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.

Keywords

Race sexuality gender multiculturalism settler colonialism Filipino

Introduction

In 2011, the Philippine media buzzed with news that a Filipina had won Miss World Canada 2011. Riza Santos, of Alberta, had captured the crown, prompting Philippine media both in the Philippines and Canada to claim her as their “beauty queen.” Philippine-based media made special mention of Santos' continuing affinity to the Philippines, highlighting her roles on various Philippine TV shows and movies. Canadian-based Filipino media took note that Santos is “half-Filipino,” a beauty studying for her engineering degree in Alberta and completed the Canadian forces army reserve military training. Excited by the possibility that Santos might win the Miss World competition being held later in the year, media on both sides of the Pacific agreed that Santos extends “beauty and brains across borders.”¹

In the media's discursive framing of Santos, she is rendered legible to the extent that her body is capable of extending across borders. Expressly, hers is a beautiful and competent body that can be read by normative scripts framing Filipina borders and bodies.² Her philanthropic and entertainment work in the Philippines falls in line with a long-standing script of a benevolent subject who returns to her parent's homeland to fulfill a certain patriotic pledge captured in the notion of the heroic balikbayan.³ Her pursuit of higher education and commitment to the military is consistent with a Canadian liberal script of a good immigrant. Both scripts render her half-white and half-brown body to be capable and deserving. Holding both tropes together is the suggestion of liberal mobility and possibility, a suggestion that renders Santos praiseworthy for her tribute to her ancestry, devotion to helping children in the Philippines, military service, and commitment to Canada's multicultural and liberal idea of citizenship.

In this paper, I explore notions of pageants as sites of power negotiations and performances. The paper follows three sections. First, I outline theories around the performativity of pageants and the politics of place. Second, I focus on the repurposing of Filipino-organized pageants at the scale of white settler narratives of settlement and multiculturalism. Third, I pay attention to how the politics pageants work at the scale of the body. Altogether, I outline the coming into being of the particular racialized, gendered, and sexual Filipina/o subjectivities by highlighting the geographies that underpin how and where they come to be. Specifically, I demonstrate how the very specific context of Canada as a white settler colonial formation makes imprints onto the racialized and gendered sexualities of Filipinos. As debates are sharpening around the place, role, and responsibility of non-Indigenous and non-Black people of color in the ongoing twinned logics of dispossessing and disappearing Indigenous lands and peoples (see e.g. Bonds and Inwood, 2016; Pulido, 2017), I maintain that attention to the work of geography and the spatial processes undergirding how immigrants of color are brought into being in gendered, racialized, and sexualized ways helps to clarify our place in settler colonial relations.

The theoretically queer approach in this paper follows work of Black scholars who press upon the need to center the particular racialized sexualities in the materialities of Black lives (see e.g. Cohen, 1997; Holland, 2010; Johnson, 2001; King, 2009). As Samantha King put it: “[S]exuality is always already everything it ever was […]. [R]acial aspects of sexuality, in particular, have become hard to see and thus the need to identify them more urgent” (2009: 273). Alongside the need to contend with the racial aspects of sexuality, the analysis is guided by the work of queer of color scholars who continue to argue that race and sexuality are co-constituted in systems of power over time and spaces (see e.g. Anzaldúa, 1987; Catungal, 2013; Fajardo, 2011; Haritaworn, 2015; Manalansan, 2003; Muñoz, 2009). As Indigenous scholars have pointed out however, while queer of color work has proven able to hold notions of race, nation, and sex together in a sustained critique of heteronormativity, it has largely minimized and even erased the settler colonial conditions of its makings (see Driskill, 2010; Driskill et al., 2011; Hunt and Holmes, 2015; Justice et al., 2010). By paying attention to spatial processes at work in the making of Filipino sexualities at the pageant, I argue gendered sexualized logics of pageants change, shift, and transform with migration as white heteropatriarchal logics enmeshed in the colonial project of Canada make grooves into the ways in which Filipino gendered sexualities come to be in Canada. In particular, I show how these grooves are made through the normalizing logics and techniques of settler colonialism in national narratives of settlement and multiculturalism and in the embodied performances at pageants. More broadly, this paper contributes to geographic literature by adding often-overlooked subtleties and particularities of race, gender, and sex in a settler colonial context.

I make these arguments by analyzing observations and interviews I conducted with organizers and participants of locally organized Filipino pageants on the unceded, traditional, and ancestral territories of the Musqueam, Skxwú7mesh, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples (Vancouver, Canada). Pageants are important sites for subject- and community-formation in the Philippines (see e.g. Cannell, 1999) and among Filipinos abroad (see e.g. Bonus, 2000; Diaz, 2016; Manalansan, 2003; Saint-Blancat and Cancellieri, 2014; Tungohan, 2014). I demonstrate how racialized, gendered, classed, and sexualized performances at work in community-organized pageants reconfigure the role of the pageant. The reconfigurations allow the pageants to be legible by liberal scripts made for racialized immigrants in the white settler colonial context of Canada. The paper examines the work that community-organized pageants do in relation to dominant settler colonial gender and sexual logics, logics that simultaneously frame Indigenous women as inherently deviant while attempts are made to secure the respectability of Filipina women's feminine heterosexuality.

Beauty pageants and multicultural liberal performances and politics

Performativity in and of pageants

Pageant Contestant 1:

Miss International 2013 Bea Rose Santiago could have chosen to represent Canada on the international beauty pageant stage, but instead the 22-year-old Filipina chose to represent the Philippines.⁴ A citizen of both the Philippines and Canada, a newspaper article explains that Santiago chose to compete for the Philippines because she wanted to, as she put it, “fight for a country that would support me 1,000 percent.” Santiago was born in the Philippines and migrated to Toronto when she was 16 years old where she finished a degree in communications at York University. While her start in pageants began in Canada when she won the Mutya ng Pilipinas Overseas Communities' crown,⁵ it is Santiago's lineage in and affective ties to the Philippines that national and international media honed in on. After winning the international title, Santiago was asked to publicly clarify her residency, citizenship and hence material connection to the Philippines. In response, the beauty queen cited her place of birth in the Philippine National Capital Region, her childhood spent with her grandparents in the Philippine province of Bicol. In Bicol, she waited while her mother migrated to Canada first and petitioned her, reiterating that: “[…] I went to elementary and I went to two years of high school there because my grandma is a teacher. I was raised in a province.”^6,7 To this laundry list, Santiago added that she could speak and understand at least four of the Philippine languages. But what endeared most in the Philippines covering her victory was Santiago's devotion to winning the international contest for those who were devastated by Supertyphoon Haiyan that hit the country only months before the competition. She declared publicly that she was entering the international competition for the survivors of the typhoon. After winning the title and meeting some survivors back on Philippine soil she shared: “[…] It just gave more sense to my fight for the Miss International crown. I’m going to get that crown for them, for all Filipinos, to give them a reason to be happy even if the situation they are in right now seems bleak.”⁸

Pageant Contestant 2:

The headline from the Philippine-based newspaper announcing the winner of the Filipino Center Toronto pageant read “Toronto center honors Fil-Canadian beauty as well as brains.”⁹ Former schoolteacher Nancy Sumaya received the honors in a crown titled Miss Paraluman¹⁰ 2015. The community center, which the Philippine consulate helped to start, honored Sumaya as a muse in its vision of being a gathering space to support and help Filipinos in the city.¹¹ Echoing this narrative, and a year earlier, one of the first nurses to arrive in Toronto in the 1950s was given the pageant title of muse for the year.¹² Estela Kuhonta Bischof was bestowed this honor for what the media article explains is the debt of gratitude Filipino overseas workers owe to figures like Bischof who opened: “the doors of opportunity by dint of their work ethic, high professionalism and unstinting service.”¹³

Santiago's claim to affinity with the suffering and fighting Filipino people and her migration to Canada, and the nurse and school teacher's industriousness and service to the Filipino community in Toronto are productive touchstones in theorizing pageants as performances that converge nation, femininity, sexuality, and race. This is consistent with readings by scholars who have theorized beauty pageants as sites of contestation, performativity, and performance. Ethel Tungohan (2014) understands the pageant as a site of political activism and space for agency for overseas Filipino live-in caregivers who organize and participate in beauty pageant contests in Toronto. In Tungohan's assessment of the annual “Miss Caregiver” and “Mother-of-the-Year” beauty pageants, they can be read as forums that re-inscribe dominant gender paradigms of the Filipina body. However, she insists they also open space for live-in caregivers to exercise their agency in ways “that simultaneously work with, work against, and work outside the Canadian state to create policies that benefit live-in caregivers and their families […]” (p. 35). The women she observed focus their performances on acts of mothering from a distance and the plight of migrant workers. For Tungohan then, performances that animate pageants can allow for narratives that run contrary to nationalist scripts. Marcia Ochoa (2014) gives another rendering of the pageant in her work on beauty pageants (both normative and queer) in Venezuela. Firstly, she highlights the role beauty pageants play in the making of the Venezuelan nation, especially in relation to transnational processes involving commercialized and international beauty contests. Secondly, she argues that “beauty pageant democracy” is used to negotiate competing ideas and desires in a politics of representation. Through this concept, Ochoa apprehends how drama and controversy that circulate in the pageant help to define proper sexual subjects through the stylized management of performances. For Ochoa in their role and form, the commercialized international contests and the locally organized pageants in Venezuela produce particular sorts of subjects worthy of projection.

Geographers hone in on performative spatialities of pageants. Jennifer Fluri's (2009) study of the Beauty Academy of Kabul and the 2003 participation of Miss Afghanistan in the Miss Earth Pageant shows how the economic and corporeal US-led project of “liberating” Afghani women functions at the scale of the body. Fluri argues that “corporeal modernity,” linking the feminine Afghani body to Western notions of freedom and liberal desires, is carefully cultivated. Caroline Faria (2013, 2014 ) also works at the scale of the body to evidence how nationalist imaginaries are reproduced by young South Sudanese men in their pageant performances. Faria documents how nationalism in the diaspora is reinvigorated, reimagined, and redeployed in vexed ways by pageant organizers, participants, and audiences in the South Sudanese diaspora in the United States. I build on such existing scholarly work on pageant geographies by highlighting the particular gendered and racial ways that bodies in pageants redeploy and reframe dominant nationalist paradigms and narratives. In what follows, I suggest that the gendered, racialized, and sexual subjectivities that materialize and matter in a Canadian colonial context are organized in ways that reinforce normative notions of a settler nation.

The politics of place and pageants in a settler colonial context

Since I am concerned with how the fixing of a national identity works for Filipino/as located in Canada, and specifically on the unceded Indigenous territories of the Musqueam, Skxwú7mesh, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples, I work in what follows to demonstrate how power operates through sexuality in a settler colonial context. All three Indigenous Nations have not ceded by treaty or surrender their lands and waters that the city of Vancouver and its suburbs have been built upon. Not even the Indigenous languages that frame the landscapes have been relinquished. As Musqueam Elder Larry Grant (2013) notes, for over 10,000 years the həΝqəmiΝəм language Musqueam-speaking people have lived in the delta upon which cities of Greater Vancouver now occupies. Sharing what he learned from his mother and grandparents, Elder Grant explains: “We [Musqueam] are the people that have always been here. We never came from anywhere else. We have no stories of transportation. We have no stories of belonging anywhere else. This has always been where we have been.” It is important here to note that such an Indigenous orientation to place sits at odds with the dominant transnational framings of Filipinas whose femininity, as in the case of beauty contestants Santos and Santiago, becomes legible through its mobility and international migration. Elder Grant goes on to describe how Musqueam land has been eroded, and how his community has been systematically excluded and isolated. Cutting to the point, he says: “[The British] claimed territory and occupied it.” Ongoing attempts to wear away at Indigenous relationships to land include systematic settler state impositions of private ownership and access to water and fish so central to Coast Salish peoples (Musqueam, n.d). Specifically, for the Indigenous communities who have lived and been part of the Fraser River Delta since time immemorial, their access to the river and fish has been systematically restricted and narrowly meted out by the state through the granting of fishing licenses while their traditional territories continue to be partioned off (Harris, 2004; Musqueam, n.d). Similar colonial logics and practices continue for the Skxwú7mesh and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. The Skxwú7mesh Nation has historic and contemporary relationships to territory upon which cities of Vancouver, Burnaby, New Westminster, North and West Vancouver, Port Moody, Squamish, and Whistler now partially or fully occupy (Squamish Nation, 2013). The Tsleil-Waututh also remind of their peoples' continuing relationship and stewardship over the lands now occupied by municipalities that border the Burrard Inlet:

While this territory was never ceded, nor our responsibility to this area ever abdicated, its resources have been exploited and damaged through industrialization and urbanization. It is now, and has always been the birthright and the obligation of the Tsleil-Waututh people to care for the lands and waters of our territory and to restore them to their prior state. (Tsleil-Waututh, 2017)

The continuing relationship of the Musqueam, Skxwú7mesh, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples to the lands layers and mediates how power operates in the colonial present.

Indigenous scholars explain that the fundamental driving logic of settler colonial nations and states is the appropriation of Indigenous lands and the dislocation of Indigenous peoples' self-governing authority. Audra Simpson theorizes:

[S]ettler colonialism is defined by a territorial project – the accumulation of land – whose seemingly singular focus differentiates it from other forms of colonialism. Although the settler variety is acquisitive, unlike other colonialisms, it is not labor but territory it seeks. Because 'Indigenous' peoples are tied the desired territories, they must be 'eliminated'. (Simpson, 2014: 19)

Given that Indigenous peoples are conceptually (and in law and policy) slated for elimination in settler colonial projects like Canada, labor from elsewhere was necessary to start and maintain capitalist development in Canada. Iyko Day (2015) theorizes how settler colonial capitalism necessitated Black labor through slavery and Asian labor through immigration as forms of alien labor to secure white property and capital in North America. Indigenous feminist and Two-Spirit scholars complement and complicate this focus on territoriality as a founding structure of settler colonialism by demonstrating how gendering and sexualization also work as intimate and embodied forms of dispossession. Bonita Lawrence (2003) details how the gender disciplining of Indigenous women by Canadian laws and institutions systematically undercuts their ways of being and relationships in their respective Nations. For example, Lawrence explains how gendered regulation of Indigenous identity under the Indian Act of 1876: “[…] disrupted the viability of Native communities for over a century by forcibly removing tens of thousands of Native women and their descendents from their communities for marrying nonstatus or non-Native men” (pp. 5–6). Here, Lawrence theorizes a link between the dispossession of Indigenous women's sovereignty with the ongoing dispossession of Indigenous lands and territories. As Sarah Hunt (2013) details in her exploration of Indigenous approaches to sex work, Canada's Indian Act set the legal framework that further entrenched and rolled out the erosion of Indigenous sovereignty. Hunt argues colonially imposed gender and racial logics worked as a constitutive part of the Act: “The Indian Act comprises colonial ideas about Indians, including racist and sexist stereotypes and ideologies, beginning with the beliefs that Indigenous peoples are inferior to Europeans and that women are inferior to men” (p. 85). She traces this colonial racial and gender logic to geographical imaginations of the Indigenous' lands as available to “seizure, settlement and development” that pivot on Orientalist renderings of Indigenous peoples as savages and Indigenous women “as sexually licentious savages or beasts of burden” (pp. 85–86). Aileen Moreton-Robinson (2015) brings into this formulation an understanding of how race operates in the appropriation of Indigenous land and sovereignty. She explains that settler states operationalize patriarchal white sovereignty by constructing the nation as a white possession. I thus argue, liberal formulations like Canada's policy of multiculturalism extend and reify such racial and colonial logics. As Jennifer Simpson, Carl James and Johnny Mack write about multiculturalism's role in colonialism: “The primary work of multiculturalism is to systematically deny, reject, and minimize the need for an anti-colonial approach” (Simpson, James & Mack, 2011: 287). Multiculturalism itself is thus a product of colonialism. Multiculturalism as a policy and ideology, therefore, folds into what Sarah Hunt (2014) has termed “colonialscapes.” A colonialscape signals the ways in which the settler state and ongoing violences against Indigenous peoples and communities become normalized. Or as Hunt puts it, colonialscapes are “a way of seeing that naturalizes the relations of domination and dehumanization inherent in colonial relations” (p. 7).

Pageants in Canada can, accordingly, be read as sites of power and contestation, wherein the gendered, racialized, and sexual subjectivities of Filipinas materialize in relation to colonial notions of a nation. I suggest that settler colonial pasts and presents find their way into the pageants in Vancouver through the specific gender and sexual performances that help make the Filipino/a legible to multicultural impulses thereby normalizing and naturalizing the legitimacy of the liberal settler state and white settler imaginaries.

Pageantry with a purpose

Community organized pageants are typically put together by local Filipino organizations. Mostly members of the local community attend them. While they are organized in different ways, and under different themes, common elements run through the pageants. The ones that I attended, whether straight forward beauty contests or Philippine-inspired religious pageants, aim to raise funds or support for charitable organizations and purposes in the Philippines and Canada. The pageants all hope to showcase certain Filipino/a cultural traditions, and all seek to achieve these efforts through a festive event.

While festive in nature and feel, the labor of producing proper pageant participants is taken seriously. Most people involved in hosting and organizing community pageants agree that a proper pageant participant must be trained. The successful ones, the ones who stand out to the judges and audience, possess seemingly innate qualities that must be harnessed. More specifically, pageant participants are expected to possess “Filipina-ness,” an innate quality that can be honed and that suggests a complicated relationship between beauty and nation. In vetting the teenage and young women for her pageant, Imelda,¹⁴ who has been organizing pageants for a community organization since the 1980s, explains:

[…] I would like to know that they still know their grandfather and grandmother. I always ask if they still have a grandpa or grandma, 'Do you make mano, mano – mano po,'¹⁵ and they say, 'Oh yes, po'. Our tradition, what we've been growing up with, I hope their mom teaches them the proper Filipino way – you know what I mean – I don't want to get rid of the Filipino way.

Holding on to this “Filipino way” when in Canada also implies a letting go. Kathleen introduces what I mean by a letting go:

Well, I think in the Philippines when you join [pageants], it’s like your focus is all there. And you’re willing to drop so many things just to make sure. Like if the parents know that their daughter has a chance, they’re not going to let her work.

Here [in Canada], no. Sometimes they join because they were asked to join. […] I think Canada is fast paced, let’s get it done, and here the focus is different. If you can do something for humanity, if you can contribute, if you can raise funds for charity, you’re doing something. It’s more your purpose.

Note the shift in purpose that Kathleen points to in the orientation of pageants when repurposed in Canada. In Kathleen's estimation, one joins a pageant to “do something for humanity.”

In the Philippines, Fanella Cannell (1999) explains the history of beauty pageants can be traced back to the Spanish colonial period wherein wealthy families enrolled their daughters in pageants in the hopes that, by winning a title, the family could secure advantageous marriage arrangements. In Cannell's ethnographic study of Bicolanos, she notes that pageants have since mutated to become what people in the community call “brains and beauty lang”¹⁶ contests. Cannell suggests pageants now align with American ideals of merit and individual self-worth. She argues that contemporary pageants in the community are playful imitations of the West in general and America in particular. Cannell remarks on the amount of labor and resources families and communities invest in enrolling their daughters into pageants, not for the possibility of marriage (as in Spanish colonial times), but to showcase their families' proximity to American ideals. While following Cannell's logic, I suggest that the pageant as a performance of “democratic civic sensibility” is taken up slightly differently ways in Canada. While still relying on the tropes of merit and individual self-worth, the pageant in a Canadian context becomes a vehicle or platform for a different set of aspirations that, while still tied to Western values and standards, is more closely scripted to liberal notions of multiculturalism and humanitarism associated with normative Canadian values.

Joyce who organizes a pageant in Vancouver as part of her organization's annual festival expounds on the purpose of her pageant:

I just don't want them to join just because or just to have fun. I want them to have a purpose because our association has a purpose. I want them to be the ambassador of our association. We have a cause, we're a charitable organization, this is not just for fun. So you have to have your responsibility when you win, you are responsible to this kind of cause.

This sense of responsibility is not unlike how those involved with pageants in the Philippines describe the ways in which the responsibilities of family, community, and nation intersect at the site of the pageant. While there are diverse reasons behind different families' efforts to encourage their daughters to join pageants in the Philippines, Kathleen explains of one:

In the Philippines, [they] join a beauty contest because[…] it’s status and eventually, they might become an actress, […] a model. The Philippines is a poor country, and so people capitalize on inborn resources. If you’re beautiful, okay, there’s your treasure chest. People will say oh don’t worry, you’re poor, you plow the field, you have a beautiful daughter, that will save you.

Riffing on Kathleen's thoughts about the promise of beauty's upward mobility in the Philippines and the Filipina's responsibility to family and community, I suggest there is a reorientation in the context of Canada, the pageant becomes entangled with another set of racial, gender, and sexual logics. In other words, the Filipina becomes invested in colonial and racialized narratives rooted in Canada's colonial and capitalist foundations. We, as Bonita Lawrence and Enakshi Dua (2005) have argued, are “[m]arginalized by a white settler nationalist project, as citizens,” while we are “nonetheless invited to take part in ongoing colonialism” (p. 133). The turn to a cause or charitable purpose, as Joyce explains, signals this shift. It signals an alignment with the benevolent and peacemaker myth pervasive in Canadian liberal and settler colonial imaginaries (see e.g. Barker, 2009). Aileen Moreton-Robinson (2011) writes of how notions of virtue lay the planks for settler nations like Canada, New Zealand, and the United States. On this moral high ground, settler states work to rationalize, “reproduc[e] and reaffirm[ing] the state’s ownership, control and domination,” wherein “[t]he possessive logic of patriarchal white sovereignty is compelled to deny and refuse what it cannot own – the sovereignty of the Indigenous other” (p. 647). As non-Indigenous and non-Black racialized bodies in Canada, Filipino/as are invited by the settler state to labor in Canada as migrant workers and sometimes as citizens.¹⁷ In this sense, we are invited to take part in the making of Canada. As Hunt (2014) explains, Canada has come and continues to rely on a naturalized version of itself made material through the what she calls “colonialscapes.” A material and imaginary landscape founded on the deeply colonial-spatial configurations of terra nullius, the frontier, and Indian reserves, Hunt writes that:

Colonialscapes, then, might be understood as representations of the space now called ‘Canada’, which perpetuate and manifest particular (colonial) expressions of power. Such representations take not only visual forms (such as maps, paintings or photographs of ‘Indians) but also textual (legal) forms within which western ontologies of space, race, gender and power are embedded. Just as landscapes appear to create a complete view of a particular space, colonialscapes create the appearance that a colonial spatio-legal perspective of ‘Canada’ is somehow ‘true’. (Hunt, 2014: 72)

With the Canadian state's invitation to work and live in Canada then, coupled with a saturation in western ontologies bound up in various western colonial projects in the Philippines, I understand that the Filipina/o in Canada is reoriented to become invested in Canada and the colonialscapes and moral high ground it rests upon. More specifically, the pageant helps the Filipina/o perform and conform to the white heteropatriarchal moorings of and in liberal multiculturalism. As critical race theorists such as Himani Bannerji (2000) have pointed out, narratives of the Canadian nation are constructed around the notion of “the two founding nations” or “two solitudes” – English and French Canada. Bannerji argues that the Canadian state has turned to “…official multiculturalism for ways to manage a colonial history, an imperialist present, and a convoluted liberal democracy” (p. 10).

In the specific context of Greater Vancouver, Indigenous nations and communities were systematically removed from their traditional lands to make way for industrial-driven settler forms of urbanization (Harris, 2004). In a project that brought together immigrants in Vancouver with local Indigenous peoples, a summary of the project details how Elder Larry Grant shared how the Musqueam had lived continuously in the Musqueam village for over 4000 years, speaking of “how with colonization, the Musqueam 'Indian reserve' was created and likened it to a minimum security internment camp” (Suleman, 2011: 50). In the same document, Delbert Guerin, an Elder of the Musqueam Nation, explains how anti-Indigenous racism links into the theft of their lands with settlement sharing:

The racism also manifests in the form of First Nations people being told that they get everything for free from various governments. I still hear comments from people about how we get everything for free […]. [T]hose who have come to these shores who have taken the land for “free” and not dealt with the issue of First Nations land claims – claims which continue unresolved. (as quoted in Suleman, 2011: 22)

The historical and ongoing dispossession of, violences against, and resistance of Indigenous peoples is the context that the Filipina who pageants in Vancouver is now situated. In this colonialscape, liberal multiculturalism shapes the narratives around Indigeneity and immigrants. Deborah Jacobs from Xwemelch’stn (also known as the Capilano section of North Vancouver) explains:

Actually it’s fascinating historically if you want to look at how immigrant communities have been co-opted in the process of actually being part of this myth in terms of non-recognition or believing that they have a right to lands and other rights. (as quoted in Suleman, 2011: 26)

Here, Jacobs points out how recent immigrants become enrolled in perpetuating the settler underpinnings of the foundation and formation of Canada. While the project report gives multiple accounts of how Indigenous participants in the project believe that recent immigrants and Indigenous peoples share common experiences of racism, the implication of recently arrived and racialized immigrants in the settler colonial project remains unresolved.

In this context, multiculturalism enables the Canadian state to transcend messy and specific contradictions involved in the power-laden processes of colonization, white supremacy, and patriarchy entailed in the making of the Canadian nation. Lawrence and Dua (2005) detail the dangers of submitting to the ideology and politics of multiculturalism in Canada to caution immigrants of color's complicity with ongoing settler colonialism. They argue that as a consequence of a tendency to conflate decolonization and anti-racist politics, decolonization has been effectively decentered and reframed as a project for special interest groups in a liberal-pluralist framework. In other words, instead of coming to terms with the ways in which the dispossession of Indigenous lands and self-determining authority organize relations in Canada, Lawrence and Dua suggest liberal multicultural politics render Indigenous peoples as a special interest group effectively side-stepping questions of nation and sovereignty. Being attentive to the pervasiveness of liberal multicultural logics, I suggest that the pageant re-performed in Canada cannot help but be repurposed to conform to these logics. Robert Diaz (2016) makes a similar argument in his analysis of the Toronto-based Miss Gay Philippines Canada pageant. He puts forward that as diasporic subjects, Filipina/os queer the racializing mechanisms built into settler colonialism vis-à-vis multiculturalism at queer pageants and through artwork and performance. Building on the work of Diaz, I likewise situate Filipina/os who pageant in Canada within the nation's dominant racial logics that undergird ongoing colonialisms. I make the point that with an eye to how gender, race, and sexuality work through and with spatial processes, the nuances of colonial regimes of power can be traced at different scales.

The scale I have focused on in this section is rooted in the settler colonial narrative of settlement and multiculturalism. It is a spatial narrative that rests on a colonialspace as theorized by Hunt (2014). By performing multicultural and liberal settler moralities at pageants, I suggest the Filipina/o as a racialized laborer and immigrant in Canada in general, and in Greater Vancouver in particular, becomes entangled in the colonialscape. To paraphrase Deborah Jacobs from Xwemelch’stn in North Vancouver who spoke of immigrants in general in Vancouver, we are active in our co-optation to be “part of this myth” and to come to “believe that we have a right to lands.” This entanglement can be seen in the pageants' efforts to be align with liberal settler multicultural ideals that inform what a proper Canadian citizen ought to be or aspire to be. Consider how Joyce explains the ways in which the pageant changes between the Philippines and Canada:

It's not just… I think I want them to know that it's not about the beauty, we want to show to them what we are really, like our – not just the culture – but our own values, our own characteristics, how we are different from other groups like Filipino groups. […] I find Canada is more, because we're multicultural, we have a different way of showing people what we are.

Kyle, a stylist and frequent judge at community pageants adds:

I think for that culturally, and I think it’s also here in Canada, it’s a little bit different because the girls join in. It’s not so much for the fame or the fortune, but I think it’s being able to serve. I think it’s allowing, it’s for them it’s a platform, you know, it’s the title for them to really have, like for their own self, what do you call that, like a personal growth.

Both Joyce and Kyle draw attention to the pageant as a platform. For Kyle, the platform is a springboard to liberal forms of self-improvement; for Joyce, the platform is a stage for showcasing values that are readily legible. Both underscore the need to reorient the pageant as a platform to multicultural desires in ways that suggest attempts to demonstrate the community's attachment to Canada.

Training sexualities: Walking the thin line between “slutty” and “classy”

In a write-up introducing a community pageant held in the 1990s, the community organization that put on the affair explains:

In the Philippines, the beauty pageant is not an exploitation of beauty nor of the female gender. It is a part of our heritage – such as the “reynas”¹⁸ during town fiestas and the “sagalas”¹⁹ during May festivals. It is part of our culture – such that it involves the whole family of the participants.²⁰

Pronouncements defending pageants against labels of exploitation percolate through much of how beauty pageant organizers and participants talk about the continuing popularity among Filipinos of the pageant form despite its less revered status in Canada. When asked why the organization thought it necessary to make their stance against the “exploitation of beauty” and the “exploitation of the female gender” known in their printed program, Imelda explained that they felt “Canadians” were not familiar with the significance of pageants in the cultural logics of the Filipino/a. Hence, in order to defend pageants, organizers used the purpose of preserving heritage and family to make the practice legible to “Canadians.” The move to family and heritage evades the question of gender exploitation while reifying the heteronormative family. The feminization of Filipino transnational labor migration is well documented and theorized. The neoliberal capitalist restructuring of the Canadian political economy has ushered in what Rhacel Parreñas (2005) calls a “care crisis.” The care crisis in economies of the Global North refers to the devolution of social responsibilities such as child care and care for the sick and elderly to the private household. This neoliberal model of “self-care” and cutbacks to the public care systems in Canada privatize health- and child-care programs. The Filipina domestic worker has proven to be a cost-effective solution for affluent families in need of these types of care. There are normative stereotypes of Filipinas in Canada that have made them particularly desirable for care work (see e.g. Pratt, 1997). Namely, the racialized, gendered, and sexualized rendering of the Filipina as: inherently docile, dutifully caring, and generally revering of the heteronormative family. In other words, the Filipina in Canada is understood as being a fit mother, albeit, a mother to someone else's children. It is important to grasp the particular ways that the Filipina women is legible in Canada through the care work she performs as this rendering informs dominant expectations of pageant performances. This dance, between appeasing a “Canadian” public and conforming to proper heteronormativity, moves to the tune of respectability. Kathleen explains:

[…] You are a beauty queen, you should show that you’re really feminine. They can really see your assets, but usually you show that in how you walk; you have to be queenly, not sexually, you are not attracting men. […] You got to be respectable, respectable. You’re a beauty queen. […] For me, I feel like an ideal Filipina should be smart, okay. You’re not cheap, you’re smart, you’re respectable, and you have good bearing.

In this balancing act, the Filipina balances hetero-femininity and desirability along a fine line held up by a particular notion of respectability. The ideal Filipina beauty “should be smart and have a good bearing” not “cheap” all while showing her “assets” in the way she walks, holds her body, and demonstrates her intelligence. Here, “assets” take on a double meaning. Tessie, a former pageant contestant and winner both in the Philippines and Canada, explains:

They're looking for a girl with a nice “asset“. […] The judges look at the whole package and shapely glutes are included. […] Some of the judges and organizers commented on my “assets.”

While showing one's “assets” in the way she walks and in her composure, Kathleen reminds us that at the same time as the contestant is being judged on bodily appearance and disposition, she is simultaneously being read for her moral orientation. Here, I am interested in how proper feminine heterosexuality is pinned to the idea of respectability. In particular, I focus on the scale of the body in relation to colonial spatial and racial narratives around proper feminine sexualities, that as Indigenous scholars and communities have pointed out, are deeply tied to questions of land, territory, and sovereignty. Audrey Siegl (2015), for example, shares this link between racialized and sexualized colonial narratives, Indigenous women, and land.

Siegl intertwines the strength and vulnerability of Indigenous women with everyday violences. Through Siegl's multi-layered and multi-scalar analysis, she demonstrates how racialized, gendered, and sexualized narratives pin Indigenous women to indecency and improperness. This becomes the persistent tactic of colonialism: to dehumanize Indigenous women. Here, Siegl draws attention to ongoing efforts to “eradicate [her] people from this land to gain what they call resources,” and its intimate link to the production of Indigenous women as inherently indecent and immoral. As Indigenous scholars (see Hunt, 2015; Lawrence, 2003; Maracle, 1996; Wilson, 2008) explain, Indigenous women as non-human or inherently degenerate is naturalized, normalized, and formative of settler colonial states and societies. Sarah de Leeuw (2016) demonstrates how legislation like the Indian Act and the common state practice of child apprehension are forms of the intimate and “slow violence.” Through the regulation of Indigenous women's bodies and the apprehension of their children, de Leeuw asserts that: “Through children and breeding, Indigenous identity as a recognized characteristic tied with state remuneration and responsibility is stripped – perhaps even more aggressively than land and territory is stripped of resources” (p. 17). The pervasive and everyday ways that the social reproduction of Indigenous peoples and lifeways are disciplined through Indigenous women's bodies suggests then that Indigenous women are unfit to be mothers. Siegl and de Leeuw point to the overlapping vectors of power that Indigenous women navigate, persist in, and push back against.

I suggest that these gendered, racialized, and sexualized narratives of Indigenous women are entangled in the contemporary pageant discourses unfolding on these territories. While Filipina women in Canada are legible as subjects fit to mother other people's children because of the care work they perform as domestic laborers, Indigenous women are rendered as subjects incapable of mothering because of the internal workings and logics the settler colonial project of elimination and dispossession. Post-colonial feminists have argued that the policing of sexualities fueled by anxieties over the constitution and preservation of the bourgeois subject are fundamental to colonial projects. The workings of colonial categories premised on moral awareness and bodily disposition is evident in the ways that the Filipina must walk a fine line between respectable comportment and physical desirability. Jessa makes clear how physiological propensities and moral sensibilities merge in the making of bodies at the pageant:

I mean there is a thin line between being slutty and being sexy or classy – sexy but classy. Because there's women who look really trashy and slutty whatever she wears even she's just wearing pants and a jacket. But if she's slutty, she will be slutty because that's how she becomes when she wears a certain type of clothes. Maybe that's her personality.

Elena adds more details to this line of defense against ideas of gendered exploitation:

Alright – it's the way people look at it. Some will say they are exploiting women because they wear these swimsuits or now bikinis, two-piece, but exploiting women – if you say that to a pageant, it's not about exploiting women […]. […] [I]t is beauty for a cause. […] If you call that exploitation then no because if these title holders are helping charitable projects, then, I don't think it's exploitation. I'll tell you what exploitation is – exploitation is not doing anything when there's teenagers being exploited on the street, they're not getting any help on the streets using drugs – that's exploitation. They are not getting the proper help. In beauty pageants, it's very healthy, mainly because we're giving, we're showing the beauty of the women. […]

Note that Elena takes pains to explain that the sexuality of bodies at the pageant is respectable because it is a sexuality used for the purposes of “charitable projects.” At the pageant then, the body and morality are conflated in a bodily ethical matrix that marks certain bodies as suitable beauties and others as incongruous with the purpose of the pageant where sexuality plays a key role in the marking of immoral and moral bodies. More precisely, the anxieties that revolve around the appropriate sexual subject help to define what Kathleen calls a “thin line between being slutty and being sexy or classy.” One way in which proper gendered and racialized sexualities are sought in the pageant's reorientation in Canada follows a gendered self-improvement narrative that revolves around motherhood and aspirations to be proper Canadian citizens. Nenita, for example, shares how she imagines pageants performed in Canada ought to be when I ask her what sort of pageant she wants to organize next in the Filipino/a community in Vancouver:

I like the idea of moms – something that will highlight parenting. Like the question would be 'What is the most important role of a mother?' Same format, like you will be crowned […] But not anymore the beauty pageant as we know it, like that you will be judged according to how tall you are, how slender you are, but something deeper. […] I think the primary one would be just to get everyone together to a beauty pageant. And maybe the values of parenting will be like a take-home bonus.

Nenita shares her idea of a pageant for mothers after reflecting on the difficulty of parenting in Canada. She tells me: “[T]he mom doesn't have much influence anymore and I see that happening. I worked at Dairy Queen and I had a mostly Filipino staff and their families are like that. It's difficult. You'll be surprised […] – poverty is an issue now […] some kids drop out because they have to find work.” It is in these structurally induced conditions as racialized and feminized laborers that the pageant is re-scripted to promote what is understood as “Canadian values” of self-improvement. Kyle elaborates:

Because I think sometimes we Filipinos, we have the tendency to be like oh it’s okay to have the nanny jobs or it’s okay to have these low paying jobs. No it’s not okay. […]. Yeah it’s okay to be this and to be that. Canada has the platform, it really gives you that sense of opportunity.

[…] But we’re very creative people. We’re an island people. […] So I find that it’s a problem when you undervalue yourself and what you can do. I really do, I really feel that. You can’t just be a nanny. You can’t just be working at McDonalds. You can be better at something that you do. You have to own it, you have to feel that.

As theorized elsewhere (see e.g. Kelly, 2012; Pratt, 2012), the conflation of individual industriousness with Canadian values is not uncommon among Filipino/as, as Canada is seen as a nation of equal opportunity based on citizenship rights. To paraphrase Kyle, owning it, and feeling that aspiration to succeed in Canada (i.e. to be better than low-wage laborers or to be better parents) is part of how pageants are re-scripted in Canada. For some of the women involved in pageants this means that feminine sexualized be carefully attended to. With these efforts to manage proper Filipina sexuality at the pageant, I see a certain politics at play. Recall, the fine line between respectability and cheapness Kathleen evokes when thinking about the forms of proper sexualities allowed at the pageant. The anxiety in this framing revolves around safeguarding the proper Filipina heterosexual feminine subject. The degenerate other is understood in “cheap” or “slutty” sexual terms. This slip into sexual disgracefulness and wantonness is not far for the Filipina in Canada. Geraldine Pratt (1997) has already documented how Filipina live-in caregivers self-regulate and manage their sexualities in the private homes of their employers and in community public spaces against a dominant narrative that posits the Filipino live-in domestic workers as “husband-stealers.” To distance their pageants and participants from such degenerate others pains are taken to ensure this line is maintained.

This line and politics of respectability is given structure and power by the white heteropatriarchal logics fundamental to Canada as a settler colonial and capitalist formation. Daniel Justice et al. (2010) argue that in the making of settler colonial states of Canada and the United States, Indigenous peoples were made into populations characterized as subjects reeking of unnatural desires. The perverse sexualization of Indigenous bodies is accompanied by colonial gender regimes. The twinned distortion of Indigenous genders and sexualities is keenly articulated by Stó:lō scholar Lee Maracle who reflects:

I responded, like so many other women, as a person without sexuality. Native women do not even like the words “women's liberation” and even now it burns my back. How could I resist the reduction of women to sex objects when I had not been considered sexually desirable, even as an object? We have been the object of sexual release for white males whose appetites are too gross for their own delicate women. (1996: 16)

While hypersexualized by the continuing settler colonial project that conflates Indigenous women's bodies with notions of easily accessible land (Finley, 2011; Justice et al., 2010), Maracle points to the utter insufferability of the Indigenous woman according to white heteropatriarchy. The Indigenous woman then in the settler colonial context of Canada is not only the degenerate and perverse counterpart to proper white feminine sexuality, but also utterly void of feeling and desire. In this rendering, feminized Indigenous bodies are always-and-already violable and upon whom extreme violence is justifiable. While not at the forefront nor directly articulated by Filipino/as who pageant on the unceded territories of the Coast Salish peoples, the Indigenous woman is nevertheless ubiquitous. She is ubiquitous as part of how past and present-day colonial violences are normalized in a colonial landscape within which Filipino/as perform our pageants in Vancouver. Our performances of proper heteronormative femininities are necessarily wrapped up in the work of settler colonialism. In such efforts to highlight proper ways racialized Canadian citizens should be and heteronormative relationships, the dominant narrative of the Indigenous woman as Canada's counter-pole to proper white feminine heteronormativity looms in the ways that the pageant is repurposed and re-scripted in Canada to service multicultural logics. As Chris Finley (2011) points out the work of white heteropatriarchy in a settler colonial context is not distributed evenly across bodies. Instead:

The logics governing Native bodies are the same logics governing non-Native people. Yet the logic of colonialism gives the colonizers power, while Native people are more adversely affected by these colonizing logics. The colonizers may feel bad, stressed, and repressed by self-disciplining logics of normalizing sexuality, but Native people are systematically targeted for death and erasure by these same discourses. (Finley, 2011: 34)

The politics of representativity at play at pageants is a politics that necessarily negotiates these gender, racial, and sexual logics ingrained in the fabric of Canada's multicultural mosaic. When organizers like Elena explain that they manage the feminine sexualities of the Filipina pageant participant to showcase the health and beauty of the Filipina, or when organizers like those of the first Filipino pageants in Vancouver found it necessary to highlight the pageant as part of Filipino culture to be legible to a presupposed “Canadian” audience, the question of what racialized bodies and sexual feminine subjectivities are understood as proper are traversed along dominant racial and gender configurations in Canada. In other words, the particularities of white settler colonial gender, racial, and sexual disciplining work through liberal notions of multiculturalism in the case of the Filipina who pageants.

Conclusion

This paper discusses the ways performances at pageants change over space and scales. I analyze how Filipina/os who participate in community-organized pageants negotiate dominant racialized, gendered, classed, and sexualized paradigms. I argue that these negotiations play out in migration from the Philippines to Canada as white heteropatriarchal logics enmeshed in the settler colonial project of Canada make grooves into the ways in which Filipino gendered sexualities come to be in Canada. By tracing the repurposing of pageant performances to align with the proper multicultural sexually normative subject, the paper adds nuance to the ways in which Filipinos contend with various forms of present-day colonialisms. 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 Filipino women’s feminine heterosexuality is made legible by liberal scripts designed for racialized immigrants in the white settler colonial context of Canada. I show how these logics simultaneously frame Indigenous women as inherently deviant while securing the racialized respectability of Filipina femininity. Thus, the paper sets in motion questions of how intersections of power are shaped by contemporary forms of colonialism. Ultimately, I maintain that attention to the work of geography and the spatial processes undergirding how immigrants of color are brought into being in gendered, racialized, and sexualized ways helps to clarify our place, and hence responsibility, in settler colonial relations.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Thank you to Sarah de Leeuw, Geraldine Pratt, and Dada Docot for insights on earlier versions of this manuscript. Thank you to the editor and anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful commentaries and suggestions. I am deeply grateful to the people and research participants who generously shared their knowledge, experiences, and expertise on pageants with me.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

May Farrales is a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Health Arts Research Centre and ECHO project at the University of Northern British Columbia in Prince George, the traditional territory of the Lheidli T'enneh people. Her research interests are nested in understanding how different forms of colonialism work over time and space. May finished her PhD in Geography at the University of British in 2017.

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