Working-Class Filipino Masculinities

Abstract

Since the 1980s women of color feminist theorists, writers, and cultural workers have collectively called for an intersectional approach to race, class, gender, sexuality, and citizenship.1 This body of work speaks to how different social formations and axes of identity are mutually constitutive, inspiring cultural analysts to examine these social phenomena and related power dynamics in a holistic, interconnected way, rather than in isolation. More recently, in 1990s cultural studies, instead of privileging settled communities (e.g., the rural village, in anthropology) as sites of culture par excellence, scholars have explored movement as an important part of how cultural meanings are produced. James Clifford, for example, argues that travel is constitutive of culture.2 That is, the embodied act of moving or traveling from one place to another the journey, not the destination informs and is an integral part of cultural productions and meanings. While Clifford s work significantly focuses on bourgeois traveling histories and practices, the general premise of his argument can be extended to include different and specific kinds of movement, for example, migration, immigration, refugee displacement, and seafaring, and how these different kinds of mobility play a role in the creation of culture. Linda Espana-Maram s Creating Masculinities in Los Angeles s Little Manila: Working-Class and Popular Culture, 1920s-1950s is a compelling and well-argued example of scholarly analysis that practices an intersectional cultural and historical approach to the creation of Filipino masculinity through place as well as movement.3 Espana-Maram argues that Filipinos were simultaneously immigrants, gendered subjects, members of an aggrieved population and consumers (7, her emphasis). Subsequently, she addresses how these complex formations and experiences were mutually constitutive and analyzes how working-class men of color Filipino men used popular culture to negotiate viable ethnic identities and create a male, working-class culture in Los