We are Filipinas: A feminist and postcolonial study on representation of Filipina bodies in foreign and local videogames

• Main Author: Pagcaliwagan, Jonina Y.
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2018
• Subjects: Feminism and video games; South and Southeast Asian Languages and Societies
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etd_bachelors/14895
• Institution: De La Salle University

The study aspired to explore the under-researched and underdeveloped field of study pertaining to the local videogame industry, one that focused on the representation of the female Filipino identity. The analysis was conducted mainly under the lenses of Laura Mulvey's Visual pleasure and narrative cinema (1999) and Isagani Cruz's essay The other other: towards a post-colonial poetics (2000) alongside Edward Said's Orientalism (1978). As the study chose to do a feminist and postcolonial approach in analyzing the portrayals of Filipino characters from three different games one is locally developed indie game and the rest are foreign developed videogames. The study conducted a comparative textual analysis of the three characters, Ara, Josie and Talim. The analysis section discussed how the portrayals of these three characters reflected the biases and perspectives of the developers, both local and foreign, regarding the ideological female Filipino identity.Aside from this, further study also identified how the games sell these characters to the players and how they are utilized within their respective narratives. Nightfall: escape from the local gaming community, presents Ara's experiences as the spectacle or what the developers intended for the players to focus on. While in Tekken 7 and Soulcalibur where the characters, Josie and Talim, are the spectacles or the objects the developers want the player to see and desire. The findings conclude that a perfect representation in regards to the female Filipino identity is non-existent and in regards to the local community, self-representation can also become a misrepresentation. In a competitive field influenced by globalization, it is the responsibility of many to take great lengths in avoiding representation and cultural appropriation."