November 19th Women’s Studies Colloquium: Melisa Casumbal-Salazar

Dear all,

Please do join us this Fri., Nov. 19th at the Women’s Studies Colloquium for Melisa Casumbal-Salazar’s presentation titled “An Aesthetic Politics of Gendered Violence: The Maguindanao Massacre, Kinatay, and National Times.”

Attached is a flyer for the event; please feel free to distribute this flyer widely. This presentation will be held in Saunders Hall, Room 624 (12:30pm-2pm).

Many thanks to the Department of Political Science and Center for Philippine Studies for co-sponsoring this terrific talk.

We look forward to seeing you this Friday, and please bring a friend!

Brianne Gallagher
Coordinator, Women's Studies Fall 2010 Colloquium
University of Hawai`i at Manoa

Friday, 11/19/10 12:30pm-2pm Saunders 624
Melisa Casumbal-Salazar, Doctoral Candidate, Department of Political Science UHM

Title: An Aesthetic Politics of Gendered Violence: The Maguindanao Massacre, Kinatay, and National Times

As rendered in both the social and cinematic events this presentation engages, misogynist violence in the Philippines is simultaneously spectacular and invisible, exceptional and banal, unintelligible and multiply- coded. The mode of misogynist violence upon which I focus is the rape and murder of women, and the mutilation of their bodies, as perpetrated in the event popularly known as the Ampatuan or Maguindanao Massacre (November 23, 2009), and as staged in the film Kinatay/Butchered (dir. Brilliante Mendoza, 2009). My analysis of the Ampatuan Massacre examines the ways in which victims’ families, news media, women’s advocates, and the law render the genitally-mutilated, raped, murdered woman’s body in/visible as an epistemological and temporal, national problem.

For example, gendered violence is made know-able, in part, as an anomaly in the movement of both religious (Moro traditional) and secular (modern liberal), national times. Kinatay, by contrast, mobilizes conventions of family melodrama and film noir in order to query the exceptionalism of gendered violence in postcolonial modernity. Sound, city-scape, and domicile function as characters as the film examines, through repeated close-up, the micropolitics of gendered violence as a masculine pedagogic project whose trauma is registered on the bodies, through the affects, of men.