Transpacific Modernities: Literatures of Filipina Femininity Under Authoritarianism

Abstract

This dissertation argues that late twentieth-century Southeast Asian authoritarian regimes mobilized femininity as a central means of narrating and legitimizing modernity. Focusing on the Philippines under Ferdinand Marcos and its relation to Singaporean and Indonesian authoritarian formations, this dissertation shows how women’s bodies were positioned as evidence of national progress and developmental success. Reading detective fiction, crisis narratives, and exile novels across Southeast Asian Anglophone and Asian American literature, it argues that literary form exposes the instability of these gendered state narratives. Each chapter traces a distinct figure—the Overseas Filipina Worker, the New Filipina, and the Transpacific Exile—to examine how femininity is produced through labor migration, authoritarian cultural politics, and transnational displacement. Against state-centered narratives, these chapters locate alternative forms of knowledge, kinship, femininity, and political relation in communal ways of knowing, social bonds outside the nuclear family, femininities organized around dissent rather than beauty or compliance, and political attachments that persist beyond exile. By placing Philippine and Filipina American texts in conversation with Singaporean and Indonesian contexts, the dissertation shifts from a U.S. centered imperial framework towards a transpacific and intra-Asian account of authoritarian modernity. In doing so, it shows that femininity is not a stable sign of progress but a contested site through which modernity is made and challenged.