Reclaiming the tomboy: Gender performativity, the masculine ego, and the Filipino lesbian experience in Shane Carreon's travelbook

• Main Author: Pinca, Mariel E.
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2014
• Subjects: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etd_bachelors/2674
• Institution: De La Salle University

The Filipino words for lesbian, such as tomboy and tibo have been observed to have negative, ill-informed implications. The tomboy is commonly perceived by thehetero-patriarchal society as a defiant and failed version of a Filipino woman. This widespread ignorance towards the Filipino lesbian existence can be due to the lack of diversified representations in several mediums, especially in literature. This study problematizes the falsified impressions and the lesbian body's exclusion from cultural intelligibility. Through the examination of Charmaine Shane Carreon's Travelbook: poems (2013), this study aims to concretize the Filipino lesbian identity and to show the lesbian body not as a deviant but a cooperative and valuable member of society. Judith Butler's gender performativity is utilized to expose the lesbian body as a venue of cultural discourse, while Antony Easthope's masculine ego characterizes the oppressive structures that limit and repudiate lesbian existense. The study concludes with the insight that the Filipino lesbian can attain subversion through a conscious choice to disregard the oppressive dictates of the hetero-patriarchal order, and to utilize her supposed derivativeness in the service of displacing heterosexist norms.