Crip Native Woman: The Hispanic American Philippines and the Postcolonial Disability Cultures of US Empire.

Abstract

This dissertation examines how Filipino intellectual cultures, “ilustrados”, and postcolonial enlightenment discourses assert political sovereignty through self-fashioning as able-minded subjects. I argue that Spanish and US colonialisms fracture the masculinist project of Philippine sovereignty thus prompting tropological investment in the “crip native women” whose impairments are either discursively rehabilitated to fix the problem of uncertain male autonomy or is deemed “too queer to rehabilitate” by more proper subjects. My dissertation is a work of literary-cultural critique that postulates an archive of the “Hispanic American Philippines” holding in tandem the intersections of both Spanish and US colonialisms—an intersection that has been largely under-theorized in Filipino Studies and US Empire Studies. Redeeming a postcolonial disability position of “linguistic incapacity” whereby Filipinos are historically unable to access Filipino Spanish writing, I analyze works by José Rizal, Franz Fanon, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Teodoro Kalaw, José Reyes, and Miguel Syjuco, in order to demonstrate how indigeneity, disability, and postcolonialism are co-constituting cultural fields across the multiple imperialisms and multiple languages of the Philippines, Filipino America, and a transpacific re-articulation of the U.S. Mexican Borderlands--all sites subject to the same colonial projects of both the United States and Spain.

“Crip Native Woman” posits the queer-of-color analytic “postcolonial cripistemology” to understand how cognitive and physical incapacities are tied to the queerness and racialized femininity of the native subject across a multilingual archive of comparative imperial encounter. In doing so, I suggest that the “Hispanic American Philippines” is productive ground for more sustained comparative work across the fields of American Studies, Asian American Studies, Latina/o Studies, Disability Studies, and postcolonial criticism.