Militarized Currents: Toward a Decolonized Future in Asia and the Pacific

8. Militarized Filipino Masculinity and the Language of Citizenship in San Diego

181 8 Militarized Filipino Masculinity and the Language of Citizenship in San Diego Theresa Cenidoza Suarez This chapter focuses on the co-construction of masculinity and manhood among Filipino navy men and their families in San Diego, California, since the mid-1940s.1 This multigenerational study is primarily based on original recorded interview data of approximately twenty Filipino navy families residing in San Diego, of which three members of each family (the male enlistee, the spouse, and an adult child) were interviewed, for a total of sixty participants whose affiliation with the U.S. Navy spans approximately fifty years. I examine the conditions of labor for Filipino navy men, how the work available to them is made to be undignified to reflect their devaluation as workers, and to institutionalize their nonman status in relationship to white hegemonic masculinity. In particular, I illustrate how Filipino men nevertheless find meaning in such work to secure a sense of Filipino masculinity and manhood through the roles of “family provider” and fatherhood. Moreover, I examine the contingency of these roles and how they rely not only on Filipino navy men but also on the expectations of their spouses (or former spouses, in some cases), children, and, to an extent, transnational family networks. I conclude with a discussion of Filipino masculinity in relationship to the United States, and how the U.S. Navy makes available to them the rhetorical language of citizenship in terms of “patriotic duty,” regardless of legal and social citizenship, and its various meanings for Filipino navy men and their families. Neferti Tadiar described in “Sexual Economies in the Asia-Pacific Community” that sexuality and ideals of masculinity and femininity undergird large-scale international relations, especially between the Philippines and the United States.2 In light of Tadiar’s analysis, I illustrate how 182 · THERESA CENIDOZA SUAREZ Filipino manhood is constructed on an ideal of heteronormative masculinity in the U.S. Navy. Roderick Ferguson explains in “The Nightmares of the Heteronormative” how heteronormative masculinity is a construct premised on the Weberian notion of rationality, which has historically formed the basis of legal citizenship and rights in the United States—an ideology of inclusion made possible through the exclusion of subjects deemed irrational, such as women, homosexuals, and nonwhite groups (with a focus on African Americans).3 In particular, Ferguson notes how the legal institution of marriage functions in society to regulate sexual expression and identify rational citizen–subjects, as well as to conform them to the institutional and ideological makeup of liberal capitalist societies.4 Thus, building upon Ferguson’s analysis, I investigate how heteronormative masculinity is co-constructed among Filipino navy men and their families; the function of heterosexuality and marriage in constituting and producing militarized and gendered Filipino citizen–subjects out of imperial domination; and the role of the patriarchal economy and military in the production of intimate, reciprocal, and contradictory relations out of conditions of imperial plunder and subdued labor.5 The feminization of work made available to Filipino stewards in the U.S. Navy institutionalized the devaluation of their masculinity. The demasculinization of colonized men was indeed integral to the consolidation of white hegemonic U.S. imperial authority in the Philippines.6 Yet, Filipino masculinity is a necessary and tenuous co-construction among Filipino navy families as well and not exclusively a male-gendered or male-gendering project. In the field of Asian American studies, David Eng, in Racial Castration, underscores that Asian American male subjectivity is constituted and sustained by the psychic valences and material dimensions of gender, sexuality, and sexual difference as constitutive of contemporary racial formation.7 I contend that heteronormative Filipino manhood is constituted through the co-constructions of heteronormative womanhood and childhood as well. All of these roles are imagined and lived within a transnational domestic sphere inescapably militarized and domesticated within the contexts of U.S. military culture and U.S. imperialism . The inversion of masculine and feminine roles on U.S. ship decks, in admiral quarters, and in mess halls—the militarized spaces where Filipino men have historically performed feminized domestic work as navy stewards and other less-esteemed labor—heightened efforts among Filipino navy families to establish heteronormative gender relations among MILITARIZED FILIPINO MASCULINITY AND THE LANGUAGE OF CITIZENSHIP IN SAN DIEGO · 183 kin even as these families effectively stretched the normative boundaries of Filipino manhood, womanhood, and childhood.8 Arguably, Filipino navy families invest the notion of...