Alternative Healing, Jolina, Kiko and Bebe Gandanghari

It is evident that the option for healthy and sexy bodies, from enrolling in the gym, to buying diet pills and whitening creams, or getting a liposuction, or patronizing the new generation of food supplements and health drinks, is a luxury which is available only for those who can afford. However, it is also true that if one looks at the bodies of those who work on manual labor, the farmers, mechanics, stevedores, and baggage handlers, we can see toned and muscular bodies matched with flat abs and bulging biceps and triceps. For them, there is probably no need to go to the gym and spend time on the treadmill or in lifting weights, considering that their everyday working lives is already one big gym. They also would probably don’t have to diet, considering that their meager income could only afford them to have simple and low calorie meals, perhaps even too low to a point that many of them end up critically malnourished. This is why while they may have the external appearance of having “bodies to die for,” it is their health that are seriously at risk. This is their tragedy, one that is caused by the lethal articulation between an increasingly toxic environment brought about by natural and anthropogenic alterations of our planet, and an increasingly expensive cost of Western medical health care, coupled with the deployment of unhealthy Western lifestyles, from fast and junk foods to unhealthy vices.

However, relying on Western medical interventions may not even be providing us a cure to the ailments of modernity. Aside from their prohibitive costs, there is also an increasing discomfort with the ferocity by which new drugs and other chemical-based medical interventions are now being pushed by pharmaceutical companies and the medical practitioners who subscribe to them. It is in this domain that the flaws of Western medicine is confronted and engaged by the emergence of alternative medicine which is more herbal, organic and oriental, and in some cases, may be more affordable. The popularity of traditional Chinese medicine, for example, has reappeared even in modern cities like Manila. These herbal-based medical practices that consider disease less of a chemical malfunctioning of the body and more as a result of an internal imbalance within, offer an interesting counter-narrative to the more intrusive, chemical-dependent, and expensive Western medical practices.

On a different note, and based from my own personal encounter with this alternative form of healing, the delivery of treatment and care takes on a different spatial configuration compared to a Western medical facility like a clinic or a hospital. The Chinese doctor I regularly visit in Chinatown is both a doctor and a source of humor, and the space where he works is not just a clinic but an inclusive community. While Western clinical practice subsists on the privacy of doctor-patient encounters, and its associated confidentiality of diagnosis, the clinic in Chinatown offers a public viewing of such encounter. The room where the doctor works is a small one, and his diagnoses of his patients, made in broken Tagalog, are orally delivered not as a confidential reading of what is wrong with the internal balance of the body of the patient, but as a recitation within the hearing distance of those in the room at the time. While those reared in Western medical practice may frown on this as highly unprofessional, it has demystifying effects, even as it makes the whole process a participatory and inclusive exercise of a group in community with each other. Those who know how to speak Chinese in the room automatically become translators both to the Doctor and to the patient; old-timers help those who are new in explaining not only the rules in the clinic, but also provide their testimonials to clear up doubts, or simply to give advise; people who are first in line help facilitate the queue. These are rituals of community that may not necessarily heal the sick, but are definitely composite of a social capital that is enabled as a group of people negotiate the space through which they seek their own healing.

This alternative form of healing, in addition to other indigenous ways, which include the native Filipino art of healing, confronts a dominant narrative in which the focus on the body, its appearance and vitality, is now in the context no longer just of capitalist production, but also of consumption and pleasure in a political economy of images, in which the body becomes now a commodity to be bought and “consumed”, and not just a resource for capitalist production. In this domain, a dominant narrative specifies not only the “look” and the “body” that is to be desired but also how these can be achieved. There is a deployment of dominant templates not only for fashion and diet, but also even on internal wellness and external appearances. These are then institutionalized in a complex array of discourses and narratives that are produced in society through the operation of certain kinds of truth and knowledge as embodied in templates as diverse as fashion rules, appearance norms, and appropriate lifestyles drawing their logic from professions like Western medicine and effectively deployed by efficient marketing.

However, there are those who refuse to go with the flow, as they create their own embodiments. Jolina Magdangal, a movie personality, is well known for creating her own sense of unconventional fashion which transgressed the established norms of color combinations and accessory matching to the consternation of established fashion gurus. In fact, the word “jologs” which refer to crass and of the hoi polloi was coined based on her name. Nevertheless, Jolina was able to impose her sense of alternative fashion to a point that she is now considered a fashion icon herself. Raymund Francis Rustia is a walking conversation piece with his dreadlocks and elaborate adornments that is uncharacteristically out of the ordinary. His appearance in the first season of “Survivor Philippines,” particularly his ethical playing of the game catapulted him to fame. Kiko, as he is popularly called, transgressed the norm provided by society, and instead of ending up being called weird, now appears in mainstream TV as host to an environmentally-oriented show in one of the TV networks. Bebe Gandanghari is another person who breached the norms provided by society with regards to the human body. Formerly a male matinee idol in the name of Rustom Padilla, he came out and admitted his true sexual orientation in one of the most explosive moment of the reality game show “Pinoy Big Brother,” went abroad, and came back totally transformed into a woman figure. Far from being considered a “freak”, Bebe is now accepted less as an anomaly, and more as a transformed body that carry a sense of personal power by deploying a kind of truth that may not be comfortable to the established norms, but nevertheless speaks loudly as a physical counter-narrative to the constrained identities that imprison those who remain in their closets.

Jolina, Kiko and Bebe, as celebrities with bodies who transgressed social forms of control provided powerful images that find meaning among a citizenry that derive their templates from popular culture. Their transgressions offered a counter-narrative to the dominant images that are displayed in the same venues where they exist—the showbiz media, TV and the entertainment industry. In their iconic presence, they are just three of the many more who are not celebrity figures, but who in their ordinary ways have tried to transgress, resist, and confront the disempowering politics by which their bodies are expected to conform to the ideal shape, size and configuration as dictated by the dominant political economy that images the body not only as a project to be produced but also as a resource to be consumed.