Love, Passion and Patriotism: Sexuality and the Philippine Propaganda Movement, 1882-1892

by Raquel A.G. Reyes

Love, Passion and Patriotism is an intimate account of the lives and experiences of a renowned group of young Filipino patriots whose propaganda campaign was a catalyst for the country's revolt against Spain. Jose Rizal, Marcelo H. del Pilar, Graciano Lopez Jaena, and the brothers Juan and Antonio Luna were talented writers, artists and scientists who resided in Europe during the 1880s and 1890s. As expatriates, they lived outside the social constraints of their own society and were eager to explore all that Europe had to offer. Provoked by racism and allegations of effeminacy and childishness, they displayed their manliness and urbanity through fashionable European dress, careful grooming and deportment, and demonstrated their courage and virility through fencing, pistol-shooting and dueling.

Their studies exposed them to scientific discourses on the body and novel categorizations of pathology and disease, ideas they used to challenge the religious obscurantism and folk superstition they saw in their country. However, their experiences also radically shaped their ideas of sex and the sexual nature of Filipino women. Raquel A. G. Reyes explores the paintings, photographs, political writings, novels and letters of the propagandistas to investigate the moral contradictions inherent in their passionate patriotism, and their struggle to come to terms with the relative sexual freedom of European women, which they found both alluring and sordid.

About the Author:
Raquel A.G. Reyes is a British Academy post-doctoral research fellow at the School of Oriental and African Studies, the University of London

Genres: History

300 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2008

Reviews

[Tatoosh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Raquel A.G. Reyes' “Love, Passion and Patriotism: Sexuality and the Philippine Propaganda Movement, 1882-1892” delves into a very talented and unusual group of native-born Filipinos, known as the ilustrados or enlightened ones. Educated initially in the Philippines, they traveled and lived in Europe just before the end of the 19th century when the Philippines was still a Spanish colony. Control of the islands was very much in the hands of Spanish-born administrators (pensiulares) and priests. Power was excluded from locals, known as insulares (Spanish forebearers but born in the Philippines) and indios (native heritage), from both secular government and positions within the local Catholic church. Reyes, a British Academy post-doctoral research fellow at the University of London, seeks to illuminate the ilustrados and their time with a somewhat feminist lens.

Reyes begins by looking at love and courtship in Manila society of the period, examining urbanidad and bourgeois sexuality. She then devotes the next two chapters to Juan Luna, the painter, and his brother Antonio. She scrutinizes Juan's view of the modern European woman, his contentious relationship with his wife and his ultimate “crime of passion”. They are examined within the context of the ilustrado's sense of manhood and position in society.

Antonio's essay's, (written for La Solidaridad and later collected under the title of “Impresiones”) are used as a guide to the next chapter, “Anatomy of Amor Propio”. Reye's notes that Luna's reaction to Spain was symptomatic of a phenomena unexpected by the friars in the Philippines. The friars feared the Filipino living in Europe would become tainted by the “contamination by liberalism and heterodoxy, what they had not foreseen … was the deep sense of disenchantment upon reaching the shores of the motherland.” Spain was not the center of sophistication, learning, or even a lesser jewel of European progress and it lost the luster it had once held in the minds of these young visitors.

She examines the ilustrado's complaints about the Catholic church, the abuses of the priests and friars, but she pays particular attention to the ilustrado's criticism of the excessive religiosity of many Filipinas at the expensive of the family and the nation, noting how the views of ilustrado's ideal conduct of women often mirrored that of the church, but showing that the ilustrados wanted to replace – to supplant - the priests as the head or leader of both home and society. Reyes makes obvious her view that the ilustrados reflected a contemporary, often misogynistic, European or Western thought of the late 19th century. But not completely misogynistic, giving nod to Rizal's admiration of many German and English women who had thrown off the yoke of religious obsession.

Jose Rizal, arguably the most brilliant star of the Propaganda Movement, is mentioned throughout the book, finally becoming the primary focus in the last two chapters. “Rizal, Female Sexuality and the Sickness of Society” and “Rizal's Erasure of Female Sexual Pleasure” chapter titles give you an inkling of the author's attitude, but she is not completely critical of Rizal as the titles might lead one to think, noting that his relationship with his sisters was very amiable and showed deep attachment each for the other, save perhaps, the black sheep of his sisters, Soledad, who eloped, thus casting shame upon her family and earning some strong brotherly censure.

Rizal's relationship with Blumentritt, along with the latter's standing in academic circles are discussed, giving the reader a better sense of who Blumentritt was and Rizal's rather uncritical admiration of him. And Reyes gives us a very intriguing look at Rizal's annotations of “Morga's Sucesos de las islas Filipinas” leaves this reader much more aware of some of Rizal's human failings or at least foibles.

Whether the reader ultimately agrees with Reyes or not, the work strongly evokes both the time and place that Rizal and his fellow ilustrados lived in and wrote about. And it does cast a revealing light upon Rizal himself, his prejudices and preferences, both by his actions and by his omissions. Reading it has left me with the desire to learn not only more about Rizal, the man, but also about his companions, particularly Graciano Lopez Jeana, who's lifestyle and conduct was apparently at some odds to that of most ilustrados. It looks at a most interesting group of men, their views of themselves, and the women they both admired and feared at the turn of the 19th century.

[Matthew Lopez · Rating 4 out of 5]

Honestly, this was a painful read for those who are starting to understand feminism including myself, but it serves as good introduction. Reyes described about the life and works down by the Philippine propagandists and giving a psychoanalysis of their works whether it Rizal and his novels and artworks or Luna and his paintings compared to their personal sexual experiences in Europe. It provides a new alternative to the understanding of the Reform Movement in Europe beyond the canon dictates of Schumacher or Agoncillo.