Filipino Language Ideology: Exploring Gendered Voices in five Filipino novels

Author: Daniela Julia Dalumpines (De La Salle University, The Philippines)
Speaker: Daniela Julia Dalumpines
Topic: Language Ideologies
The (SCOPUS / ISI) SOAS GLOCAL CALA 2020 General Session

Abstract

Through the use of language, an author’s voice reflects an ineluctable influence of upbringing, culture, religion, class, economy, and identity that evokes roots of gendered conception of ideas formed by historical and social formations. Five memoirs of the Second World War in the Philippines recounted the cruelty of the Japanese invaders and the imbalance of political leadership in the Philippines that led to the stir of social contract and the formation of consciousness. These memoirs are enveloped with the gendered voices of the authors that represent a particular body of human consciousness that was impelled by World War II in the Philippines which ingrained the Filipino ideology.

This study deals with the exploration of the gendered voices in the five written accounts of the history of the Japanese Occupation in the Philippines in 1941 until 1945. Focusing on the influences of the historical events and the gendered voices in the five memoirs, this study aims to determine the specific Filipino ideologies portrayed that made up the dominant ideas of the society that still exist today. This study presents that the five involved memoirs are channels of language ideology that represent the relationship between history, culture, and society.

This research proves that historical influences greatly made up the conventions and cultures of a nation as it strengthens that through a number of significant historical events in the timeline of the Philippines, there are ideologies that were kept and continue to remain unheard behind pages of personal expositions. As Jameson posits that analysis of ideology of form should reveal signs and systems that overlay the historically original types of alienation such as political domination and commodity reification; therefore, history itself becomes the ultimate ground of the untranscendable limit of understanding textual interpretations (1958).

This comprehensive study presents an intensifying presence of an ideology of perseverance in casting away foreign domination with a certain sense of awareness to the real situations brought by the past experiences of the Filipinos from the three-century colonizers. This research aims to determine how do gendered voices influence the society’s production of ideas and conception of consciousness and how do history influences conventions and cultures that made up the dominant ideas of the society. Hence, this research aims to put an eye on how gendered voices in these literatures shaped and influenced the Filipino language ideology alongside with the presence of the figures of power and elements of society.

Keywords: Gendered Voices, Filipino Ideology, Language Ideology, Human Consciousness, Gender