Feminist Theory in the Time of Dictatorship: Transnational Development of Filipino Nationalist Feminist Thought in the 1970s and 1980s

This paper tracks flows of revolutionary feminist intellectual production by women in the Philippines and the United States during the 1970s and 1980s and their efforts to fight the dictatorship of then-President Ferdinand Marcos, Sr. and resist US neo-colonial rule in favor of national liberation. Women in the underground movement and in support of it abroad together grappled with new ideas about the intersections of feminism, racism, nationalism, and organizing grounded in their local conditions and aspiration for national democracy. The paper discusses the creation of the first explicitly feminist organization in the Philippines, KALAYAAN, alongside one of the first Third World feminist study groups in the U.S. Northeast. The paper will feature letter writing between women in the United States and the Philippines, illustrating the development of an emergent transnational “Filipino nationalist feminism” that integrated gender, class, and national liberation. The letters reveal a multi-directional flow of feminist theory building, rooted within pockets of dissident friendship among women within larger political formations on both sides of the Pacific.