Feeling Filipinos: Unraveling Thoughts about the Emotional and the (Trans)National An Introduction to the Special Issue

How does a nation come to be imagined as having a “soft touch”? How does this “having” become a form of “being” or a national attribute?

—Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion

Nothing more than feelings. So goes the ballad that many older generations of Filipinos in the Philippines and its diaspora have sung for years in their showers and in karaoke parties. Feelings with a “p,” as many Filipinos are prone to do when they pronounce the “f” sound, not only become a marker of linguistic vestiges and accent detection among Filipinos everywhere but also constitute the very process by which a kind of compassionate and progressive analytical rigor about what it means to be Filipino today in a globalized world and during these precarious times. “Feelings” become “peelings” as recent scholarship on Filipinos demonstrate, especially the ones in this special issue, as they focus on exfoliating the layers of affective and emotional matter and discourses that compose and shape Filipino experiences in the homeland and in multiple migratory sites. Feelings and emotions are really nothing more than the semantic, corporeal, and material fuel and animating force of various everyday domestic and public experiences of contemporary life. They are the fulcrum that propels energies toward labor, migration, leisure, and survival. They also compose the various kinds of ecological intensities and contextual moods that circulate among bodies, spaces, and temporalities within and across various geographic scales.

To critically understand Filipinos today constitutes a challenge to confront the constellations of meanings around bodily energies that intersect in various arenas particularly when it comes to making sense of the Filipino nation and its predicament in the twenty-first century. There are multiple levels or strata that need to be peeled away not to come up with a common core or a central truth but to understand the stratigraphic almost palimpsest-like layerings of meaning and matter and the way they “move” and circulate within and across borders. This special issue puts together scholarship that centers the affective, emotional, and sensorial dimensions of how Filipinos negotiate, perform, establish, and/or resist the multiple predicaments of work, family, and nation. From anger to laughter, from the kinetic energy of hip-hop and the atmospheric shifts of humor, the four authors, Nerissa Balce, Allan Isaac, Jeffrey Santa Ana, and Mark Villegas, limn and map the exigencies of citizenship, labor, colonialism, kinship, class, sexuality, race, and gender through the prisms of emotions, feelings, and the senses.

Far from being an audit of such bodily skills and energies, the essays in this special issue argue against the facile binary notions of inner life versus social life, between mind and body, and between the private and public. These skills and energies are not “natural” like breathing. Rather, they are social because they become audible, palpable, visible, and palatable in relation to structured relations of power and historical unfoldings. In other words, Filipino bodily energies from affect to feelings are conditioned not by idiosyncratic personal quirks but by the forces of history, culture, and social hierarchies. Therefore, these bodily energies are part and parcel of world making and world imaginings.

Sara Ahmed, in her book The Cultural Politics of Emotion, astutely notes that such bodily energies are “points of entry,” not static states of being as they “move, stick and slide” across various spheres and realms of social life.¹ Feelings and emotions circulate and are the passageways and vessels for the flow of capital and the buttressing of the nation. They are not “internal” or inside the body. Neither are they contained by biochemical drifts and organ function but can be instruments of oppression by much larger systems such as the state and the private corporation. They form part of the grit that causes frictive relationships between family, region, nation, and the globe. As such, emotions and feelings bypass or transgress the very borders they themselves have created.

For example, “care” in the Filipino case takes on a rarefied air of “national character.” Movies, government training programs, slogans, and other [End Page...