Gaining Breath: Filipino Laboring Bodies Performing Nation

This dissertation examines how Filipino laboring bodies—across historical and transnational contexts—perform, contest, and reimagine the nation through acts of embodied resistance. Drawing from performance studies, visual culture, and indigenous Filipino concepts of selfhood, it introduces karton cartography, a framework for mapping fragile yet insurgent spaces where marginalized subjects assert presence and breathe within oppressive systems. Three case studies structure this inquiry: (1) Filipino migrant workers who danced with white women in 1930s California taxi dance halls, (2) Alfonso Ossorio’s collaboration with Ade Bethune and Victorias mill workers in postwar Negros to build the Chapel of St. Joseph the Worker, and (3) contemporary Overseas Filipino domestic workers in Hong Kong who organize beauty pageants as performative claims to visibility and community. Each instance enacts ginhawa—a culturally embedded notion of breath, ease, and collective relief—amid colonial and neocolonial constraints. Through indigenous concepts such as kapwa (shared self), pakikibaka (struggle), lakas ng loob (inner strength), and lamangan (outperforming or gaining advantage), this work theorizes performance as a political and affective practice of self-actualization. It further articulates the notion of transgressive aura—a queer, counter-visual gesture of becoming—that disrupts dominant systems of power, gender, and visibility. Combining archival research, ethnography, and comics interludes as visual essays, the dissertation itself performs a decolonial methodology that joins scholarship and art-making. Ultimately, Gaining Breath argues that Filipino laboring bodies enact nationhood not as a static identity but as a performative, precarious, and breathing practice—one that transforms subjection into presence, survival into imagination, and endurance into art.