Repurposing beauty pageants: The colonial geographies of Filipina pageants in Canada

Abstract

This paper considers how notions of beauty and performances at pageants transform as they move across different colonial times and spaces. It examines how gender, racial, and sexual subjectivities take shape among cisgender Filipina women who participate and organize community-based pageants on the traditional and ancestral territories of the Musqueam, Skxwú7mesh, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples (Vancouver, Canada). I analyze observations and interviews conducted with Filipina/os who organize and participate in community pageants. Based on this examination, I argue that spatial processes make apparent the shifting nature of gendered, racialized, and sexualized pageant performances. Pageant ideals change with migration as white heteropatriarchal logics, which are enmeshed in settler colonial projects of Canada, make grooves into the ways Filipino gendered sexualities come to be in Canada. More broadly, the paper speaks to the ways in which power works with and through space through the logics of race, gender, and sexuality. It outlines how racialized women’s feminine heterosexuality is made legible by liberal scripts designed for immigrants in the white settler colonial context of Canada. Thus, the paper sets in motion questions of how intersections of power are shaped by contemporary forms of colonialism.

Political geographical perspectives on settler colonialism

“…Smiles (, p. 141) similarly foregrounds “the stark totality of quotidian settler violence towards indigenous bodies,” yet emphasizes that this violence need not always be overt. De Leeuw () stresses that geography's prevailing focus in the study of colonialism on natural resources and territory problematically overlooks the ways in which settler colonial violence takes place through geographies of homes, families, and bodies, calling for greater attention to these intimate domestic spaces (also see Farrales, ; Holmes, Hunt, & Piedalue, ; Plonski, ). Griffiths and Repo () challenge a purely thanatopolitical framework for understanding settler colonial biopolitics, situating checkpoints in the West Bank as regulatory sites that (re)produce sexual divisions of labor.…”

“…While discussions about race and racism by geographers have engaged with settler colonial theory for some time (Lloyd & Pulido, ; Pulido, ), more recent work has much more centrally theorized the connections between white supremacy and settler colonialism both spatially and temporally. The concept of settler colonialism as an ongoing modality of empire is highly instructive to the geographical study of race and racialized geographies because it draws attention to the material conditions underpinning white supremacy, but also attends to how white supremacy and settler colonialism work together in practice (Bhandar, ; Bonds & Inwood, ; Moreton‐Robinson, ; Mott, ; Quijano, ) and how multiple colonial histories and racialized subjects intersect (Farrales, ; Kauanui, ; Pulido, ; TallBear, ; Trask, ). The linkage of white supremacy with settler colonialism further enables geographical thinking on race and racism to relocate the idea of white supremacy as lurking in the past and contend with how it is continuously remade in the present (McKittrick, ; Bonds & Inwood, ; also see Mott, , ).…”

“…While most literature in political geography has been focused on the role of geographical imaginations in underwriting forms of empire, violence, and dispossession, this work has long attended to the limits and contradictions within these forms of spatial reasoning (Gregory, , p. 475; Bonnett, , p. 61) as well as how patriarchal and racialized models of imagination might be undone (Closs Stephens, ; Rose, ) and how imagination opens up possibilities for radical emancipatory futures (Gieseking, , p. 2; Thomas, , p. 155). In spite of this engagement, few political geographers have analyzed the specific, ongoing influences of settler land appropriation and indigenous erasure on the consciousness of settlers or indigenous people (Daigle, ; Farrales, ; Hughes, ; Naylor et al, ), demonstrating the present absence of settler colonial frameworks in the field.…”

“…The field of settler colonial studies investigates the replacement of an indigenous population with an exogenous one on the land as a category analytically distinct from colonialism, which involves domination from afar (Veracini, ; Wolfe, , ). The centrality of land, territory, and sovereignty within settler colonial studies partially explains why geographers and other scholars, particularly in political ecology and indigenous studies, have found this literature increasingly fruitful in their research agendas (e.g., Alatout, , ; Cattelino, , ; Curley, , ; Day, ; Farrales, ; Fix, ; Getzoff, ; Kirk, ; Kauanui, ; Pasternak, , ; Pulido, ; A. Simpson, ; Shoffner, ; Smiles, ; Tomiak, )—albeit not without challenging some of its premises and disciplinary dominance relative to indigenous studies (Snelgrove, Dhamoon, & Corntassel, ). Until fairly recently, however, political geographers have been reticent to fully take up the settler colonial framework, often avoiding explicit reference to the settler colonial designation in researching these polities (see Bhungalia, , p. 314).…”

“…Despite this longstanding present absence, which endures in contemporary political geography, recent works by political geographers are engaging with the field of settler colonialism much more directly (Gentry et al, , Hawari, Plonski, & Weizman, , Hughes, , forthcoming; Machold, ; Naylor, Daigle, Zaragocin, Ramírez, & Gilmartin, ; De Leeuw & Hunt, ), focusing particularly on biopolitics, planning, urban geopolitics, and gendered and racialized foundations of settler colonialism (Farrales, ; Naylor et al, ). Indeed, Coleman and Agnew () argue that the settler colonial framework is of rising importance to the field of political geography.…”