To Slay a Specter: On the Founding of the Women Doing Philosophy Group in the Philippines
By Cassandra Teodosio
For years there has been a lingering specter of disenfranchisement that taints the profession of philosophizing. At first, it was difficult to articulate this feeling owing to its vagueness which one can easily pass off as one’s inability to do philosophy well. Nevertheless, by continuously peering into the source of this sentiment, one cannot help but doubt the self-imposed shroud which keeps the critical eye from stabbing into the core of this discontent. In trying to understand where this feeling of disenfranchisement comes from, I decided to subvert the lens of criticism—from the inside out.
I reflected on my experience: that I am not alone in doing philosophy, that I have fellows who are women doing philosophy, that the struggle for recognition—not only in academic and professional excellence—extends beyond the University, and that this struggle might have been beating us down because, here at home in the Philippines, we have not coalesced into a critical mass that can slay the specter in its multifarious faces: (internalized) misogyny, alienation and exclusion, classism, racism, gender discrimination, clericalism, gaslighting, and nepotism among others.
Filipino women philosophers are still hounded by the sexual division of labor—bearing the burdens of writing minutes in meetings, taking the role of the hostess in conferences and events, doing emotional labor inside the classroom, in their respective departments, in their professional organizations. Also, when we dare raise our voices, we either get laughed at for being sensitive or sweetly chastised (since we are supposed to be ladies) or worse, we get sidelined and railroaded back into the stereotypes of being the virtuous exemplar of academic womanhood or the mad professor who knows not how to keep herself in line. Our rage becomes meaningless, not because it does not have value, but because the system in place makes it so. Given these, it is truly exhausting fighting alone.
Thus, the birth of the Women Doing Philosophy group in the Philippines in June 2020: slowly but strongly, we have been building our network. We are creating safe spaces where our voices are heard and valued, and our experiences witnessed and recognized, by fostering amity amongst ourselves without fear of censure. The Group also aims to work on supporting women from underrepresented regions, classes, across genders and ethnicities among others in the country. Our work is long and difficult, but we plough through to ensure better futures as women philosophers.
Since its founding, the group organized its first event, the Brown Babe’s Burden conference, inspired by Tracy Llanera’s article of the same name published in Hypatia. Our group intends to continue the Brown Babe’s Burden series with a different set of women philosophers sharing their experience and expertise in their chosen fields, drafting rules for safe mentorship, and conducting teacher trainings in philosophy. We plan on intensifying our online presence (through social media, online newsletter, official blog, short vlogs) to showcase the diverse interests and fields of research done by Filipino women philosophers. Hopefully, these forthcoming efforts will bridge the gaps in the presence and literature about Filipino women philosophers beyond the cult of personality and convenient tokenism. We will also work on diversifying our canon in pedagogy and curricula practiced in the Senior High School programs and in Higher Education in the Philippines. Ultimately, the group will work on its formal registration as a professional Philosophy group in the Philippines with a long-term goal of establishing a journal and formalizing linkages with other philosophy groups and institutions.
With the founding of Women Doing Philosophy group in the Philippines, we are no longer voiceless nor rootless. And together, we will slay the specter!
II
In/Visible Brown Babes:
Synthesis of the Brown Babe’s Burden 2020
By Tracy Llanera
Western philosophy is ocularcentric. Metaphors of vision pepper the dialogues and meditations of Plato and René Descartes: the analogy of the sun, the eye of the soul, natural light of reason, clear and distinct ideas, the revelation of the divine. Concepts of sight describe how philosophers go about their business, day in, day out: observation, mental representation, perception, reflection, imagination. Memorable philosophical passages and thought experiments are often rendered in visual terms: the elegant fusing of horizons à la Hans-Georg Gadamer, the abominable peeping through a keyhole à la Jean-Paul Sartre, and who can forget Jeremy Bentham’s perverse panopticon? Philosophers, the professional voyeurs of the academy, are obsessed with the activities of seeing and seeking and synthesizing. The other senses seem dull in importance compared to the sense of sight in the canonical literature.
So when I reflect on who I am—a Filipina philosopher, a member of one of the many subgroups of academic “brown babes” from Southeast Asia—I sometimes wonder what people who have never had to question their place in the philosophical tradition see, if they in fact even see people like me at all.
Naturally, that curiosity only lasts a second. I have read enough Frantz Fanon to know that it is counterproductive to pander to the gaze of the privileged (curious? check out this opus and this recent collection of Fanon’s previously unpublished works). The experience that truly matters is mine, and in the case of Filipina philosophers, their own. My task in this short essay is to present how Filipina philosophers today have articulated the experiences of being seen and not being seen in the first Brown Babe’s Burden* panel, organized by the newly formed (Filipino) Women Doing Philosophy group on October 24, 2020. The first ever gathering of its kind, the event welcomed the (exclusive) participation of 37 Filipina philosophers working in the Philippines and in Europe, Australia, and the United States.**
I frame my synthesis using Linda Martín Alcoff’s Visible Identities: Race, Gender and the Self (2006), which rightly takes heed of Western philosophy’s ocularcentrism and argues that race and gender function as our defining visible identities. Race and gender are not essentialist concepts or wishy-washy social constructs that can be readily negotiated or reformed; rather, she argues that they are material situations and embodied horizons of interpretation. Rich in history and ripe with significance, these visible categories deeply inform how human beings come to know, engage, and move about in the world.
Taking my cue from Alcoff’s work, I use the notions of “visibility” and “invisibility” to describe the intersectional experiences of women philosophers in relation to the character of the spaces they inhabit in the Philippines and globally. I articulate how the embodied category of the “brown babe” were mirrored in the insightful and moving contributions of Filipina philosophers Kelly Louise Rexzy Agra (“Epistemic Paralysis and the Epistemic Salience of Identity”), Rowie Azada-Palacios, (“Pilosopiya Bilang Abot-Tanaw”), Rachelle (Dara) Bascara (“Three Brown Babe’s Complaints”), and Jacklyn Cleofas (“Can Brown Women Be First Rate Philosophers?”).
First, let’s look at brown babe visibility, which has shaped the lifeworld of Filipino women in local and global philosophy departments, and in many ways to their disadvantage.
Dr. Jacklyn Cleofas, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Ateneo de Manila University, explored her experience of being made to feel that being a woman made her an ontological mistake in the discipline. She’s too philosophically astute to be a woman, according to a senior male Filipino philosopher everyone respects! In the Philippines, as in many places, she pointed out that philosophy is still being pitched as the male mind’s exclusive territory. This view places women philosophers in a double bind, one that gratifies and welcomes them to the philosophical club at the expense of their gender. Yet, she argued, when male philosophers misbehave and harass their subordinates, the world would always turn to women philosophers to guard public morals and police their departments. But shouldn’t men take primary responsibility for the toxicity of an academic culture built for their success and impunity?
Rowie Azada-Palacios, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Ateneo de Manila University and PhD researcher at University College London, reflected on having to constantly negotiate her relationship with her intersectional identity in different contexts in her talk. Her discussion of her racialization as “brown,” the derogation and possible reclamation of the word “babe,” and the horizon and development of her intellectual research, spoke to the pattern of being perceived and treated in a multitude of (sometimes conflicting, and in the UK, racist and disparaging) ways as a Filipina intellectual.
Given our gripe with our hypervisibility in a world of maleness and whiteness, it is not surprising that sometimes, Filipina philosophers like me find odd comfort in invisibility. After my PhD, I submitted my work to various peer-reviewed publications in philosophy. It came as a refreshing welcome that my research was finally being judged on the quality and rigor of arguments and not by any other corporeally visible criteria. Maybe this confirms, as my well-intentioned but misguided mentors in philosophy told me when I finished my master’s degree at the University of Santo Tomas (Manila, Philippines) that “I write like a man” — an experience so similar to Jacklyn’s and as equally undermining.
But challenging the problems of visibility takes us to the next and more problematic stage of this synthesis. Central to the reflective self-understanding of Filipina philosophers is their invisibility in the discipline of philosophy. The paradox is that the hypervisibility of their “brown” and “feminine” bodies makes them invisible in local and global spaces.
Dr. Dara Bascara, Philosophy Tutor at City Lit Institute and Associate Lecturer at the University of Lincoln, discussed how her experience of racial discrimination, with Philippine tertiary education belittled by the administration of University College London, served as a racist confirmation of our subpar status in the global hierarchy. Her critique of universalist Western feminism and the fear of nationalism by First World liberals also echoed the invisibility of the culture of the Global South in the general narrative. These positions displayed many Western academics’ ignorance of powerful women-centered cultures in indigenous religions and folklore, and their inability to imagine the rich emancipatory resources rooted in Third world nationalist consciousness.
Kelly Agra, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of the Philippines-Baguio and PhD student at University College Dublin, identified the Filipino identity as a site of “epistemic paralysis,” a concept she is now developing in her dissertation on social epistemology and epistemic injustice. That the notion of Filipino philosophy still needs to be articulated and defended in the literature, and not taken for granted in the business of doing and writing philosophy, shows how our being philosophers as Filipina women seems to be simultaneously visible and invisible, both to ourselves and to other people.
The Q&A forum in the event confirmed that until now, women philosophers are still being treated as invisible service workers in the Philippines. Often tagged as the unofficial secretaries and travel agents and food committee heads in their respective departments, rarely do they get invited to lead prestigious research committees or manage editorial boards. Worse, Filipina philosophers are seen as second-rate assistants rather than the leaders and the future of philosophy departments in the country. Overseas, the problem of race further complicates the gender picture. In my case, I seem to have developed a mild allergic reaction to attending big Anglophone philosophy meetings. It is hard to deal with always being physically reminded that I am but one of several black and brown specks in the white universe of philosophy. While many good folks attend in these huge events, there are also those who disclose that they look at Filipinas like me as an exception or as a diversity statistic.
In sum, the Brown Babes Burden gathering has shown that Filipina identities have functioned as sites of locution and constraint. They are locations of expression and exclusion, encoded with unique burdens and, in light of our emerging collective feminist effort from our home in the Global South, also new and interesting possibilities.
I end this piece by recalling a pivotal moment in 2016, when I, together with my dear friend Darlene Demandante—a Filipina philosopher specializing on the work of French philosopher Jacques Rancière—attended a week-long interdisciplinary seminar on “Decolonizing Feminism” in Sydney. Linda Alcoff, one of the few prominent philosophers of color to hang out by invitation in a very white and macho Australia, was part of the program. When I meet philosopher rockstars I admire, I usually babble for five minutes before anything I say makes sense. An endless stream of words was already racing in my head when Linda came over to say hi to us. With the gentlest, kindest, softest voice, she said: “so when are we philosophers going to have lunch?”
It was a nudge, subtle in its meaning and pregnant with potential. Linda’s gesture of declaring us as philosophers that day, in public, was galvanizing. It was a power move. Her recognition confirmed that our individual experiences are indeed part of a shared narrative of women and philosophers of color. It bolstered the hope that it is through friendship, through solidarity and commitment to social amelioration and the transformation of philosophy, that non-traditional philosophers can keep the fire burning within each day red-hot. I’m glad to be kindling that fire with more and more Filipina brown babes.
—
* The phrase comes from Uma Narayan’s essay entitled “What’s a Brown Girl Like You Doing in the Ivory Tower? Or, How I Became a Feminist Philosopher,” published in Singing in the Fire: Stories of Women in Philosophy (2003). Narayan describes the “Brown Babe’s Burden” as the joint experience of representation and tokenism: “as the only woman of color and often the most junior person at more panels and events than I want to remember, I have also felt the stress of the recognition that my public performance and philosophical acuity would likely be, whether I like it or not, a measure of whether ‘women of color can do philosophy.’” This phrase inspired my musing as a Filipina philosopher working in Australia and the United States in Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy (2019) and the entry “Revisiting the Brown Babe’s Burden” in the Black Issues in Philosophy blog.
** I thank my fellow members of the Brown Babe’s Burden 2020 organizing committee—Cassandra Teodosio (University of the Philippines Los Baños), Danna Aduna (Ateneo de Manila University), Gladys Esteve (Ateneo de Naga University), and Marielle Antoinette Hermoso Zosa (University of the Philippines Diliman)—for their work and commitment. Working with you has been inspiring and delightful!
Cassandra Teodosio
Cassandra Teodosio is a Graduate Philosophy student at the University of the Philippines Diliman. She also teaches Aesthetics, Ethics, and Semiotics (and at intervals, Philosophy of the Human Person for Senior High Students at the University of the Philippines Rural High School) at the UP Los Baños. Her research is on Kant, freedom, and aesthetics.
Tracy Llanera
Tracy Llanera is Assistant Research Professor of Philosophy and Faculty Affiliate in Asian and Asian American Studies at the UCONN-Storrs. She is also a Research Fellow at the Institute for Ethics and Society at the University of Notre Dame, Australia. Dr. Llanera works at the intersection of philosophy of religion, social and political philosophy, and pragmatism, specializing on the topics of nihilism, conversion, and the politics of language.
