Unfastened: Globality and Asian North American Narratives

4. Feminist Subversions: Comedy and the Carnivalesque

Nina Aquino and Nadine Villasin’s play Miss Orient(ed) and Deepa Mehta’s film Bollywood/Hollywood (2002), both set in Toronto, use humor , irony, and parody to question and challenge the insidious effects of global American culture on Asians, particularly those in the North American diaspora. First performed in Toronto in December 2001 and then again in the spring of 2003, Miss Orient(ed) is a raucous and entertaining theatrical production featuring an all-female cast of Filipina Canadians.1 Set in the world of the “Miss Pearl of the Orient” beauty pageant, the play reveals the ways in which contemporary Filipinas have been stereotyped, socialized, misconceptualized, and misoriented. Bollywood /Hollywood, though primarily farcical and fun rather than serious like Mehta’s other films, has its share of subversive critical and feminist elements. Mehta uses a seemingly lightweight musical comedy rather than a dramatic art house film to respond to some of the prevailing racial, socioeconomic, and gender ideologies in contemporary North American culture. The film parodies and pokes fun at Hollywood and Bollywood filmic practices and provides what anthropologists call “rich descriptions” of the local South Asian diasporic community in Toronto (see Featherstone, “Localism, Globalism, and Cultural Identity,” 48). 4 Feminist Subversions: Comedy and the Carnivalesque 63 Beauty and Filipina Bodies Miss Orient(ed) playfully but powerfully explores the construction of Filipina North American subjectivities. Filipina bodies in the diaspora are sites of contestation, used nostalgically as the embodiment of the lost motherland (see McClintock, Imperial Leather, 354) and, at the same time, used to personify the success of the American dream. The multiple and, at times, conflicting identities and ideologies in contemporary society “discipline” Filipina women (Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 187ff), their bodies, and their desires, causing some women to collude with the colonizing gaze, the discourse of imperialism, and Hollywood’s ideals of beauty. Success in North America is sometimes achieved at the expense of the female body and often results in the commodification and commercialization of “native” culture. Miss Orient(ed) exhibits various ways in which young Filipina Canadians react to, collaborate with, and resist these confusing ideals and negotiate with both internal ethnic practices and the dominant culture’s assumptions about the “Oriental” girl. Through numerous short vignettes of three aspiring beauty queens and their mothers, it reveals the complex and sometimes confusing ideals and identities of the “modern Filipina” (scene 17). One reviewer notes, “If there’s an image of Filipinas that hasn’t made it into Miss Orient(ed)—from Imelda Marcos to babysitters to Mariah Carey–wannabes —it probably doesn’t exist” (Al-Solaylee, “Review of Miss Orient (ed)”). Through songs, exaggeration, camp, and monologues, the play pokes fun at, but at the same time poignantly depicts, the aspirations and, often, the misplaced hopes of two generations of Filipinas in America. That the site of a beauty pageant is the setting of Miss Orient(ed) is significant for a number of reasons. Beauty pageants play a large role in the cultural and psychic landscape of people in the Philippines. The crowning of a “Miss Philippines” or the year’s “Miss Universe” is much anticipated and is a more publicized event there than it is in North America .2 One of the mothers of the play’s contestants, Conching, remembers winning “Miss Pearl Bicol” when she was young: “Winning the crown was a dream come true for us. Well you know, beauty pageants are so important to us Filipinos” (scene 11: Conching). As scholars of beauty pageants have shown, the beauty contest may appear frivolous and trivial, but it stages “complex struggles over power and representation ” (Lieu, “Remembering ‘the Nation’ through Pageantry,” 127). It is 64 Feminist Subversions situated in “multiple systems of culture, struggles for power and control, and discursive fields of practice” (127). As it plays out in other parts of the globe, the beauty pageant is a site where dominant discourses of nationalism are articulated. In the Philippines, in addition to expressing national pride, reinforcing “dominant constructions of gender and idealized forms of femininity” (127), the beauty pageant is also a version of the American dream. Contestants, their families, and spectators look to beauty pageants as an easy way to success, fame, wealth, and a passport abroad. Because beauty can supposedly break down barriers created by social class, education, and economic status, winning a pageant is like being spotted by Prince Charming at the...