UC San Diego

What can the intergenerational conflict between a conservative, immigrant Filipina mother and her leftist, diaspora-born daughter teach us about the relationship between family and structural violence? The mango is a riddle. A migrant mother is a puzzle. The dictionary is a colonial teacher one hates and needs. Virtue can flay a diaspora Filipino/x family like tender mango flesh. Colonial, family, and structural violence reverberate in one another. Trauma breathes life into trauma. Movements articulate the wanting that cannot not be wanted. Inter-generations vision futurity through citational and disidentifying materialization. This cross-genre thesis examines violence and filial silence through food writing, lyric, documentation, list, autoethnography, recipe, critical essay, autotheory, documentary poetics, citation, personal narrative, memoir, dictionary/etymology, and family history. The prose and poems in this project address the following questions: How ought one be in relation with relations who desire to be deeply possessed by settler English, by settler amnesia? What is the relationship between violence, virtue, and movement for the gendered Filipina in queer diaspora? What misfeeling, or deviation from normalizing affects, occurs when a migrant or descendant assimilates into, and/or refuses, the power hierarchies of imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist cis heteropatriarchy? What archive of misfeeling shapes those who organize against these power hierarchies? How do memory and the body function as this fight’s terrain?