The Philippines. Women's movements and the Filipina, 1986–2008 By Mina Roces Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2012. Pp. 277. Bibliography, Index.

Abstract

Women's movements and the Filipina, 1986-2008 By MINA ROCES Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2012. Pp. 211. Bibliography, Index. doi: 10.1017/S0022463414000472 Mina Roces's book Women's movements and the Filipina, 1986-2008 could be seen as a culmination of her work in the fields of Women's, Gender and Philippine studies. One of the foremost scholars of women and feminism in Asia, and particularly the Philippines, Roces's latest study of women's movements in the Philippines revisits the themes that have been central to her earlier work--Filipina women's history, Filipino and transnational feminisms, personal politics, fashion, and defining the 'Filipina' in theory and history--focusing on the 'history of the feminist project and its interrogation of the Filipino woman' (pp. 1-2). By exploring women's and feminist groups in the Philippines (mostly based in Manila), such as feminist nuns, indigenous women activists, women workers (including prostitutes and overseas contract workers), cultural workers in the media, actors, and teachers, Roces produces an engaging, compelling and well-researched study of feminism in the Philippines. According to Roces, most of these women's organisations are concerned with two major issues: challenging the dominant ideology of womanhood in the Philippines, and fashioning an alternative vision of Filipino women. To these ends, feminist leaders and activists deploy several discourses that centre on what Roces cahs a 'double narrative' of victimisation and oppression, while also forging an activist programme that produces role models and feminist practices designed to fashion an empowered Filipina. Most of the chapters are devoted to in-depth studies of various women's and feminist movements in the Philippines. She argues that these organisations advanced a particular form of Filipino feminism, which distanced itself from Western feminism and was grounded in a deep understanding of women's situation in the Philippines. Starting from the 1980s, these women's movements laid the foundation for a Filipino feminist theory that challenged the traditional representations of femininity in the Philippines such as the Virgin Mary or Maria Clara (the female protagonist in Jose Rizal's Noli Me Tangere), and instead promoted powerful female icons and heroines such as the babaylan (pre-Hispanic female shamans), Gabriela Silang (a revolutionary heroine who fought against the Spanish), and Lorena Barrios (a leader of the New People's Army who was killed in combat in the 1970s) as representatives of the ideal Filipina. Roces divides her work into three parts: 'Representing the Filipino woman'; 'Fashioning the Filipina through practices'; and 'Understanding the transnational context of the Filipina struggle'. Roces recognises the feminist nun, the prostitute and the woman worker as representatives of the new 'Filipino woman'. Although they did not totally reject the Catholic Church, feminist nuns played a key role in the evolution of Filipino feminism by deconstructing the religious roots of women's oppression. As single, unattached and successful women, they became alternative and subversive role models who 'sought to empower women by demystifying suffering, and resocialising women into rejecting the Catholic ideals that endorsed subservience to men' (p. 37). While nuns were represented as powerful women in the discourse of Filipino feminism, feminists represented prostitutes not as sex workers but as victims 'pushed towards a life of prostitution' by poverty, failures in government policy, and 'by social norms that idealised the woman as martyr and dutiful daughter' (p. 57). According to Roces, this discursive strategy was adopted by feminists in order to decriminalise prostitution and to punish male pimps, traffickers and clients, rather than prostitutes themselves. Finally, feminists have added 'workers' to 'wives and mothers' in their constructions of the 'feminine', representing peasant women, domestic and migrant workers as both victims of a male dominated local and global workforce, and as the chief breadwinners. …