Reckoning with Prostitutes: Performing Thai Femininity

Abstract

A few months ago, I came across the San Francisco-based ‘Mail-Order Brides/M.O.B.’ through the work of an American colleague, Gina Velasco (2008). It was my first encounter with a cultural activism that thoroughly refuses the sexual conservatism of a diasporic collectivity which is first and foremost imagined as the source of cheap ‘maids’ and ‘brides’.¹ Rather than expressing moral outrage about, or attempting to disprove, the relentless stereotyping of Filipinas and the nation they come to negatively symbolize, the M.O.B.s tackle the figure of the mail-order bride head-on in ironic performances. Velasco shows how the queer ensemble use ‘parody’, ‘humour’, ‘feminist camp’ and ‘ethnic/national drag’ (Velasco, 2008, pp. 15ff.) in order to interrupt a circulation of bodies and images which continually returns those assigned female² and Filipina to their moral and economic place.³ The M.O.B.s’ info-mercial Always a Bridesmaid, Never a Bride, for example, launches a multi-layered critique of the ways in which Filipina femininity becomes the constitutive outside of respectable femininity: excluded from the domestic realm as wife, the Filipina is nevertheless reintroduced as maid: ‘cheap’, underpaid, sexually available. In their performances, photographs, karaoke videos and art installations, the ensemble challenge the truths of the mail-order bride discourse by sticking the labels ‘maid’ and ‘bride’ onto their own bodies. They empty the stereotype by filling it so amply it bursts at the seams.⁴

We, the Mail Order Brides/M.O.B., are a trio of young Filipina-American artists engaged in (wedded to) a collaborative process of cultural investigation. We have taken our name in response to the common misrepresentation that Filipina women make ideal (read: submissive, obedient) brides, a myth born from the unfortunate economic reality that makes women and their labor the Philippines’ leading export. It has not escaped our attention that, acronymically speaking, ‘Mail Order Brides’ abbreviates down to a more sinister series of initials which inform the darker subtext of our connivings and conspiring.

(Mail Order Brides, ‘Artists’ Statement’, cited in Velasco, 2008, p. 15, emphasis in original)