Gesturing Towards a Decolonial Rereading of the 'Single' Story: The Possibility and Precarity of Matandang Dalaga Narratives

Date of Award

5-1-2023

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts major in Literary and Cultural Studies

First Advisor

Danilo Francisco M. Reyes

Abstract

The ageing single woman is a cultural and literary figure of either deficit or celebratory narratives around singlehood. Running through these default narratives is (re)productive ideology that shores up (re)productivity and that regulates single women’s narrative position and place in contemporary society. The present study is a textual and critical analysis of literary and nonliterary narrativizations about the matandang dalaga who not only summons the sociocultural stereotypes of single Filipino women past the typical marrying age (pindangga, malungkot, and kawawa) but also invokes narratives of exclusion, failure, and decline (walang nanligaw, di ganap ang pagiging babae, and walang mag-aalaga sa pagtanda). Through close readings of matandang dalaga texts, this undertaking participates in the specific efforts of Singleness Studies to impugn such narratives while nullifying unsifted resignification of singlehood as a simple matter of choosing autonomy over traditional femininity.

Relevant concepts of Singleness Studies, Ageing Studies and (queer) Narrative Theory elevate awareness about the authenticity and complexity of the single life, the ubiquity of singlism, the enmeshment of women’s single status with ageing, the limited narrative position of the ageing single woman, and the legitimacy of the singles perspective as a vital lens that needs to be assimilated in the humanities as an academic discipline. There is a caveat, however, in relying mainly on the established interpretive paradigms and civilizational feminism in the Global North even while Singleness Studies in the Global South has yet to firmly take root. The theoretical works of Maria Lugones1 and Francoise Verges on Decolonial Feminism are particularly instructive on the coloniality of gender and capitalist logic and the ways in which colonized resisters actively subvert modern colonial imposition of how lives should be (re)productively lived. Singlehood as lived by racially differentiated women is grounded in oppositional responses to colonial modernity. What it means to be an ageing single Filipino woman, this paper argues, can be grasped in decolonial rereadings of matandang dalaga narratives. Narratives about the matandang dalaga are textual spaces mediating how singleness also comes to be understood as a colonized experience or a lived experience of coloniality that is actively, (infra-politically), and intimately resisted. Given all the odds stacked against them, ageing single Filipino women are agents in their own stories.

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