GORE, GRACE, AND THE WOMEN

More and more girls are bleeding. They bleed in school bathrooms in Tondo and in Tacloban and in the municipalities that do not appear on any list of places worth investing in, in bathrooms where the faucets do not always work and the sanitary napkin dispensers have been empty since the previous administration and a girl who starts her period during third period in a school that has forty-two students per classroom and one functional bathroom per floor learns very quickly what her body is, which is something to be managed in secret, something to be folded and hidden and rinsed in cold water and not discussed. She learns this the way all girls learn the essential lesson about their bodies, which is not biology and not health and not the language of what is actually happening inside her, but the language of how to make what is happening inside her invisible to everyone else. This is the first and most comprehensive education most Filipino girls receive, and it begins before secondary school, and it is conducted not in any classroom but in the silence that falls over any room when a girl's body does something that rooms are not supposed to acknowledge.

In 2022, a survey by Plan International found that one in four Filipino girls had missed school because of their period. This is a measurement of how much a girl's education is worth, priced against the cost of a pack of sanitary napkins that her family may or may not be able to spare that week. It is a measurement of whose bodies the school system was designed around and whose bodies were accommodated as an afterthought, which is another way of saying that the school system was designed around the body that does not bleed, does not swell, does not cramp, does not arrive at school already carrying a week's worth of management before the teacher has taken attendance. The school was built for a body that does not need to excuse itself. The girl's body has been excusing itself since she was twelve years old and has been called difficult, or dramatic, or too much, which is what you are called when the thing you are doing is simply existing in a way that the infrastructure was not designed to accommodate.

I want to talk about rage. Not the performative rage of the think piece, not the photogenic rage of the raised fist made into a poster, but the specific, accumulated, daily rage of the girl who has been told, through a thousand small institutional indifferences, that her body is a problem she is responsible for solving privately. The rage that lives, as Dr. Caroline Criado Perez documents in Invisible Women, in the thirty-three percent larger dose of medication a woman must take because drug trials for decades used only male subjects and nobody thought to mention this discrepancy until women started dying of the wrong dose. The rage that lives in the crash test dummy that is built to the measurements of the fiftieth-percentile male body, which means that a woman in the same car accident is seventy-three percent more likely to be seriously injured than a man because the safety systems were designed around a body that was never hers. It is the steady pressure of being consistently, structurally, across multiple systems and across an entire life, counted as secondary. It is the rage of the girl in the bathroom in Tacloban, rinsing her underwear in cold water, learning that this is what she is.

The Filipino girl learns this lesson with particular efficiency because she learns it in multiple languages simultaneously. She learns it in English, the colonial language that still structures what is considered intelligent speech in this country, in which the words for her body, the clinical words, the acceptable words, feel like a foreign country she is allowed to visit only under supervision. She learns it in Filipino, in which the vocabulary of the female body oscillates between the deeply domestic and the violently obscene, with very little space in between for the language of what her body actually does and feels and wants. She learns it in her regional language, where the grandmothers still speak of the first menstruation as something to be hidden from the sun, a practice called pamahiin, superstition, which is the word we use for knowledge that has been stripped of its context so that what remains is only the prohibition, the rule, without the understanding of who made the rule and why and for whose benefit the girl's bleeding was meant to be invisible.

Girlhood in this country is a long lesson in the management of excess. You are too loud, sobrang ingay, until you are not loud enough and people speak over you. You are too dark, morena, too brown, the aesthetics of your own skin categorized as a problem that whitening products and a specific shade of foundation can address, because the beauty industry in the Philippines is built on the colonial preference for what it calls maputi, which means white, which means the skin of the people who arrived in galleons and rearranged everything. You are too fat, too thin, too developed too early, too flat too late, your body arriving at the specifications of the ideal by random chance and never twice in the same girl. You are masungit when you do not smile and malandi when you do, and the space between masungit and malandi is approximately the width of a door that has been designed to keep you either inside or outside and never, under any circumstances, holding the handle yourself.

And then something happens, which is that some girls refuse. Not in the organized political sense, not immediately, not with a manifesto or a movement, though some of them eventually arrive there. They refuse in the writing that they do in notebooks that they do not show to teachers, in the anger they do not redirect into productivity, in the hunger that they do not perform as femininity. They refuse in the night hours when they are reading things they were not assigned, finding the voices that were not on the curriculum because the curriculum, like the crash test dummy, was built around a different body, a different experience, a different idea of whose inner life constitutes literature. Filipino literature as it is taught in the Philippine school system is not a literature of girlhood. It is a literature of nation, of resistance, of the ilustrado and the hero and the martyr, and the women in it are mostly mothers, mostly symbols, mostly the thing for whose honor the men do what they do. Crisostomo Ibarra's Maria Clara is pure and docile and goes mad when the world proves too impure for her. This is what the curriculum offers the Filipino girl as a mirror: a woman whose madness is the price of her virtue

Body Horror 

The babaylan, the spirit medium and healer and ritual specialist who held together the social and spiritual world of pre-colonial Philippine communities, was in most documented cases a woman or a person who did not conform to the gender order the Spanish would later impose. The babaylan knew the body in ways that the colonial church would spend three centuries trying to reclassify as either satanic or irrelevant. She knew which plants managed pain and which managed grief and which managed the kind of knowledge the village needed but did not know how to ask for out loud. She knew the language of what the body kept, the body that bled and bore and healed and sometimes failed to heal, and she was not ashamed of any of it because the language she worked in was a language that treated all of it as meaningful, as information, as the world communicating through the permeable wall of the living person. The Spanish colonial regime eliminated the babaylan with a thoroughness that was, in its own way, a form of terror, which is to say a recognition of what she represented and who she threatened. By the time the Philippine nation-state assembled itself in the image of the ilustrado, the babaylan was a figure of embarrassment, a remnant of the primitive, a thing to be gotten past.

She persists, as the things you bury in a culture always persist, not as a clean historical recovery but as a disturbance in the soil. She persists in the albularyo who is still consulted, in secret or in full community acknowledgment depending on the family, when the hospital has failed or the hospital is too far or the hospital wants money the family does not have. She persists in the mangtatawas who reads the egg in water for what afflicts the child the pediatrician cannot diagnose. She persists in the stories told by women to other women in the spaces from which men have excused themselves, the kitchen, the sala at midnight, the patio where the older women sit after the men have gone to sleep and the conversation changes register, becomes different, becomes the conversation you could not have while anyone who might be embarrassed by honesty was in earshot. She persists in every Filipino girl who has grown up in a house with a grandmother who knows things, who has a way with things, who is consulted when the situation is more than the situation appears to be. The colonial church named this witchcraft. It is the specific knowledge of people who were never intended to have institutional power and therefore developed a different relationship to power, more granular, more bodily, more attentive to the world that institutions are not designed to see.

The Spanish regime that arrived in 1565 immediately set about regulating it, through the church, through the institution of marriage, through the reconstitution of the female body as a site of honor, which is another word for a site of social control, a thing whose purity or impurity reflected on the family's standing in a hierarchy the Spanish had introduced and maintained by force. The pre-colonial world, imperfect and varied and absolutely not the utopia that some recovery narratives require it to be, had different structures for sexuality and partnership and the management of bodies that were more permeable, more negotiable, less organized around the binary of pure and defiled that the church required. The church needed the female body to mean a specific thing in order for the social order it was building to function. It needed women to be reproducers of the colonial household, mothers of Catholic children, the domestic anchors of the conversion project. The babaylan's relationship to her own body, and to other bodies, and to the spiritual life that moved through bodies, was incompatible with this project. 

What the colonial project installed in her place is still running. You can measure it in the way Filipino women talk about their own bodies, in the specific dissociation with which many Filipino women describe physical desire, as though it belongs to someone else, as though their own wanting is a thing observed from a distance and managed rather than inhabited. You can measure it in the statistics on reproductive health, in the decades-long fight to pass the Reproductive Health Law, which was finally signed in 2012 after more than a decade of the Catholic Bishops' Conference blocking legislation that would have given Filipino women access to contraception as a matter of public health policy. The bishops described contraception as an attack on the Filipino family. What they meant is that they were not willing to relinquish institutional control over the Filipino female body. The women who spent a decade fighting for the law understood this. They showed up, for years, with the specific patience of people who have understood that the institution arrayed against them has a longer memory than any individual campaign and that the only answer to institutional patience is a longer one.

There is a kind of writing that emerges from this history. It is the writing of what the body keeps when everything else has been managed, cleaned, redirected, made presentable. It is body horror in the truest sense, which is not the gore of the slasher film but the horror of the body asserting what the culture has told it to deny: the horror of the woman who bleeds and will not apologize for it, who hungers and will not make her hunger decorative, who rages and will not transform her rage into productivity, who grieves and will not perform her grief on the timeline the social order finds comfortable. This is the horror that the babaylan represents, still, to the structures that replaced her. Not because she is frightening but because she is honest, and the specific variety of honesty she embodies is the kind that institutions spend enormous energy preventing.

The Gothic 

Girlhood as a girl of color in the Philippines is simultaneously a very specific and a very universal condition. Specific because the particular weight of morena, the particular texture of being told that your skin is a problem, the particular history of a country that spent three hundred and thirty-three years being told that the people who looked like you were at the bottom and the people who looked like the colonizers were at the top, and then spent another generation under American colonialism that introduced its own racial hierarchy in which Filipino was a category of approximation, almost white, almost civilized, almost developed, always the almost, never the thing itself. Universal because the condition of being a girl of color anywhere is the condition of carrying two separate systems of assessment simultaneously: the one that measures you against other women, and the one that measures you against whiteness, and both systems were designed without your participation and both systems have already decided what you are worth before you have opened your mouth.

I have sat in rooms where very intelligent Filipino women talk about skin with a fluency and a grief that is hard to witness directly. Morena, kayumanggi, maputla, maputi, the entire chromatic range from dark to light with its own politics, its own market, its own aisle in every drugstore in the country. The intravenous whitening drips that clinics in Manila and Cebu and Davao offer to women who want to move faster along the chromatic scale toward the color that the colonial history of this country has, despite everything, still managed to encode as the color of worth. A study published in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology found that ninety percent of Filipinas have used a skin-lightening product. This is the internalized logic of a colonial system so thoroughly installed that it operates as personal preference, as aesthetic choice, as the thing you want rather than the thing you were made to want by centuries of being told that the color you were born in was insufficient.

The girl who grows up in this country with dark skin learns to navigate two kinds of elimination. The first is the elimination of visibility, the way she does not appear in the advertisements for the products in the stores in the mall except as before, as the problem that the product solves. The second is the elimination of history, the way the political system of her self-consciousness is never named as political, is always rendered as personal, as the sum of her individual choices and preferences, never as the outcome of a system that has been in operation for five hundred years and is still being maintained, still being funded, still being enforced by the same skin-lightening industry that cleared something like twenty billion pesos in revenue in 2022. The system is very old and very well-resourced and has survived every generation of people who have named it. But naming it is the difference between the girl who hates her skin and does not know why and the girl who hates her skin and understands exactly why and begins to direct that understanding somewhere.

The gothic, as a literary tradition, was always about the thing the house contains that the family has decided not to name. The ghost in the Philippine context is always the babaylan they killed, the dark-skinned body they told to diminish itself, the girl who bled through her clothes and was sent home from school and learned in that sending what she was. In a country where the dead are kept close, where the Undas is still observed with genuine intimacy, where the pagtatawas is still practiced in provinces where the hospital is too far and the grief is too immediate, the ghost is not a metaphor. She is a form of knowledge that the dominant culture has tried to classify as superstition because superstition is the category into which you place knowledge that threatens your epistemological monopoly. She is the repository of what was lost in the colonial translation, the things that did not survive the passage into the language of the colonizer because that language did not have the categories, or chose not to develop them.

Grief in the Filipino context does not operate on the timeline that Western therapeutic culture has assigned it. The Filipino structure of grief is communal, extended, organized around the body of the dead and the needs of the living in ways that refuse the privatization of loss that modern life prefers. You feed the people who come to sit with you, even if you cannot afford the food, because the feeding is part of the ceremony and the ceremony is the acknowledgment that the loss belongs to more people than you. You pray the novena for nine days, not because the theology requires exactly nine days but because the community requires a structure that holds the grief collectively for long enough that no one person has to bear all of it alone. You remember the dead at anniversaries, at the birthday they would have had, at the holiday where their absence has a specific shape. This is a technology of collective survival developed by people who understood that grief, like everything else, is more bearable when it is not privatized.

The girl learns grief early in this country. She learns it in the presence of old women who have outlived husbands and siblings and sometimes children, who carry their dead with them not as wounds but as presences, who can tell you what the person who is gone would have said about the situation you are currently in with the specificity of someone who has been practicing the conversation for years. She learns grief in the houses where the departed's photograph still sits on the wall and is spoken to, not as an eccentricity but as a maintenance of relationship, because the relationship does not end with the body and the Filipino understanding of what persists after the body is not the Christian understanding that was imposed on it in the colonial period but something older, something that understood the boundary between the living and the dead as more permeable than the church required it to be.

The monster in the Philippine tradition is not the monster in the Western tradition. The aswang is not Dracula. Dracula is a count. He has a castle. He is, underneath the horror, a figure of aristocratic power whose monstrousness is the shadow of his grandeur. She, and the pronoun is deliberate, the aswang is in most forms a female figure, a woman who is monstrous because she will not stay in the category of woman. She has a hunger that is not domestic, not organized around feeding the household but organized around feeding herself, and this hunger is categorized as monstrous because the hunger of women in this culture is supposed to be organized around everyone else. She is the nightmare version of the babaylan, the woman whose power has gone unsocialized, unchecked, unmanaged by the community. She is also, if you look at her from a different angle, the woman who refused the management. Who decided that her hunger was hers. Whose monstrousness is the monstrousness of a woman who takes up space.

The manananggal, who separates at the waist and flies through the night with her upper body trailing organs, is a figure of such specifically female bodily horror that she is worth considering carefully. She is her own worst nightmare in the logic of the culture that produced her: a woman whose body has come apart, whose insides are visible, whose lower half is left behind while the rest of her goes where she wants to go. She preys on pregnant women. She represents, to the culture that fears her, the threat of the woman whose body is ungovernable, whose desires cannot be contained, who has made a pact, as the origin stories always tell it, with something dark, something outside the household and the village and the hierarchy of legitimate authority. She is also, from the other direction, a figure of radical autonomy. 

There is a Filipino queer tradition that lives in the shadow of all of this that has never been given adequate institutional attention. The bakla, the Filipino category that encompasses a range of gender and sexual identities that do not map cleanly onto Western LGBTQ+ frameworks, has been a feature of Philippine life long enough that Spanish colonial records document both the phenomenon and the church's effort to eliminate it. The pre-colonial babaylan was often binukot, set apart, belonging to a category beyond the standard gender order, and the contemporary bakla inherits a history that is simultaneously honored in certain social spaces, in the beauty salon and the fashion industry and the entertainment world where the bakla's presence is celebrated as flamboyance and flair, and systematically excluded from the institutional recognition that would give her the protection of law. The SOGIE Equality Bill, which would have provided basic anti-discrimination protection, has been filed and refiled and killed in the Philippine Congress for more than two decades. The celebration of the bakla's performance is not the same as the protection of the bakla's personhood. You can applaud someone's talent and refuse her rights simultaneously. 

The lesbian and bisexual Filipina exists in a space that is even less legible to the institutions. She does not have the protected category of the heterosexual woman, limited as that protection is. She exists in the intersection of two elimination: the elimination of the female body as a political subject and the elimination of the queer body as a legitimate form. Her desire is not even given the dignity of being feared properly. It is more often simply not processed, not included in the social script, rendered invisible in the way that things are rendered invisible when the system cannot find a category to put them in and finds it easier to simply not see them. Her writing, when she writes from this intersection, is necessarily speculative in the deepest sense: imagining a world in which she exists as a full subject, in which her desire has a name that belongs to her rather than being assigned by someone who needed to manage what she represented.

The Philippines is an archipelago, which means it is a country that is also a body of water, that is more ocean than land if you measure by the space between things rather than the things themselves, and the sea in this context is not the sea of the postcards, the turquoise and the white sand and the tourism branding that sells the Visayas to foreign investors and Korean honeymooners. It is the sea of the women who fish in the predawn dark in bancas that their grandmothers' grandmothers also fished in, who know the water the way the babaylan knew the plants, not as a resource to be extracted but as a system to be understood, whose knowledge of the currents and the tides and the seasons of the fish is a kind of science that has not been validated by any institution and is therefore invisible to every policy that affects it. The typhoons are stronger now and everyone in the coastal municipalities knows this without needing to read the IPCC report, because they lived through Yolanda, because they watched the storm surge take the houses that had never been taken before, because the water level at high tide is now where the water level at high tide was not when the grandmother was young.

The ecological grief that Filipino coastal communities carry is a grief with no legitimate therapeutic container. It is not individual loss, which the culture has structures for. It is the loss of the world as it was, which is a loss that has no name and no novena and no anniversary to sit with the dead at, because the dead in this case are not people but the reef that was alive when the grandfather was a boy and is now bleached and silent, the mangrove that protected the shore that is now gone, the fish that came in season that no longer come. The climate movement in the Philippines tends to speak this grief in the language of international advocacy, in the language of carbon budgets and loss and damage frameworks and climate finance negotiations, because this is the language that moves money and policy. But underneath the advocacy language is the older language, the language of the woman standing at the shoreline looking at what the water has done, holding the specific knowledge that the water has changed and that the change is not natural and that the word for what was done to the sea is the same word, in the end, as the word for what was done to the babaylan and the word for what was done to the dark-skinned girl and the word for what was done to the queer body and the word for what was done to the woman who bled in the school bathroom with no napkins in the dispenser. The word is extraction. The word is the removal of something for the benefit of someone who was never going to bear the cost.

The Mothers 

Let us talk about the mothers. The Filipino mother is a figure of such overwhelming cultural weight that the actual women who occupy the role of Filipino mother have been, for most of the country's literary and political history, obscured by it. The Inang Bayan, the Motherland, is one of the central figures of Philippine nationalist imagery, a woman who must be protected, served, sacrificed for, who functions as the embodiment of the nation in the same way that the nation functions as the embodiment of what men must defend. This figure has very little to do with the actual Filipino mother, who is managing a household economy on a budget that does not accommodate all the things the household requires, who is sending her children to school and attending the parent-teacher meetings and negotiating with the landlord and doing the work that the census calls "unpaid labor" and economists call "informal care" and her family calls her life. The Inang Bayan is pure symbol. The Filipino mother is a person who is tired in a specific way that has a specific history and is almost never given the language to describe it except in the register of heroism, which is the register that makes her sacrifice beautiful and does not ask who decided that the sacrifice was hers to make.

The horror that lives in the mother's body is the horror of having been constituted entirely as a resource. The ambition she gives in the calculus of whose career, hers or her husband's, the household can afford to prioritize. They are the literal movement of matter and time and possibility from one body to the larger project of the household, and the larger project of the household is embedded in the larger project of the economy, and the larger project of the economy is embedded in the larger project of the international division of labor, which needs Filipino women to reproduce the labor force that the labor market will then export. The mother who raises children in the Philippines is not raising them inside a neutral set of economic conditions. She is raising them inside a specific political economy that has decided what her children are for, and the decision was made without her input, and she has been given the language of love and sacrifice to describe her participation in a process that is also, in structural terms, an extraction.

The Literature of Menace

The woman who writes from inside all of this, from the bleeding and the browning and the grief and the queerness and the ancestral memory of the babaylan and the sea that is warming and the mother whose body has been constituted as a resource, is writing in a tradition that Philippine literary culture has not always known what to do with. She is not the Maria Clara who goes mad from purity. She is not the Inang Bayan whose suffering ennobles the national project. She is not even the OFW hero whose sacrifice is presented as virtue rather than as systemic failure. She is the woman whose body is the archive of everything the system has needed her to be, has needed her not to be, has needed her to manage in secret, has needed her to perform as love. And when she writes from there, from the actual interior of that body and that history, the writing is always speculative, in the deepest sense, because it is imagining a reader who takes the full weight of her seriously, imagining a world in which the archive has value, imagining the possibility of a literature that does not require her to diminish any part of herself in order to be legible.

What words that haunt look like, in the Filipino context, is not always the Gothic atmosphere of the Western tradition. It is sometimes just the word basta, which means something like simply, or just, or because that is how it is, used by a Filipino woman to close a conversation that she has determined is over, not because she has run out of arguments but because she has decided that the argument is not the point, that the point is something the argument cannot reach, that she is holding something in her body that predates the argument and will outlast it and does not require the argument's permission to persist. Not the ghost in the house but the woman who has decided that what she carries is real, is significant, is worth the cost of carrying it, even when the room she is in has no language for what she is carrying and no category for what she is and no framework that can accommodate the full weight of what she knows.

There is a word in Tagalog, gigil, which describes the urge to squeeze something overwhelmingly cute, an involuntary physical response to tenderness, the body moving toward what it loves before the mind has had time to authorize the movement. There is a word, kilig, for the pleasurable shiver of romantic excitement, the specific warmth of being reached by someone who sees you. There are words for what the body does when it is in the presence of beauty and tenderness and connection that English does not have, that the language of clinical psychology does not have, that the language of international development certainly does not have. They are imagining, through naming, emotional experiences that other languages have not found it necessary to name, which means they are imagining a world in which those experiences are important enough to have words for. A literature that uses these words without translating them into English is not being difficult. It is refusing to submit its emotional reality to the language of empire. It is insisting that what happens in the Filipino body, when the Filipino body is in the presence of the people and things and moments that make it feel most alive, deserves the dignity of its own name. This is, in the end, what all of the bodies in this essay have been asking for. Not just the babaylan and the manananggal and the bakla and the dark-skinned girl and the woman at the shoreline. The body that bleeds every month in a school bathroom where the dispensers are empty. The body that sends money home and watches its children grow up through a screen. The body that loves in a way the law refuses to recognize. The body that carries the dead with it, not as pathology but as relationship. The body that stands at the edge of the warming sea and holds, in the only language available to her for what she is witnessing, the word for this that the international climate negotiations are still searching for. Each of these bodies has been asking, in the specific register of the thing they carry, to be named in a language that does not require them to be smaller than they are.

The literature of menace is the literature that takes this asking seriously. That walks into the part of the room where the institutional light does not reach and stays there long enough for the eyes to adjust and begins to describe what is breathing in the dark. It is everything the horror has been protecting: the knowledge the babaylan carried, the specific texture of the brown girl's beauty that the colonial mirror refused to reflect back to her, the queer desire that has been living in the shadow of the law for a hundred years and has accumulated, in that shadow, a knowledge of survival and connection and love that the institutions which excluded it will eventually need and do not deserve. The anger that has been composting in the bodies of Filipino women since 1565. The grief that is also a form of loyalty. The hunger that is also a form of knowledge. The sea. The mothers. The monsters who are not monsters but women who refused the management. The girls who are going to grow up and name everything.

Works Cited

UNFPA Philippines. “Menstrual Health Matters: Understanding the Matters of Menstruation.” United Nations Population Fund, 2024, philippines.unfpa.org/en/news/menstrual-health-matters-understanding-matters-menstruation. [On the statistic that girls miss school due to menstruation; the essay’s figure of one in four is drawn from Plan International survey data widely cited in this period; UNFPA and World Bank corroborate the pattern with Philippines-specific data.]

UNICEF Philippines. “10 Fast Facts: Menstrual Health in Schools.” United Nations Children’s Fund, 28 May 2024, www.unicef.org/philippines/press-releases/10-fast-facts-menstrual-health-schools.

Huggett, C., et al. Menstrual Health in East Asia and the Pacific Regional Progress Review: Philippines. UNICEF, Burnet Institute, and WaterAid, 2023, www.unicef.org/eap/media/13941/file/Philippines%20-%20Country%20Profile.pdf.

Criado Perez, Caroline. Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men. Abrams Press, 2019. [Source for data on sex-disaggregated drug trials and the documented exclusion of women from clinical research.]

Forman, Jason, et al. “Injury Vulnerability and Effectiveness of Occupant Protection Technologies for Older Occupants and Women.” National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 2019. [Basis for the statistic that women are 73% more likely to be severely injured in a frontal crash; the essay cites a figure of 47%, which derives from a 2011 University of Virginia study also based on NHTSA data (controlling for weight and body mass); both figures are documented in peer-reviewed literature and government reports.]