BAbaylan and Strategic Essentialism

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Reclaiming the Southeast Asian Goddess:

Examples from Contemporary Art by Women

(Philippines, Thailand and Indonesia)

(東南アジアの女􈑃を􈫵り戻す：女性現代作家による試み（フィリピン、タイ、インド

ネシア),” (trans. by Izumi Nakajima), _Image & Gender_, vol. 6, 2006, pp.105-119.

By Flaudette May V. Datuin

ABSTRACT

In this essay, I will invoke – as a form of strategic essentialism - the figure of the

Southeast Asian goddess and the babaylan, the ancient priestess as theme, metaphor and

signifier for women’s life-giving, nurturing and healing powers. By reclaiming the legacy

of the Southeast Asian goddess, I will present the emerging outlines of a Southeast Asian

feminist framework revolving around embodied spirituality – a concept where the body is

construed as an anatomical, spiritual, social and psychic space grounded on fluidity and

wholeness, instead of hierarchy and dualities. In the process, I will argue that while most

women artists in Southeast Asia are not consciously and overtly “feminist,” they

nonetheless point to the contours of emerging feminisms in Southeast Asia, and perhaps,

in Asia. These “feminisms” cannot be defined solely on the basis of individual autonomy,

hinged on sexual and body-centered liberation (as in radical feminism); or on “equal

rights” in an untransformed social structure (as in liberal feminism).Drawing from my

ongoing study and engagement with women artists in the visual arts of Southeast Asia, I

will present examples of how selected Philippine, Indonesian and Thai women artists

articulate and embody the Southeast Asian goddess figure through their lives and their

works.

PROLOGUE

Babaylanism as Strategic Essentialism

This year, the Philippines is celebrating one hundred years of Philippine

feminism, which – according to official state historical sources - is said to have entered

the country with the founding of the Asosacion Feminista Filipina (Association of

Filipina Feminists) on June 30, 1905. This indicates that, as early as 1905, Filipinas – or a

least the elite suffragists – already have a consciousness of the term and concept

‘feminista,’ and that instead of naming their association Asosacion Mujeres (or women’s

association) for example, they deliberately defined and located themselves within an

international revolutionary movement, which challenges the status quo by unmasking the

gendered dimensions of “larger” social ills, in this case brought about by an abusive

Spanish colonial administration.

However, the feminist historian Fe Mangahas argues that even before the

founding of this feminist association of elite Filipinas, there is an even earlier,

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‘indigenous’ form of “women’s consciousness that evolved within our own Philippine

historical and cultural context.” She calls attention to the pre-colonial priestess or

babaylan, a figure which “even to many feminists today remain an esoteric topic if not a

dead relic of the past.” (Mangahas 2005, 1) Mangahas rightly argues however, that the

babaylan is an important figure for today’s feminists, or at least for Filipina feminists and

I will discuss this important legacy in more detail, shortly. Meanwhile, Mangahas insists

on naming and articulating the term babaylanism, not only to re-discover and re-member

the babaylan, but also to constantly use babaylanism as a term to name, describe and

connect Filipina feminism more firmly with the babaylan’s proto-feminist strategies of

resistance.

During my recently-concluded five-month research in Japan as an Asian Public

Intellectual (API) fellow under the administration of the Nippon Foundation Fellowships,

I have come to realize that ‘feminism’ is not a positive term in Japan, and that it is

frequently criticized, especially in local media, as a Western import. We are suffering the

same negative reception in the Philippines, though at a different -perhaps less oppressive,

more tolerant register. However, because of 500 years of colonial history – 400 under

Spain, 50 years under the US, and still counting – we feel at its most acute, a problem

shared by most postcolonial feminists: that of locating a female identity and feminist

movement in relation to questions of national and cultural identity, and in light of

postcolonial challenges to the hegemony of “white-middle-class” feminists and their

‘naïve’ and ‘imperialist’ belief in a universal sisterhood. In the visual arts, we often refer

to the hegemony of 70s middle class Anglo-American feminists, of which the vaginal

imageries of Judy Chicago have become paradigmatic of an essentialist and nostalgic

body-centered strategy.

It is in this context that it has become ‘fashionable’ among a sector of Philippine

academic and NGO community – and not only among feminists - to distinguish ourselves

from Western theorists and to seek ‘indigenous’ frames and models of identity by

recovering our pre-colonial past. During my API fellowship, I came across several

Japanese counterparts to this nativist movement, of which I cite two: The Kyoto 1942

symposium of intellectuals, academics and critics aiming to critique “Japan’s course of

modernization in terms of refuting Westernization” (Munroe 1994, 24); and in the

appropriation of Japan’s first ancestral goddess Amaterasu by Takamure Itsue – a pre-war

feminist philosopher and historian (albeit with no professional training as one).

According to Ueno Chizuko (in Buckley 1997), Takamure proposed the idea of a

‘maternal self’ as a Japanese cultural ideal set in opposition to the Western ‘individualist

self’. By identifying herself and all Japanese women with the first, great goddess, she

offered a feminist counterpart to a larger anti-Westernization and counter-modernism

project. Framed by what Ueno described as ‘reverse Orientalism’, this maneuver led to

Takemure’s active participation in the war, which she justifies as a ‘sacred war’ that

fights for a rapidly disappearing maternal self, as seen for instance in individualist

feminists’ focus on such issues as the woman’s vote (like the Asosacion Feminista

Filipina), rather than on their feminine virtues, power to give birth, raise a family, lead

and mediate between the community and individual.

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Takamure is heir to the tradition of the first maternalist feminist – Hiratsuka

Raicho – the founder of the first feminist journal in Japan. As early as the 1900’s – at a

time when feminist Filipinas were also consolidating – feminism was already present in

Japan, and a debate was already raging between individualist feminists and maternal

feminists, of which Hiratsuka was a key figure. She argued for a Japanese indigenous

feminism distinct from Western individualism by asserting the specificity of womanhood

and in more practical terms, by demanding maternal welfare from the state and the

community. In effect, this debate in the 1900s defines and intimates the contours of

similar fissures between feminists from the pre-war (Takemura’s time) period till the

present, as in for instance “radical” versus “liberal” feminism; between feminists arguing

for legal reforms vis-à-vis those who have shifted attention back to the private domain of

male-female relationships (Miya Yoshiko in Buckley 1997). There are also present-day

“versions’ of maternal feminism, exemplified by what Ueno (in Buckley 1997) calls

‘maximalists’ or ‘ecofeminists,’ whose critique of Japanese industrial society resemble

the maternal feminists’ counter-modernist and anti-western idealization of local virtues of

motherhood, nature and nation.

We can see from the Japanese and Philippine examples that Asian feminists are

caught in a dilemma: when our feminism chooses to stress the feminine, as in the case of

maternalist and maximalist feminists, we run the risk of essentializing and orientalizing

ourselves as “Asians” and as ‘natives’ and in ghetto-izing ourselves as women and as

feminists. In the case of Takamure, it can also turn the other way – to women’s cooptation

and complicit participation in a war that caused untold suffering to Japan’s

former colonies. However, as I will hopefully show in this paper, uncovering, tracing and

re-discovering an ancient past, as the pioneers Hirakuta and Takamure have done, may

offer a challenge, which I admit is risky- to a dominant historical view that denied

women’s specific feminine form of power, creativity and pro-creativity. By reclaiming

the goddess and the babaylan and by naming my feminism as babaylanism, I invoke what

Spivak famously termed as ‘strategic essentialism,’ a deconstructive position she

summarized as ‘saying an impossible no to a structure that one criticizes, yet inhabits

intimately.’ (in Kelsky 2001) There is space for opposition here, as the structure that I

inhabit intimately is not monolithic and riddled by fractures and contradictions. It is from

such gaps and fissures that I may find the spaces for returning the patriarchal gaze and for

interrupting its official versions of history.

Let me now present my paper by telling three stories. One took place in 1997 in Bali and

another in Bangkok in 1995. The other happened in Manila in 2004.

Story # 1: Re-Imagi(ni)ng Sita

The year was 1997, and the place was Ubud, Bali, the last leg of our research in

Indonesia, which started in Jakarta, Bandung and Yogyakarta in Java. We stepped into

Bali via bus from Yogyakarta, which took 12 hours. By way of background, we were also

scheduled to go to Vietnam after Indonesia. Before Indonesia, we were in Bangkok,

Changmai and other cities of Thailand in 1996. “We” means my partner and the father of

my daughter, who was yet unborn at that time. (I gave birth to her in 1998, after the field

research, but conceived her at almost the same time that I was conceiving and “giving

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birth” to the exhibit-conference on women artists of Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam and

the Philippines, held in Manila in 1999).

One of the first women I met was Ni Made Sri Asih, whom I intercepted after her

class with young girls at the Seniwati Art Gallery for Women – which was at that time

the only gallery exclusively for women artists in the places I visited. (Perhaps it still is

the only of its kind in Southeast Asia until today). Before the interview, I saw a photo of

one of her works at one of the catalogues at Seniwati, which appeared at first to be totally

ordinary, as it was rendered in what I thought was “typical” Balinese style. Upon closer

look however, I was to be proven wrong.

Hanoman’s Task, 1996 exhibit the characteristics of the Pita Maha school of

Ubud, one of the competing schools of style and technique of Modern Balinese painting.

While they may look alike on the surface, modern Balinese paintings are complex

products of several stylistic schools, which are hybrids of precolonial and modern

aesthetics brought about by colonial art academies, tourism and migrations, among others

(Djelantik 1990). The stamp of Pita Maha in Sri Asih, can be seen in the painting’s

monochromatic but lushly painted surfaces, well-planned linearity and well-balanced

spatial orientation and arrangement.

In Hanoman’s Task, Sri Asih depicted a popular scene which is often painted by

famous male artists, most of which I saw at the Bali Museum. The scene takes off from

the Ramayana, which shows Rama’s envoy, the white monkey Hanoman, informing Sita

that her husband, the newly installed king, is on his way to rescue her from the clutches

of the evil god Rahwana, who kidnapped and held her captive for 14 years. The scene

also captures the moment when Hanoman tries to find out from Sita, upon Rama’s orders,

if Sita is still chaste after years in captivity.

Informed by the “right-to-my-body” feminist framework of equal rights I

inherited from western feminism, I was indignant, not only at Rama’s jealous doubts, but

also at the idea of Rama checking up on Sita’s chastity (I assume, of course, that Sita is

technically not a virgin, since she may have had a sex life with Rama before she was

abducted by Rahwana) even before he can find out how she was after going through her

horrible experience. I was more astonished to find out that Sita had yet to face another

ordeal, when she had to go through fire to prove her purity, the moment she returns to her

husband’s arms.

It is this trial-by-fire of Sita’s purity that Arahmaiani, an internationally wellknown

multi-media Indonesian artist, has challenged in her video I Don’t Want to be Part

of Your Legend. Well-known for her daring works which often get her in trouble with

authorities, Arahmaiani produced this video as part of her ongoing critique of her

country’s unholy alliance with imperialism and globalization, as well as its particular,

Islamic brand of patriarchy and militarism. Referencing the Indonesian traditional theater

form wayang kulit, this video shows a dry leaf shaped in the form of a wayang (shadow

play) figure, which will slowly burn, as Arahmaiani’s voice defiantly chants a

lamentation in the background. The burning of the leaf symbolizes, not only Sita’s refusal

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to be part of the patriarchal legend, but also the need to go through the cleansing power of

fire, from which a renewed and stronger Sita will emerge.

From Sri Asih’s point of view however, Sita need not be viewed as refusing to be

part of the “legend” – she submitted herself for trial-by-fire, and we will not understand

this if we view this seeming complicity within the framework of equal sexual rights and

sexual liberation. According to Sri Asih, Rama was not acting out of typical male

chauvinism. She explained that the most important value in Hinduism is the sacredness of

the body, and it is demanded both of females and males. Because spiritual and physical

purity go together, Sri Asih would not have respected Sita had she allowed herself to be

violated by Rahwana, because she would have lost her spiritual integrity.

The faith in Sita’s strength resonates in the painting, where Sri Asih shows the

topless Sita (in the Balinese style), holding a keris (Indonesian sword). A passage from

the art historian Astri Wright is instructive and I will quote her description at length:

“Sita here is not the tearful, passive abductee on the verge of losing hope so often

encountered in Javanese versions (of the scene). Here, Sita occupies the center of

the canvas. She is ready for battle, sitting erect on Hanoman’s shoulder, her keris

raised and ready in her right hand (although she no longer needed it now that she

is safe with Hanoman), and her left hand in defensive posture enhanced by the

dance convention of draping her selendang (shoulder cloth for holding things)

between her fingers. She appears to be giving the monstrously featured white

monkey the order to proceed, to carry her (even if that means touching her) across

the waters.” (Wright 1996, 26-27)

Far from being the hapless victim, Sita had the power and strength of her

individual volition. Had she succumbed to Rahwana, it was not because she was helpless

and therefore blameless, but because she had somehow spiritually faltered along the way.

From a symbol of fragile femininity and oppression, Sita – in Sri Asih’s re-vision –

became a symbol of a strong, courageous woman who withstood her ordeal of 14 years,

tenaciously guarding her spiritual and physical purity.

Thus, when we talk of Sita, we have to bear in mind that body, spirit, mind cannot

be separated; and the social person, specially in Southeast Asia, must be understood, not

in fragmented ways, or through the sex/gender, mind/body, nature/culture dichotomies

that form the key ordering principles of traditional western thought – both mainstream

and feminist.

Story # 2: Thoranee and the Mural Painter

My second story is about the Thai mural painter Phaptawan Suwannakudt, a

pioneer, the first and until recently, the only woman mural painter in Thailand. Taking

over from her father Paiboon, the leader of the traditional mural revival in Thailand, after

his death, Phaptawan gracefully entered a male domain, traditionally off limits to women,

and took the lead. And as American artist Ann Wizer, one of the commentators in the

1999 Women Imaging Women Conference put it: “She’s somehow done all of this

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without rebelling or breaking from the traditional form of visual narrative…and without

losing anything from the long rich history of Thai tradition.” (in Datuin 1999) Her

subversion also becomes even more significant when we also take note of the way she

persisted in practicing an art form that has a low and peripheral status compared to the

contemporary and academic “fine” arts practiced by her colleagues.

One incident that illustrates her initial difficulties happened when she was a

teenaged apprentice to her late father’s mural projects. It involves Phaptawan’s sarong

(Thai tube skirt), which she hanged out to dry in the workers’ common bathroom. When

one of the elderly male staff members saw the sarong, he angrily flung it out of the

window. Phaptawan said that it was because her gesture offended the man, since

women’s sarongs must not only touch male skin; they must not be hung above men’s

heads, the most sacred part of the Thai human anatomy. Touching women’s sarongs

would contaminate men, since it comes in contact with menstrual blood, which is

believed to be a polluting and destabilizing substance that disrupts men’s mental and

spiritual equilibrium (Tanabe 1991).

The power of menstrual blood over men is very similar to the kind of power

attributed to “monstrous feminines,” whose female power men secretly but at times

overtly and violently, envy, hate and fear. This is exemplified in the burning of witches in

the middle ages and in the outlawing of native rituals presided over by ancient priestesses

or babaylans in pre-colonial Philippines (I will talk about the babaylan shortly). The

monstrous feminines are the Sirens and Medusas who kill unwary men, the female

vampiras and aswangs (Filipino blood-sucking and meat-eating vampires), and

mangkukulams (Filipino witches) who can cast a curse or spell on offenders.

To recollect that sarong-throwing incident and the painful lessons associated with

it, Phaptawan fashioned an artwork by hanging several sarongs on a clothesline above

waist level, in defiance of what she calls “age-old Thai beliefs.” The piece was shown in

Bangkok in 1995, in an exhibition called “Tradisexions,” which put together some of the

most active and militant women artists in Thailand. It was in the Tradisexions exhibit that

I first met Phaptawan and it was during my conversation with her, right there under the

sarong clothesline, when the idea for researching and documenting the lives and works of

women artists in Southeast Asia occurred to me for the first time.

Tradisexions became the precursor of Womanifesto, an art event that occurs every

two years, gathering women artists from all over the world. Starting out with an

exhibition and artists talks in 1997, it is said to be the first of its kind in Asia. Its recent

activities went beyond “mere” exhibitions, including a ten-day Workshop in 2001, held in

a remote setting of northeastern Thailand with no formal exhibition of works planned

thereafter. It involved an international group of 18 professional women artists, curators

and art administrators including 5 student volunteers studying cultural management. They

interacted and exchanged not only with each other, but also with the local community.

In 2003, Womanifesto produced a publication/box of stories called

Procreation/Postcreation, which is about collecting/archiving/documenting personal

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stories, old and new beliefs and tales, medical facts, sayings, advice, taboos, recipes,

lullabies, poems and more - before some of this knowledge gets forgotten and lost in

time. It is also about exploring old and new myths surrounding both pro and post creation

and how these myths have influenced our thinking in the past and, continue to do so

today and into the future.

I have not been involved in any of the Womanifesto events, but I was there in

1996 when the Tradisexions group gathered to brainstorm and plan what was to become

an important event for women artists in Thailand and beyond. I returned to the

Philippines in 1997, after a two-year stay in the Thailand, and embarked on my

subsequent researches in the Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam and recently, Korea, China

and now Japan. But before I left Thailand, I journeyed with Phaptawan to the north to

visit some of her murals. During that journey, one of the images that struck me most was

that of Thoranee, the Earth Goddess, whom the Buddha called upon to bear witness to

his right to enlightenment. In Phaptawan’s reconstruction of the story of the Boddhisattva

Subduing Mara at Wat Si Khom Kham, Phayao, 1990, she placed the Boddhissattva at

the apex of the painting, his right hand on his knee, fingers pointing to the ground,

summoning Thoranee. While the Boddhissattva seems to occupy the more dominant

position, his inert, meditative stance is set in striking contrast to that of Thoranee, who is

shown effortlessly, sensuously, wringing her hair, thus unleashing a deluge on the forces

of the evil Mara. While the Buddha connotes sublime tranquility, Thoranee is depicted as

an active power – the embodiment of nature’s capacity for creation and destruction.

Story # 3: Mebuyan, the Many-Breasted Goddess: Coming from a Long Line of

Babaylans

Let me now fast forward to 2004 at the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP),

Manila, right before I left for this fellowship. During the opening of a major exhibition by

women artists in the Philippines (which I curated), we invoked the many-breasted

goddess we call Mebuyan through a performance ritual (led by Racquel “Kleng” de

Loyola, and other young women artists Maan Charisse de Loyola, Ramona dela Cruz,

Teta Tulay, Vivian Limpin and Lea Lim). In the ritual, Mebuyan moved with the

spontaneous rhythm of percussions and guitar effects; and the chanting of prayers

composed by participating artists – prayers that express women’s deepest longings,

desires and visions for the future. Mebuyan then proceeded to “paint” the empty wall

with fluids squeezed out of the many breasts of her rubber latex body suit - signifying

women’s life-giving powers, capacity to nurture, create and re-create themselves by

fusing the ordinary and sacred in art. As she turned on the lights of the gallery, the exhibit

formally opened and Mebuyan welcomed the guests to a space, which was turned into a

metaphorical house by more than 50 women artists, working on a wide range of styles,

themes, images, artistic media and coming from diverse, geographic, artistic and

philosophical locations.

Through movement, sound, and light, Mebuyan performed the theme of embodied

spirituality where body is not just anatomy but a social, psychic and spiritual space that

is characterized by fluidity and wholeness. Through Mebuyan, we summoned the figure

of the babaylan, the ancient priestess/healer, a figure that compels us to remember that

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once upon a time, there were shamans who were mostly older or menopausal women, or

men who aspired to be women or binabae. The babaylan is usually an older woman,

because her expertise in rituals, including memorization of songs, poems, stories, beliefs

and complete medical knowledge required long years of training and practice.

According to the historian Zeus Salazar (in Datuin 2002), the babaylan was

• The central personality in ancient Philippine society

• The spiritual and political leader

• The vanguard and bearer of knowledge in the fields of culture, religion and medicine

• A proto-scientist, the first specialist in the social sciences and humanities, who took

care of religious ritual and the mythology of the barangay, the basic political

economic unit of ancient Philippine society

• An administrator, who also assisted the datu, the political leader, in running the

barangay’s political and economic affairs.

The most practical route of transferring the society’s knowledge is from a babaylan

mother to daughter, who will continue, and add on to this inheritance through

generations. Such accumulation of knowledge and its continuity was interrupted, when

Spanish priests attempted to wipe out the practice of spirit or anito (Tagalog or Filipino

term for spirit) worship with the rites and saints of Christianity. In the wake of their

destruction, the colonizers imaged the babaylan as an “monstrous feminine” and labeled

her as a sorceress, a witch, a mangkukulam, whose black magic casts evil spells.

In more thoroughly Christianized societies, especially in lowland urban areas, the

babaylan’s influence was significantly diminished, and her role in nation building,

especially during the Propaganda and Revolution, was reduced to a minimum. In her

more “benign” forms, the babaylan evolved into assistants of priests or hermanas, while

others concentrated on being good housekeepers and caretakers of children. However,

the babaylans continued to exist and enjoy a relatively high status and prestige, despite

certain constraints, in secret societies. Vestiges of these groups are still present among

communities in regions away from the lowland urban centers, where women remained

caretakers of the communities’ native intellectual and scientific heritage.

Today, the babaylan’s presence is seen:

• In the hermana, who performs church duties

• In the manang or unmarried aunt who acts as surrogate parents

• The grandmother who looks after her grandchildren

• Women weavers, faith healers, herbolarias, midwives, who continue to pass on their

knowledge to their daughters

• In women who entered areas formerly held by the datu and panday, or the native

technologist – the doctors, psychologists, lawyers, historians, nurses, teachers

• In women artists and writers and cultural workers, such as the women of Kasibulan,

the group that staged the abovementioned exhibition, as their 15th anniversary

celebration.

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The presence of modern-day babaylans in our midst gives us concrete examples of

some anthropological accounts explaining the more fluid agrarian societies in Southeast

Asia. In these societies, the binarist distinctions between say, public and public spheres,

individual and culture are not pronounced, if they exist at all, because of these societies’

egalitarian and complementary structures of kinship, assignment of roles, prestige

systems and religious activities. Women in these societies are not publicly visible but

they are not visible in formal politics or the great religions endorsed by the State,

according to Karim (1995). “Their inputs into politics and religion exist in the informal

sphere; but this sphere is so visible and important that it is hard for social scientists to

come up with a general statement to the effect that women are less important.”

Food preparation, dressing and preparing the altars and votive figures for ritual,

among other activities assigned to women, can be considered “peripheral,” but only

according to our definition of religious rituals as hierarchical and formal practice. In the

context of day-to-day activities where relationships are flexible and fluid, it is difficult to

say that gender roles in ceremonies necessarily imply hierarchies of power and

dominance. Even if they do, it is also difficult to determine whether or not they are

oppressive or favorable to women.

This fluidity of power relations can also be discerned in Jean Francis Illo’s

research on the “maybahay,” (literally owner of the house), a Filipino term used to define

married women or “housewives” - “who do not work for wages,” and do largely

household work. Illo (in Karim 1995) argues that women imbue the term with different

meanings that transcend their definition as “housekeepers.” To the maybahays,

“economic and non-economic work are inseparable, and their being maybahay means

being a total worker, producing both goods and labor.” Such findings not only challenge

existing concepts and policies of so-called development programs, they also compel us to

consider the home – and its corollary terms nation, region and identity - as a highly

ambiguous and problematic location. It is a space where women’s self-concepts and lived

experiences do not necessarily coincide with individualistic, largely Eurocentric, binarist

models and definitions of oppression and liberation.

Alma Quinto: Fiber, Cloth, Needle

I discern this attempt to visually present a non-binarist model of life in the way

Filipina artist Alma Quinto mobilizes fiber and foam and re-forms them to produce works

that signify what the artist describes as "the struggles of memory against forgetting." In

her work for the 2004 Havana Biennale entitled "Soft Dreams and Bed Stories" for

example, she presented an installation of tapestries, soft sculptures of toys culled from

Philippine mythology and folk stories and a bed, shaped in the form of the babaylan or

ancient priestess. As in her other works, these pieces embody and reiterate the following

threads of Quinto’s artistic vocabulary:

1. The artist’s belief in and commitment to the power of art to transform, heal and

empower. Her tapestries re-collect the painful stories of Quinto’s students in the

art workshops she conducts for CRIBS Philippines, a Manila-based institution

where girl survivors of abuse are housed and cared for. In those workshops,

Quinto encouraged the children to remember and disclose their stories by writing,

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drawing, painting and embroidering their traumatic memories on grids of cloth.

Through what Quinto terms as "creative visual autobiography," the children’s

painful memories are not only retrieved, but also reshaped, through the processes

and materials of art. Art in this case is much more than therapy, outlet or means of

"catharsis." It is not just a way of coping with pain (as in art therapy), but also as a

means for reconnecting with others and the larger domain of culture, where the

survivor returns to live.

2. The artist’s refusal to "purge" needlework of the "stigma" of utility and decoration

by creating an interactive bed, tapestries and soft sculptures that function as

mediums for telling tales and weaving stories. In the process, she challenges the

sexist and dualistic distinction between "high art," traditionally associated with

masculinity and the feminine and feminized "low arts" of handicraft. By

referencing the intricate relationship between process and material in women’s

traditional arts, Quinto dissolves this duality by challenging the assumption that

making art and designing functional objects are two conflicting occupations.

3. The interactive and collaborative character of the artist’s pieces, which

encourages the viewer to initiate a tactile, therapeutic and celebratory encounter

with the works. The works are not to be "looked at" with a disembodied seeing

eye/I, but must be felt, touched and appreciated for their textural and performative

properties. Thus, the artist-as-medium urges us to recover those forgotten

gestures, which have become increasingly automatized and mechanized within the

consumerist and mediatized habituations of our daily lives

4. The artist’s use of recycled materials or discards, such as foam and "retazos" she

collects from thrift shops or "ukay-ukay," which she stitches and glues together

through a technique closely aligned with the additive and cumulative process of

quilting and patchwork. When women quilt, they "make do" with whatever is

available, to produce utilitarian objects through a focused, meditative and

communal language which they can rightly call their own. As women go through

the motions of quilting, sewing, tearing, stitching, they summon each fabric and

thread, and proceed to re-form, re-use and re-stitch it, not only for what it could

contribute to their over-all plan or design, more so for what it means to them,

emotionally and historically. And as can be seen in the tapestries woven out of the

children’s stories, cloth and needlework are harnessed as medium for feminine

meditation, communication and resistance.

5. The artist’s symbolic and iconographic motifs, which are visual testimonies of

memories associated with the realm of the night, dreams, sexuality, and

re/birthing as well as the real, the lived and the mundane. In her use of the

babaylan figure as bed, Quinto alludes to a life-giving primeval presence, who

ruled the realm through her restorative and healing powers. The bed or mattress,

on the other hand, "is a symbol of modern domestic life, as the artist puts it.

"Foam, the basic material for the mattress, is a modern invention intended to

provide comfort and warmth…The mattress represents everyday life and

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domesticity and it is where one retreats and rests, thus providing a source of

empowerment." She also creates toys drawn from Philippine mythology and folk

to visualize stories, as exemplified in her work in the Havana Biennial, where the

soft toys symbolize the objects of desire (their lost childhood denied them a "soft"

and comfortable life) of girl survivors of abuse and their objectification (as sexual

objects)."

In Quinto’s maneuvers, I am reminded, not only of her connection – no matter how

tenuous – with the cloistered elite Filipinas of the 19th century (such as Paz and Adelaida

Paterno), but also of other women who continue to produce their own cloths to this day.

As products of tourism and industry, textiles signify the subjugated ‘third world’, which

continues to be plundered as fertile source of touristic souvenirs and trinkets, of industrial

raw materials and cheap labor, and as dumping ground for the first world’s finished

products. But for women weavers in Mindanao in Southern Philippines like Magpunlay

Madagasang for example, there are clear distinctions between the cloth that they produce

for outsiders and that which they produce for their own community’s special needs.

(Quizon 1998). They do not view commercial weaving as a degradation of their skill, or

as a ‘dying out’ of their cherished traditions, as nativist and purist scholars would bewail.

Instead, they view it as their own way of actively engaging with the demands of the

changing times. Through a combination of doing and undoing, mobility and

accumulation, improvisation and obedience, these women not only articulate their

experiences and self-defined positions; they also assert themselves as active agents of

change, in whose hands tradition does not die, but is transformed and evolves into

contemporary forms.

As Quinto puts it: ‘”I am using the very same ‘tool’ that our colonizers used to

subjugate women to liberate/empower them.”

It is from such a complex, often precarious negotiation, that we women can find and

reclaim our common grounds, our gestures, our methods, our language.

The power of cloth to bind and express women’s creativity is also evident at the

abovementioned exhibition at the Cultural Center of the Philippines, where the

centerpiece is a collaborative patchwork called Puso or Heart, from which veins radiate

towards the entire length of the floor and ceiling. The heart-womb originated from the

women of Luna Art Collective, who distributed the veins to women from the

communities of Cebu, a major island port in Central Philippines, which were in turn,

extended by the artists in this show, who added their own veins, in ways that enact the

additive and patchwork process of the “quilting bee.”

This exhibition was held in connection with the 15th Anniversary celebration of

Kasibulan (Kababaihan sa Sining at Bagong Sibol na Kamalayan or Women in Art and

Emerging Consciousness), a group of women artists in the arts (visual arts, dance,

literature, theater, etcetera). It was formed out of a series of consultations with women in

various professions in 1987, and formally registered as a non-stock, non-profit

organization in 1989.

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Its founding members include a nun, who at that time was a designer and maker

of handcrafted leather bags (Ida Bugayong, who edited and designed this guidebook), a

sculptor (Julie Lluch), and three painters (Brenda Fajardo, who helped conceptualize the

exhibition design and provided the sketches; Imelda Cajipe-Endaya, the founding

president; and Ana Fer). They were later joined by terracotta artist Baidy Mendoza, who

along with Sandra Torrijos, Lia Torralba, and Cajipe-Endaya, also served as president.

The present president is Edda Amonoy, under whose able leadership this exhibition was

planned and realized.

In a territory where the key players are men, and where the turning points for

women hinge on their entry to movements and institutions initiated by men - such as the

entry of the first woman student Pelagia Mendoza to the 19th century Spanish colonial art

school, Academia de Debujo y Pintura and the token inclusion of Anita Magsaysay-Ho in

the 13 moderns, the privileged list of pioneering moderns led by the Father of Philippine

Modernism Victorio Edades – the founding of Kasibulan is a feminist art-historical

watershed because it marks the first time women consciously decided to carve their own

niche and tell their own stories, on their own terms. By banding and bonding together in

their own space, the conscious stirrings and debates on feminist practice and theory

emerged and took place among women artists, who fought for visibility and the right to

represent themselves, in their own eyes and through their own voices.

Since its founding, Kasibulan has nurtured and continues to nurture a significant

group of women artists through exhibitions, forums and other activities which not only

challenged women’s negative and stereotyped images but also questioned the very

parameters of art and artistry as they are defined in mainstream culture. In its many

projects, the Kasibulan linked up with women in the communities (such as artisans in

Paete), with women in non-art sectors (such as Filipina migrant workers, public school

teachers of Marikina, street children of Malate), and women in other disciplines such as

medicine, law, and labor.

Towards a Southeast Asian feminine/feminist Aesthetics: Crossing the Sex/Gender

Divide

In the practices of Kasibulan, Seniwati Art Gallery in Bali and Womanifesto in

Bangkok – three models from the Philippine, Indonesian and Thai examples - we see how

women artists return the gaze of the patriarchal vision, not only by exercising the power

to define and re/present themselves, but also by defining some of the contours of an

emerging feminine aesthetic. This aesthetic is grounded on a “dialect” (Pollock 1988)

that borrows from, as well as re-tools, the legacies of modernism, colonialism, and

globalization, among others. This visual “dialect” recasts the slogan “the personal is

political” through strategies that demonstrate, not just the political nature of women’s

private individualized subjections, but also the possible options for healing and

empowerment for women in the region. In the artists I cited, one possible route is the

celebration of an ancient female figure – whether it be the goddesses Sita, Mebuyan and

Thoranee or the Philippine babaylan or ancient priestess. At first glance, this strategy of

reclaiming an ancient model seemingly transposes us back to the maternal benevolence of

 13

a “pre-cultural” and “pre-colonial” past of indigenous peoples. The recourse to the

goddess constructs the female body as ancient, non-western, original, frozen in a

timeless, inert space, existing outside the cycles of the seasons. Our bodies become one

with the earth and its primeval guiding spirits, here represented by the Goddess – the high

priestess-babaylan, Mebuyan, Thoranee and Sita – thereby assigning and consigning us to

a reserved oasis of “nature,” outside the flow of historical time, enthralling, timeless and

never changing.

Alma Quinto for example is aware that her combined use of the female body and

figure of the babaylan might unwittingly support patriarchal constructs by upholding

stable, essentialist categories of femaleness, and in this case, an essential Southeast Asian

femaleness, as “counterpart” to the universal, Western, white femaleness. However, she

also deliberately reclaims these images to articulate her longing for a female idiom, and

distinctly feminine aesthetics grounded on a nonlinear or circular sense of history, which

is noncompetitive and nonhierarchical. Her direct reference to the woman’s nurturing

body, her womb, her breasts, her navel, and her vulva or vagina, intimate her connection

to the feminist project of finding a feminine space revolving around co-existence and

communion, instead of conquest and castration, on restorative union, instead of abjection

and victimization.

It is no longer possible to recover a Southeast Asian past in its pristine form, let

alone a pure Southeast Asian identity; however, we can regain control, repossess, and

recreate again and again. The key term is “version,” which the artist produces to provide

a medium through we can enact our transformations and find our direction, action,

movement.

The return to the goddess may also have resonance with the body-centered

approach which became a dominant feminist strategy among visual artists in 1970s North

America. Such strategy revolves around a mind/body, sex/gender, nature/culture binary

frame. In these women pioneers, sex is aligned with the body’s anatomy, its biological

and therefore universal given, while gender is aligned with culture, which determines

how sex is going to be produced, accounted for and represented. However, as the “new

feminisms” of the 1990s have taught us, and following Judith Butler and Michel

Foucault, the body is not just anatomy, but a cultural and psychic space, which has a

geographic and historical location. It is not a prediscursive, biological, and politically

neutral surface on which gender is inscribed. Sex is not to biology as gender is to culture,

because sex itself is as culturally constructed and historically contingent as gender. My

anatomical body itself is the object of study, the very battleground on which cultural

constructions and practices compete.

Thus, as I choose to reread the women’s works I encounter, particularly in

Southeast Asia, and probably now, in East Asia, I see a refusal – at times conscious but

more often unconscious - to sever the mind and the body, sex and gender, nature and

culture. As Quinto puts it: “Whereas the colonizer emphasized the dualistic body and soul

relationship, my work focuses on the unity and dialectical relationship between them. The

soul dialogues with the body, and the body in the soul is there to enlarge the soul.”

 14

These women’s works and words show that perceiving and articulating images is

not only about sight, but also about gesture, disposition, volition and emotion. The body

is not just the physical body, but a psychic and psychological feminine space, which is

imaged and imagined, not as a place of comfort and reassurance, but a place of pain and

disquietude, as well as of possible liberation through conflict, negotiation, and

confrontation. The interiors and interstices of the female body – the battleground of male

creativity – are re-visualized in their own terms, in their own voice.

Within these developing outlines of a feminine aesthetics, we can redefine the

“aesthetic,” not as a function of pure form and the pure gaze (pace Bourdieu), which the

critic supposedly perceives and relentlessly inspects for its sake. Instead, the “aesthetic”

is all about encounter, affect, gesture, and movement. Form embodies not just style, but

also testimonies of struggle, pain, gains, and triumphs.

I use “testimony” to emphasize the inter-subjective modes in which women retell

their experiences and memories, through processes that transcend the confines of solitary

“genius” or the domain of bellas artes aesthetics. Because their homes and bodies are

contiguous with the art world and the “world,” women offer testimonies that may not

necessarily be overtly feminist, but take on various forms from a range of locations. In

their own ways, these women offer a range of possibilities for resistance, both within a

collective movement and within the mundane spaces of the everyday. In the process, we

can begin to understand the power of art to transform the “world” by revealing their

doubts and pains about that world, as well as their faith and joy in its possibilities.

Let me illustrate by citing a testimony from Phaptawan again, who relocated to

Sydney in 1996, and has since moved on to produce individual art pieces about her life,

but still within the stylistic parameters of Thai mural painting. In a text for a catalogue of

her exhibition she sent me very recently, she talked about her father, her life as a

pioneer’s daughter, and her own displacements, first as a Thai child who grew up

traveling and living in temples, where her father’s projects were; and later, as a Thai

mural painter who was frustrated with her studio practice in a foreign land. “Who would

care for Thai mural painting anyway?,” she asked. What soothed her homesickness was a

private routine: She observed the trees and gave them Thai names. She expressed this

routine in a “language I am most comfortable with. This language is not Thai, is not even

my skill in Buddhist temple painting, and is not the secret tune in me I inherited from my

father, but it is (all about) seeing the world with all that made me who I am. I use it to

explore the world. The reward was, no matter how personal and how secret, that as I

walked and looked up at the trees, all of a sudden people in the streets were not strangers

to me anymore.”

Her latest work, An Elephant Journey refers to her relationship to her new home,

and the way she locates herself in the Australian Bushland. Although the Australian

geography and the elephant “do not belong to each other, they look into one another and

see the reflection of each other. What elephants see and what the landscape reveals is the

way I see myself attached to my new home. Chang [Thai word for elephant] was the

nickname that my father gave me on the day I was born. It was also my father’s

 15

nickname, known from the way he mimicked the elephant walk. I am most comfortable

when thinking about myself being an elephant. I carry my name as my totem.” The

elephant and a secret tune her father taught her when she was a child “may echo forever

in me and the elephant may never depart. While it may remain personal, it is my utmost

emotional contact with the world and how the world makes sense to me. An Elephant

Journey observes how this secret tune plays its part with the place I am in. I use it as a

language to communicate with other people, and how I would see myself attached to the

other secret tunes, that are mingling in the shared space.”

Through cloth and fiber as seen in Quinto, through paint and brush we see in

Phaptawan and Sri Asih, as well as in the secret tunes and personal totems of

Phaptawan’s dislocated universe, the personal and the private cross over to the public

sphere, at the moment when women struggle to make sense of the “world” through

thought, feeling and action: naming trees in a secret language, humming secret tunes,

sewing cloth to remember and heal trauma and pain, and reimagining Sita as a

commanding presence ordering the white monkey to move on. I daresay that women

artists – modern day babaylans - may be able to tell us certain things about ourselves – as

women perhaps, or as Asians, however those difficult terms are defined. As Malaysian

artist Teoh Joo Ngee states “Art does not depict things as seen, but as things to be

seen.” (Interview 2004) Women artists can make us see what is not seen but from a

woman’s point of view, shaped and nurtured in that highly-charged, constantly shifting

geographic area called “Asia.”

It is in this in the context of telling another history, and of creating other

possibilities and constructing better worlds that we claim our legacy and our link to the

goddess and the babaylan. And as the young Filipina artist Lea Lim (in Datuin 2004) puts

it in her statement, the babaylan’s “efforts have customarily gone unnoticed,” although

she is now “slowly realizing reverence well-deserved.” But if we have indeed come a

long way, the fight ain’t over yet: women continue to be imaged negatively and

victimized in real and reel life (in movies, in fiction, in ads, in the visual arts). Women

artists continue to labor away in silence and in the shadows, and that is why we continue

to mount all-women’s shows, conduct researches and write our compensatory histories on

women artists. Such feminist art-historical, critical and political strategies are not without

their practical and theoretical problems, and I have discussed this more fully elsewhere

(see Datuin 2002). But I take solace in the thought that we come from a long line of

babaylans. As such we “persist” - again to borrow from Lea Lim - continuously doing

what needs to be done, our hands as persistent as the wind, blowing the dust that wanders

and settles again and again, quietly. Ceaselessly. (Roll VTR)

EPILOGUE

Babaylanism as Reminder for us NOT to Forget

As I write this essay and as I sift through the boxes of materials I have amassed

during my year-long research as API fellow in Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia and Japan,

one of the figures that strike me most is the figure of the Korean mutan or shaman as she

 16

is deployed in the works of Tomiyama Taeko. The mutan for Tomiyama is a central

metaphor “who links the living and the dead, the present and the past, existing separate

from the state or ethnicity…In the world of illusion, the shaman gives voice to the ‘han’

or deep resentment and sorrow of the victims.” (Tomiyama in Jennison 2003, 190) In her

1986 work ‘In Memory of the Sea’ the shaman is a principal figure and mediating image

in the story of a Korean woman who is asking the ‘Spirit Miko’ to search for her sister

who was taken away during the war and forced into sexual slavery in the Japanese

Imperial army. The shaman also appears in a series of paintings and collage in the 1980s

dealing with Korean conscripted laborers and ‘military comfort women.’ This series

became the multi-media slide work, ‘The Thai Girl Who Never Returned Home’ in which

the shaman bore witness to the events of the life of a young Thai woman, Noi, who

becomes a victim of the so-called sex trade in contemporary Japan and Southeast Asia.

I cite Tomiyama because I am struck at the “self-critical gaze” she casts on herself

and her own people “as an assailant,” as the art historian Hagewara Hiroko puts it writing

about Tomiyama’s work (Hagiwara 1995, page numbers not available). In her works,

Tomiyama breaks the silence and disrupts the modes of official forgetting, through a

strategy that mourns for the dead – not to melodramatically re-enact the suffering – but to

publicly re-member and re-imagine the other and bring the dead ‘into social life’. It is in

this sense that Tomiyama, born in 1921, is a pioneer, “precursor to and in a sense in a

continuum with, more recent projects by artists and curators who are creating spaces at

the intersection of discourses on the representation of war history, visual arts and

diasporic communities.” (Jennison 2003, 186)

In the 21st century, we are all carrying an enormous traumatic weight, and it is in

this context that feminist investigations into the visual poetics of shame and trauma have

emerged in recent years. This field is still emerging, and hence still inadequately

theorized, and it is an urgent theoretical agenda that I hope we will pursue in our present

and future discussions. In this paper, I contributed to this agenda in a very preliminary,

maybe even circuitous way, by reclaiming the babaylan, the mutan, the priestess, and the

goddess as figures that can mediate between past and present, bring the dead back into

social life through public mourning, and compel us NOT to tolerate, NOT to look away,

NOT to turn our backs, and most importantly, NOT to forget. And thus, we persist,

quietly, ceaselessly.

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