(re)reading and (re)writing social relations under duress of the world order
By Carissa Pobre
ABSTRACT
As a Filipino, it’s my personal dream to explain the state of class relations exhaustively. I’ll tell you why I have this dream. Which has been more like a fever, more like an illness. Give up on that premise, even scholars will tell you—unless you’re courting a kind of madness, or speaking in high theory, it’s right pointing out that you cannot really give an exhaustive account of something like it. Class, a defining feature of the experience of Philippine society, is both abstract and material, acute and slippery in all the ways that Filipinos (consciously or unconsciously) understand their identity. In fact not only their identity. But their possibility.
READERS IN CHORALE
Akemi Elgar, Joanna Fabricante, Laetitia Franco, Lia Gutierrez, Precious Santos, and Rhenzy Urmeneta
KEYWORDS
class relations, middle class, postcolonial cities, Philippine society
April 12, 2025
1.
As a Filipino, it’s my personal dream to explain the state of class relations exhaustively. I’ll tell you why I have this dream. Which has been more like a fever, more like an illness. Give up on that premise, even scholars will tell you—unless you’re courting a kind of madness, or speaking in high theory, it’s right pointing out that you cannot really give an exhaustive account of something like it. Class, a defining feature of the experience of Philippine society, is both abstract and material, acute and slippery in all the ways that Filipinos (consciously or unconsciously) understand their identity. In fact not only their identity. But their possibility. |
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And I wanted to give an account of this ever since I was a child: growing up in middle-class environments, I was the last child of a family of five children to have been born out of struggle and out of our old house in Sampaloc, Manila, on Maria Cristina Street. The family had moved to Quezon City by the time I was born, among the lineage of Manileños who had moved from old Manila to the peri-urban sprawl of QC around the 80s and 90s. Here in Barangay Bagong Pag-asa, I grew up ‘protected’ enough that sometimes I’ve thought I may as well have grown up in a gated village—though I never did—and through years of private school going to and from home—just like how it happens in almost all my dreams—I knew I was always trying to run away from something. |
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It’s the trouble with certain dreams that you won’t really know what was real to begin with. You’d have opened your eyes and then you find yourself gathering pieces leftover from what you thought to be your waking life. Arrange whatever comes your way, I once read in a book. Ever since going to school, which are all among my earliest memories, I had the ill feeling that understanding this reality of class in Philippine society would be like trying to understand how we all got here. She will put her arm in yours and gaze out. At your backs will be history. And if I could figure it out exhaustively, I’d have a more satisfying answer than hearing my mother, who grew up in a working class family, say, see you’re so lucky. |
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The material conditions, the spatial arrangements, the social attitudes of people around me that seemed like they had been born into them—they live in every side-comment I heard that festered, every family reunion of a mixed bag of backgrounds and personalities, every conversation cut from the fabric of the nuclear, Filipino home that I felt I couldn’t participate in. I was studious, growing up. Later on, I’d realize that a school can be but a microcosm or a chasm of Philippine society. |
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It’s in those memories, I realize now, trying to understand what we all call now to be ‘social class’, that I was trying to look for my own country. So, fully waking into this consciousness, more than any other marker of personal identity, has been one of my ultimate dreams as a Filipino. |
2.
I’d like to put intense articulation and feeling to those conditions related to class, telling us whose problem it is feeling like they’re a problem, and what is the class composition of that problem. And we’ve been saying it, over and over, us descendants of the postcolonies—but I wonder if we’ve been explicit enough to say, for writers, artists, and intellectuals, that this is our problem to have. It’s our problem and we ought to name it as such. |
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A friend of mine one afternoon over coffee would remind me about the Gramscian idea of the organic intellectual,¹ when I tell him how happy I am that Ka Mimi is running for office.² Mimi Doringo, a mother, community organizer, and urban poor rights activist, was already Secretary General of Kadamay when I first met her. Born during Dekada Setenta, she was among the progressive candidates who launched their senatorial campaign for the 2025 midterm election. I remember the first time I heard Ka Mimi speak—at a graduation ceremony for urban poor farmers, who went through an agroecology training program organized by a citizen action group (including myself)—and I could still remember the reverberation of her voice that day. At high noon. Nanays and their children and the husbands of a few and more young people like us gathered for the day’s celebratory community kitchen, organized in the fight for housing rights and the right to the city. Ka Mimi addressed the audience and I heard then in her voice how she spoke that her life depended on it, every word. |
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Here I’m talking about the inorganic ones, us intellectuals: those who arise out of and participate in the professional consensus. |
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Born in Masbate—though having grown up, living, and working in the capital city—Ka Mimi worked as a contractor for 15 years in the factory of a cosmetics company, where she was exposed to issues of labor exploitation, and eventually became a community organizer. |
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The poet and scholar Fred Moten once distinguished this: the distinction between work and labor. One is organized. The other is stolen. |
3.
To tell it slant³—to reread, to rewrite, to rearticulate. |
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There’s a Kodak photograph from 1998 that I’ve placed by my bookshelves: me with my grandmother, only in her late 60s then—both of us smiling at the camera, during a family trip we had taken to the US. More than half of her kids ended up migrating to the US as adults, and by that point, all my titas and titos ever wanted was to bring her abroad as many times as it could be possible. It was, of course, a way of showing gratitude to my grandmother: Mama (as we all called her) raised them as a single mother, in the old house on Maria Cristina Street, which had the first-floor printshop she ran as a mom-and-pop business, interspersed with some days she spent bottling patis to sell on the side. And a few other side hustles. As one of my titos once remarked, Mama worked hard so that all of them were sent to a private school. With Manila-born-and-raised blood, the family had the charity of a few Dominican priests who paid for the education of some of her sons, and many of her kids ‘made it’ successfully in America, some doing working class jobs, some as elevated office professionals. I am the youngest child of Mama’s eldest daughter. For more than three decades, my mother made a career for herself, and during the early part of her working life, was briefly an OFW of Bank of America in Hong Kong. Everyone describes my grandmother (her mother) as a principled woman—old-school, pero maprinsipyo, would beat you to death in those days but never in front of your schoolfriends. I was almost a Grade One kid in that photo from 98—and I’ve kept the photograph on my wall ever since Mama died, and it’s still a fresh wound. At the funeral, I cried giving the speech. The eulogy that I wrote. Then my mother with no tears, without faltering took the next speaking role and apologized to Mama in her casket. I’m sorry, Mama, if we took the time for your dreams. It seems that no one else remembers the bottles of patis, except for my mother. It seems to be one of her most vivid memories of her, growing up. Even with all that ‘success’, my mother once confessed that she lives her dreams through me. |
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There’s a truth in our politics that is deep, buried, and hidden. But you grow up hearing it on the news. Eventually it’s in every report or pulse survey you read. It’s inside of every TV commercial, every campaign ad, every book or lesson you picked up in school. Somehow, every signage or billboard, every textbook or talumpati is trying to tell us this. Or keep us away from it. The precipice to knowing what we’ve always wanted. |
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The deep-seated fear that I also carried—that I didn’t know what I wanted—was something passed down in the bloodlines of many women, and the goalposts to all philosophy, all political theory to caretake the life that is worth living is shrouded in the terms of patriarchy, capitalism, and intellectualism where women are rarely given the conditions and the language for desiring what it is that they truly wanted. Something was coming out of my hands. Something about desire and language. And if I could make the bloodpact now—the performance, the event—rewriting this social order, caring for the next—then this is the pact that I’m making: that none of us, especially women, would ever sacrifice for its own sake. The truth is not a burden. It’s sacred. |
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Not a manifesto anymore (no manifestos anymore), but a credo. A chorale. Set to music. Set to improvisation. |
Royal tru orange at Egg sandwich. Madalas na meryenda namin ‘to tuwing naiiwan ako sa bahay nina nanay at lolo, ang mga magulang ni mama. Sila ang naging pangalawang magulang ko nang nagsisimula pa lamang si mama bilang punongguro at si papa naman ay nakikipagsapalaran sa ibang bansa. Sila rin ang nag-alaga sa ilang mga pamangkin nila noong naisin ng mga ito na mag-aral sa Maynila. Ang tahanan nila ang nagsilbing silong habang malayo sa pamilya. Si Nanay ang tipo ng guro na binabalikan ng mga estudyanteng nagtapos upang ibalita kung ano na ang narating nila sa buhay. Madalas pa, isa si nanay sa mga pinasasalamatan nila na humulma sa kanilang kakayahan at naniwala sa kanilang galing. Saksi ako sa mga patotoo kung gaano siya kagaling na guro dahil ang kwento ng mga bagong pasok na guro sa paaralan nila, siya daw ang inspirasyon nila. Hanga talaga ako sa kaniya—sa husay niya’t dedikasyon. Kaya naman ang bawat trabaho ko’y pinipilit kong gawin ito nang may puso, kagaya niya. Ang daming pamana ni nanay sa akin na alam kong ako ang mas nakakuha higit sa aking ina. Ngunit, sa totoo lang, kahit pa tanggap ko ang lahat ng mga naipamana sa akin ni nanay; ang kaniyang galing, talino, ang sipag at tiyaga sa buhay, at ang tapang na sumubok ng mga bagay, may takot na nanananahan sa aking puso na baka hindi lang ang mga ito ang makuha ko. (“Sa Hindi Pag-alala: Mga Naiwang Bakas ng Kahapon”, Laetitia Franco)
4.
Social life today demands a different kind of reckoning. But perhaps I’m looking more for revisitation, close to revision—going back to something consigned to how it was once written (by a lot of white male European leftist thinkers and manarchists, I have to say!), and not coming out the same way you went. It is exactly what that event prohibits. |
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Living in times we call political education and radicalization⁴—a rupture born of a postcolonial moment that is still unfolding and we are actively making—the missing piece of the “political heuristic challenge”, as a social demand, is a lived critique of the class in which some of us were born, some of us were raised, and some of us became professionals to maintain. |
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Those of us who have been in or around the struggle may have learned to call these ‘entanglements’,⁵ but institutional and social forces have sublimated in the class war the paradigms of professional consensus. The ‘middle’ in the middle class is fluid—because we all have the capacity to see ourselves in the broader struggle, and we actually expect a lot from the ‘middle class’—but if we ever felt like the middle-class problem, we probably submitted to the professional consensus more than we’d like to admit. We wax entanglement from institution, without always building the imaginaries that not only pose alternatives to industry conventions but also disrupt notions of success, and offer new ones in a much broader web of life. And the sites of neocolonialisms are all professional entities—schools, offices, occupations. Even as we resist in a socio-civic sphere, the demand itself (drawing from Moten who explicates a poetics of hesitant sociology) is “encased within the constraints of policy, administration, regulation”⁶—legitimate structures to which our social action is directed. |
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The thing is: In all the possibility not to reproduce the prevailing social order—the social order we inherited through institution, an inheritance that is at once structural and generational—where are the artists and writers situated in the construction, in the making? |
Totoo pala iyong takot grumaduate, ‘no? Dati, hindi ko maintindihan kung bakit nararamdaman iyon ng iba. Bakit nakakatakot ang bagong yugto ng buhay? Bakit takot ang mga tao sa pagbabago? Ngayon, nasa pangatlong taon na ako ng kolehiyo. Sa tuwing naglalakad ako kasama ang mga kaibigan ko at ang mga tawanan at kwentuhan namin ay humahalo sa mundo—sa kahel at pulang kalangitan, sa mga punong marahan na sumasayaw, at sa konkretong daanan— hindi ko mapigilang matakot. Kapag lumalabas kami mula sa Arete at nakikita ang iba’t ibang uri ng sining, hindi ko mapigilang matanong sa sarili, mararamdaman ko pa ba ang pagtigil ng mundo? O mas lalo itong bibilis hanggang sa hindi ko na alam paano gumalaw? Ang sabi nila, mag-accountancy raw ako. Sundan ko raw ang yapak ni Mama. Maaari din daw akong mag-abugado dahil marami akong opinyon sa mundo. Kaya nga naguluhan sila nang malaman nilang kursong Creative Writing ang kinuha ko. Kailanman ay hindi ko lubos na maintindihan ang ganoong pananaw. Anong klaseng mundo ang walang sining? Natural ang paglikha sa tao. Hindi ko maalala na nabuhay ako sa mundong ito na walang bahid ng sining sa aking paggalaw. Ang tunog na nililikha ng ating katawan ang hudyat sa nakararami na umiiral tayo. May espasyong pinupunan. Ang mga likha ang nagpapahiwatig ng pagbabago—ang marka ng pagkabuhay. (“Muling Pag-angkin ng Espasyo”, Rhenzy Urmeneta)
5.
By piecing together the mirror that can be held up to the ‘middle’, can we leap altogether. |
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Although class is often reified as a marker of identity, it is not always fixed, and this becomes a unique challenge for those of us who “resist from the side of remaindered life,” as the scholar Neferti Tadiar helps put this⁷—from the side of the poor, the working class, the grassroots. It is an “[intellectual preoccupation and aesthetic problem] of Global South artists”⁸ for whom this psychic life and social operation of power is stark, and by way of social backgrounds (especially pertaining to education, employment, and language) are also broadly middle-class. Easy enough to write about this with irony in our self-deprecating poetry, or relegate it to the domains of theory, but we also ought to look at those conditions spiritually and seriously. We owe part of that psychic life to the social order we inherited. Passed down one generation to the next, one form of distinction upon another. Materially it’s also knowing, as middle-class Filipinos—attuned to the paradoxes of living, with more of the privileges to live a full life—that our lived experiences have always been marked by class-based divisions and extreme inequalities: living inside the postcolonial, Global South realities of chronic underdevelopment and overdevelopment⁹ at the same time. |
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From a prior moment when decolonization and revolutionary justice met their impasse,¹⁰ we have only really known and tried to understand our everyday social life under what I borrow from Moten as “the neurosis of the demand”: the demand that is lodged in the times of political education and radicalization, where we attribute the rupture of one’s political consciousness. This social demand is a psychological and spiritual question (paano ka namulat?), which is both deeply postcolonial and also specific to us in the ‘Third World’ … from which neocolonialism and more polite idioms took from anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism, and class struggle to rearticulate its tensions. Thus, it calls to question class composition and the particular subjectivity of the writer, the artist, the intellectual-activist in the Global South. Power, after all, is the “non-full subject”.¹¹ |
I grew up in a gated home that resides in Antipolo, but the village labels itself as one that is located in Cainta, Rizal. Half of my village’s population resides in Cainta, while the other half in Antipolo—I am part of the former. All my life, I felt as though my environment was controlled—meaning: a safe, deliberate, intentional space that my parents worked towards placing me in. I used to live in a gated condominium with my parents up until we needed more space for my new siblings. It was in that condo that I experienced Ondoy. … And every year, like clockwork, the floods come pouring in and the same politicians get elected—nothing changes. The crystalline barrier that I am accustomed to brings me exactly here. The more stress is inflicted on the exterior surface, the more likely the structure and composition internally will change anatomically—a dislocation. (“Dislocation”, Akemi Elgar)
6.
Understanding there to be a ‘fluid middle’—one that is instructive, potent for radicalizing, and historically and politically important in social mobilization—how do we construe class and social composition in the postcolonial urbanized South? |
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The impoverishment of social life, the intricacies and shared precarities of cosmopolitan existence, as well as the transit from one class or class context¹² to another, underscore the deconstruction of concepts of social life and subjectivity. For us in the Third World, social life is characterized less by fixed signifiers of identity (as perhaps a dominant, identity-based politics would have it) but rather by relations of power and precarity¹³ that pulsate in the social demand. Class shapes how we view the world—and because we’ve known our everyday social life under the worsening realities of social polarization and cultural segregation, encoded in almost all our forms and spaces of contact, more and more of those in the ‘middle’ only come to appreciate people from different class and social backgrounds through exchanges of labor. Our social life is based on relations in their constructed role in (class) society that is their manifestation and representation as (stolen) labor. |
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Social contact across class lines or inter-class contact has always been limited, as many scholars and writers have noted¹⁴—and anyone who lives in Metro Manila knows that social life here is like class segregation. The temporary embarrassment from our middle classness is also, in part, a sociology of absences—a term I borrow from the sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos, laced in the reality of precarity itself as a postcolonial, Third World problematic where some become class actors and others become even worse than labor: nothing at all. Drawing from de Sousa Santos to better depict Global South contexts and epistemes, this sociology of absences—meaning that what does not exist is in fact actively produced as non-existent—is important in countermovements of subaltern cosmopolitanism. That is, our inter-class relations and solidarities with each other. |
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So is it any wonder that, midway into Marcos Diktador Tuta Jr.’s administration, the progressive Makabayan bloc organized their senatorial slate this way: magsasaka (farmer) – mangingisda (fisherman) – maralita (urban poor) – dating konduktor (former bus conductor) – tsuper (driver) – nurse – teacher – dalawang representative ng women’s partylist. They are not identifiers in the way that a dominant identity politics would have us check boxes. They are social relations. Perhaps even before the matrix of labor, these are basic functions of how things work in a society. Taumbayan naman. |
Growing up in Bacolod, there has always been some underlying pain or grief hidden in the city. I have always felt a sense of tragedy from the past, present, or future. I never realized that such a calm, sweet, and culturally rich land could have such a dark history, despite its highly celebrated festival. I grew up in the city, surrounded by relatives from my maternal grandmother’s side of the family, who are scattered across the land. Through the history education provided to me by the different institutions and classes I have taken, we were taught how the sugarcane industry in Bacolod dates back to the Spanish colonization when the commercialization of sugar on the island and its shipping to outside countries began. The decline of the sugar industry led to numerous issues, particularly affecting the Negrenses, who lost their jobs and had their lands stolen by Marcos and his cronies. Furthermore, Marcos failed to address the persistent malnutrition issues, exacerbating the province-wide crisis and resulting in widespread famine and hunger-related deaths. Not even the powerful founding sugar barons or the elites of the land were left untouched during these crises. In mourning for all the tragedies that had struck their homeland, the city’s residents and government came together to commemorate the pain and suffering they had endured. Despite this, Bacolod became known as the “City of Smiles” after the formation of Masskara. Hidden beneath the smiling masks lies the sadness of Bacoleños. Grief-stricken in mourning: feelings of helplessness, hunger, and death; The City of Smiles (“The Horror beneath the Smiles”, Joanna Fabricante)
7.
It’s been a few years since the first overtly democratic socialist candidates ran for the highest seats of public office in my lifetime, in the time after the Duterte administration—though it’s a time we’re still living. |
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My stint as a campaign manager stand-in for one among the coalition candidates was short lived, even though it felt like years. Born in Bacolod, Luke Espiritu, a father of four daughters, a lawyer, and labor leader, ran a senatorial bid in 2022, and I volunteered for the job to help meanwhile the daughters and sons of landed families with whom I went to school did photo-ops back in their provinces and voted for national policies that were essentially anti-democracy. Once, on the way to a campaign sortie, I somehow found myself asking Luke (likewise a graduate of Ateneo) about how he parents his four daughters—looking for something human, perhaps, trying to look again for the language of mutual care and creation without knowing it, in a bid to drop certain defenses. The politics we know has its conventions. In the evening we waited for a taxi at SM North Edsa after shopping for his local cigar stash in the big Kultura, and he said what he would sometimes tell young people is, “Finish your education. But don’t get a career.” |
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Going back to the origins of what I wrote while in undergrad, I revisited the last interview of the scholar Edward Said before he died, a documentary from 2003. He said that while writing his memoir, he was surprised how much of his life was shaped by memories of school. And Said (being distinctly postcolonial) had also articulated for us how dominant Western discourse still largely takes no cognizance of “the role of classes, the role of economics, the role of insurgency and rebellion” especially in intellectual resistance.¹⁵ He suggests the possibility: “to make explicit what is usually allowed to remain implicit… to begin again rather than to take up writing dutifully at a designated point and in a way ordained by tradition… to write in and as an act of discovery rather than out of respectful obedience to established ‘truth’”.¹⁶ |
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I sorta learned this the hard way. Every abstraction is a charged political silence. An unbearable heightened consciousness. |
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The irony is that the Filipino middle class, concentrated in mega-urbanized Metro Manila, has emerged to be a “remarkably coherent social identity”, perhaps despite the fluid, abstract, and socially constructed nature of ‘class’ itself: socialized through forms of institutionalized education and upheld by professional consensus—again pointing to how the ‘middle-class’ points more to this reproduced social order. As the sociologist Marco Garrido cites, “Middle-class politics may be considered to be an embodiment of some kind of modern consciousness acquired through higher education and standards of living…”¹⁷ And as many of us well know, educational institutions perpetuate social hierarchy and domination,¹⁸ all through our psychic life, that tells of a social one. |
The name Henry Sy did not leave an impression on me when I was living in Baguio in 2014. All I knew is that if I told people from school that I was going to SM that they’d make a face. I don’t know what had me believing that SM Baguio was newly developed at the time, when in fact, it was developed in 2003, 28 days before I was born. I had never known of a Baguio City without SM Baguio. And yet, when my Lola’s sister would drive me to school, I dwell in a shared nostalgia. Look at all those pine trees, I’d tell her. The city is going bald, she’d say. … I’d end up living in one of those [SM] condos. I longed to live in Loyola Grand Villas as a kid. My classmates lived there. It was where the rich kids lived. Where lots were huge. Where parties were held in households that didn’t mind. Had more rooms than people. I thought La Vista and Loyola Grand Villas were the same subdivision. It isn’t. In fact, if you enter La Vista and move eastward towards Loyola Grand Villas, apparently you will notice that they are on two separate elevations. The faultline, I think. La Vista on a plateau, Loyola Grand Villas in the valley. If you continue towards that road, you will see a slope like a cliff, at the base of which is the Marikina Fault. A high magnitude earthquake waiting to happen. Active enough to move every two hundred to four hundred years. It could happen any time now. To resist binaries. To know that two things are not mutually exclusive. To recognize that there is always a multiplicity of meaning. And yet, power, privileging, profit. My articulation does not contest that of someone else’s, but amid a wrestling for truth: domination. (“Sudden Disappearances”, Lia Gutierrez)
8.
In the long stream of ‘becoming conscious’, out from the political unconscious we inherited, it may work for us if we ought better to be ‘politicizing’ subjectivity than reifying identities, given how no one is born a class traitor.¹⁹ But the feeling that we are ‘middle class’—building on the work of anarchist thinkers—has more to do with how institutional and social forces work for us (beyond purely economic signifiers), and it’s that we create alliances with these institutions that we become cogs of social reproduction. |
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Decolonial scholars know that precarity is a potent political idea. It trains our attention in understanding the hegemony of uneven conditions, and is a vital and necessary tool toward living out one’s critique of capitalism—“leaning away from habit, stepping outside of comfort zones, and [actually] changing the modes of critical thinking”²⁰ so that we can produce the tools necessary for undoing institutional and social forces. So is refusal. So is revisitation. |
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Although ‘precariousness’ may be no stand-in for a kind of a ‘middle-classness’ born of a prevailing social order—in the way that the Global South artist or writer who resists from the side of remaindered life tends to be comparatively less precarious than others—I’ve started to think this is why the figure of the student (the student activist, the insurgent turn) is so activated in our class politics, our postcolonial history, our literature. |
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Despite it all. Theirs is a life that courts infinitude. |
The uphill road has always been my weakness. I grip the metal handlebar and push on the pedal twice as hard. I could feel the chains resisting, the stubborn thing has yet to understand that I command it to move. I brush off the sweat trickling down my forehead. The loud chatter of my passengers was a passive noise. They do not understand the heaviness in my thighs, nor the ache in my bones from the exhaustion of passing these roads a hundred times a day. Their fresh perfumed bodies and damp hair were yet to be touched by the polluted air of the main road. What I would give to take a break from all the pedaling. To bathe in cool water and scrub all the day’s debris until I am left with calloused skin hardened by labor. The roar of the jeepney a few feet away shattered my fantasy. The kind eyes of my passengers greet me, “Manong, bayad po.” In my palm, the clinking of shiny metal. The fruit of my labor. I zip my body bag open and place my first earnings of the day. Only a few hundred pesos left, I think, and I lean back into my tattered vehicle, waiting for the next passenger I deliver to their destination. Just outside our compound, several street vendors gather when the sun sets. A variety of stalls are present–a takoyaki, kwek-kwek, and barbecue stalls are often our favorite spots, together with a large milk tea. We used to ride bikes to go to the park, but then we had to let them go when the compound grew smaller from all the buildings being built. … I loved walking. I loved the idea of two realities joining together, separated by a sidewalk. Gravel and soil. Grass and dust. People and insects. One is always conscious of time and space and the inevitable end. The other, spreading and resisting human acts and the spaces they greedily consume. … I began my day with a walk. (“The Diary of Forgetting”, Precious Santos)
9.
There are women who’ve written records of their class betrayal. Some laced with grief, some with violence. Somewhere, everywhere, I think I’m looking more for them—those who are trying to write and live between the desire for their language, and a poetics of hesitant sociology—and maybe I’m trying not only to trace that, but to create it myself. |
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Feminist elder Delia Aguilar critiqued Western identity politics for us back in 2004. Short of saying, those aren’t our epistemologies. During the launch event of the republication of her book,²¹ a friend poignantly remarked how we might have more access to books by feminists like Rebecca Solnit but none by elders like Delia. And I’ve witnessed this during Q&As and assemblies before: that day, someone went up to the open mic to ask her a question and nearly began crying, why don’t we account for the women at the grassroots level? the nanays, the organizers whose stories are not recorded into history? |
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In a hardcover textbook I picked up from a bookshelf (titled Women/Writing/Teaching—in fact some of them published lectures), I once came across this kind of intellectual and moral directive from the poet Adrienne Rich: “As long as our language is inadequate, our vision remains formless, our thinking and feeling are still running in the old cycles, our process may be ‘revolutionary’, but [it will not be] transformative.” |
¹Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere/Prison Notebooks
²Bulatlat Contributors, “On National Heroes’ day, Makabayan bloc introduces senatorial slate for 2025 midterm elections”, Bulatlat, Aug 27, 2024, and Iñigo Pastor, “Amid A Flood of Struggles, Urban Poor Leader Mimi Doringo Braves the Whirlwind Toward the Senate”, Philippine Collegian, Mar 8, 2025
³“Success in Circuit lies —” (Emily Dickinson)
⁴Fred Moten, A Poetics of Hesitant Sociology
⁵Mercedes Bunz, Kathrin Thiele, et al, Symptoms of the Planetary Condition
⁶Moten, A Poetics of Hesitant Sociology
⁷Neferti Tadiar, Remaindered Life
⁸Ibid
⁹Both the terms ‘underdevelopment’ and ‘overdevelopment’ have themselves been used with the baggage of discrimination and judgment that similar terms like ‘Third World’ and ‘developing country’ have come to mean, particularly in discursive and administrative spaces of global development policy. Furthermore, the framing of something being ‘underdeveloped’ is itself highly contestable. Nonetheless I am using them here to describe structural material conditions and huge social inequalities in the Global South, and to signal the importance of ‘development’ itself in the postcolonial South contexts and epistemes (i.e. regimes of colonial and neocolonial extraction).
¹⁰See Walden Bello and Neferti Tadiar on the Philippines and the Global South under neoliberalism. It is also worth noting here how Bello describes the middle class as the “great understudied class” in sociology (as remarked in his 2019 lecture The Democratic Dilemma: Elections and the Far-right).
¹¹Moten, A Poetics of Hesitant Sociology
¹²See Chantal Jacquet, Transclasses: A Theory of Social Non-reproduction
¹³José Luis Barrios, Paradox and the Discourse of Inclusion?
¹⁴As the sociologist Marco Garrido highlights in Patchwork City: Class, Space, and Politics in Metro Manila, the social and spatial order is marked by “the sharpness of the spatial boundaries inhibiting such contact, the extent of the concentration by class within those boundaries” (citing Marcuse and van Kempen, 2000).
¹⁵See Edward Said, The World, The Text, and the Critic
¹⁶Yasif Ahmad Faysal and Md. Sadequr Rahman, “Edward Said’s Conception of the Intellectual Resistance”
¹⁷Marco Garrido, Patchwork City
¹⁸See Bourdieu and Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture
¹⁹Chantal Jacquet, Transclasses
²⁰Natalie Alvarez, Claudette Lauzon, Keren Zaiontz (eds), Sustainable Tools for Precarious Times: Performance Actions in the Americas
²¹Delia Aguilar, Towards a Nationalist Feminism
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