“Feeding.” Photo courtesy Mail Order Brides/M.O.B. (Barrios, Estrada & Wofford). 

Under the cover of darkness, they hunt. Beautiful, successful businesswomen in Silicon Valley corporation Manananggoogle by day, they transform into voracious eaters of entrails and unborn babies once night falls. They are members of the pantheon of Filipino folkloric monsters transported to the New World, now making their demonic presence known not only to the people of Northern California, but throughout the globalized world. Is anyone safe from the clutches of the dreaded Manananggoogle?

In the brief discussion that follows, I begin to explore the most recent work of the Filipina/American performance and visual art collective, the Mail Order Brides (M.O.B. for short). My work on M.O.B.’s “Manananggoogle” project tracks the ways their relocation of the Filipino demon to California’s Silicon Valley provides a critical commentary on global circuits of political and economic exchange, mapping the local and regional economies that voraciously consume the labor and lives of Filipina women and other communities of color. In the larger work from which this piece is drawn, I also think through the decolonial, feminist and queer politics behind the Manananggoogle project—of the radical worldview that the monster can offer us.

Since 1995, Reanne “Immaculata” Estrada, Eliza “Neneng” Barrios, and Jenifer “Baby” Wofford have collaborated as the Mail Order Brides. Independent visual and performing artists currently based between LA and San Francisco, the three have occasionally come together to produce live and taped performances, installations, photo and video series that skewer American and Filipino popular culture. From the Southern gothic/neo-noir karaoke video “Mail Order Bride of Frankenstein,” their Technicolor photo shoots at the over-the-top Madonna Inn in Central California, to their “Rent-A-Bridesmaid” services at San Francisco City Hall, the Mail Order Brides have made their name playing with gendered and racial discourses of Filipina femininity in a signature flamboyant and camp style. With their garish white-face makeup, shellacked up-dos, and terno dresses, perfected over the past eighteen years of their collaboration, the three M.O.B.s evoke nothing as much as an Imelda Marcos returned from the grave, a revenant of Filipino (post)colonial excess that refuses to die in the modern age.¹

M.O.B. take monstrosity quite literally in their latest series, “Manananggoogle,” performing as high-powered executives at a company whose name is a mashup of two different terrors—that of the Filipino monster, the manananggal, and the other of a truly global corporation with physical headquarters in the greater San Francisco Bay Area. In this satiric sendup, M.O.B. update the visual representation of the manananggal, one of a class of folkloric monsters in the Philippines known as aswang which “incorporate aspects of five creatures: witch, self-segmenting viscera sucker, were-beast, bloodsucker, and corpse eater” (Lim 97). The manananggal is unique among other aswang in part for its gender presentation as “an attractive woman by day, buxom, long haired, and light-complexioned” and whom, on its nightly hunt, “discards its lower body from the waist down and flies in search of human prey” (qtd in Lim 99). The manananggal’s prey of choice is also similiarly gendered—they are feared for hunting pregnant women, their long thread-like tongues piercing their bellies to suck out the fetus (Lim 97). While M.O.B. stay fairly true to the physical description of the monster, theirs are successful tech executives—the powerholders of Manananggoogle, Inc.—not the Filipina women usually associated with being manananggal.

Commissioned as part of a mini-restrospective at the San Jose Museum of Art in 2012, the “Manananggoogle” exhibit consisted of six photographic prints and props from the photo shoot.² Accompanying the exhibit, M.O.B. also created a publicly accessible company website for the Manananggoogle corporation, where we learn of its founding in 1898 and its mission “to organize the world and [to] make it universally accessible and useful.”³

Visitors encountered the “Manananggoogle” exhibit immediately after entering the main gallery space from the second floor foyer. The six photographic prints flank a large boardroom table with props: three binders and a rolodex, entrails spilling out of them, and several branded company mugs. In the prints, we see three “before” and three “after” shots of the Mail Order Brides-as-businesswomen. In the before shots we encounter a triptych of “Executive Portraits” of the Mail Order Brides (R. Immaculata Estrada as Chief Executive Office, E. Neneng Barrios as Chief Operating Office, and J. Baby Wofford as Chief Financial Officer of Manananggoogle, Inc), the three seated around the boardroom table staring imperiously at the camera as if we have interrupted their “Conference,” and a third shot of the women relaxing (though looking quite discomfited) during their “Coffee Break.” 

       
                  Fig. 1 “Conference.” Photo courtesy Mail Order Brides/M.O.B. (Barrios, Estrada & Wofford).

The location of Manananggoogle Inc. in California’s Silicon Valley, and the displaying of this exhibit in the heart of downtown San Jose give the project local, national, and global valence. In their human form, the Manananggoogle executives embody the fantasy of progress expounded by global technology companies based in California cities such as Mountain View and Cupertino. Many of them prominently feature female CEOs, CFOs, and COOs—such as eBay’s Meg Whitman, who ran a multimillion dollar campaign in the 2010 California gubernatorial election—as evidence the full incorporation of women into the national workforce. The technology that these companies proffer, moreover, promise open access to information without bias—and in real time at that. Like the beautiful manananggal by day, companies like Apple and Google hold their customers in thrall, seducing them by their aesthetics and their delivery of information at ever-faster speeds on their ever-faster proprietary devices. The seductive power of technological innovation has worldwide reach, even as these companies’ headquarters are based in the former farmlands of Northern California, a true accomplishment that would make any locally-bound manananggal proud!

If Benedict Anderson’s imagined national community is bound together by the newspaper—by delivering a fantasy that throughout the nation, there is a simultaneous consumption of the very same information—the global community dreamed up in Silicon Valley is bound together by the iPhone, through which consumers can participate in the sharing of news, business and fun communication through email, online chat, Facebook posts, and other social media and online services.⁴ The discourse of “calendrical coincidence”—to borrow from Bliss Cua Lim’s phrase—of simultaneous consumption flattens world time, as modern technology touts itself as bridging differences and distance in social and geographical location to produce a more modern, liberal and multicultural world populace. This is perhaps the greatest fantasy envisioned by the Manananggoogles of Silicon Valley—a more harmonious, open global society facilitated by benevolent uses of technology.

As the visitor to the Manananggoogle exhibit discovers, however, the beautiful veneer of this modernity has its dark underbelly. Hanging on the adjacent wall, the three “afterhours” prints of the Manananggoogle execs, now revealing their true form as manananggal, are far more sinister and playful: “Feeding” shows the manananggals, hard at work, greedily devouring entrails from an unseen victim; “Fission” reveals the three digesting their meals before completely detaching their lower human halves to fly away to continue their hunt; what is left behind, finally, is depicted in the last photo of the series, “The Bottoms.”

        
                       Fig 2. “The Bottoms.” Photo courtesy Mail Order Brides/M.O.B. (Barrios, Estrada & Wofford).

If the viewer did not know of the manananggal’s deadly duplicity before encountering these images, it becomes apparent by the end of the photo series why it the Mail Order Brides were so taken with the monster to comment upon the contemporary tech industry: like the manananggal, Silicon Valley companies disguise their true nature while sucking the

        
                  Fig 3. Manananggoogle Inc. corporate map

lives out of poor communities and communities of color. On the Manananggoogle corporate website, a map of its headquarters in Mountain View – established in 1946, coincidentally the same year as the Philippines’s “independence” from the United States—casts a dark shadow over the greater Peninsula. The region’s main traffic routes are stained red, giving bodily inflection to the arteries of local travel and global commerce the map represents. On the regional scale, these arteries illuminate the bleeding out of labor, investment, and infrastructure from formerly dominant economic sectors and locales—from farmlands and suburbia of the East Bay to the banking and financial industries of downtown San Francisco—into the new edge nodes of Silicon Valley. While once agriculture was the lifeblood of Northern California, with war industries and postwar suburban construction giving the region new life in the mid-1900s, the two tech booms of the 1990s and 2000s have created new centers of commerce, construction, and development in Silicon Valley that, once again, only benefit a few at the expense of many.

In the Bay Area region, communities of color have economically “been sucked dry” by the ongoing dot-com and real estate boom-and-bust cycles of the 1990s and 2000s. Even as San Jose has the second largest highest per-capita income of any city in the US, mostly going in the pockets of tech professionals,⁵ cities and suburbs such as Stockton and Vallejo, from where many poorer service workers to Silicon Valley make their supercommute, were the hardest hit by the subprime mortgage crisis.⁶ In San Francisco, housing and rental prices have hit an all-time high in desirable, gentrifying neighborhoods such as the South of Market, the Mission and Bernal Heights, where young tech professionals enjoy “ethnic” foods and new “local” business while pushing out the very Latino/a, Filipino, and black communities that have given these places their very “diverse” character. Like the Manananggoogle executives, it is the developers, programmers, and middle management in these harbingers of modernity whom have greatly profited, at the expense of those left out of this bubble centered quite literally in their own backyards.

In a place discursively produced as a “Happy Valley” of prosperity for all its inhabitants and workers, Silicon Valley’s effects on women’s bodies differentially across lines of race and class mimic the manananggal’s gendered predatory logics. In many contemporary aswang films, the manananggal descends into the poorest slums of the city or the barrios in the provinces, finding young and vulnerable women with little cultural or economic capital to protect them from the monster. Meanwhile, the manananggal herself, while in human form as a beautiful woman, is able to move freely throughout the city or countryside, reaping the social privileges accorded to the area’s most beautiful women. Likewise, the manananggal’s targeting of the unborn fetus in Philippine myth perfectly, and tragically, mimics the disproportionate risk to reproductive health for women working in Silicon Valley’s sweatshops. David Pellow and Lisa Sun Hee Park, in their searing account The Silicon Valley of Dreams: Environmental Injustice, Immigrant Workers, and the High-Tech Global Economy (2002), document that “miscarriages, birth defects, sterility, distorted menstrual cycles, toxic breast milk, and breast cancer are only a handful of the illnesses and disorders women electronics workers face” (12). For these women, on the scale of the body, to be a victim of the manananggal is to also experience real harm to your person and to the land that you live on. From the exploitation of feminized workers on the factory line, making microchips and assembling iPhones in hazardous conditions in China’s Guangzhou province, to the environmental destruction in the Silicon Valley, which hosts the highest density of federally designated toxic Superfund sites in the nation,⁷ Manananggoogle respects no national boundaries or the sanctity of the individual body in its pursuit of profit. The natural landscapes rendered unnatural, unhealthy and monstrous by the imposition of global corporations spans from Mountainview to Manila and to the rural places in between. They are located in places given designations like “Export Processing Zones” in order to escape regulation and remain sites of great physical pain for the women most targeted to work there.

Even as the Silicon Valley is a geography of death for the women on the assembly line, other feminized bodies—those of the executives spoofed by the Mail Order Brides—have become the spokespeople for mainstream feminist “success,” their entry into leadership positions in highly male-dominated corporations being used to sell the idea that any woman can, in Sheryl Sandberg’s terms, “lean in” to achieve power in the boardroom. M.O.B.’s critique of this privileged and highly limited conception of feminist self-realization was most evident in their site-specific, participatory performance on October 12, 2013. Conducted at the downtown San Francisco offices of the Global Fund for Women, “Divide//Conquer: The Manananggoogle Onboarding Experience” invited approximately forty “new hires” for “an enthralling evening of immersive indoctrination.” Told only to “dress to impress,” this small group of fellow artists, scholars, activists and other curious folks were surprised on arrival with multiple training videos (a mix of movie clips from classic '80s office films like Working Girl, YouTube videos of aswang films and lip-synched performances from the Philippines, and disorienting digital montages created by Barrios), and gender-specific “team building” challenges run by the three Mananannggoogle executives and with the assistance of their three submissive Renfields A, B, and C. Emphasizing the gender inequality in the white collar workforce of the real world, the Mail Order Brides’s exercises worked to playfully overturn the glass ceiling, by training the female hires to harness tyrannical power, at one point having us cheer/jeer at the male hires made to run an obstacle course consisting of menial clerical tasks such as stapling and carrying trays of coffee.

With its emphasis on creating tongue-in-cheek group bonding experiences over shared exercises in domination, the Manananggoogle Onboarding Experience could easily be read as one-note, a light and entertaining reminder for the small group of us—good Bay Area lefties who already “get” the politics—of the need to overturn gender hierarchies. Yet, I would argue that the very affective community of joyousness and play that was produced that evening was a performative iteration of the affects needed to reproduce global capitalism—or the need to produce collective indifference to labor exploitation in exchange for the promise of creating superficial connections through social media and other technology. The infamous video game and sports rooms at Apple, the free lunches in the Google cafeteria and bikes on the Google “campus,” the colorful open office spaces at Zygna: these infantilizing work spaces are built to create an atmosphere of “fun” that benevolently reproduces neocolonial divisions between the First and Third Worlds. Even with women at the helm of some of these corporations, the pursuit of profit and violation of workers’ rights remains unchanged, the boys club as intact as ever.

As the new hires exited the building at the close of the performance, we came across a table of branded Manananggoogle merchandise: several coffee cups, and their version of

      
                       Fig. 3. Image taken by the author.

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s bestselling self-help book, Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead, its subtitle reworked to instead evoke Nietzschean commentary on human nature: Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Power. What is the “community” of women that Sandberg’s book conjures and celebrates as central to winning it all, in the bedroom and in the boardroom? Manananggoogle’s version of leaning in makes its methods far more transparent by refusing to hide the insatiable appetites and predatory impulses of its aswang executives. In their consumption of those beneath their station, the Manananggoogle executive literalizes the master-slave dynamic of global power, and reveals that such exploitation is not unique to the contemporary work force, but has a much longer genealogy and expansive geography based in Euro-American domination of racialized Others. Using the aswang as mascot, Manananggoogle’s mission of “reorganizing the world” satirizes late capitalism’s predatory logics as rearticulations of colonial divisions between human and non-human, between master and slave; so central is this logic that “Divide” and “Conquer” is Manananggoogle’s slogan, framing the company’s bloody logo on its website. As the project takes pains to remind us, preying on the poor and brown has long precedent; the 1898 founding date of Manananggoogle not coincidentally marks the year of America’s violent acquisition of the Philippines. In relocating the manananggals to Silicon Valley, the Mail Order Brides’s project allows us to see that rather than being discrete and separate, the spatiotemporal borders between the rural, global South and the modern, global North are actually mutually dependent and quite permeable. Their work also reminds us that the creation of a modern, wired society continues to rely on things imagined to have been “left behind” in the global South: on the exploitation of feminized laborers trafficked across and between national borders, and on the sucking dry of natural resources for the creation of unnatural technology.

Manananggoogle Inc., and the globalized industries it is based on, thus simply works –both literally and metaphorically—by collapsing the geographic distance between the Philippines and the US and compressing the elapsed time between the pre-modern world of aswangs and the hyperreal future of high technology. That these industries predispose so many to premature death is the true terror that the Mail Order Brides personify as the executives of Manananggoogle, Inc.; their callousness and embrace of death for their pleasure makes them not bygone creatures of the past but the perfect symbols of the modern world.

Works Cited

Lim, Bliss Cua. Translating Time: Cinema, the Fantastic, and Temporal Critique. Durham: Duke University Press, 2009.

Pellow, David Naguib and Lisa Sun-hee Park. The Silicon Valley of Dreams: Environmental Injustice, Immigrant Workers, and the High-Tech Global Economy. New York: NYU Press, 2002.

Endnotes: