Gina R. Gatarin interviews Kelly Louise Rexzy Agra, Guest Editor of the current special issue: The Philippine Condition: Threads of Critical, Decolonial, and Feminist Contentions

GG: In this special issue on the Philippines, the concepts of decoloniality/decolonisation and the “margins” feature prominently in the scholarly engagements of the contributing authors. Why does the Philippines provide such a rich context for these discussions?

KA: The Philippines provides a very rich context from which to perform decolonial critique, first, because of its postcolonial history, second, because coloniality continues to undergird its political, epistemic, and social structures. There is this illusion that we have escaped coloniality because we are running our own government. However, the logics of domination and extraction that we inherited from our colonizers remain sedimented into the way our institutions and government are run. In the last two decades we have witnessed the rise of authoritarian forms of administration globally. In the context of the Philippines, this manifested through various forms of political repression—the shutting down of the news channel ABS CBN[1], the red-tagging of activists and state critics as terrorists, the proliferation of extrajudicial killings and the increasing number of desaparecidos[2]are some examples. These repressive tactics are not unique to the Philippines, but these have been taking place in the country in the last few years.

Adding to this postcolonial context, perhaps one unique situation, but something we probably share with other post-colonial contexts like Brazil or India, is that the Philippines is a very multicultural country. This is not only because we were colonised by the Spanish, the Americans, and the Japanese; we are multicultural because our labour is exported across the world. We are involved in the social reproduction of the world, which has its colonial origins too, but this involvement creates a very diverse, multicultural, and global collective consciousness. The multiplicity of conditions and contexts that Filipinos are thrown into activates multiple reasons to engage in critical thinking. This is most especially the case if we pay attention to the intersecting types of suffering and oppression that we have to confront at an everyday level and the different kinds of subjectivities that emerge from our encounters with other nationalities in different parts of the world and in the Philippines, as an effect of our being ‘labourers of the world’. These are the decolonial contexts fuelling our work.

Reading this from a feminist point of view, I also want to add that our personal lives, given how much of our exported labour involves domestic and care work, are in fact foundational to the global political and economic landscape we’re in. We are reproducing the world insofar as we are the ‘workers of the world’, to be a little bit Marxist. Without essentialising the Filipino culture, there is a general presumption too that our social ontology is deeply relational. This is observable whenever we talk about the concept of kapwa[3], for example. When Filipinos travel or work abroad, their subjectivities seem to be immediately oriented towards building relations, finding your kapwa, from Lovelyn Paclibar’s contribution to this Special Issue, referring to ‘active weaving of kapwa relations’ through ‘kwentuhan’, is a good example of this. It is particularly interesting how the modality of this kapwa-relation changes when we export our labour in predominantly white communities or when we are in First World countries. The subjectivity and body schema of overseas Filipino workers seem to be distinctively deferential towards white people or the people in First World countries. This is of course not the case for all Filipinos, but it is observable among our overseas workforces. This deferential subjectivity allows Filipinos to be perceived as congenial in these spaces. They are not perceived as threats, at least not in the beginning anyway, unless there is a massive migration from our end. This work-related mobility and congeniality open possibilities for us to learn the cultures of other nations. In turn, these pieces of learning get imported back to our country. So, I guess, our post-colonial past and our neocolonial present are the reasons why the Philippines is such a rich context for decolonial critique.

GG: The Philippines is experiencing numerous intersecting political, economic, cultural, and ecological challenges in recent years. Are there hopeful lessons or contributions that the rest of the world could learn from these experiences based on the research articles included in this Special Issue?

KA: There have been a lot of developments in the last two years that were not fully pronounced yet when we were writing the articles, but there are continuities. For example, Darlene Demandante’s paper, Can Dead Bodies Do Politics? is a very good material to read in understanding the problems that beset the Duterte administration. One tension that arises in some of the discourses on this is the question of the International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecuting our former president, with concerns raised in the spirit of decolonisation that he must be prosecuted in the Philippines. Domestically, his prosecution by an international court is perceived as perpetuating subservience to Western authority. However, if we also think about the extrajudicial killings, the repression of media, the stigmatization of protest and dissent, and the proliferation of dead bodies during his administration, one can trace direct continuities between these forms of authoritarian control and the forms of state violence that the Philippines suffered from during the colonial period. Demandante’s contribution to this Special Issue offers us an example of how we as citizens can critically, politically, and phenomenologically reflect upon the Philippine condition here and now.

One of the practical objectives of the Special Issue is to demonstrate how we ourselves can perform a critique of our condition—we do not need Western thinkers to think for us. We can take advantage of the resources that we inherited from them but use these resources to critically respond to the concerns and issues that confront us in the Philippine context. PJ Mariano Capistrano’s contribution on Agency, Global Capitalism, and Postcolonial Patronage and Krissah Marga Taganas’ Addressing the Mother Gap are excellent examples of the double move of what Lovelyn and I talk about in our introductory article: the ‘critical unweaving’ of logics of domination and Westernisation undergirding Philippine realities and the ‘reparative reweaving’ of what we have and how we can make our situation better on the basis of what we have. The emancipatory dimension of the Special Issue can be found both in the content of the articles and in the way the articles deploy critical theoretical, feminist, and decolonial resources in conceptualising and reorienting the way we look at problems in the Philippines. The Special Issue returns the critical agency to Filipinos.

Meanwhile, we also challenge the tendency in academic spaces to talk about indigeneity, indigenous values, and indigenous knowledge and practices in a romanticised way. This tendency presumes a homogeneous Western science, Western theory, or Western philosophy, that is then contrasted with a homogenous, untouched field of indigenous knowledge. If we examine this assumption historically, sociologically, and anthropologically, a lot of these theories and scientific ideas were drawn from and enriched by knowledge from indigenous communities. It is not as if we have a pure Western science that is then placed in comparison with a pure indigenous science. The development of Western science has been continuously influenced by knowledge extracted from multiple transnational environments and communities. This homogenisation and romanticisation are tendencies that we try to veer away from. For instance, Raphaella Elaine Miranda’s article Filipino Feminism from the Margins contests the romanticisation of indigenous communities in the idea of a critical theory at the margins. She highlights how ‘critical theory at the margins’ tends to presume that the ‘margins’ refer to a static location outside the location of a dominant group. As I was suggesting earlier, and to use your words, we are a ‘globalising workforce’ sustaining global politics and economy. The margins are technically not what is outside Western Europe or America or the centre: the margins are at the centre of social reproduction. They have been at the centre delivering services to people’s households, offices, hospitals, restaurants, public transportations, customer hotlines, and so on, across the world—they are the ones giving coherence and stability to the so-called centres and dominant groups’ dwelling and working spaces.

GG: Why is Thesis Eleven an important platform to discuss the topics included in this Special Issue on the Philippines?

KA: First, when we were trying to find a home for the Special Issue, it was non-negotiable for us that it must be a critical theory journal because we want it to be recognised as a form of critical theorising and social theorising. Second, that the journal must have a long tradition of genuinely engaging with or seriously catering to critical theories beyond the Frankfurt School, and beyond Eurocentric critical theory. Thesis Eleven is perfectly positioned to meet these two criteria. We could have also published it in a Philippine journal but the writers in this Special Issue are also feminists, and feminism in Philippine critical theory or feminist critical theorising in the Philippines have only had strong resurgence in the last decade. It is possible that if we published in a Philippine journal, our voices will not be taken seriously as critical social theory, since our academic, epistemic structures and infrastructures still presume that what is international has more validity than what is local and that philosophy is not a place for feminist theorising.

There is thus a political epistemic strategy in making Thesis Eleven the home for the Special Issue. But also, because Thesis Eleven had always represented a more open understanding of what critical social theorising should be. It caters to critical social theory in a more ‘capacious usage’, as Amy Allen would put it. In this case, while we draw on some Western thinkers, thinkers from the Frankfurt School tradition, thinkers from the Marxist tradition, or feminist traditions beyond Philippine scholarship, we nevertheless use them in a critical way in this ‘capacious usage.’ We inherit their ideas but also creatively transgress their usual usage, it is critical theorising for the Philippine condition not for others’ social conditions. It is critical theorising in response to actual concrete contexts that beset us as Filipino theorists in this case.

GG: Why is it vital for authors and voices from traditionally marginalised sectors and locations — including women, communities in the Global South, and rural populations — to remain visible, vocal, and courageous in articulating place-based and context-driven scholarship?

KA: I shall respond to this in two ways. The first one is when we are talking about the processes of marginalisation, processes of oppression, political subjugation, and deployment of power to marginalise groups of people, these always go alongside, for lack of a better term, the ‘epistemic deauthorisation’ of the people subjected to domination. To represent them as people who do not have the resources to contest the structures and conditions of their own oppression. That is the reason why ideology critique in critical theory has lost favour in the last few years because of the tendency for ideology critique to be epistemologically authoritarian. It presumes that the critical theorist is the only one who can see the relations of domination that beset people because these people have been allegedly brainwashed by the system that oppresses them.

In reality, yes, the marginalised may be powerless, excluded, and dominated politically. However, this is exacerbated at the epistemic level by the presumption that the only ones who can contest the form of subjugation taking place are the ones who are already privileged politically. Both in the political and epistemic sense, the agency is taken away from the marginalised. And so, your question is so important because why indeed should we remain visible? Why should the voices be heard? Why should we remain courageous? It is because we are forced to empirically provide the basis for contesting our ‘epistemic deauthorisation’ that presumes that we are always passive both in the political and epistemic sense—we are waiting to be saved and educated. As Filipino critical theorists, the task for us when we were forming this Special Issue was precisely to demonstrate this critical agency that we already have, but which for the longest time been relegated by our colonial and patriarchal norms of credibility as something that we did not or cannot have.

So, if you are represented as someone ontologically and epistemologically unable to do critique, due to whatever biological constitution you have, and that you are incapable of high-level theorising, such as the ones we find in racializing texts during the Enlightenment period as well as in the works of some scholars who think that feminists should not be theorising—these representations can prevent you from being taken seriously when you contest the conditions of your own oppression. In my contribution to this Special Issue, (Mis)educating the Empire, I have argued that this is part of our colonial miseducation. The authors of this Special Issue are practicing the unlearning of this representation through this body of work. We are making the stance that we are theorists too and we have always been theorising, however, there are structures that prevent our own forms of resistance, our forms of critique from being taken up in the dominant spaces of the academe and the dominant spaces of our epistemic institutions. It is important to keep doing this kind of work, but also, it’s equally vital to do it with others. Because if you are on your own, if your voices are individualised, it is very easy for the dominant structures to silence you and it may be difficult for you to track how you yourself might be reproducing colonial logics unbeknownst to you. Doing it with others helps you countercheck your inherited biases and intersectionally acquired privileges, alongside the opacities that come along with those privileges.

So what hope is there? Why are we doing this? It helps that our sources of recognition as scholars are no longer tied to Philippine institutions. We have been educated abroad, we have received valuable mentorship from different networks across the world; and so even if we critique the institutions that we now have in the Philippines, we don’t feel as precarious as we would have been if we had never left the country. Our work has been gaining a good following from students because they are seeing a very different way of doing philosophy that is no longer tied to prestige and dependent on the funding of our local institutions. A different model of doing critique, of doing philosophy, will eventually help us challenge the structures that have solidified and rigidified over the years. As a last point, I guess, that’s why I was referring to the individualising and engulfing tendency of dominant structures and why we had to do the work together and produce this Special Issue. It will be stronger if our critique is organised while remaining pluralist in our approach. If you look at the articles, we’re talking about so many different aspects of Philippine society, but to use Nancy Fraser’s term, our objective was to form a ‘counter-hegemonic bloc.’ It is important for us to be able to do critical social theory because the topics that we talk about are not only topics that matter to the Filipino people in general but matters that affect us personally at an individual level. This publication is not just an academic exercise. It is a deeply personal and political work that requires the painful and rigorous scholarly work of using the resources that we have and challenging the resources that prevent us from responding to the context and issues that matter to us democratically and personally. It is to affirm that we can and must subject these concerns to reparative critique, for our sake and our people.

Notes

[1] ABS CBN is a Philippine broadcasting network that was forced off the air on 5 May 2020 after its 25-year congressional franchise was not renewed during the Duterte administration. As one of the country’s largest television and radio networks, it had long served as a major source of news and information for millions of Filipinos. Its shutdown significantly affected access to television and radio news, particularly in areas that relied heavily on its broadcasts for information and public service programming.

[2] Desaparecidos is a Spanish term meaning “disappeared persons.” In the Philippines, many desaparecidos have been farmers, workers, activists, and other individuals perceived as dissenters. The phenomenon became especially widespread during the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos Sr. and has persisted into the contemporary period. Many of these victims of enforced disappearances were allegedly abducted, tortured, and subjected to extrajudicial killings, often with military and police forces implicated in the violations.

[3] Kapwa is a unique Filipino concept that recognises a shared identity. According to Virgilio Enriquez, the founder of Filipino psychology, kapwa is the core concept of Filipino psychology, which integrate the self and the other. Filipino scholars have also described kapwa as a shared inner self, shared identity, or the self in the other. Kapwa translates to caring for one another to uphold the shared dignity of people.

About the cover image

Yllang Montenegro is a feminist, independent multidisciplinary artist based in the Philippines whose work and activism are informed by her experience as a migrant worker. Yllang founded Empowerment through Art in 2017, co-founded The O Home, an independent m(other)-run space for women and children in 2023, and TKTk Feminist Printmakers in 2025.

Her artwork Kutob, featured above, explores the uninhibited sensibility of the woman drawn from her own experiences. In this work, Yllang draws on her self (inner and outer body) as a map to explore past experiences and history, facing the present time to identify inexplicable feelings. The sculpture is located inside the University of the Philippines Center for Women’s and Gender Studies (UPCWGS).