Author ORCID Identifier
https://orcid.org/0009-0000-6559-8005
Abstract
Discussions about the monster have always hinged on the modes of othering or assimilation, yet through mobilizing negative and positive affective registers respectively, they both objectify the monster in service of a normativizing agenda of managing the abnormal, eventually inhibiting the monster’s potentialities in feeling and relating otherwise. This essay traces the historicities of the manananggal, a Philippine folkloric monster, and compares key cultural and literary representations within and beyond the Philippines. In particular, it examines the short story “Good Girls” from the speculative short story collection Never Have I Ever (2021) by the transnational Filipina American writer Isabel Yap. Through engagements with diasporic literatures, affect theory, and feminist and queer scholarship, this essay examines the selfsegmenting monster across three dimensions—the narratorial, the affective, and the erotic—and argues that Yap’s manananggal embodies an “archipelagic monstrosity,” characterized by diffuse circuits of address, affective ambivalence, and homoerotic relations. I contend that thinking about the manananggal’s monstrosity within the archipelagic framework circumvents identitarian co-optation and avoids reductive interpretations. Instead, the manananggal can be envisioned as always pluralistic and multi-connective, spinning unruly networks as an uncontained assemblage of relations, much like an archipelago.
Recommended Citation
Pang, Kam Tou
(2026)
"Archipelagic Monstrosity: The Manananggal in Isabel Yap’s “Good Girls”,"
Kritika Kultura:
No.
49, Article 22.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.13185/1656-152X.2261
Available at:
https://archium.ateneo.edu/kk/vol1/iss49/22
