Ain't I A Filipino (Woman)?: An Analysis of Authorship/Authority Through the Construction of “Filipina” on the Net

Abstract

In this article, I examine the process by which Filipino women's identity was articulated, reified and renegotiated on soc.culture.filipino, a newsgroup community on the Internet that, as a hub, sustains a flux membership of 20,000 registrants. By observing several online debates, I witnessed the process by which members of the diaspora negotiated the meaning of Filipino women's identity with people in the Philippines and how they atempted to forge a cultural identity for the community itself. In this article, I show that articulated stereotypes of Filipino and Asian women were intimately connected to racial empowerment, anti-colonial, and nationalist projects. In doing Internet research, I was able to document the intersection between postcolonial studies and computer mediated communication theories on studying identity in flux and was able to analyze the role of the Internet in decentering identities as well as the possibility of dismantling Grand Narratives.