The queerness of identity in the Philippines in The Chambers of the Sea by Edith Tiempo

Every society, community or tribe is unique with its identity. A myriad of factors make up the multifaceted surface and endodermis of a community. Norms, morals, culture, history, economics, hegemony, and people, men and women alike, push and pull to affect each other. Often the people who create and perpetuate volatile norms, morals, culture, and hegemony can emancipate or imprison people who make the same edict. Resistance to him or release from him may mean ostracism or insults. Anyone who goes against the current becomes a victim of a tyrannical culture. Therefore, the culture becomes bipolar. It nourishes but also creates pain sutures. People are left to slavishly continue to belong or to fight unbearably against suffering. Or let’s say, a person who rebels in an oppressive culture faces what Helen Cixous calls “castration or decapitation” for not supporting the dominant culture.

One of the most common repugnant social constructions is human identity. In other parts of the world, people are divided, labeled, judged, and expected based on their anatomy, gender, and norm. The question of man against woman. Each sex is stereotyped according to social expectation. Males are portrayed as strong, rational, logical, intelligent, providers, masters, straight, muscular while females are weak, irrational, illogical, assholes, recipients, slaves, sex objects, emotional, and worse yet, abused, silenced, and evil. in different media and literatures.

But what if a person is neither male nor female? What if a person opposes the entire expected role or identity based on the normativity and performativity dictated by society? So we imagine the worst. The victim becomes vulnerable to criticism from society, where he or she is rashly and harshly judged as evil, abnormal, weird, impure, immoral, or “queer.” This is where the writer positions his role to fully understand the very colorful and introverted life of Edith Tiempo’s controversial character Tío Teban in the story “Las Cámaras del Mar” (Tiempo, 2009).

More often than not, queer is defined as anything that is abnormal, queer, weird, or anything that challenges or questions a dominant culture, norm, or behavior. In the Philippines, being queer is equivalent to being weak, soft, different, strange or even immediate conclusions to being gay or homosexual.

Many scholars believed that society’s notion of sex is deeply ingrained in people’s minds perpetrated and perpetuated by social institutions such as school, church, family, and others. Queer theory challenges these social formulations to understand and tolerate sexual or gender identities beyond misunderstood and transmitted beliefs about sexual categorization.

The theory and practice of queer criticism is based on questioning or challenging, discrediting the categorization of sex and gender that leads to the identity of an individual. Identity cannot be fixed and is not fixed. Questions of performativity and normativity in relation to sex and gender, resistance and power relations are also attempted.

In the Philippines, the family, the school, and the church are actively involved in the creation, categorization, and fixation of gender and sexuality. The choice of colors for children’s clothing would signify sexuality. Blue for boys and pink for girls. A lack of color matching would mean malicious interpretations that would lead to labels like gay or lesbian, as if colors and children were congruent with their sexuality. When they grow up, children are told that playing dolls is for girls and toy soldiers are for boys. Children don’t cry, parents told their young children. Implicitly, they say that only girls cry. And these are passed down from generation to generation. There is always a strong categorization in the Philippines full of do’s and don’ts for boys and girls as they are subject to social categorization, sexuality and its performativity. Anyone who doesn’t hold up, anyone who deviates, anyone who doesn’t support the dominant culture of men is labeled gay or homosexual with Filipino varieties of bakla, bading, badaf, shoke, darna and other demeaning names.

Edith Tiempo’s story Chambers of the Sea subtly and delicately describes a man named Teban Ferrer or Tio Teban (Uncle Teban), as addressed by the narrator growing up from Bangan and his diaspora to Dumaguete, whose growth and eventual maturity is puts in a test, interrogation, scrutiny and suspicion from its sexuality or normativity and performativity. Thus, the haunting question of whether Tio Teban is gay, homosexual, or queer is focused through the lens of queer theory and analysis.

Uncle Teban finds himself in the middle of strong binary opposites where the characters are expected according to performativity and heteronormativity. His Bangan family with his huge land on the left and his new family with his cousin in Dumaguete on the right. His family is made up of strong men: his father, who hates Uncle Teban’s feminine behavior, Antero, his brother-in-law, who physically farms the whole family’s land, and his sister Quirina, who wants him to carry on the legacy of the family. his father’s land. The social expectation of Uncle Teban’s family is high based on his supposed performance as male and heterosexual.

In Dumaguete, with its boundless sea, Tio Teban finds more comfort in the softest and weakest surroundings. Her cousin Amalia is a typical housewife who fulfills a social role according to her sexuality, mother of four children. More often than not, Amalia’s roles extend to Tio Teban when the former runs off on family errands. His wife’s husband is a passive man who never questions his behavior because he exhibits a calm man that he provides.

Amalia’s honest troublemakers interrogate and criticize Uncle Teban’s different behavior. Her moody laugh is like Uncle Teban’s immediate family harshly condemning his weirdness. Because he doesn’t perform and is against the norm of a typical man, as expected, he was small for a weak, slow, weird guy. Mentally, they are attacking him for the weirdness of him. His father, who is supposed to understand him for who he is, is the first to ostracize him. His judgment is based on Uncle Teban’s “feminine disposition” and she could not forgive her only son for being so similar to him in appearance but very different from him in his ways (p. 103). Uncle Teban’s father despises his inclination to cultivate a rose garden, draw and paint with watercolors, his wanderings in the countryside, his perpetual reading of literature, his height and squint. All of this is beyond his father’s acceptance of him.

But above all these artifacts, we see him retaliate against his family even if they offend him, hate him and even denounce him for being different for not “satisfying his selfish desire” of wanting him to be what he is not. He felt violated and exposed. Out of a “fight or flight” dilemma, he chooses a calm and resolute decision to leave his family in pursuit of graduate studies in Dumaguete, where he successfully completed a master’s degree in Political Science. It can be deduced from a psychological point of view that he displaced his silent rebellion against his family towards the school search where his family could not catch up with him mentally and intellectually. He chooses his battle with intellectual elegance against the rough furrows of the earth. His identity, although different, abnormal and queer in the opinion of his family and Amalia’s children, Uncle Teban is happy with himself. His identity to himself is not an issue, not a question, not a problem, but rather a choice. His stature only comes under siege when people come back to question him and evaluate him based on his sex and role. In this text, Uncle Teban becomes a role model of a positivist existentialist who finds happiness amid people’s excessive concern for his identity. He chooses what he pleases without personal qualifications. He does not have an identity crisis in contrast to the popular notion. The notion of him is also affected, influenced and enveloped by socially constructed critiques against not so typical men like Tio Teban. The question of what he is doing in his room in Dumaguete is more of a personal introspection in economic terms. He, with a master’s degree, remains docile in his cousin’s house. Society again forces him to work according to his heterosexuality. The choice is yours.

Suspicion of her identity versus her personal choice as opposed to social expectation and the labeling of her sullied gender identity is put to a test that ends in a crystal clear dramatic ending to the story. She received a letter about the death of his father. Uncle Teban became a two-faced character as he runs into the sea. He summons grievance from him but finds happiness in thinking of the death of a father who is highly prejudiced against him. Without his father, there is more of himself, freedom. The hegemony of power exercised and created by his family only oppresses him. Thus, with the death of his father there is more personal emancipation from the meddling family and social expectation rather than lamentation. Queer becomes clear. He rejoices in his true self. He is neither male nor female; neither a mythical merman nor a mermaid but a person. He is happy with what he is without a label. The rarity of it, from people’s perception, is just a myth. The whole world is a stage, and people have different roles to play. A man needs to be happy with either a minor or major role in this vast world of identities that only men and women build. As the narrator puts it, “At least Tio Teban knew one thing for himself as he turned and hurried away.” Uncle Teban is “He is what he is” to gamos irons, union of male and female; not gay or homosexual but a person with a designated corner in heaven, with a niche on earth and has his own “camera in the sea”…

REFERENCES:

With Davis, Robert and Ronald Scheliefer. (1989). Contemporary literary theory: literature and cultural studies. New York: Longman, Inc.

Time, Edith (2009). “The Chambers of the Sea”. Edition: Anthology of Philippine Literature in English Manila: PNU Press.