Masquerade Hysteria and Neocolonial Femininity in Jessica Hagedorns Dogeaters - Book Report/Review Example

Analysis of Dogeaters Jessica Hagedorn 1990 pastiche novel is written against the backdrop of postcolonial Philippines,during the years of building the nation and military decree under the regime of Marcos, who ruled Philippines from 1965 to 1986. In the revisionary history of Dogeaters, patriotism perpetuates the repression of colonialism by restructuring the dual form on which the colonial suppression was founded. If the imperialist patriarchy vindicated its colonizing attempts by expounding the conquered as the dissimilar, mediocre and alien other, jingoism engages a concentrated endeavor at recovery of the manhood lost in colonization, estimating woman as the other, to be glanced at, controlled, defeated, and enjoyed. Building the nation during the postcolonial period Philippines becomes a search for retaining a lost manliness for the native men of power. Hagedorn’s feminism introduces a position in the text for a terse analysis of the anti-woman propensity inheriting in chauvinism. The female characters in Filipino postcolonial community depicted by Hagedorn exemplifies the patriarchal negation and amalgamate the dichotomized models of romanticize femininity and dishonored whoredom. In the novel Zenaida is depicted as the mother of a prostitute, and a prostitute of a mother. Hagedorn here is trying to disembody her as the symbol of nonstandard, adulterated femininity. The writer has presented the personal as the political. The sexual relationships between men and women carry a political connotation, therefore making the hysteria in the power equations of the genders, within and outside the organization of marriage in Dogeaters, a national disquiet. Then there is the woman issue fore-grounded in the novel which is relevant to a postcolonial text (Chang 637-63). Hagedorn has selected to have about a dozen tales in the text with women as lead characters displays her investment in this question. A patriarchy is involved in the responsibility of restructuring its machismo identify after the weakening attack of colonialism, women become expunged from the political progress itself. The only means women can experience a delusion of emancipation is by complicity with patriarchy, as in the case of the General’s wife, and the First Lady. Conversely, female characters like the president’s wife and the talk-show host build and signify manifestation in the service of the nation. The First Lady has the propensity of explaining women enthusiasm to participate in beauty contests as a gesticulation of nationalist fortitude and in effect conspires in the substitution of the imperialist glance. The endeavor to force women into beauty contests and making this involvement a display of patriotism diminishes women of their subject standings by transforming them into subjects of glance. Turned into sexual positions where masculinity is gnarled and legitimized. As Dogeaters illustrates, women are motivated in the name of patriotism, to become objects. The glance inevitably is a hierarchical act, emancipating the brokers and emaciating the object. The beauty pageants are sites of this power play that legitimize masculinity and diminish women’s agency. The tackiness of the female approval for male hostilities is also witnessed in the self-degrading Leonor Ledesma. Ledesma functions as a facilitator and is accountable of collusion with her hostile husband. In a masculine state where hostility and viciousness are standardized, how does a woman arbitrate her life and come to harmony with conscience? (Chang 637-63). Conversely, the gang rape of Aurora depict that politics is better yet an uneven field. Essential to the feminist politics of Dogeaters, Daisy’s contraventions by the builders of the stare functions as a trope for the debasement and dehumanization of the bothering procedures with which imperialist principles modernized its defilement of other lands and women. Daisy’s defilement at the hands of the Filipino state leaders makes a declaration about the perverted power configuration in postcolonial Philippines. It claims that instead of establishing right the wrongs the attack of women by violating the female body and by debasing women to mere bodies. The gang rape, a general male act of contravention of the female body, is carried out accurately in the text, to the backdrop voice-overs from the preferred radio program of the Filipinos. One man after another rape Daisy and all watch each other in turns. This factual depiction of the hostility on the female body, implemented by the nation’s most powerful men contains, in addition to its pornographic introduction, the ominous connotation that it will be narrated and re-narrated as an ethical story to threaten women into surrender and suppression. Both the probability and reality of rape are political instruments continuing male realm over women by force. The interference of the entity politic set in action by colonization and continued in the neocolonialist attempts of the separatists, it consequently engraved in the text as an invasion, an impressive hostility, and a contaminated upsurge of the body erotic (Chang 637-63). While tyrant thrives on the world stage, Hagedorn’s lead characters dream themselves actors in a foreign movie, frequently confusing cinematic actions with individual memories. They create themselves in the likeness of another’s wishes; renovate a common stock of clichéd tasks and communal rituals, or endeavor to read the shadows that occupy their environment. Their anecdotal extents of connivance and maneuver dramatize the paradoxical meaning of the world actors: they are instruments that act on and change their surroundings, and sheer recollections of existing paradigms and wishes (Chang 637-63). Imelda’s mystique stanch from her capability to take advantage of feminine prototypes ingrained in folk religion and acclaimed in media denotations of woman. In the Philippines, where a well know saying summarizes the state’s history. In Dogeaters Imelda visually reinforces the dream of riches and glamour that all squatters and other low-income earners longed to share. She knew the sensational enjoyment her spectacular image bequeathed on the desiring multitude. The First Lady mediatory role during her husband’s reign expresses the connection between politics and manifestation, in a community where image was the final commodity. In the novel, Hagedorn has presented spectacle as both enabling and disabling. These gendered denotations, conversely, express the dependant position of economical and socially disempowered women. As paradigms for classification, such icons of female suffering and suppression consecrate and consequently perpetuate the function of the victim. Nevertheless, they in addition offer the persecuted and marginalized sectors of the populace a conduit for their dissatisfaction. Hence these spectacles of deserted, prostituted and martyred women in Philippines melodrama can serve a model function. They can offer a justification for the erotic depiction of women’s bodies and a reification of their disempowerment. Hagedorn’s female protagonists read their own persecution in these doleful stories of seduction and treachery. Hagedorn presents Philippines as that one which belongs to women who effortless weep and men who are embarrassed to weep. It is consequently not astonishing that Hagedorn juxtaposes a scene of love letters with an episode displaying the cross-examination and succeeding rape of a young woman (Chang 637-63). Paradoxically, Daisy’s/Aurora’s collusion in the display brought her into the limelight to start with. Aurora’s participation in the beauty contest and her succeeding coronation conciliate her empowerment and her privacy, as aggressive strangers start volunteering personal consultation, masculine voices propose marriage on the phone, and movie contracts are given. Aurora appropriate the facilitating authority of demonstration only long enough to sabotage it, reinventing herself as an affiliate of the dissident opposition. Through the beauty contests, women not only objectify federal standards of beauty and virtue, but in addition serve as marketing functions to promote cosmetics, body images and clothes. In Dogeaters Hagedorn is endeavoring to show the connection between manifestation and commodity culture which lies in this stress on visual depiction and consumption. In the novel, characters such as Rio and Aurora are patrons of global commodities of beauty. Their recognition or rebuke of these packaged paradigms is itself a political act. Next, Aurora’s body is first ingrained by the principles of the beauty that inform the beauty contest ceremony, and then by her resignation of that function in favor of dynamic opposition. Given the martial and patriarchal feature of the regime; her crucial act changes her sign value (Chang 637-63). Hagedorn’s aesthetic preference to integrate colonial text in her fiction passes Dogeaters off as a perfect postcolonial story endeavoring to retell history. In summing up, nevertheless; the text undermines its own charade to decisiveness of the purpose when the character by the name Pucho rewrites Rio’s adaptation of Hagedorn’s story. At the end also, the author gives a new twist to the already indefinite text, intimating that there could other adaptations to the tale that she narrated meticulously. Consequently after close analysis of the novel, Rio can be seen as Hagedorn’s alter ego. She somewhat presents a partial and dubious version of an imperceptible certainty. Her opposition is the text’s brave resistance with its own incompleteness. Rio the female leading role from whom we heed much of the unfolding depicts Filipino subjectivity as growing out of sophisticated affair with the colonizing civilization. In Dogeaters, Hagedorn presents the Filipinos are so intensely Americanized. Hagedorn has utilized both Rio and another character, to look back and endeavor to restructure themselves and their nation. The novel itself symbolizes a postcolonial pursuit and enacts a countrywide yearning for variety that would be all-encompassing of the broken smithereens of dissimilar identity constructions. Politicians such as Senator Avila depicted as primary political player in the text, articulates the predicament prevalent to postcolonial self-delineation. According to the Senator, the Filipinos are a sophisticated realm of cynics, children of martial ethnicities which were colonized by the Americans and Spaniards. The disjointed, fantasy like narration of Dogeaters depicts the psychic setting of a defeated land, surprising under patriotism and surviving the burden of a colonials past (Chang 637-63). Work cited Chang, Juliana. “Masquerade, Hysteria and Neocolonial Femininity in Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters.” Contemporary Literature 44.4(2003): 637-63. Print. Read More