Note: This is a shortened version of the original 28-page paper that I presented in the 8th ASEAN Inter-University Conference last May 2008. It is a critical analysis on the gender representations on the original graphic novel of Carlo Vergara.
This paper is also accepted at conferences in Davao (ACMC), Canada (42nd ASPAC) and Romania (Reality or Fiction). I made a separate film critique which I will be presenting in South Africa on February 2009.
A book containing my full paper will also be published in 2009. Wait for it guys!
And thank you very much to to Carlo Vergara.
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In 2002, Carlo Vergara independently published the graphic novel, “Ang Kagila-gilalas na Pakikipagsapalaran ni Zsazsa Zaturnnah” (“The Amazing Adventures of Zsazsa Zaturnnah”) through Alamat Comics. To date, it’s easily the last most popular Filipino superhero comic. The success of Zsazsa Zaturnnah serves an attempt to rekindle and reinvent the concept of a superhero in comic books. The brainchild of Zsazsa Zaturnnah, writer and artist, Carlo Vergara, created a persona which no one has ever attempted in the Philippine comic book scene before: a superhero which germinated from a ‘bakla’ a Filipino term for the effeminate homosexual male.
The graphic novel has been very successful. This work raked positive reviews from both audience and critics alike even received a National Book Award for Comic Books from the Manila Critics’ Circle in 2003 .It has successful adaptations – from being Tanghalang Pilipino’s most staged musical (Zsazsa Zaturnnah: Ze Muzikal) to a film (Zsazsa Zaturnnah Ze Movee) which garnered awards for its openly gay actor who played the main character.
Zsazsa Zaturnnah is set in a Philippine rural area where our main characters reside and the whole story happen. We are introduced to Ada, a gay male beautician who is the proprietor of his own beauty salon. We can say that he is a lonely man, depressed by life’s trials of being a gay man and he has given up on the possibility of a romantic relationship for the mean time. Then we have Didi, Ada’s gay bestfriend, much more than his assistant in the beauty salon. Unlike Ada, Didi is flamboyant and outspoken and he’s considered a major element to most of the narrative’s development in the beginning. Dodong is considered the epitome of the real man, oozing with masculinity despite soft-spoken. He is Ada’s object of affection. Then we have Zsazsa Zaturnnah, Ada’s superhero alter ego, a character that emerges out of a process of magical transformation. We also have Zsazsa Zaturnnah’s nemesis, Queen Femina Suarestellar Baroux and her four Amazonistas, who are images of powerful angry women who hate men with a passion.
The novel introduced us to Ada who made a big decision in his life after a lump of stone, the size of a fist with the initials ZATURNNAH engraved on it, fell in his shower room one night. Didi challenged Ada to swallow the stone just like what’s being done in the comics, which Ada did. This has transformed him to a beautiful woman with supernatural strength and was named Zsazsa Zaturnnah, and clothed her (him) in a skimpy, revealing outfit.
The adventure begun after Zsazsa Zaturnnah defeated a giant frog that invaded their town. This caused alarm to Queen Femina Suarestellar Baroux, with her four Amazonistas, who are actually responsible for the frog’s emergence, and decided to woo Zsazsa Zaturnnah along their side and colonize the land and defeat the male forms. However, Zsazsa showed her (his) ignominy with Queen Femina’s thrust and instead agreed to face her to a new challenge. After Zsazsa’s succession of wins on challenges, she finally faced Queen Femina in a physical battle. Queen Femina revealed that the reason behind their anger against men (the male forms) is deeply rooted from the violence that the men did them in the Planet XXX which has caused them their freedom and near extinction.
The battle ended when Zsazsa can’t handle Queen Femina and the Amazonista’s “hypocrisy” on their hatred against the men because she (he) can’t get the point of hating men while at the same time referring on men’s violent ways to achieve their goal for female domination. She (he) revealed her (his) true biological sex, causing raucous to the Amazonistas. He threw the stone away, aimed directly at Queen Femina’s mouth. While trying to answer the Amazonistas inquiry on who is the man in a female costume, Queen Femina’s answered that the man is none other than Zaturnnah. The utterance of the word caused her to transform to a pig with a body of a man. The Amazonistas tried to destroy the creature, causing them to retreat from the earth and return to Planet XXX.
Ada, now with the absence of his alter ego, returned to his normal life as a beautician and decided to move to Manila because living in the town proves too hard for him to handle. In a surprise, Dodong came and pledged his love to Ada, asked his permission for courtship, and a proposal to live with him. Ada, delighted with the proposal affirmed to all the questions and looked forward for a happy life with Dodong in their place of destination.
In a published interview with Ruel De Vera, Vergara indicates his intention “to repackage the gay persona, giving it a few twists here and there, which veer from the way conventional media portrays homosexuality” by “reinventing” the tried-and-tested formula of gays: the stereotype. Here in the Philippines, we familiarize ourselves to the idea of a gay as the effeminate, the cross-dresser, the loud parlorista, the gossip writer – the bakla – thus is the stereotype gay. Vergara’s aim in creating Zsazsa Zaturnnah is the un-stereotyping the stereotype gay, to make a personal attack on how the media portrays the homosexual by using a stereotype – a cross-dressing beautician – as its central character. The fact that stereotypes does exist, they must be represented in a new dimension, away from what the people normally perceive them: hence, and the allusion of a “gay superhero”.
Zsazsa Zaturnnah is interesting because it succeed in making it appear to subvert the image of the stereotype gay: the gay, whom we always recognize as weak but loud, can actually be typified in a strong image of a superhero. Is this representation of gayness enough to say that it veers away from the stereotype? I would like to challenge the author and the readers’ view on the gay milieu and question what way did Zsazsa Zaturnnah, as a gay graphic novel, liberate the gays/bakla? Using textual analysis, with gay and queer theories as frameworks, the paper seeks to figure out whether the creative work are aligned to Vergara’s objective of representing the male homosexuals in a better light. Is the transformation enough to claim that the material is a reinvention of gay portrayal or did things remain only in the skin-level?
A gay man in the Philippines is always associated with his swishy persona, or more the least, his effeminacy. Gays are considered a “subgroup” or “minority” being guffawed at by the society for breaking the norms of the way a “real man” should live according to the roles related to being a male – the macho way. In a specific passage, it’s notable how Ada describes becoming bakla as something that can’t be explained, not definitely a choice but a force of nature and describes his position as “not normal.” Why in the first place gays are not normal for the eyes of many? The issue here is the generalized notion of the gays’ non-conformity to the supposed gender role of their biological sex.
Here in the Philippine context, the most common representation of the gay is the bakla, which denotes an identity which is effeminate and sexually oriented toward other males and that he is a man per se who regards and identifies himself as a woman. This definition doesn’t cover the masculine males who are equally attracted towards men. Therefore, a homosexual male doesn’t necessarily means that he is bakla. The media’s usual representation of the male homosexual is through the use of the bakla, and the treatment has always been comical and dismissive, and most of the times, demeaning, rising up to the problem of the gay’s representation.
In another passage, Ada was framed in a way wherein he exclusively shut the door in discovering more about his identity and totally accepting himself the same way the society has framed him, thus he becames the sterotyped stereotype. Through Vergara’s representation of Ada, he has reestablished the stereotype “in one’s consciousness as truthful, and so they end up becoming part of the ideological apparatuses whose singular purpose is to effectively maintain the present gender.” Ada is a transgender; his gender identity is more closely associated with the other primary gender, without actually the desire of becoming that sex. He feels that he is a woman trapped in a man’s body. His being a transgender is also supported for him being a transvestite, as he dresses like a woman, and adopts the identified behavior of a woman while maintaining a closer alignment to the sex role identity of a female. With the swallowing of the stone, Ada didn’t just change his sex, his femininity has achieved its ultimate high and he discovered enjoyment through his newfound confidence as a woman. There is a problem with the use of my terminologies here because suddenly I realized that I might be wrong to categorize him as transgender at this phase.
When Ada became a woman, can she now be referred as a transsexual? According to Perry, "transsexuals can so strongly identify with the other primary sex’s biology that he or she may elect to have sex-change surgeries along with hormone and psychological therapies.” Since the procedures indicated above are required to refer that somebody is transsexual, can we consider Ada/Zsazsa as such? Considering the stone as a symbolism for sex change, does this act affirm that the bakla has an (subconscious) aspiration to become female? Now I lead myself to another question: is a woman trapped in a man’s body really a woman? Ada’s identity does slide into the feminine side, the gender of the bakla. And taking into account that Ada/Zsazsa could be transsexual is another way of saying that the transformation of the biological sex leads to her becoming a real woman, now bearing both its biological sex and gender.
With this in mind, is Zsazsa Zaturnnah can still be considered gay at this point? Without resorting to thinking that Ada/Zsazsa is transsexual, then we have to start looking at them as two separate entities sharing the same identity. Ada is none other than a male who acts effeminately, in basic terms: bakla, still a he. Zsazsa Zaturnnah, on the other hand, is an embodiment of Ada’s feminine identity but is definitely a female, a she.
In the corollary, Vergara didn’t create a gay superhero because Zsazsa Zaturnnah is not gay at all; she is but a new female superhero whose alter ego is an effeminate male homosexual. The Zsazsa Zaturnnah persona basically becomes a generalized representation of the fantasy of the bakla who becomes a reality in the world of Ada. It starkly shows how a bakla could possibly be empowered by becoming the woman that he dreams of being, a stand which may is not always be true for everyone in the gay community.
It’s interesting how Queen Femina Suarestellar Baroux and her Amazonistas were represented in the novel as colonizers, whereas colonization is almost referred as a masculinizing project, since our constructions regarding to gender and sexuality, have been an influence from the West.The Amazonistas, being the only representative of females in the graphic novel, were portrayed as if they actually aspire to become like men, embodying with them the convention of what is masculine, as it is told through Queen Femina’s statement somewhere near the climax of her fight with Zsazsa Zaturnnah. Queen Femina’s construction of the man is typified as nasty, violent, brute - and she is ready to embody these qualities to achieve domination. Then it just proves the “colonization as masculine” axiom: Queen Femina takes over the land to propagate masculinity, only that the masculine is personified in a woman.
Queen Femina actually veers away from feminism. She doesn’t aim to empower women but she want to isolate them. She neither seeks for equality of men and women in the society nor did she fight against patriarchy, but actually stood for it, through embodying patriarchy through her female body with the vision of eradicating men completely so that she could be able to dominate. And feminism, in a radical sense, opposes patriarchy, not men. To equate radical feminism to man-hating is to assume that patriarchy and men are inseparable in principle.
Vergara created a battle between two conflicting and extreme gender differences between a man who wants to become a woman (who really became a woman) with a desire to be loved and accepted (male but feminine transformed to female and feminine) and a woman who wants to be like man with a hunger to dominate (female but masculine). Despite the fact that Vergara continues to play with the emergences of constructions at this point, he represented them in a manner that showcased how these conventions of femininity and masculinity can lead to our possible misunderstanding of our positionality in this society. Then we’ll lead to the man that covets Ada’s affection: Dodong, who exemplifies the image of the real man. He has the looks, the built and the body to die for, but unlike the typical masculine brute, he is gentle and nurturing. He even asked Zsazsa Zaturnnah if he could have the stone, so that he would be the one to fight against the Amazonistas. The difference with Dodong to other so-called real men is that he falls in love with Ada, without the economic benefits. It’s difficult to understand for many that such kind of relationship will reach to actualization, even to Ada himself. The only thing that would stop relating this event to a mystery is to accept that Dodong, despite his macho physique and un-feminine acts is a homosexual himself, and that no one in Dodong and Ada’s homosexual relationship assumes the role of the man and the woman.
As it has been already mentioned in the previous discussions, homosexuality is simply a question of sexual orientation and not of gender and to say that Dodong is a homosexual yet is a masculine should not be debated otherwise. With Dodong who actually gets (sexually) attracted to and falls in love with another male, despite a stereotypical cross-dressing bakla, does affirm his being a homosexual. The fact that he resolves his love to Ada is a form of “coming out” to himself
To look at Dodong and Ada’s relationship as that of a “real man” and a bakla will fall it under a heteronormative, despite homosexual, type of relationship which is heavily laden with the patriarchy’s gender norms. This traditional view of homosexuality, according to J. Neil Garcia, “is as oppressive as it is heterosexist: underlying the identities and relations of the bakla and the real man is the symbolic distinction between the roles of a dominant male and a dominated female.”
Ada’s unquestionable yearning for a real man that has been consistent from beginning to end thus proves that he’s not yet ready to step away from the conventions attributed to his being a bakla. While there’s nothing wrong with the Ada-Dodong relationship (which I believe is the best thing that happened in this book, despite predictable) it could have been an irrevocably homosexual love and rise as a challenge to the heteronormative.
There is a big misconception that a gay reading of texts is equally a queer one. Well, queer ideology did root from gay/lesbian studies that focused largely on questions on homosexuality. Queer theory however expands its realm of investigation by critiquing, looking at a political stand on anything that falls under the normative and deviant categories, particularly sexual activities and identities. Queer theory rejects the constructed essentialism of sexuality. It promotes the idea that gender is broad, fluid and ever-changing, that gender is a performance: a doing, not a being (according to Judith Butler), that the idea of socially correct masculine and feminine must be dissolved. To put it short, queers are people “who do not organize their sexuality according to the rubric of heterosexual procreative monogamy.”
So, who among the characters in Zsazsa Zaturnnah queer? Or is there anyone who falls under the category? Ada, the stereotypical bakla isn’t queer because he accepts his identity and homosexuality as well as he accepts and lives with the constructs that the society has labeled into his being a bakla. His transformation to a woman (as Zsazsa Zaturnnah) after swallowing a magical stone is definitely not queer, because whether we accept it not a symbolism to transsexual transformation (which is totally rejected by queer theory because it is a cross of sex and not of gender) but of a mystical transmorphication, it sticks to the convention that a bakla dreams of becoming a woman, which is not always the case.
Ada did make a queer act in terms of his fantasy to become a woman when he threw away the stone that gives him the power to be a woman and decided to remain as bakla, without taking away his effeminate qualities. However, to remain bakla, he puts himself again under the category of a woman in his relationship with Dodong, whom he always sees as a real man. Dodong and Ada’s relationship is physically queer and homosexual, taking away the idea that a romantic angle between a bakla and a real man can only be a factor economics, but Ada enters it as an ideally heteronormative couple.
Didi isn’t queer despite his pride of being a stereotypical cross-dressing bakla because just like Ada, he remains on the continuum that the society is expecting for the bakla. Probably, he’s being a sidekick puts him into a negative position in the story while it’s on its peak, regardless of his big contribution on the earlier parts. In short, his character did not germinate.
Queen Femina and the Amazonistas aren’t lesbians, feminists and especially not queers. They don’t embrace femininity to empower themselves but they fuel their aspiration to dominate through inhabiting masculinity in their ideology. Their awakening from oppression took them a different turn to become oppressors and their sticking on the conventions, by looking at masculinity as a source of power defeat the ideology of queer. Queerness doesn’t aspire for domination but of equal footing of the people in the society.
Dodong is a butch homosexual whose character is distinctively queer from beginning to end. Unlike Didi whose character suddenly faded away and left us is his traces of conventionality, Dodong’s character remained a mystery until we reached his final blow in the end, revealing that he actually loves Ada. If observed properly, he didn’t tried hard to keep his manly behavior all throughout (because if a homosexual doesn’t act bakla at all, he is pa-men, nagpapakalalaki, trying hard to act like a man, and is always perceived as hiding his homosexuality) because it appears that he is confident of what and who he is and he doesn’t need to conform with what the society’s dictations. He came out of the closet, despite the queer’s disapproval to the forceful outing of homosexuals (which I agree upon), but since he did it out of his voluntariness to declare his love for Ada, he remains queer.
Dodong’s image of homosexuality is not the one that we commonly perceived in the Philippine media. Probably Dodong must be the one that Carlo Vergara should have been labeled as “un-stereotyped” stereotype and not Ada/Zsazsa because with Dodong, the typical idea of gays and homosexuals as bakla and the masculine as “real man” were broken. Vergara redefined the stereotype masculine and bakla through Dodong that a masculine man can also be homosexual at the same time, without resorting to effeminacy. Through Dodong the complexity of human sexuality was represented.
It's interesting to note that despite the proliferation of non-queer characters in the novel, I can still say that the narrative has led us to some queer understanding.
I raised the point of Ada’s trangenderism which is not actually the point of contention but on the representation of the gays wanting to become women. Ada became a woman, Zsazsa Zaturnnah (who is not a gay superhero at all) but decided to return to her male form by throwing the stone to Queen Femina’s mouth. This act could be the queerest among all realizations in the novel, that by throwing away the stone, Ada throws away the chance of him becoming a woman again, accepting what he is as a bakla, that for the first time, he broke the convention that the bakla’s fulfillment of his desires is rooted in becoming a woman.
Of course, the romantic relationship that arose between Ada and Dodong is in itself queer because physically, it rejected the conventions that consists a relationship especially that it is between a butch and an effeminate homosexual, which is again perceived to be always laden with economics, a factor that isn’t existent in Ada and Dodong. Again, their relationship is however remained ideally heteronormative because of Ada.
In my journey along this research, I found the pattern of an attempt to subversion: subversion to gay oppression, subversion to the concept of the superhero, subversion to male dominance, subversion to romantic relationships.
However, these supposed subversions were again subverted to go back to where it started. When the attempt to repackage the gay persona is actually a display and affirmation to their oppression; when a superhero who is supposed to be gay is actually a woman; when the battle used to stop male dominance is just another patriarchy in a different form; when a relationship bloomed between two men stay in the man-woman setup. The biggest subversion of all is that, despite all of these failed subversions is a novel that actually attempts and aspires to be queer despite its anti-queer characters.
Wala lang. Natuwa lang talaga ako. Ngayon lang ako naka-feel ng goosebumps sa panonood ng isang cheerdance competition (at in fairness, sa TV lang ako nanood). Sobrang laki ng respeto ko sa Pep Squad, aaargh!! Hindi ko alam kung paano ko iqu-qualify ang katuwaan ko after i-announce ang UP as winner. 
