Pornotopia
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.25120/etropic.21.1.2022.3842Keywords:
Philippine poetry, poetry sequence, porno-tropics, language of resistance, landscape of desireAbstract
The poetry sequence “Pornotopia”—in coupling the words “pornography” and “utopia”, a world infused and suffused with desire—is an attempt to respond to the idea of “porno-tropics” where the white conqueror “feminizes the earth as a cosmic breast, in relation to which the epic male hero is a tiny, lost infant, yearning for the Edenic nipple” (McClintock, 1995, p. 22) and connects the “relationship between pornographic fantasies of the tropics and the brutal, often violent facts of conquest” (Balce, 2016, p. 40). “Pornotopia” continues the legacy of literary resistance that uses the linguistic tools of the master to subvert the insatiable lust of the empire, like in the poem “Land of Our Desire” by the Philippine poet Amador T. Daguio (1934/1989, p. 195), whose early works mark “the turning-point in Filipino poetry from, rather than in, English” (Abad, 1993, p. 23). Borrowing lyrical and stylistic tools from the 1984 poem “Sex Without Love” by Sharon Olds (p. 57), “Pornotopia” also explores the topography of voyeurism and the landscape of loveless sex.
References
Abad, G. H. (1993). Introduction: The Language of Our Blood. In G. H. Abad (Ed.), A Native Clearing: Filipino Poetry and Verse from English Since the ’50s to the Present: Edith L. Tiempo to Cirilo F. Bautista (pp. 1–26). University of the Philippines Press.
Balce, N. S. (2016). Body Parts of Empire: Visual Abjection, Filipino Images, and the American Archive. University of Michigan Press. https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.8841993
Daguio, A. T. (1989). Land of Our Desire. In G. H. Abad & E. Z. Manlapaz (Eds.), Man of Earth: An Anthology of Filipino Poetry and Verse from English: 1905 to the Mid-50s (p. 195). Ateneo de Manila Press. (Reprinted from The Philippine Collegian, 1934; The Literary Apprentice, p. 81, 1937, UP Writers Club; and The Flaming Lyre, 1959, Craftsman House).
McClintock, A. (1995). Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. Routledge.
Olds, S. (1984). The Dead and The Living: Poems. Alfred A. Knopf.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2022 CC-BY
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Authors who submit articles to this journal agree to the following terms:
1. Authors are responsible for ensuring that any material that has influenced the research or writing has been properly cited and credited both in the text and in the Reference List (Bibliography). Contributors are responsible for gaining copyright clearance on figures, photographs or lengthy quotes used in their manuscript that have been published elsewhere.
2. Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) License that allows others to share and adapt the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
3. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository, or publish it in a book), with proper acknowledgement of the work's initial publication in this journal.
4. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (see The Effect of Open Access or The Open Access Citation Advantage). Where authors include such a work in an institutional repository or on their website (i.e., a copy of a work which has been published in eTropic, or a pre-print or post-print version of that work), we request that they include a statement that acknowledges the eTropic publication including the name of the journal, the volume number and a web-link to the journal item.
5. Authors should be aware that the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) License permits readers to share (copy and redistribute the work in any medium or format) and adapt (remix, transform, and build upon the work) for any purpose, even commercially, provided they also give appropriate credit to the work, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. They may do these things in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests you or your publisher endorses their use.