny Boully, The Body (2007)

“Thank god I’m pretty.”
– Emilie Autumn

If I were asked how many minutes I spend preparing my face for other faces to meet, I’d feel a little sheepish to respond. I might say, fifteen to twenty minutes in the morning, to layer on toner, moisturizer, sunscreen, and BB cream, and then to draw my eyebrows, contour my nose and jawline, tint, balm, and paint my lips, apply shadow around the creases of my eyes, oil and curl my eyelashes, and set everything with a brushing of loose powder and a spritz of facial mist. I also spend about fifteen minutes in the evening on cleansing, toning, and moisturizing my face; the last step involves the layering of three products with progressive viscosity — an essence, a serum or facial oil, and a cream or sleeping mask — punctuated by periods of waiting for the skin to absorb each type of moisturizer before the next. Do I do this everyday? Virtually — but if I’m in too much of a hurry, I skip the BB cream, contouring, and eye shadow in the morning, though of course I never so much as step out the door of my dorm room to fetch water from the kitchen without shading my eyebrows. Without the face I paint over the face that I pamper, I don’t feel quite like myself.

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Two years ago, when I still felt deathly embarrassed to admit I took selfies in my office when I’m supposed to be marking papers, I uploaded one to Facebook as my profile picture, and felt impelled to alleviate my guilt over my vanity by writing an essay to accompany the grainy image:

I liked this photo because I thought in it I looked professional. Then I remembered reading an essay [by Autumn Whitefield-Madrano] from The Beheld in The New Inquiry on how looking “professional” is all about labor — how the pursuit of a “professional look” assumes that membership in the professional class should be the goal of the working class, and signals that one is an active producer and consumer of goods and services in a capitalist society — for one’s “beauty” is achieved not only through personal effort or the largesse of genetics, but by the purchase of costly products, from makeup to apparel, and the labor of others (hairstylists, “nail technicians,” make-up artists, massage therapists, etc.). In other words, the pursuit of a professional look (which is tantamount to the pursuit of beauty in the context of workplaces, like in retail, that practice compulsory femininity, tying a woman’s value to her looks) demonstrates that one makes money, which is taken as the measure of one’s worth.

Thus I more fully appreciated why looks are considered in the matrix of oppression analyzed by intersectional feminists: it’s not just that beauty, as Naomi Wolf postulated, is a normative construct defined by the patriarchy, but also that beauty — or at least the kind celebrated by every beauty and fashion blogger ever — is commoditized, and thus is tied to class. And when one considers how the services sector — especially jobs that have to do with beauty — is largely feminized, how the women who take such jobs are often overworked and underpaid, and how the prices of products marketed for women are often higher than similar products marketed for men (discriminatory pricing known as the “Pink Tax” ), the connection between the beauty industry and the oppression of women becomes more distinct.

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Recently The Guardian published an article on how women in South Korea — whose beauty industry is so famed for skincare protocols and products, makeup, and cosmetic surgery — have begun to rebel against their society’s strict aesthetic standards by dumping their beauty products en masse. Benjamin Haas writes, “One theme running through the movement is the idea of a beauty regimen as a form of labour, one that only women are expected to perform and for which they are in no way compensated.”

And I thought, that last bit isn’t quite true — in a society that stigmatizes and penalizes those who deviate from what is considered a desirable appearance, there are “compensations” for conforming to the ideal of prettiness, from compliments to promotions. For instance, in Tagalog we have a saying, “Umasal lamang nang naaayon sa ganda,” which ties physical appearance to the level of good treatment or indulgence from others that one deserves — the prettier you are, the more entitled you are to dispense with polite niceties, as if beauty itself were the virtue to be rewarded for its own sake. Thus, being, or rather, striving to look pleasing to the eye functions as a form of courtesy, which is the effort one exerts to make others feel at ease.

As the labor of beauty is assimilated into the framework of neoliberal meritocracy, being “unattractive” comes to signal a lack of interest, effort, or skill in self-development, and is deemed to be not only an aesthetic, but also a moral failing — i.e. to be ugly is not just to be ugly, it is to be lazy, lacking in discipline or health-consciousness, self-respect, courtesy, etc.; thus, to be ugly puts one at a disadvantage in various fields of competition, be it in Tinder, the office, or a reunion with judgmental relatives. One sees this kind of conflation of moral and aesthetic judgments especially in discourses about fatness.

Photo from Asianwiki

In the South Korean drama My ID is Gangnam Beauty, for example, the protagonist Kang Mi-Rae is so persecuted and ostracized for her fat body and “troll-like” face that she almost commits suicide. Abandoning that, she instead starves and runs herself to thinness, and gets into debt for plastic surgery — just to feel “normal,” to be treated with some humanity. She develops a habit of rating other women according to their faces, internalizing the ideology that drives most of the men in the drama to constantly evaluate and comment on the appearances of their female peers, as some women (like Hyun Soo-A) pit themselves against one another for male attention and popularity. In this drama, competition among women happens when their status is pegged to the kind of man they can be with, to how much male attention and female admiration they can attract and how well they can deflect envy. Being the perfectly likable woman is an impossible performance.

While Mi-Rae still gets shit for the artificiality of her post-operation prettiness (“Gangnam Beauty” is a pejorative term for a woman who obviously got cosmetic work done; in the words of one of her spurned suitors, she’s a “plastic monster”), rues the fact that her circumstances forced her to such a measure, and retains feelings of insecurity despite her newfound popularity, eventually she learns to be happy with herself, see beyond people’s surfaces, and develop a more prosocial subjectivity. But it’s doubtful whether she would have been able to undertake the soul work of self-acceptance and self-expression had she not paid such a high price to replace her face.

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Sometimes I still agonize over my own pursuit of “looking good” (and all the effort that takes), especially when I acknowledge that often my concern isn’t the health of my body’s largest organ, so much as it is vanity — I want to look *like this* until I’m forty-five. And for that I splurge on oils and creams and lotions, dutifully follow my skincare regimen, and celebrate my makeup skills with selfies posted to IG. Am I merely complicit in perpetuating sexist and capitalist hegemony?

I like to think that the problem is not the labor of beauty per se, which can be a form of self-making and self-care. The problem is that such labor is gendered, and becomes compulsory, if one wants to be accorded a modicum of respect and esteem — that is, when this technology of the self functions as a technology of domination. But then again, so much of what we do in the name of self-development — from spending at least eight hours in the gym each week, to spending upwards of a decade earning advanced degrees — functions as a technology of domination. So maybe it shouldn’t be a shock to realize that for all the critique we engage in, at the end of the day we most of us remain — and actually strive to remain — good subjects of capital.

(Now let me put on my hyaluronic acid-infused face mask and rest with my simplifications.)

Retropost: On Instalado (2017)

From a Facebook post published on 16 July 2017, lightly edited:

Watched Instalado, an independent sci-fi film written and directed by Jason Paul Laxamana. I didn’t like it because of shoddy world-building and character development, but it wasn’t a waste of time.

 

Instalado (2017) imagines a world in which traditional education is being phased out by the worldwide adoption of new technology that enables individuals to purchase, download, and install knowledge into their brains, thus literalizing “the marketplace of ideas.” In this world, knowledge across a variety of disciplines — from the hard sciences to the social sciences and humanities, including art and languages — is packaged as certified courses or degrees. In this story, predominantly set in the State of Central Luzon, specifically Pampanga, the technology of “installation” is controlled by transnational corporations, local capitalists, and, funnily enough, the Catholic Church.

The film explores a number of conflicts, primarily the commodification and inaccessibility of education; its opening scene is a student protest movement condemning the cost of installation (one course costs 100 to 200 thousand pesos to install; one ought to have at least two courses to get more than an entry-level job) and the government’s withdrawal of support for traditional education, causing many schools to close and teachers to lose their jobs.

It also depicts the developmental problems that come with adolescents leaving the traditional school system to become “instalados,” after which they can enter the workforce and virtually stop being children; one of the main characters, Danny, holds a senior management post at the age of 14, and acts as cynically as any garden-variety douchebag CEO. Related to this is generational tension between young instalados who simply paid for knowledge and got in four hours what people usually study for four years, and older workers who graduated in the traditional way. Companies prefer to hire instalados, and instalados generally prefer to download profitable rather than personally meaningful or socially relevant courses, in part because they need to recoup the cost of installation, but also because many of them are too young or too blindered to know what they really want, or how to make a life beyond providing themselves and their families with material comforts.

Its numerous plot threads and focal characters prevented the film from delving deeply into any of its narrative elements, or covering plot holes. As a sci-fi story, it is unsatisfying: its novum (installation) and the way this technology has transformed the material and cultural structures of the world was not clearly thought out; I felt that not enough research was done to make more believable the science that makes installation possible, and the effects it has on psychology, both individual and social. For instance, it fails to engage with questions about the limits of the human mind, semantic and episodic/autobiographical memory and their effects on personality, or declarative vs. procedural memory; it’s rather difficult to believe that procedural memory — knowing not just What, but How To — can simply be downloaded, especially when the knowing-how-to consists not in conscious remembering, but in something that comes more “automatically” through long and repeated practice, like biking or painting or playing the violin. One minor character, an Aeta, wants to get a course in law installed, so she could help her tribe fight for their land rights; is knowledge of the law all it takes to become an IP rights lawyer, to argue and write, to negotiate the grossly uneven playing field of politics, with acumen?

Perhaps my biggest problem with Instalado is how it never problematizes the sufficiency of installation for the development of competencies. Thus it glosses over a significant critique of the consumerist notion of education, one which maintains that learning is not simply an act of consumption — that is, paying for tuition demands something of the “buyer” before s/he can enjoy what s/he paid for, in a way that is very different from when one pays for a latte (I can enjoy my drink the moment I claim it from the counter and hand over the receipt for the barista to stamp; I cannot enjoy the fruits of my knowledge unless I work hard to build it).

Instead, the film conceptualizes knowledge as mere information for transmission, as if the very process of learning were not the important aspect of education. In so doing, it cheapens its own critique of the commodification of something whose substance and value is difficult to pin down, to quantify. Learning is irreducible to the acquisition of information per se, for it largely depends on building the mental architecture and capacity to organize facts, observations, and suppositions in a meaningful and coherent way; in this sense, knowledge-construction is inseparable from society, from power, from identity, positionality, and ideology as worldview. Knowledge is praxis.

So, does installation confer not just knowledge as an aggregation of discrete facts, but also knowledge as “justified true belief,” as something embodied, or as a function of politics? The film is vague about the nature of its central sci-fi element. If this question were explored further in the film (not necessarily through explicit narration, of course), then the viewers would be able to think more about why the Catholic Church tries to corner the market for this technology, why companies prefer instalados to traditional graduates, or why instalados need multiple installations to get good jobs. Because if one thinks about it, traditional education, which occurs through a long period of time and involves consistent and difficult work and interaction with others, actually offers more latent benefits — not just habit- and values-formation, but social and cultural capital — that instalados don’t get by what amounts to a minor non-invasive surgical procedure. One cannot download diligence or focus or five months of sitting next to your crush and future co-author in class.

The above just expresses my dissatisfaction with conceptualization. There’s also the matter of storytelling, including flat characterization and abrupt shifts in character focus that precluded the development of conflicts and motivations, which made it difficult for me to empathize with any character, even with the girl who ironically got a degree in education installed so she could teach poor kids in the barrio. (That production value is not the greatest is understandable. That the acting is sometimes over the top is understandable.) All in all, the premise of the story is interesting, but the execution lacked nuance, complexity, and coherence. Nevertheless, it’s still worth seeing, especially for grade school or high school students who must think about what higher education is for (aside from, you know, getting a nice job, earning money, buying stuff, etc.).