Writing about the ordinary and everyday as epiphany and political redemption

I started this book by making reference to my ordinary and everyday journeys, not only in physical terms as I travel a distance from my home to the university where I teach, but as an existential expedition into a constrained space for finding academic and scholarly meaning. While the theoretical and conceptual challenges may have appeared insurmountable, I derive pleasure in being able to craft my own narrative that on its own has become not just a scholarly endeavor, but has also acquired a form that is also personally and deeply political. The materials that I used in stitching what may appear to some as diverse bodies of texts are all based on my personal encounters, either as actual physical experiences, or as virtual immersions.

Being a TV fan, I considered media spaces as a natural home from where I can launch my inquiries. In the end, not only that I was able to draw empirical data from my sources, I was also able to establish kinship with my respondents, from TV journalists to celebrities to reality game show contestants. It is also in writing this book that I became a netizen. In my attempt to enter the world of cyberspace as merely a methodological strategy from where to craft my inquiries, I eventually became an active participant in the online discussions in Pinoyexchange as a “PEXer,” an avid member of the Facebook community, and a blogger managing my own site.

The human body also became a space of interest to me, being someone who has been mystified by the centrality of the body in our discourses, even as we try harder to cover and hide it. It is here where I was able to engage the pleasures of having my body re-worked in a gym and rejuvenated by alternative medicine that started just as efforts to put some methodological rigor and adopt participant observation techniques in my research to ensure a more immersed form of inquiry, but has become rituals that I have come to associate with a lifestyle that made my body sexy and healthy not only for my private satisfaction, but for the pleasure of being the object of public admiration. While I could be accused of succumbing to the power of the dominant body narratives, this made me realize the complexity of human choices that could not simply be limited to submission and defiance, that one can still be empowered by refusing to be beholden to this simplistic dichotomy. It made me realize that repression is not just about submitting to dominant narratives, but also comes when you un-problematically submit to constructs that fix your position as one that is supposed to be repressed. It is also in this regard that while my inquiry into the public narratives of the body enabled me to learn about the private pains of commercial sex workers, it also unsettled what I thought was a stable ground for my theorizing that fixed the identity of prostituted women as always disempowered and without choices. That single encounter with a sexual worker in Calamba City has seriously confronted my own academic biases and has motivated me to think outside the box of theoretical politics drawn from long years of having feminists as friends, into a more nuanced appreciation of how different, and how powerful and theoretically sophisticated the ordinary reflections from marginalized identities and objectified bodies are.

The university is an easy place for me to inquire into. It is my natural roaming ground. It is also where I encountered most of my pains, even as it is also a place where I asserted my own political identity. The inspiration that led me to write this book is in fact drawn less from my theoretical readings of the French cultural theorists, or of Foucault. While they provided the templates from where I crafted my narratives, as they also provided me what may have appeared as my ideological framework for engaging my own political projects, what actually inspired me more to write this book was how I experienced institutionalized disempowerment in a university setting, and was further cemented when I still felt this even at a time when I already occupied a position of administrative leadership. It really made me realize how fluid, and how contentious ordinary and everyday power relations are, how inadequate the meta-narratives of the dead white men of political theory could be, and how limited our dominant tools of political inquiry have become.

Writing a book about the politics of ordinary and everyday experiences may be too theoretically avant garde, and I may court accusations of lacking performativity, or usefulness. This may be the “truth” for others, but it is far from my own truth. This book has an extremely performative value, not only as it was able to exorcise my personal pains, but more importantly, it is a concrete step in providing a compelling story to tell against the dominance of statist political science. It is my own stake in a discipline to which I migrated from a totally different field in the natural sciences, but within which I also found myself lost. This book is a narrative of how I recovered my own ground.

This book touched on the logic of cultural production as a domain of contestations, and posited that the dynamics by which these are institutionalized through our narratives is a complex game of those who assert their power to dominate and those who challenge them by engaging in a complex array of acts of resistance, from open contestations to the deployment of hidden and everyday weapons of the weak. This book is at the heart of this dynamics. I showed that a book could also be a narrative of resistance, in as much as it can also be a political project. This book is an artifact invested in how I assert my own performativity, narratives and templates as my way of speaking loudly to the power or truth and desire, as a body of knowledge the production of which has brought me much pleasure. It is also a vehicle by which I was able to recuperate the authenticity of my political identity, even as I proposed modalities by which others can recuperate theirs. Finally, its redemptive power lies in how I was able to build its politics around a sense of community with those whom I am writing it for, the ordinary peoples as they negotiate the challenges of their everyday lives, even if I must share the guilt of having presented this in a form which many of them may not be able to access or understand.

The most political moment, however, is when the validation of this book will rest on those whose flaws and imperfections it may have implicated in its texts. I may have to admit that some of the most biting critiques I have launched were directed at those practices which “had” us, and will continue to “have” us. One of the most enlightening epiphany of reflexive scholarship, experienced both in writing and reading texts, is when one realizes that much as we want to search for the enemy in the spaces, narratives and bodies of others, that in fact it lies deeply embodied in our own spaces, narratives and bodies. Realizing such is, however, the moment when redemption begins, and proceeds further as we also discover that our liberation rests not on the permission of others, or on account of the meta-narratives found in the grand ideologies, methodologies and canons of our disciplines, but on the power of our own local, ordinary and everyday small stories, and of those stories that are told about us. This is the whole point of this book. It makes our politics personal, and places our liberation in our own hands. It is about the political that lies in the ordinary and the everyday, not in unfamiliar spaces where narratives of domination and resistance emerge and are contested by others, but in familiar grounds, found here, now, in us.