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Women & Performance: a journal of

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Your terno's draggin’: Fashioning

Filipino American performance
a
Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns
a
Asian American Studies, University of California, Los Angeles

Available online: 14 Dec 2011

To cite this article: Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns (2011): Your terno's draggin’: Fashioning Filipino
American performance, Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, 21:2, 199-217

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 Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory
Vol. 21, No. 2, July 2011, 199–217

Your terno’s draggin’: Fashioning Filipino American performance

Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns*

Asian American Studies, University of California, Los Angeles

In this essay, I explore the semiotics of the terno, the Philippine national
dress, creatively interpreted by diasporic artists as a dense metaphor for the
proper and improper Filipina. These artistic deployments of the terno
lay bare unquestioned notions of Filipina femininity and nationalism to be
fabrications of colonialism, militarization and globalization. The reconfi-
gurations of the infamous ‘‘butterfly dress’’ by multimedia artist groups
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Barrionics and Mail Order Brides (M.O.B.) take center stage in my

discussion. The genealogy of the terno I focus on in this article emphasizes
alteration and transformation, to resist facile binaries of the nation as
traditional and the diaspora as the site of modern and innovative
modifications. My historicization of the terno underscores it as an emergent
form in which to situate the uses of the terno in Filipino American
performance projects within the history of the terno itself. Specifically,
the essay focuses on the defamiliarization of feminine constructs that
operate both in the nation and the diaspora, as well as to foreground the
imbrications of colonial histories and our neocolonial present in the current
global circulation of Filipina bodies. I highlight how these artists in the
Filipino diaspora spectacularize the inchoateness of categories of gender,
race and sexuality. Their performance works delink the dressee from
the dress, the terno from the Filipina, the dress from the girl and the boy,
the dress from the straight and from the queer, the dress from the diasporic
and from the national. Within such figurations, the terno emerges as
an overprivileged icon – of ideal womanhood and of the mother nation –
whose iconicity is re-routed through bodies that do not belong.
Keywords: Filipino American performance; fashion and national costume;
dressing

‘‘We call it butterfly dress because after independence from the US in 1947, Filipino
women could really fly.’’
– Paola Isabella Rocha Tornito, Puerto Rican–Filipina ‘‘socialite’’1

‘‘Dresses are props in racialized constructions of identities.’’

– Laura Peréz, ‘‘Writing on the Social Body: Dresses and Body Ornamentation in
Contemporary Chicana Art’’
It is an evening of performances by and about Filipina American lives. In a one-act
performance entitled de blues, performed at Bindlestiff Studio in San Francisco,

*Email: lmburns@ucla.edu

ISSN 0740–770X print/ISSN 1748–5819 online

ß 2011 Women & Performance Project Inc.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0740770X.2011.607597
http://www.tandfonline.com
 200 L.M.S.P. Burns

California, a woman in her 30s comes onto the stage, half-clad in a terno, the
distinguished national dress for women in the Philippines.2 The dress drags on the
floor, with its infamous ‘‘butterfly’’ sleeves, typically stiff, remaining limp on
the woman’s shoulders. An argument ensues between the young woman and her
mother. We soon learn that the occasion for the evening is the daughter’s second
debut – a ritual designed to introduce to society young Filipinas who are of
marriageable status. The ‘‘repeat’’ debutante no longer fits in her terno, much to her
mother’s chagrin. The first cotillion did not yield a husband and thus the need for a
second attempt. Her mother insists that her daughter dress herself in this national
vesture, the only feasible attire for a ritual of passage announcing a young woman’s
formal (re)entry into society. The mother’s determination to find a suitable escort
for her daughter underscores the function of this coming-of-age ritual in upholding
the strictures of hetero-normativity. In this struggle between mother and daughter,
the terno becomes instead a visible marker of contestation. Even as the debutante’s
body accedes to the performative stature of the dress, it remains stubbornly resistant,
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interrupting the prescribed script of the terno’s grandness.

In this performance, the physical comedy of actress Bernadette Sibayan
Rosquites enlivens the contrast between the regal terno and the ageing debutante.
Rosquites performs her character as falling out of the seams of the terno, constantly
fidgeting and uncomfortable in the formal dress. While the mother pontificates on
the importance of the occasion, the debutante rolls her eyes and tugs on her dress,
and drolly responds: ‘‘The cotillion is one of the ‘‘‘three evils of the Pilipino
culture’,’’ along with ‘‘‘Capitalism and Catholicism’.’’ The over-the-hill debutante is
literally unable to fit into the terno, and figuratively unable to live up to what the
terno, in this instantiation, symbolizes – a highly feminized, demure, marriageable,
and upper-class Filipina. Through parody, de blues critiques the institution of the
cotillion as a patriarchal ritual practice naturalized as a benign cultural tradition of
becoming a woman. It puts on comedic display Filipino American racialization
within gendered and classed structures, normalized through social practices such as
the debut, and markers such as the terno.3
The appearance of the terno in this evening of performance works focusing on
Filipina identity is, in many ways, inevitable. After all, this national costume is the
vestimentary icon materializing the ideal Filipina. de blues’s depiction of a maturing
debutante, ill fit to wear the regal garb, is an exemplary mobilization of the terno by
contemporary artists in the Filipino diaspora. Read within the grain of its own
historical and cultural notoriety, the terno here is reinforced as a powerful sign,
foregrounding a contentious performance of gender and class stabilization through
its figuration of the multiple genealogies undergirding its evocation. In this essay,
I analyze how performance artists deploy the terno as a dense metaphor for the
proper and improper Filipina. Centralizing the terno as a costume metaphor and
as a literal ‘‘prop’’ of Filipinaness allows me to link performance to matters of
materiality. To put it another way, these performances require an engagement with
the material history of the terno, the process through which the terno came to assume
its lauded place in the nation. Michel Foucault’s well-rehearsed notion of genealogy
is useful here in its emphasis on variegated structures of emergence rather than on
 Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 201

fixed origins: ‘‘It opposes itself to the search for origins’’ (Foucault, 370). For
Foucault, a turn to genealogy is ‘‘to expose a body totally imprinted by history and
the process of history’s destruction of the body’’ (376). Genealogy as a historical
concept provides a framework that attends to the historically mediated relationship
of the body with the dress. As in de blues, the wearer does not simply wear the dress,
nor is the dress simply worn by the wearer. Thus, Laura Pérez, in describing uses of
dress and body decoration in 1970s and the 1980s Chicana art, writes that dress
‘‘call[s] attention to both the body as social and to the social body that constitutes it
as such, specifically through gendered and racialized histories of dress, labor,
immigration . . .’’ (2002, 51). Multidisciplinary performance and visual arts such as de
blues, Barrionics does Barrioque (2003) and A Public Message Service about Your
Private Life ‘‘expose a body,’’ one enfolded in the terno, in multiple national
contexts. The genealogies of the terno I construct here emphasize concepts of
alteration and transformation, and resist facile binaries of the nation as traditional
and intact and the diaspora as a space of ‘‘undoing’’ and modernity. Instead, I read
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the terno as an emergent popular form whose deployments provide spaces of

immense possibility for performance artists in the Filipino diaspora.
In his theory of the American leisure class, Thorstein Veblen strictly demarcates
national costume from fashion, claiming that costume is ‘‘more static,’’ hence out-of-
style. The history of the terno could not be a more fitting antithesis to Veblen’s
declaration of national costume as ‘‘stable.’’ Veblen’s opinion of national dress as
‘‘stable costumes’’ extends to the people themselves: ‘‘. . . they belong in countries,
localities and times where the population, or at least the class to which the costume
in question belongs, is relatively homogenous, stable, and immobile’’ (2004, 281).
The historical and symbolic formation of the terno defies Veblen’s clear distinction
between fashion and national costume. Here, I trace the terno’s body politic within
Filipino American performances to explore how its alterations and transformations
establish it as a national object that is equally fluid in its form and unfixed in what it
symbolizes.
The modifications and reconstructions of the terno in Filipino American
performances are interjections into the larger discourse of US multicultural
liberalism, the Philippine nation’s multiple colonial histories, and the circulation of
Filipina bodies in contemporary globalization. In turn, these three foci also found
the ideological ground on which Filipino American subject and community
formation and Filipino American cultural works are subsumed. The works of the
artists I discuss here embody the inchoateness of categories of gender, race and
sexuality, denaturalizing the idea of a seamless relation between the national
costumes and the bodies that wear them. Within such figurations, the terno emerges
as an overprivileged icon – of ideal womanhood and of the mother nation – whose
iconicity is re-routed through bodies that do not belong.
Nationalism is always already invoked in discussions of national costumes.
This essay builds on scholarly works that approach the terno, its emergence, and its
representations within a history of colonialism and a consideration of the body as
site of regulation and resistance. Mina Roces’s writings on politics, dress and gender
in the Philippines argue that the tension between Western Dress and Filipino dress
 202 L.M.S.P. Burns

in twentieth-century Philippines ‘‘became not just semiotically charged but also

politically potent’’ (2005a, 1). For M. Roces, ‘‘focusing on the politics of dress,
and its gendered implications . . . show how the semiotics of dress was crucial to
political strategy’’ (2). Her discussion of the Filipina suffragette movement in the
early twentieth century highlights activist mobilization of the terno, whereby it
both upholds ‘‘traditional womanhood’’ and advocates for modern rights. Anna
Labrador moves the conversation towards a different rendition of history in her
essay on celebrations of the centenary in Philippine visual arts. She observes
‘‘a correlation between images from historical paintings and the promotion of
Philippine national costume’’ and ‘‘how contemporary artists found different ways
of evoking them’’ in their own interpretations of ‘‘national identity and anti-colonial
sentiments’’ (1999, 60–1). Labrador underscores (albeit briefly) the state policy that
required government workers to wear Filipiniana, as part of the national Centennial
celebration; she writes that this mandate ‘‘brought a process of negotiating a
standard form of dress’’ (59). Filipiniana, as Labrador points out, is a contradictory
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term for all things Filipino as it emphasizes more the foreign influences undergirding
on iconic costumes such as the terno. Alicia Arrı́zon traces this hybrid genealogy,
beginning with the terno’s former name – traje de mestiza. Arrı́zon identifies the
terno as emerging from a mestizo body, and proposes that ‘‘as it [the mestizo body]
developed in fashion, the body [through the clothing] is linked with privilege,
affirming the identity constructed by adopting the Hispanic legacy’’ (2006, 146).
Of particular interest here is an exploration of Filipina American engagement
with the terno as a complicated extension of, and an integral part of, the political
body of the Filipina. To ask, broadly put, what do these performances in the
US Filipino/a diaspora reveal about the social and political practice of donning the
terno? In attending to such questions from the diasporic stage, I reconsider the
terno’s singular nationalist value, and in doing so, defamiliarize hegemonic feminine
constructs that operate both in the nation and the diaspora. Within the work
of M.O.B. and Barrionics, the semiotics of the terno unfold layers of complex
signification, configuring notions of Filipina femininity and nationalism to be
fabrications of colonialism, militarization, and global migration patterns.
My meditations on the terno extend, in some measure, contemporary analyses of
vestimentary objects such as the turban or the veil. Controversies around the turban,
the veil, and the burqa rest on the (false) liminality of both the object of clothing and
the body that wears it. Such readings emphasize (and rightly so) the calculated
spectacularization of religion and affect made visible within mobilizations of these
objects. Jasbir Puar, for example, argues that the donning of the turban is a daily
practice whose insistent ordinariness works against its controversial/exceptional
status. By invoking the daily practice of donning the turban, of ‘‘selecting, tying,
binding, pinning, folding, winding what might seem to be endless . . . amounts of
cloth,’’ Puar emphasizes the repetitive nature of the ritual, while equally
foregrounding the inexorable difference that each repetition brings (2007, 192).4
For Puar, ‘‘the turban is part of the body’’ such that the separation between the
organic body and the inorganic object can no longer be sustained. My readings
of the terno in these performance works depart somewhat from Puar’s collapse of the
 Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 203

separation between the object and the body. Instead, I begin with a well-worn
observation: significance is produced through articulating a relationship between the
body and the clothing. Indeed, in the case of the terno, it is precisely the staged
distance between object and body that creates scripts of possibility for the wearers/
performers. Collapsing the organic body and inorganic object works less effectively
in the context of the Filipino body and the terno, as the stakes of the Filipino body
in a terno (in the nation and the US diaspora) are significantly different from that
of the Sikh body with a turban. That I locate the terno on the Filipino American
body allows me to articulate its signification beyond a one-nation-bound
performance of nationalism. Rather, my interest in the terno relies more on its
dissemination as a (falsely) stable, ordinary icon of Filipino/Filipina American
culture, and in understanding what is at stake for us to continue to do so. What
do we learn from a shift in focus from the terno’s naturalization to the compacted
colonial histories encrypted in the terno itself? In other words, how do the
refashionings of the terno within Filipino American performance corrupt, extend
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and/or even consolidate sedimented languages of colonialism and globalization?

Dressmaking/nation-making: butterfly dress and the Filipina woman

The terno was declared by legendary Filipino designer Joe Salazar (who made Imelda
Marcos infamous for her butterfly dresses) to be the ‘‘marker of Filipina identity.’’
It is known by other names: traje de mestiza, butterfly dress, Maria Clara. At times,
it is also referred to as baro’t saya, the name of its origins. Names and varying
references to the terno reflect its changing look. This Filipino dress was once a
four-part suit (terno is Filipino for ‘‘suit’’), which included the camisa (blouse with
sleeves), the saya (skirt), the panuelo (a cloth worn over the camisa), and the tapis
(worn over the skirt). Through the years and a series of innovations, it has emerged
as a one-piece dress, sometimes with detachable ‘‘butterfly’’ sleeves. One of the most
intriguing and identifiable features of the terno is its ‘‘butterfly sleeves.’’ A unique
variation on the long tulip-shape sleeves of the nineteenth century, the ‘‘butterfly
sleeve’’ is a metamorphosis that emerged in the 1920s from Pacita Longos’s complex
designs. The ‘‘starched tulle [babaharin]’’ is used to create the ‘‘butterfly sleeve’’
shape, which is ‘‘pleated at the shoulder line to create the impression of a butterfly
on tiptoe for a flight’’ (A. Roces 1978, 2539). Deposed first lady Imelda Romualdez
Marcos made popular the present-day starched ‘‘sculptured look’’ of the terno’s
butterfly sleeves; hence, it is also known as ‘‘Imelda sleeves’’ (Cruz 1982, 11). Its
detachable arm easily transforms the terno into a fitted evening gown.
Discussions on the modifications of the terno are most often preoccupied
with modernity and modernization, consistent with oft-cited fashion theorist Gilles
Lipovetsky’s (1994) observation of fashion as coextensive with modernity. The
genealogy of the terno, on the other hand, is more an amalgamation of indigenous
and colonial garb and its modifications over time are influenced by various cultural
trends and mores. For example, Ramon Valera’s one-piece terno creation in 1939
initially scandalized terno wearers, as this design seemed to destabilize an established
idiom of Filipina womanhood and propriety. During an earlier period, explains
 204 L.M.S.P. Burns

distinguished and internationally known high-couture designer Pitoy Moreno, the

‘‘incarnation’’ of the panuelo ‘‘the period’s [nineteenth-century] concession to
modesty – the camisa being low necked, and made of the flimsiest fabrics, the piña
and jusi.’’ The tapis appears to have a similar function: ‘‘the addition of the tapis
as overskirt was to keep the lower torso from showing through the sheerness of the
skirt material.’’5 In another account the panuelo’s use as a head covering, worn most
often in churches, reinforces this clothing and modesty; or in this case, piety:
Contrary to the observations of foreigners during the last century, the veil was not
an intrinsic part of the native dress. It was worn only to church, but since our
female ancestors were a pious lot, they were often seen with their heads covered. The
church-going colegiala of the 18th century wore a thick baro’t saya with long narrow
sleeves, a shroud-like veil and an estampita (saint’s picture) hanging from her neck to
deliver her from evil. By the 1750’s, the colegiala’s mother was wearing a large cape-like
pañuelo and a wide floor-length saya. (Pitoy Moreno, excerpted from Philippine
Costume [1995, www.filipinoheritage.com/costumes)
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Most significantly, the project of colonialism provided the condition for the
evolution of terno designs as a means to police the production of gender through
propriety. Colonial regimes regulated women’s subjectivity through dress codes that
controlled bodily movement. Codes of dressing and movement – pious, modest,
delicate (like a butterfly), graceful – have been naturalized as a characteristic of ideal
Filipina womanhood. What is now presumed to be a sign of nationalism is thus
ironically more a corrupt effect of colonialism.
Although the terno is an amalgamation of styles from various influences,
as described by Moreno and Cruz, its very name is derived from Spanish. The
terno naturalizes the Spanish colonial cultural residue as the authentic site of
‘‘Filipinaness.’’ This particular embracing of Spanish culture was a salient form of
political protest against Americanization in the early decades of the Philippine
Commonwealth. National artist Nick Joaquin is described as one of the leaders
of this movement. In his famous plays such as The Portrait of an Artist as a Filipino
and Tatarin, Joaquin strategically depicts the Spanish mestizo landed class as
redeemable and the true inheritors of the Philippine nation. In the context of
protesting Americans and sajonista (sajon is the Spanish term for Anglo-Saxon),
Arrı́zon’s point about ‘‘adopting Hispanic legacy’’ noted earlier is seen in a different
light. This act of Hispanic affiliation erases and dis-identifies with laboring bodies
of the servant class as it resists American occupation and influence.
Class formation further constitutes Filipina womanhood and shapes emerging
versions of the terno. Alfredo Roces, a leading historian of Filipiniana costumes,
writes: the terno
should be distinguished from such other Filipino dresses as the informal balintawak
and the patadyong. Lacking the terno’s svelte sophistication, these rural costumes are
worn mainly by barefoot dancers of the tinikling and by carabao-riding maidens in the
landscapes of Amorsolo. The terno, on the other hand, goes with the stately grace of the
rigodon de honor, flores de mayo processions, coronation nights and the Malacañang
Palace. (1978, 2536)
A. Roces makes the distinction between the various Filipina clothing, placing
a higher sartorial and social value on the terno, to be worn in places such as the
 Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 205

Malacañang Palace and at special occasions. The kinds of women who would wear
terno and those who would wear other native garbs is once again explained here
through movement, in particular, dances. Changes in the design of the terno itself are
at times made to differentiate between the upper- and lower-class Filipina women.
Whereas Pitoy Moreno, in the quotation earlier, explains the function of the tapis
in the language of propriety, another terno historian describes the tapis as
‘‘a garment worn by servants.’’ The discarding of the tapis is attributed to its
identification with women of a lower class, making it unnecessary and inappropriate
attire for upper class Filipinas. Indeed, if the tapis is a garment only useful
to servants, it is precisely irrelevant to those who would most likely be wearing the
terno and to where it would be worn (Philippine Terno, 2005).6
The terno’s place in politics may have been sealed during the Marcos regime, but
it played a relatively key role in democracy debates of the newly forming republic
during the early twentieth century, specifically in women’s participation within
the nation-building project. As noted earlier, Mina Roces’s writings on the politics of
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dressing highlight specific historical and political moments in which the terno was
woven into the social and national fabric. As it were, the terno took central stage in
one of women’s struggles to enact the most popular form of democracy – voting.
During the American colonial period, Filipina suffragists donned the terno while
advocating for equality in the workplace and political arena. Roces argues that the
‘‘panuelo activists’’7 fought for the rights of women and deployed the terno as a
political tactic by appealing to the nostalgia of ‘‘traditional Filipina womanhood’’
(M. Roces 2005b, 5). During this period, as the Philippine nation was negotiating
its entry into modernity, the figure of the ‘‘traditional Filipina’’ carried the burden of
nostalgia. Filipina suffragists’ understanding and manipulation of the semiotics
of the terno, at a critical historical moment, moved forward the rights of Filipinas.
In the 1970s, the Marcoses actively re-envisioned Philippine history through their
own lives (Rafael 2000), and made good use of the terno in these nation-remaking
efforts. The then-Philippine president/dictator Ferdinand Marcos and first lady
Imelda Romualdez Marcos popularized the terno and the barong tagalog. The terno,
for a particular generation, is almost synonymous with the deposed president’s wife.
Dressing played a role in what the Marcoses declared as the ‘‘New Society,’’ where
the terno and the barong tagalog was instrumental in fashioning the image of the
modern Filipino and democratic Philippines. First lady Imelda notoriously wore
the terno on all occasions and locations, hence she gained a nickname that sutures the
terno sleeves and her sense of power – ‘‘steel butterfly.’’8 Many have interpreted
the Marcos’s sartorial choices as part of a strategic self-fashioning of themselves as
pro-nationalists. Like the suffragists at the turn of the century, the former first
lady manipulates the cultural capital of the terno as a ‘‘bearer of tradition,’’ but for
entirely different ends. M. Roces argues that Imelda’s employment of the terno as a
‘‘construction of the feminine as ‘bearer of tradition’ was essential to her dual agenda
of legitimizing her husband’s authoritarian regime and her own access to power
via her husband.’’ Imelda’s attempts align her with the cultural capital of the terno
as a pro-nationalist symbol, even as the terno is consequently rejected by the masses.
As M. Roces writes: ‘‘by the 1980s, the terno was metonymy for Imelda Marcos
 206 L.M.S.P. Burns

rather than metaphor for the nation’’ (2005b, 12). Mrs Marcos tirelessly wore the
Philippine national dress, as an expression of Filipino pride. At the time of her trial
for racketeering charges in 1988, her image in a lavishly colored terno worn in
New York winter made a worldwide impact. Times Magazine reporters wrote:
‘‘She swept into U.S. district court in nothing less bewitching than a floor-length
turquoise gown, a silk-and-chiffon terno that is traditional Philippine wear’’
(Lacayo and Sachs 1988).
Early in the new millenium, the terno remains a continuing source of inspiration for
Philippine couture. The year 2003 was declared the ‘‘year of the terno’’ for the
Philippine couture industry (Mauricio, 2004). Fashion shows, such as the ‘‘Timeless
Terno,’’ and design competitions zealously promoted the ‘‘return and modernization’’
of the national dress. A series of efforts galvanized the terno as a metaphor of the
Philippine nation, and workers such as the bordadoras are synonymously constructed
as the weavers of cultural/national identity. Luli Arroyo, daughter of president Gloria
Macapagal Arroyo (2001–2010), and Bea Zobel Jr, arts patroness, top presidential
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aide, and a member of wealthy and powerful the Ayala clan, spearheaded this revival
effort. They also launched ‘‘Ternos for Twenty-one Competition: Taking the Terno to
the New Century,’’ a competition for fashion designers with the idea of a ‘‘modern
interpretation of the terno.’’9 Their terno revival project is a collaborative venture
involving the Metropolitan Museum of the Philippines. Within such elitist
collaborations, we see what Benedict Anderson has famously branded as ‘‘cacique
democracy’’ in its manifestation within matters of culture.
The recovery of the terno, as articulated in these popular cultural projects, hinges
on its modernization, in design and in function, and on a renewed commitment to the
makers of this national dress. The project leaders are moved to action through
their recognition of the potentialities of labor involved in the making of the terno.
This lengthy quotation from Bea Zobel Jr is an affective appeal, one that seeks
to ignite passion for the national dress and its return back into fashion. The plea
is partly organized around craftsmanship and the labor economy generated by the
garment’s production:
The terno was a form of art that produced livelihood and jobs for whole communities:
from the bordadoras to the seamstresses to the weavers of the fabric. More important,
the terno was one of the carriers of our history and identity. I felt more and more that
many Filipinos were losing touch with our roots and our sense of self was constantly
being undermined.
Our handicrafts were in the hands only of the elderly and our different national
costumes were being abandoned. Few women were wearing the terno. I was soon
screaming for help. Someone had to listen. We could not let the terno disappear with
our other national costumes. If some people could spend a lot on imported clothes,
we certainly could spend on ternos. (http://www.inq7.net/lif/2004/apr/26/lif_8-2.htm)
(Zobel, 2004)
Labor consciousness is layered on nationalist language; the recovery of the terno thus
embodies a work of art and an art of work. Scholarly discourse on fashion and
clothing can be catalogued under several categories: historical studies of clothing,
postmodern studies that speak to gender-bending or the epistemology of fashion, dress
as a battle ground for nationalist struggles, policing or regulating of gender and sexual
 Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 207

identities, globalization and dress, and materialist critiques of labor practices in the
clothing industry. In the quotation above, Zobel conflates nostalgia with tradition,
labor-practice consciousness, and national/ethnic identity. Zobel’s interventions on
the material histories of the terno are key reminders of the continued success of
commodity fetishism. Now more than ever, with the rise of ethno-chic and aggressive
appropriation of ethnic and traditional wear into everyday moda, there is a sense of
globality promoted through consumerism, while the laborers remain invisible.10
This brief history of the terno that stitches dress, politics and gender now
segues into interpretations of Filipina cultural constructs by diasporic feminist
performances. The invocation of the history of the terno and the politics of dressing
in the Philippines (although both topics are only partially laid out here) are critically
connected to diasporic alterations. Both diasporic and national modifications of the
terno negotiate an uneven relationship to the terno’s symbolic and materialization
of ideal Filipinaness, oscillating between reproduction and alteration. I now turn to
the works of Filipino American artists as they participate in this variegated narrative
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of the terno.

Alter(n)ations: Queer diasporic refashionings of Filipinaness

The works of multi- and interdisciplinary artists Barrionics and M.O.B. tailor the
terno to comment on Filipinaness as constructed in the liberal multicultural context
of the US and within the history of the Philippines as multiply colonized. Through
their use of drag as performance style, M.O.B. and Barrionics defamiliarize Filipina
femininity while also denaturalizing ethnic identity markers, using creative methods
such as contrast, juxtaposition, collage and other methods that orchestrate the
performers’ bodies, costumes, staging and props. The terno is reconstructed,
appearing as a single butterfly sleeve, not necessarily worn by a woman, and
contrasted more stridently with mod/punk-style haircuts, bouffant wigs, and bright
nail polish. While these performance projects engage with identity politics rooted in
the discourse of US multiculturalism, they equally disrupt images of Filipinas
overdetermined by varying historical legacies, specifically the construct of Filipina
femininity within the global circulation of Filipina bodies, and the cultural capital of
‘‘ethno-chic.’’ And as such, each performance labors, more specifically, as a critique
of the normalization of Filipina bodies as ‘‘servants of globalization’’ (Parreñas
2001), as well as hold suspect valorized discourses of hybridity and transculturation
as simply artistic processes that emerge in a fast-shrinking world.
Both M.O.B. and Barrionics are particularly attentive to the entanglements
of sexuality and performance through the modality of drag. In a preface to the
Journal of Homosexuality’s issue entitled ‘‘The Drag Queen Anthology,’’ Judith
Lorber writes:
Drag’s core elements are performance and parody. Drag exaggerates gendered dress and
mannerisms with enough little incongruities to show the ‘‘otherness’’ of the drag artist.
In the exaggeration lies the parody. . . .What is the joke in drag? Not that someone can
pass convincingly as a member of the opposite gender – transgenders and permanent
cross-dressers do not want to be unmasked. The joke in drag is to set up ‘femininity’ or
 208 L.M.S.P. Burns

‘masculinity’ as pure performance, as exaggerated gender display – and then to cut them
down as pretense after all. (2004, xxv)
Lorber’s emphasis on drag as performance is useful in my discussion of the works by
M.O.B. and Barrionics. Both M.O.B. and Barrionics use exaggeration and
incongruity as performance devices that comment on Filipinaness, femininity and
globalization. The terno and other Filipiniana costumes are juxtaposed against
bodies, other material objects, as well as against scenes that echo familiarity.
However, I am reluctant to fully surrender to Lorber’s easy linkage between parody
and drag. M.O.B. and Barrionics, for example, perform drag to enact their affection
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‘‘Barrionics does Barrioque’’. Johanna Poethig, Anne Perez, and Rico Reyes. Image courtesy
of Barrionics.
 Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 209

for the Philippine nation and display their pride as Filipinos. Drag as discussed by
Lorber focuses on its deployment as a critique of gender and sexuality but rarely
extends that critique to questions of geopolitics and race. M.O.B. and Barrionics, on
the other hand, perform drag as a critique of empire and globalization. Following
Martin Manalansan’s (2003) critical interpretation of the gay Filipino transmigrants’
appropriation of Santacruzan, a highly theatrical parade/procession/pageant
Filipino celebration in the month of May, as a critique of gender, sexuality and
empire, I want to directly articulate drag, in my readings of M.O.B. and Barrionics,
as a performative and analytical tool that foregrounds the limits of US multi-
culturalism and empire.
Barrionics does Barrioque was an exhibit held in 2003 at the Togonon Gallery
in San Francisco, CA; it included paintings, mixed media, video, and performance
from its three members: Johanna Poethig, Rico Reyes and Anne Perez. The terno
makes its appearance in this exhibit in the form of a single butterfly sleeve worn by
Urduja (Poethig) and Fanta Siya (Reyes). Fanta Siya is also partly clad in a baro’t
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saya, an ‘‘older version’’ of the terno. Also in a baro’t saya, with an accompanying
panuelo, is the seated Perez. Costume designs, by Reyes, and the other props in this
image are crafted with materials that create an ‘‘ethnic aura.’’ Accouterments include
mats made of hemp-like materials. The sheer panuelo (also called alampay) could be
made of jusi (raw silk) or piña fabric, traditionally used to make the Philippine
national costumes of the terno and the barong tagalog. The careful staging of the
Mac power book on the wooden end table next to a rattan recliner, the collage of
suggestively-ethnic clothing, camouflage patterned cloths, mats, shell necklace, and
the wires that connect the human bodies to electronic technology suggest more than
anachronism. The artists of Barrionics deploy juxtaposition to perform the contrast
and intersection of ‘‘ethnic,’’ invoked as pre-industrial and natural, with technology,
physicalized in the wires attached to the artists’ bodies. Together, scraps become
objet trouve´ and make up a portrait of Filipinos in the global era.
I am struck by Barrionics’s sustained attentiveness to the variegated aesthetic
histories that structure the group’s artistic labors. For example, baroque, in art
history, describes the lush and highly ornamental style of mid-sixteenth- to
eighteenth-century European art. Barrionics acknowledge early cross-cultural
intersections of this European art form with Asian art. As they write in their artist
statement, their interest is to explore ‘‘the aesthetics, passions and politics of baroque
traditions and transculturalizations.’’ The wires attached to the artists are material
metaphor for transcultural exchange. Their mission statement highlights the practice
of cultural exchange during the Baroque period. In doing so they are able to play
with notions of ‘‘borrowing,’’ camouflage, and hybridity as deriving from a long-
tradition of transculturation dating back to the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries.
Yet, Barrionics’ interpretation of transcultural exchange, and the resulting hybrid
aesthetic at play, must be understood alongside its development within a history of
domination. They perform hybridization with objects and on bodies that circle back
and forth to the historical and contemporary realities of US imperialism in the
Philippines. Thus Filipino costumes and camouflage cloths are stitched together.
‘‘Barrionics does Barrioque’’ is a performative image that conjoins material and
 210 L.M.S.P. Burns
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‘‘Urduja’’. Johanna Poethig. Image courtesy of Barrionics.

symbolic histories: the weaving of Filipino cultural hybridity (baro’t saya, the fictive
symbols of the mats and shells), Spanish colonialism (terno), US imperialism through
military occupation of the Philippines (military fatigues), and globalization
(Mac computer, wires). It is an image of scraps or the excesses of globalization
and an evocative performative portrait of Filipinos and globalization.
Barrionics in-your-face barrio pride is akin to another aesthetic movement that
fuses postmodern collage and violent colonial histories, rasquache. Amalia Mesa-
Bains describes the Chicano art aesthetic of rasquachismo in the following terms:
In its broadest sense, it is a combination of resistant and resilient attitudes devised to
allow the Chicano to survive and persevere with a sense of dignity. The capacity to hold
 Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 211

life together with bits of string, old coffee cans, and broken mirrors in a dazzling gesture
of aesthetic bravado is at the heart of rasquachismo. (2003, 298)11
I invoke rasquachismo because of the centrality of Barrionics’ barrio pride. The very
name Barrionics toys with racialized notions of place that are pre-industrial or
invoke the tropics while appended with the futuristic technological ‘‘ionics.’’ Both
archetypal and stereotypical notions of barrio folks – naı̈ve, gullible and baduy
(out of fashion) – are present to resist the broad-reach of the cosmopolitan glamour
of the global. They re-appropriate the barrio, highlighting its sensibility in multiple
political and aesthetic contexts. Here it is resituated in urban sites and invokes a
communal way of living lost in the individualist, anonymous, and hardness of the
city. The politics of collectivity is most evident in Barrionics’s work of art in public
spaces, both as a collective and as individual artists. Each artist in Barrionics has
been involved in community neighborhood beautification and heritage projects
in San Francisco, Stockton and other cities.12
Barrionics does Barrioque’s exaggerated fabrications of village-gone-techno also
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satirizes the commodified notion of ‘‘ethnic.’’ Objects such as straw mats are used to
suggest some exotic cultural item, as mere approximations of something ‘‘ethnic.’’
Styles, patterns and materials from ethnic and traditional cultural wear globally have
been rich sources of inspiration (or appropriation) for various fashion sites including
high couture, avante-garde designs, and popular fashion. Use of mats and other
objects that are not necessarily an item of clothing or item to be ‘‘worn’’ becomes a
satire of avant-garde fashion’s fetish for breaking conventions of what can be worn,
what is clothing, what is cloth. As Dorinne Kondo argues in her book About Face
(1997), the innovation of avant-garde convention often builds on and/or relies on
racist notions already at the seams of avant-garde and/or popular fashion industry.
Barrionics works the malleability of the terno, appropriating it as part of its barrio
aesthetic. While in the Philippines, this regal dress is associated with a higher social
class, Barrionics stitches the butterfly sleeve to the baro’t saya, the panuelo, and
bamboo mats to shift its significance within the context of multicultural US and
to juxtapose it alongside contemporary Western dress codes. More importantly
Barrionics reworks the emergent form of the terno to comment on art, hybridity and
the link between colonialism and circuits of exchange.
While Barrionics comments on US multiculturalism, globalization and empire by
piecing together recognizable scraps of ethnicity and technology, M.O.B. sets its
portrait of the Filipina in diasporic domesticity and hospitality in A Public Service
Message about Your Private Life (M.O.B. 1998). In one of the poster installations,
‘‘Have you eaten?’’, each bride is outfitted in a terno variation, accessorized with big
hairdos, fancy shoes, and brightly painted nails. The scene is set in a dining room,
with a table lavishly adorned with picture-like-quality foods and giant paper flowers.
Catholic religious icons, such as a statue of Santo Niño and a laminated image of the
Virgin Mary, are looming in the background. In this image, each performer is
positioned at the table holding a dish. They are directly looking at the camera and
are overtly posing for the photograph. The poster includes the frame of the window
indicating that the position of the camera and the photographer as outside of the
‘‘room’’ where this feast is about to happen. The window frame literalizes M.O.B.’s
 212 L.M.S.P. Burns

project of ‘‘looking into’’ Filipina subjectivity. Their hospitable gaze beyond the
window frame makes the viewer aware that the ‘‘looking in’’ is welcomed, and that
those being looked at are also looking.
M.O.B.’s A Public Service Message about Your Private Life consists of a poster
series with seemingly familiar scenes in Filipino households, performed for the
camera. Three artists make up M.O.B.: Eliza Barrios, Reanne Estrada and Jennifer
Wofford. In 1998, A Public Service Message about Your Private Life was on display
in kiosks on Market Street in San Francisco, as part of the SF Art Commission’s
Art in Transit Program.13 The description of this public exhibit reads:
Inspired by the similarity between the Market Street kiosks and Filipino nipa huts, this
artist team of three Filipinas . . . created a vibrantly colored poster series of domestic
scenes, placing ‘‘homes’’ in the midst of the hustle and bustle of the commercial core
of San Francisco. The series is a reminder that people from a wide range of
cultures move to San Francisco to set up house. (http://www.sfartscommission.org/
pubartcollection/uncategorized/2008/08/31/kiosk-poster-series/12/)
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Each poster image is accompanied with a caption, questions such as ‘‘Are you
entertaining?’’ (two young girls watching someone in a maid uniform singing with a
karaoke machine in a living room); ‘‘How much longer?’’ (a young woman looking
longingly out the window); and ‘‘Why don’t you settle down?’’ (an elderly couple
sternly talking to a young woman who is looking away from them). A Public Service
Message about Your Private Life shares Barrionics does Barrioque’s concerns about
the inhospitable nature of city life. The posters are indeed ‘‘vibrantly colored,’’
conveying warmth and intimacy. Yet, there is more to these beyond public
advertisements of ‘‘inviting’’ domestic scenes; they are not merely earnest invitations
that ‘‘place home’’ in the urban center. M.O.B. treads the line between parodying
such public service announcements meant to remind the city of its diverse occupants,
and portraying Filipino American domestic scenes to affirm the city’s ‘‘wide range
of cultures.’’
Through their use of ‘‘props’’ of Filipina-ness such as the terno, M.O.B. puts on
the character of a Filipina, along with fancy-styled, big-hair wigs, brightly painted
nails, high-heeled open-toed shoes. Juxtaposed next to other images in the series that
do not include the artists wearing wigs, there is a strong contrast highlighting
M.O.B.’s performance of Filipina drag. While big bouffant-styled wigs appear
continuous with the terno to recall 1950s/1960s scenes of tightly knit, nuclear family
units, M.O.B. artists’ ‘‘natural,’’ contemporary urban hairstyles – short hair, blonde/
brown highlights, asymmetrical bob – evoke discontinuity with the national dress.
Reanne Estrada, one of the Brides, explains: ‘‘We take on various characteristics of
Filipino culture. Apart from the obvious ‘drag’ clothes that we put on – because we
are basically American – when we’re doing that sort of stuff it’s a very conscious
thing to put on the dress and be like, OK, we’re playing at being Filipino’’
(Brenneman 2002, 78). M.O.B. relies on a fixed vestimentary code of the terno – the
symbol of Filipinaness, and deploys it as a costume to perform Filipina drag.
Estrada’s statement here articulates diasporic identity crisis vis-à-vis the nation, what
is now a much-rehearsed terrain of US identity politics in the era of liberal
multiculturalism. M.O.B. engages with the tension the diasporic Filipina body as it
 Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 213

negotiates its emergence within transnational context. The artists of M.O.B. came up
with their name ‘‘in response to the common Western misconception that Filipinas
make ideal (read: submissive and obedient) brides, a myth born out of unfortunate
economic reality that makes women and their labor the leading export of the
Philippines’’ (interview with Brenneman 2002).14 In this public service announcement
poster series, M.O.B. confronts the significations of the global circulation of Filipina
bodies, subverting reified notions of Filipina domesticity.
Scenes in this series, ‘‘vividly colored and beautifully executed,’’ range from a
feast in a Filipino household to a mah-jong game among kumadres (group of women
friends). Some of the subjects of these posters toy with images that traditionally
appear in Filipino calendars, particularly ones which insist on Filipino cultural
values such as prioritizing family duty.15 Distributed in the form of calendars and
product advertisements, these images circulate widely, simultaneously endorsing
and naturalizing heterosexual and patriarchal family values through the production
of the Filipina body as domestic. Often the terno is cast as the vestimentary icon in
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these portraits, where it takes a central role in the production of a national and
cultural ideology that normalizes heterosexuality and affirms patriarchal family
values. In A Public Service Message about Your Private Life, M.O.B. takes these
familiar familial scenes of domesticity, understood to be Filipina femininity,
and unfolds the dominant ideology embodied in these images. M.O.B.’s posters
place the terno in the private domestic setting of a Filipino household, though it is
a home that is constituted by the global that Barrionics portrays. Hospitality, as
routinely linked to Filipina femininity, is overwhelmingly performed in ‘‘Have you
eaten?’’ M.O.B. plays with the question ‘‘Have you eaten?,’’ as they pose graciously
offering an abundance of food as a typical welcome that one receives in a Filipino
household. The power of M.O.B.’s works is that it hovers at the edge of playfulness
and dementia. While we can simply read this scene as Filipina hospitality portrayed
in camp, a comedic recognition of Filipino identity that transcends displacement and
is retained in the diaspora, we cannot help but also read the implications of the image
of the ‘‘Filipina as hospitable’’ in the context of the millions of Filipinas on whose
bodies the Philippine economy is being built and sustained. Neferti Tadiar writes
that in the ‘‘making of women into Filipinas [,] . . . in its [‘‘Filipina’’] idealized
and therefore commodifiable form [,] it consists of practices of caring for others,
or extending oneself to others, of serving and accommodating others’’ (7). And
thus M.O.B.’s performative visual posters art signify the complex of hospitality as
performed by the Filipina body; hospitality becomes understood as one of the
categories under which Filipina subjects are evaluated and distributed globally.
In contrast to the public image of Filipina hospitality in ‘‘Have you Eaten?’’ the
portrait of Filipinas in ‘‘Do you play?’’ offers a different view. ‘‘Do you play?’’ shows
several kumadres playing mah-jong. The ‘‘glammed up’’ house makers in ‘‘Have you
eaten?’’ are pictured on their ‘‘day off’’ in ‘‘Do you play?’’ The women are sitting
around the table, mah-jong tiles on one hand and a cigarette and a can of drink on
the other. They have shed their ternos and are dressed in loose, flowery and colorful
daster, house dress typically worn in the house. Their hair is undone and they wear
ordinary house tsinelas (house slippers). When women are in their dasters, they have
 214 L.M.S.P. Burns

no intentions of leaving the house and nor being seen in public. They have settled
into their mah-jong game. In the room, there is a figure of Buddha with children and
a laminated photo of Jesus Christ Sacred Heart. A little girl joins the game, and a
man in the back part of the room, looking towards where the women are playing.
‘‘Do you play?’’ shows the women relaxing in their domesticity, performing an
activity for themselves. M.O.B.’s display of the terno and the daster in different
domestic scenarios reveals the relational production of the terno’s iconicity.
In many ways, this essay too has proffered a reading of the creative deployments of
the terno as a site of playful materiality and possibility. I have turned to this material
icon and national metaphor precisely because of its overdetermined and yet curiously
underexamined presence in the Filipino diasporic cultural imagination. To approach
these diasporic translations of the terno is to at once acknowledge and complicate the
terno’s historical prominence as an icon of nation and gender. From its recuperation
by Filipina nationalist feminists, to its staged manipulations by the Marcos regime, the
terno has been a source of differentiated historical capital. The challenge here has been
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to engage with diasporic renditions of the terno that mine its historical capital for
scenes of transgressive pleasure and profit. Such performances stage embodied
performative practices that circle back and forth between historical and contemporary
histories of US imperialism in and out the Philippines.
My focus on the terno as a site of ‘‘historical’’ performance equally calls on
specific modalities of time and place, heightening what may otherwise be relegated as
mundane practice. By shedding the terno for the daster, M.O.B., for example,
confronts the routinized circulation of Filipina bodies, subverting reified notions of
Filipina domesticity. Barrionics and M.O.B.’s use of the terno stridently imagines
its symbolic function in the global circulation of Filipina bodies. Their works make
central the labor of the Filipino performing body in making visible the production
of a material icon. Yet these productions do not merely advocate for a facile
recognition of the terno’s material contexts within circuits of transnational labor.
Rather they urge us to consider these material contexts as equal sites of performance
and contestation.
The (false) ordinariness of the terno as vestimentary object gives way instead to
scenes of historical and performative disarray. Indeed, as seen in the multiple
recastings of the terno, it is precisely the staged distance between object and body that
creates scripts of possibility for the wearers/performers. Within such articulations,
the terno is more a strategic marker of profound undoing, delinking the dress
from the dressee, the terno from the Filipina, the dress from the girl and the boy, the
dress from the straight and the queer. Read less as a stable object of vestimentary
desire, the terno emerges instead as an embedded sign whose materiality speaks
the entanglements of labor, history and performance. ‘‘Your terno’s draggin’’’
becomes, as it were, an evocative performance of Filipinos and globalization.

Notes on contributor
Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian American
Studies at UCLA. Her forthcoming book, Puro Arte: On the Filipino Performing Body, is a
study of the emergence of Filipino American theater and performance. It stresses the Filipino
 Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 215

performing body’s interlocking genealogies as it conjoins colonial histories of the Philippines

with US race relations and discourses of globalization.

Notes
1. Statement made at the opening of a designer clothing store Pucci in New York City,
September 11, 2004.
2. Bindlestiff Studio, located in San Francisco’s South of Market district, has been home to
Filipino American performances for over a decade. Self-proclaimed as an ‘‘epicenter of
Filipino American performance,’’ Bindlestiff Studio presents and produces music, theater,
performance art and film, as well as provides artistic workshops. See Bindlestiff Studio
2003 www.bindlestiff.org.
3. For a filmic interpretation of the significance of debuts among Filipino Americans,
see Gene Cajayon’s The Debut.
4. Here Puar references Judith Butler’s well-known ‘‘repetition with a difference,’’ in her
essay ‘‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and
Feminist Theory’’ (1997).
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5. http://www.filipinoheritage.com/costumes/findesiecle/maria_clara.htm. Originally from

Pitoy Moreno’s Philippine Costume (1995).
6. Certain terno garments and the manner in which they are worn may also be distinct
according to specific regional dressing practice. In Alfredo Roces’s ‘‘The Ins and Outs
of the Terno,’’ a caption under one of the photographs reads: ‘‘The wearer of this
well-matched baro’t saya (circa 1912) is probably a Busying, as indicated by the absence
of a tapis’’ (1978, 2537).
7. Originally cited in Roces (2005a, 5). Mary Grace Tirana gave this appellation in her essay,
‘‘Pañuelo Activism’’ published in Women’s Role in Philippine History.
8. Others also note this nickname as ‘‘iron butterfly.’’
9. Another ‘‘modernizing’’ project I want to mention here is the ‘‘Miss Asia Pacific Terno
Competition: The Maria Clara Quest.’’ This event was part of the 7th Hair Olympics
Competition, held at Philippine International Convention Center in Pasay City,
Philippines, in 2003. The sponsoring organization for this competition is the Asia
Pacific Hairdressers and Cosmetologists Association. Part of the ‘‘modernizing’’ project is
the global appeal of this national dress.
10. Kristin Hoganson’s (2003) essay, ‘‘The Fashionable World: Imagined Communities
of Dress,’’ was helpful in formulating this observation. In this essay, Hoganson
interrogates US bourgeois women and their participation in the transnational trade
network as fashion consumers in the early twentieth century.
11. I wish to thank Felicity Schaeffer-Grabiel for this suggestion.
12. An example of this commitment to public art projects is Johanna Phoetig’s collaborative
public art project ‘‘BEACON’’ 2007 in Gleason Park in Stockton, California. Poethig and
Brian Laczko of Oakland designed the twin pillars, which feature glass-covered portals
that enclose historic photos of the character and original inhabitants of the Little Manila
community and the Stockton area. The metal flames are based on traditional Filipino
‘‘sari manok’’ motifs. The gateway completes the park element of the larger
redevelopment project for the neighborhood, which will also include a new elementary
school and new housing units just south of the Crosstown Freeway.
13. This set of works was also exhibited, along with other pieces, at Oakland’s Lizabeth
Oliviera Gallery (now located in Los Angeles) in January 2001. M.O.B. has exhibited
their works at the DeYoung Museum, the Triton Museum, and galleries in Manila,
Philippines.
14. See Rachel Parreñas’s Servants of Globalization (2001) and Miriam Ching Yoon Louie’s
(2001) Sweatshop Warriors for a book-length study of Filipina women’s participation in
transnational global labor.
 216 L.M.S.P. Burns

15. I wish to acknowledge Terry Acebo Davis, a scholar and visual artist, who delivered
a lecture on Filipino/Filipina American art at a gathering of the National Federation of
Filipino American Association in San José, California, in June 2002. In this lecture,
she argues that Filipino and Filipina American art is distributed through the popular
reproduction of these works in calendars.

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