Recuperating Rebellion: Rewriting Revolting Women in(to) Nineteenth-Century Cuba and the Philippines

Abstract

Using the late nineteenth-century independence movements as points of departure, this article uses a transoceanic approach to explore women’s revolutionary history in Cuba and the Philippines. Using María Lugones’ model of the modern/colonial gender system as a frame, I trace how women’s revolutionary contributions became co-opted by male revolutionary figures in service to their own aims, rewriting the “revolting women” (in the rebellious sense) so that they were less “revolting” (viz. causing disgust) to nationalizing discourses. I argue that these national heroes, such as José Martí in Cuba and José Rizal in the Philippines, contributed to the minimization and even erasure of women’s revolutionary participation and knowledge production through these rewritings. This allowed the coloniality of power to endure well into the new world order via reframing of a woman’s place—or lack thereof—in the nationalizing project. To unearth the complexities of this minimized history, I dig deeper into these canonical literatures to find women’s voices in letters, speeches, and oral histories to show how women sympathetic to the revolution actively conceptualized nation and citizenship through writing, protest, and action. As the field of Philippine-Hispanic Studies expands, this article aims to begin a conversation where we may confront and re-evaluate the privilege assigned to male national heroes’ discourses in both Hispanic regions and the Philippines, Kristina A. Escondo Otterbein University, Ohio