About
The mission of Alon is to provide an on-line forum for publishing original and refereed essays, artwork, reviews, and moderated reflections that productively and critically engage with Filipinx American and Filipinx Diasporic Studies. Through Alon, we aim to generate and showcase works that positively engage with and critically analyze key questions in the production of knowledges regarding Filipinx Americans and Filipinx diasporic subjects: how are Filipinx bodies represented across multiple forms of media and in what ways do Filipinx people cultivate and create identities and subjectivities to counter these representations? What are the experiences of Filipinx migrants and what about these experiences shed light on the nature of global racial capitalism? How do they imagine and organize toward non-extractive, sustainable futures? How do Filipinx people construct an alternative global archipelago of being and belonging? How are these fields’ particular theoretical and methodological approaches rooted in scholarly production and activism? How are these projects linked with attempts to trace interracial solidarites, as fraught as they may be, to disrupt racial capitalism’s impulse to both homogenize and propagate “multicultural” difference? These and other related questions drive the work behind and in front of Alon.
Alon seeks submissions from those who are engaged in fields that include, but not limited to: Filipinx Studies, Philippine Studies, Filipinx American Studies, Asian American Studies, Asian Studies, Ethnic Studies, Diaspora/Transnationalism Studies, Gender Studies, Sexuality Studies, Cultural Studies, Literature, and the Visual and Performing Arts.
Volume 3, Issue 1, 2023
Alon Volume 3 Number 1
Editor's Preface
Essay
The Problem with Kapwa: Challenging Assumptions of Community, Sameness, and Unity in Filipina American Feminist Fieldwork
This article brings into question the ethics of conducting feminist research on and with Filipina American women as a Filipina American researcher. Through identifying and challenging the assumptions of kapwa—a “pillar” of Filipino cultural values that refers to viewing the “self-in-the-other”1 —I ask, how does one research communities they have deep and personal stakes in without reproducing the existing “fissures and hierarchies of power” existing in Filipinx American studies?2 Drawing from personal experiences of navigating research-participant conflict during fieldwork, I center this methodological question to interrogate the affective assumptions of sameness and unity amongst Fil-Ams in diaspora and to address what responsibilities we might have as Fil-Am feminist researchers to challenge such assumptions in our research and writing. In order to center women’s complex lived experiences and disrupt positivist, static representations of Filipinx American diaspora, kapwa must be reimagined as a critical standpoint and “sameness” de-centered thro