Male-Ordered Bodies

Abstract

In this chapter is about the alien body of the Filipino woman in white Australia. The racialised and sexualised citizenship of foreign brides is inscribed in the political economy of nations as much as in women’s bodies, underwritten by regimes governing transnational gaze and desire. I read the significations that the ‘mail-order bride’s’ body has engendered and have, in turn, ‘corporealised’ the Filipina-Australian into life. I argue that while these works are responses against the representation of Filipino women as ‘embodiment of exchange’, a collective effort to redefine Filipino-Australianness, they contradictorily express a disavowal, highlighting the embarrassment of being Filipino. Central to this embarrassment is that bodies, sex and reproduction are articulated as whoring and only thinly couched as political. The Filipino woman is carved into the very specificities of the body as docile, but that this docile body follows the grammar of ethnocentrism and class hierarchy. This chapter analyses the points of view of a self-avowed ‘mail-order bride’, a minority writer and three Filipino male immigrants.