Each society, community or tribe is unique with its identity. A myriad of factors make up the multifaceted surface and endodermis of a community. Norms, morals, culture, history, economics, hegemony, and people, men and women alike, push and pull to affect each other. Often, the people who create and perpetuate volatile norms, morals, culture, and hegemony can emancipate or imprison the people who make the same edict. Resistance to him or release from him can mean ostracism or insults. Anyone who goes against the grain becomes a victim of a tyrannical culture. Therefore, the culture becomes bipolar. Nourishes but also creates pain sutures. People are left to slavishly continue to belong or to fight unbearably against suffering. Or let’s say, a person who rebels against an oppressive culture faces what Helen Cixous calls “castration or beheading” for not supporting the dominant culture.
One of the most common disgusting social constructs is human identity. In other parts of the world, people are divided, labeled, judged, and expected based on their anatomy, gender, and norm. The question of man against woman. Each sex is stereotyped according to social expectation. Males are portrayed as strong, rational, logical, intelligent, provider, master, straight, muscular, while females are weak, irrational, illogical, jerks, recipients, slaves, sexual objects, emotional, and worse, abused. , silenced and evil in different media and literatures.
But what if a person is neither male nor female? What happens if a person opposes the entire role or identity expected from the normativity and performativity dictated by society? So we imagine the worst. The victim becomes vulnerable to criticism from society, where they are rashly and harshly judged as evil, abnormal, weird, impure, immoral, or “queer.” This is where the writer positions his role to fully understand the very colorful and introverted life of Edith Tiempo’s controversial character, Tío Teban, in the story “Las Cámaras del Mar” (Tiempo, 2009).
Most of the time, queer is defined as anything that is abnormal, weird, weird, or anything that challenges or questions a dominant culture, norm, or behavior. In the Philippines, being queer equates to being weak, soft, different, weird, or even immediate conclusions to being gay or homosexual.
Many scholars believed that society’s notion of sex is deeply ingrained in people’s minds perpetrated and perpetuated by social institutions such as school, church, family, and others. Queer theory challenges these societal formulations to understand and tolerate sexual or gender identities beyond misinterpreted and transmitted beliefs about sexual categorization.
The theory and practice of queer criticism is based on questioning or challenging, discrediting the categorization of sex and gender that leads to an individual’s identity. Identity cannot and is not fixed. Questions of performativity and normativity in relation to sex and gender, resistance and power relations are also attempted.
In the Philippines, the family, the school and the church actively participate in the creation, categorization and fixation of gender and sexuality. The choice of colors for children’s clothing would signify sexuality. Blue for boys and pink for girls. A lack of color matching would mean misleading interpretations leading to labels like gay or lesbian, as if the colors and boys were congruent with their sexuality. When they grow up, boys are told that playing dolls is for girls and that soldier toys are for boys. Children don’t cry, parents told their young children. Implicitly, they say that only girls cry. And these are transmitted from generation to generation. There is always a strong categorization in the Philippines full of do’s and don’ts for boys and girls as they are subject to social categorization, sexuality and their performativity. Anyone who doesn’t stick up, anyone who strays, anyone who doesn’t support the male-dominant culture is labeled gay or homosexual with Filipino varieties of bakla, bading, badaf, shoke, Darna, and other derogatory names.
Edith Tiempo’s story Chambers of the Sea subtly and delicately depicts a man named Teban Ferrer or Tio Teban (Uncle Teban), as approached by the narrator growing up from Bangan and its diaspora to Dumaguete, whose growth and eventual maturity is puts in a test, interrogation, scrutiny and suspicion from its sexuality or normativity and performativity. Therefore, the haunting question of whether Tio Teban is gay, homosexual, or queer is focused through the lens of queer theory and analysis.
Tío Teban finds himself in the middle of strong binary opposites where the characters are expected according to performativity and heteronormativity. His Bangan family with his huge land on the left and his new family with his cousin in Dumaguete on the right. His family is made up of strong men: his father, who hates Uncle Teban’s feminine behavior, Antero, his brother-in-law, who physically cultivates the entire family’s land, and his sister Quirina, who wants him to continue the legacy of the his father’s land. The social expectation of Uncle Teban’s family is high based on his alleged acting as male and heterosexual.
In Dumaguete, with its limitless sea, Tio Teban finds more comfort in the softest and weakest environment. Her cousin Amalia is a typical housewife who fulfills a social role according to her sexuality, mother of four children. Most of the time, Amalia’s roles extend to Tio Teban when the former runs off on family errands. His wife’s husband is a passive man who never questions his behavior because he exhibits a calm man that he provides.
Amalia’s honest rowdy kids question and criticize Tío Teban’s different behavior. Her sulky laugh is like Uncle Teban’s immediate family harshly condemning his weirdness. Because he doesn’t perform and is against the norm of a typical man, unsurprisingly, he was small for a weak, slow and weird guy. Mentally, they are attacking him because of the weirdness of him. His father, who is supposed to understand him for who he is, is the first to ostracize him. His judgment is based on Uncle Teban’s “feminine disposition” and she could not forgive his only son for being so similar to him in appearance but so unlike him in ways (p. 103). Uncle Teban’s father despises his penchant for cultivating a rose garden, drawing and painting with watercolours, his wandering through the countryside, his perpetual reading of literature, his height and his squint. All of this is beyond his father’s acceptance.
But above all these artifacts, we see him retaliate against his family even though they offend him, hate him and even denounce him for being different for not “satisfying his selfish desire” of wanting him to be what he is not. He felt violated and exposed. In a “fight or flight” dilemma, he chooses a calm and resolute decision to leave his family in pursuit of graduate school in Dumaguete, where he successfully completed a master’s degree in Political Science. It can be deduced from a psychological point of view that he shifted his silent rebellion against his family to the school search where his family could not reach him mentally and intellectually. He chooses his battle with intellectual elegance against the rough furrows of the earth. His identity, although different, abnormal and queer in the opinion of his family and Amalia’s children, Tío Teban is happy with himself. His identity for himself is not a matter, not a question, not a problem, but rather a choice. His height is only challenged when people question him again and evaluate him based on his gender and role. In this text, Uncle Teban becomes a role model of a positivist existentialist who finds happiness in the midst of people’s excessive concern for his identity. He chooses what pleases him without personal qualifications. He does not have an identity crisis in contrast to the popular notion. The notion of him is also affected, influenced and involved by socially constructed criticisms against men not so typical as Tio Teban. The question about what he is doing in his room in Dumaguete is more of a personal introspection in economic terms. He, with a master’s degree, remains docile in his cousin’s house. Society forces him again to work according to his heterosexuality. The choice is yours.
The suspicion of her identity versus her personal choice as opposed to societal expectation and the labeling of her sullied gender identity is put to a test that ends in a crystal clear dramatic finale to the story. She received a letter about the death of his father. Uncle Teban became a two-faced character as he runs into the sea. He summons his grief but finds happiness at the thought of the death of a father who is highly prejudiced against him. Without his father, there is more of himself, freedom. The hegemony of power exercised and created by his family only oppresses him. Therefore, with the death of his father there is more personal emancipation from the nosy family and social expectation rather than lamentation. What is queer becomes clear. He rejoices in the true self of him. He is neither male nor female; neither a mythical merman nor a mermaid but a person. He is happy making it unlabeled. The rarity of him, from people’s perception, is just a myth. All the world is a stage, and people have different roles to play. A man needs to be happy with either a minor or a major role in this vast world of identities that only men and women build. As the narrator says, “at least Uncle Teban knew one thing for himself when he turned and hurried away.” Uncle Teban is “He is what he is” with deer irons, union of male and female; not gay or homosexual but a person with a designated corner in the sky, with a niche on earth and has his own “chamber in the sea”…
REFERENCES:
With Davis, Robert and Ronald Scheliefer. (1989). Contemporary Literary Theory: Literature and Cultural Studies. New York: Longman, Inc.
Time, Edith (2009). “The Chambers of the Sea”. Publisher: Anthology of Philippine Literature in English Manila: PNU Press.