The (Neo)colonial Sentimentality of 90 Day Fiancé and the Figure of the Heartless Filipina

Introduction

In the first season of the TLC reality television series, 90 Day Fiancé: Before the 90 Days, a white American man, Larry, travels overseas for the first time to meet his online girlfriend, a Filipina woman, Jenny.¹ In an interview that overlays onto the scene of him anxiously weaving through Ninoy Aquino International Airport, he explains that despite their months of video calls and extensive planning, he fears this may have all been a ruse: “Please don’t break my heart. Please be real.” At the outdoor pick-up area, the camera cuts to a closeup of a woman’s feet in red sandals, toe lightly tapping, then to brown arms crossed over a small chest. Larry approaches, meekly grinning, and finally, the camera reveals Jenny’s face, a stoic gaze softening into coy recognition. They embrace, the camera spinning around them, the spectacle of a rom-com cliché. Larry tries for romance: “I finally get to meet you for the first time, love.” Jenny’s response is more pragmatic: “How was your flight?” He stumbles through an explanation of how his bags were lost and he must buy new clothes. She laughs at his nervousness and he defensively points out that everyone is staring at them. She jokes, “Don’t worry. People here are not eating you, okay? . . . I can take care of you here.” With her cool demeanor, she dismisses his sentimentality, but still manages to care for his needs.

First airing in 2014 on TLC, 90 Day Fiancé is a reality television series that follows a common phenomenon of the postcolonial, globalized age: international, interracial marriage. Each season follows four to eight couples, consisting of one American and one foreigner, on the path to the K-1 marriage visa,² and culminates with them either making it to the altar after the 90-day window (thus beginning their march toward US citizenship for the foreign partner) or calling it quits (in which case the foreigner leaves). Since the original series’ success, 90 Day Fiancé has evolved into a massive franchise consisting of over twenty different spinoffs, dozens of seasons, and over one hundred featured couples.³ As the suspenseful editing of this first-meeting scene between Larry and Jenny showcases, 90 Day Fiancé’s success lies in its dramatization of the intimacy between domestic and foreign subjects, and all the interpersonal tensions that marriage entails, intensified by the logistical and political stakes of securing an American visa. Thus TLC renews the travel narratives of the white colonial male subject to undiscovered lands and his forays with Indigenous women, what Mary Louise Pratt has termed “contact zones” of colonial encounter.⁴ The romance of 90 Day Fiancé appeals to viewers not only because it is “real,” but because the series depicts locations and people that American audiences might otherwise never encounter, and subsequently links those foreign sites and subjects to divergent, non-Western attitudes toward marriage and love: while American Larry is sentimental about love and marriage but fears his partner is deceiving him, Filipina Jenny is unsentimental and pragmatic but states an intent to care for him. If 90 Day Fiancé constitutes a visual resurgence of the travel narrative in the neocolonial age, what lesson does it disseminate about its subjects that form the transnational and interracial marriage union? Who can afford to be sentimental, and who owes a debt of care?

Filipinas are but one racial and diasporic group who have been marked as unassimilable by US Empire through the marriage institution, as evidenced by 90 Day Fiancé’s representation of foreign partners from every inhabited major global region. However, when we account for the foreign partner’s country of origin, the US man–Filipina woman coupling is the most featured formation overall across the 90 Day franchise.⁵ Following Vernadette Gonzalez and Robyn Magalit Rodriguez’s work on Filipina women’s representation on the Internet and their argument that “‘Filipina’ becomes a universal icon for the mail-order bride industry” and “a kind of universal signifier for other women’s bodies,”⁶ I am interested in how Larry and Jenny, along with twelve other featured US-Filipina couples, function as televisual tropes within their individual narratives, and across the 90 Day Fiancé enterprise. How does the series’ deployment of the figure of this couple form enable an ideological encoding of normative ideologies that bolster the ongoingness of US Empire in the Philippines? Further, what do we make of the Filipina’s recursive and historical function as a metonymical symbol for the exploitation of women’s bodies in the Global South? As a dominant reality television form, 90 Day Fiancé is a logical progression of US visuality and mass media, insofar as its narratives extend what Stuart Hall, in “Encoding and Decoding in the Televisual Discourse,” calls “the perfect myth” of US Empire, epitomized in the TV Western as the first televisual genre to present “the archetypal American story” of expansion.⁷ The Western genre encoded immediately recognizable themes and signs that stood for masculine power and Manifest Destiny, thus deriving narrative and visual elements from “the real historical circumstances” of domestic US Empire—this included the figure of the cowboy and his accoutrements.⁸

So, too, has 90 Day Fiancé encoded recurring symbols and motifs through and around the institution of marriage as a locus for establishing heteronormative, racial, and neoimperial politics, in the context of US Empire abroad – the Filipina and her accoutrements.⁹ As such, this article attempts to decode the ways that 90 Day Fiancé extends the myth of American Empire through transnational marriage, and how the series deploys the figure of the Filipina to encode and reproduce, on one hand, “proper” subjecthood and citizenship in terms of assimilability, and, on the other, ongoing anxieties about miscegenation, foreign/immigrant invasion, the primitivity of postcolonial peoples, and the contamination of the white liberal subject. Sentimentality toward love and marriage is a prominent overall theme in 90 Day Fiancé, abstracting from the history of US Empire that established the material conditions in which Filipina women turn to marriage with US men in the first place.

Following Lucy San Pablo Burns’s discussion of the erotic and abusive colonial relation between the United States and the Philippines as performed in theater productions, I aim to highlight the historical and metaphorical prostitution of the Filipina, a literary and dramatic trope for the United States’ exploitation of Filipino natural resources, land, labor, and bodies. I ask, how does 90 Day Fiancé prolong and transform “the conditions of profit and pleasure that make possible the production and circulation of the Filipino/a performing body” by teasing the uneasy binary of prostitution of and marriage to?¹⁰ Responding to this question requires us to understand transnational marriages between Filipina women and US men in the context of the Philippine-American War (1899–1902) which rationalized US Empire through Manifest Destiny, benevolent assimilation, and normative racial and gender scripts, and serves as the inciting point of contact between these archetypical figures. In Nerissa Balce’s examination of US media and cultural texts produced during the war, she highlights the racial, sexual, and colonial abjection of the Filipino body, and, citing Ann McClintock, as that which US imperialism continually “seeks to expunge” but “cannot do without.”¹¹ Balce focuses on visual and textual objects, such as vaudeville, minstrel shows, popular literature, and war photography that feature sexually and racially abject Filipinos, and that both do and do not overtly represent imperial violence, but nonetheless demonstrate both the racial and sexual dimensions of US Empire.¹² Meanwhile, Dylan Rodriguez’s meditation on Filipino American identity and community forms makes explicit the violence of US Empire under the guise of political and cultural tutelage; he emphasizes the “banality” in war policy, and the resulting deferral of “intimacy with genocide” that continues to inform Filipino (American) identity.¹³

Thus, Filipinx studies lays the foundation for the rhetorics of sentimentality that obscure relations of war, violence, and exploitation, and that define 90 Day Fiancé.¹⁴ Colonial, racial, and sexual abjection, imperial genocide, and exploitation defined the turn-of-the-century war/occupation era, utilizing rhetorics of tutelage, domesticity, intimacy, tutelage, and economic opportunity that abstract, erase, sanitize, and neutralize empire’s violence and exploitation.¹⁵ The legacy of Manifest Destiny and benevolent assimilation continues to be reproduced through transnational marriage. Tessa Winkelmann has detailed the history of interracial marriage and family-making between US men and Filipina women since the war and occupation, arguing that miscegenation was a cornerstone of occupation, and underlining “the logical, rational, and intellectual nature of the decision-making processes of the mostly Filipina women who entered into relations with Americans.”¹⁶  In a similar vein, Genevieve Clutario explores how Filipina women utilized beauty and fashion in their collisions with Spanish, American, and Japanese Empires, and white women.¹⁷ Additionally, Asian American scholars have attempted to read intentional subversion of racist and imperialist structures in artworks depicting individual Asian women’s marital and sexual intimacy with white men.¹⁸ Such strategies of racial and sexual subterfuge recall Gonzalez and Robyn Magalit Rodriguez’s discussion of “Filipina” as a signifier for the exploitation of women’s bodies generally and their hope for the capacity of technology to enable more agential, subversive modes of Filipina representation. Further, Allan Punzalan Isaac posits how Filipinos, in the service and care labor sectors, disrupt the physical, commodity-driven confines of labor time and capitalist exchange, and produce “vital affects, other chronicities, multiple networks, and other worlds,” through online community and creative production.¹⁹ 

In my own analysis of 90 Day Fiancé and contribution to Filipinx studies, I focus specifically on Larry and Jenny to connect the series’ representations of Filipina women to the histories of abjection, exploitation, and war that these Filipinx scholars urgently unravel (in particular, I closely read scenes of Larry and Jenny’s marriage rituals during their season of Before the 90 Days, a spinoff which focuses on American partners visiting their foreign counterparts in the latters’ home countries, prior to engagement and initiating the K-1 visa process). I build on the framework of sentimentality that Denise Cruz exposes in her discussion of the trope of the “caring mother of the nation” in Cold War-era literature, as an ideological construct that postcolonial nationalism modeled after American Manifest Destiny, sentimentality, domesticity, and nationalism.²⁰ I also analyze online responses to a viral scene in which Jenny mispronounces an English word and the possible identitarian modes of resistance that the scene enables based on a refusal of the “caring” Filipina trope. The Filipina’s apparent “heartlessness,” as Cruz describes such a refusal, might inadvertently function as what Sarita See calls the “decolonial eye,” the creation of “a visual and rhetorical grammar of violence” that disarticulates the historical and cultural dispossessions of American empire.²¹ Thus, I argue that the Filipina of 90 Day Fiancé “talks back” to the institutions that deem her unfit for marriage and US citizenship, and through her disarticulation, she reveals how the sentimentality surrounding marriage extends the mystification of the social and economic conditions of global capital and neoimperialism.

Simultaneously, however, my analysis resists the impulse to recuperate the figure of the Filipina from her histories of racial and sexual abjection, exploitation, and genocide, and assert for or demand of her the agential action of disarticulation. Following the Filipinx scholars I have cited here, I forgo a stake in that figure’s agency, insofar as that figure is, indeed, a figure, and instead examine how agency is overdetermined by grammars of nationalism, neoliberalism, and global capital. Aligned with Filipinx scholars’ concern over Filipino American identity formation’s misrecognition of its own construction within US Empire’s logics, I worry that recuperating the figure of the Filipina risks replicating the sentimentalist logics of US Empire (and of the postcolonial state), and lifting it from its historical conditions within (neo)imperialism and global capital.²² 

Derived from my engagement with Hall’s definitions of encoding and decoding and Cruz’s analysis of the literary motif of the Filipina heart, and aligned with See’s decolonial eye that embraces the violence of disarticulation insofar as violence might mean to refuse and deconstruct the grammars of empire, I offer unsentimental decoding as a method of reading, viewing, and interpreting media. Unsentimental decoding follows Filipinx and visual culture scholarship’s refusal to obscure or erase the histories of empire, racialization, gendering, and global capital that undergird works of media.²³ 90 Day Fiancé rests on an uncritical sentimentality that its producers and viewers may not recognize as being based in, as Cruz reveals, a sentimentality that extends US Cold War constructions of modernity, gendered domesticity, and national duty.²⁴ Hall, in his emphasis on decoding the aesthetic features of a media object as political or hegemonic rather than merely technical, premeditates the postmodern problematic of reality television today—it claims to transmit “reality” but depends on a predetermined system of aural and visual signs to do so, and on the ideological positions of its audiences.²⁵ To that end, unsentimental decoding highlights the Philippines, the figure of the Filipina, and Filipinx studies as rich sites for visual culture and media studies to more deeply examine US Empire’s deployment of visuality to evolve normative ideologies into the current moment of (neo)imperiliasm and global capital. This first section aims to introduce the necessary convergence of visual culture and Filipinx studies, which, together, enable me to interpret 90 Day Fiancé‘s deployment of normative racial, gender, class, and (neo)colonial codes in its televisual representations of Filipina women in particular. The second section offers a reading of Larry and Jenny’s arc that engages the dominant ideologies that are encoded in the series as a model of Western media, the decoding and encoding practices of online cultural producers in response to Larry and Jenny, and my own critical decoding of the series that highlights the figure of the Filipina as a locus for US Empire, postcolonial nationalisms, and feminist, anticolonial, and anticapitalist discourses. The third section considers the 90 Day Fiancé franchise as a conglomerate, highlighting the patterns that emerge in US man–Filipina woman couple formations, and the series’ relevance to ongoing questions of US-Philippine intimacy. Finally, I offer unsentimental decoding as a reading method that enables Filipinx studies to engage Western media and avoid replicating its vernaculars, especially in terms of sentimentality, nationalism, and essentialization. Too, I am invested in unsentimental decoding’s attunement to questions of class and labor, and what I view as a tendency in recuperative, resistant reading methods to fetishize alterity and obscure the historical and material conditions of (neo)colonialism and global capital.

Decoding and Encoding Larry and Jenny: American Sentimentality vs. Filipina Abjection on Air and Online

In their introductory episode of Before the 90 Days (2017), we learn that Larry (age 39) and Jenny (age 25) first met online through the dating website, Filipino Cupid, which links Western men with Filipino women. Prior to his voyage to the Philippines, Larry, interviewed in his home in Florida, remarks on the sheer volume of messages he received from Filipina women when he joined the website with just one line of information in his bio: “‘I’m just looking for the right one for the rest of my life.’”²⁶ He continues, “I got 217 emails in 24 hours. I talked to 15 girls on Skype.” Jenny was the last to speak with him, and he couldn’t believe his luck: “She says to me, ‘I want to cook for you, I want to clean for you, I will never cheat on you, I will never get divorced, I’m a devout Catholic, I’ll work full time’ . . . Where are you going to hear a girl say that?” From the couple’s introduction, the figure of the Filipina is defined in terms of, on one hand, interchangeability and commodifiability and, on the other hand, boundless care and domestic labor. We witness an enactment of the pleasure-profit dynamic that defines the figure of the mail-order bride as the embodiment of an endless resource of care and service labor for empire and global capital. Larry marvels at the vast selection of Filipinas at his disposal, and at Jenny’s expression of domestic care for and loyalty to him, and commitment to God and full-time work. In a similar vein, Gina Velasco’s study of the Filipina transnational body at the core of queer diasporic nationalisms features her own brief meditation on a different couple from 90 Day Fiancé, Brett and Daya, the latter being a nurse and mail-order bride, ready to immigrate and dispense care and trained medical labor to her husband and the global economy.²⁷ However, if Western men and global capital demand Filipina labor, the postcolonial Philippine state has answered in kind, as Filipinx scholarship reveals the history of the 1988 campaign, “mga bagong bayani” (“the new heroes” of the nation), coined by President Corazon Aquino, which meant to uplift the new labor population of Overseas Filipina Workers (OFWs) who entered the international service and care labor markets.²⁸ OFWs sent their earnings to their families back in the Philippines, with remittances making up $8 billion of the Philippines’ annual GDP, and as Neferti Tadiar explains, the postcolonial nation-state thus framed OFWs’ sacrifice for their families’ well-being as sacrifice for their country—a national duty that has employed Catholic values to enforce the subject position of the OFW, and recalls Walter Benjamin: “If the commodity had a soul, it would be the most empathetic soul.”²⁹ 

Thus the commodity ensouls the Filipina, whose racialized and gendered care have been appropriated as a symbol of national and familial duty, measured in sexual service and capital earning. The Filipina is able to take on a leadership position within global and national service, as Martin Manalansan suggests in his analysis of the 2008 film Serbis, which features a matriarch-led family, who live in and operate a porn theater, and whose title is derived from a Tagalog slang term for “service” that can denote general service work and sex work. Thus Manalansan highlights how the slippage between service and sex work informs everyday culture and domestic life in the Philippines, with Filipina women grotesquely empowered as “the global servant and domestic helper par excellence.”³⁰ We witness that slippage in Larry’s reasoning for why he “chose” Jenny among hundreds of other Filipina women—her declared endless capacity for intimate care, domestic labor, and wage earning. Further, in his study of what he calls the “diasporic maternal” to describe how Filipinas and the Philippines are “expected to serve a maternal role in globalization,” Harrod Suarez cites Marx to reveal the collapse in the distinction between marriage with and prostitution of the Filipina, who, under global capital, is considered exclusive, private property as wives and “universal private property” as prostitutes.³¹ While this is the condition of women under capitalism broadly, it becomes heightened in the global labor conditions that establish and demand the Filipina’s endless capacity for care, such that, as Robyn Magalit Rodriguez and Gonzalez argue, “Filipina becomes the signifier for other multinational women.”³²

If the commodity’s “most empathetic soul” is that of the OFW, we might consider why Larry and Jenny’s first in-person meeting scene was edited to obscure her face, and why her reveal is prefaced by Larry’s fear that she might have deceived him. Before his trip to the Philippines, Larry’s cousin, Carl, and his wife, also a Filipina, who have gone through the K-1 process, reveal that they hacked Jenny’s Facebook and discovered messages with other American men. “She has backups,” they claim, and they insinuate that she is a “typical” mail-order bride, wanting not love but a green card, and wishes to exploit Larry’s resources, as he dipped into his 401(k) to visit her. While I discuss the series overall in the third section, I note now that 90 Day Fiancé’s depictions of the US man–Filipina woman relation frequently include the man and his family’s anxieties about the Filipina’s economic exploitation. Further, all couples’ stories begin with the perspective of the US partner, until the first meeting, with the foreign spouse’s appearance in the flesh serving as a climax, after which each partner’s perspective is integrated into the plot. Even after Jenny is introduced in person, her own reasons for “choosing” Larry as a partner are not as explicitly stated as his. Perhaps this is because what the US man brings to the table is implicit—he is from the US, and by manipulating him with feigned affection, as Larry’s cousin and his wife suggest, a Filipina stands to receive the benefits of US citizenship and the US dollar. In Rolando Tolentino’s interrogation of the mail-order bride industry, he notes: “Advertised mostly for middle-class, elderly white men, mail-order brides embody the hyperreal shopping for the First World male and the hyperreal commodification of women and the Third World.” Further, Tolentino cites the “regime” of global capital that prevents ethnographic engagement with actual mail-order brides; thus their narratives remain “individually kept secrets,” and with “no body constitutable as a subject,” such women can only be known “in geopolitical terms . . . confined in a commodity trade devoid of pleasure.”³³ Thus, the agential white subject can openly express his individual desires and needs from a partner, whom he may choose from literal catalogues of women that commodify them in terms of their capacity to tend to the white subject’s desires and needs. Meanwhile, the figure of the Filipina cannot be known as an individual subject, and only in terms of her structural position, or, in other words, her commodification within global capital.

The Filipina’s unknowability, rendered through 90 Day Fiancé’s narrative, visual, and editorial techniques to generate suspense and suspicion before her in-person reveal, thus illustrates how sentimentality has served as an ideological apparatus of US Empire and global capital to obscure their exploitation of Philippine resources and bodies. The series can only create tension about Jenny’s potential deceit by suggesting that she is unsentimental and heartless. Here, Cruz’s concept of the figure of the “heartless Filipina” functions as a harbinger for 90 Day Fiancé. After the US-Philippine War, the Pensionado Act of 1903 allowed Filipina women to pursue education in the West, and they came to represent the Philippines’ emergence as a modern, independent, postcolonial state, often figured into nationalist propaganda.³⁴ However, in her discussion of Cold War-era Filipina authors, Cruz reveals how the United States’ national ethos of sentimentality and communal responsibility in the fight against communism was imposed upon the Philippines, with the Filipina heart becoming a recurring literary motif for her care of the motherland and its nationalist male heroes. Further, the Filipina heart enforces “the representational setup of a naturalized link between Filipina women and what sociologists have called a ‘chain of care.’”³⁵ In other words, sentimental narratives and campaigns continue to abstract the history of US Empire’s enforcement of healthcare training and medical science that subsequently facilitated a global market of Filipina care and service labor, as revealed by Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, Catherine Ceniza Choy, and Warwick Anderson.³⁶

90 Day Fiancé’s depiction of Larry and Jenny also features a scene of a marriage ritual, wherein the figure of the Filipina is juxtaposed with animals, implying what Mel Chen has characterized as a racially, sexually deviant nonhuman animality, cast against proper human subjectivity.³⁷ 90 Day Fiancé positions the figure of the Filipina in what Chen describes as a spectrum of animacy that Western empire wrought on Africa and Asia, a “multiracial drama,” or what Anne McClintock calls an “iconography of domestic degeneracy” that arranges and repurposes racial iconographies across different colonial contexts to preserve the normative position of the white male, rational subject.³⁸ Despite his family’s attempted intervention, Larry is reassured by Jenny over video call that those other American men are part of her past, and he travels to her family’s rural home in Urdaneta, Pangasinan, where they have prepared a feast for the occasion. They unveil a whole roasted pig, or lechon, from underneath a massive banana leaf, and Jenny’s father begins to butcher it, using a machete to chop the spine and remove the head, which he displays vertically on the table as the centerpiece, the hog’s empty eye sockets and mouth cast to the sky.³⁹ Shots of the father’s bare hands handling the machete and the greasy meat are intercut with interviews of him and his wife explaining that the lechon took five hours to prepare. Flies swarm the carcass, dogs and chickens beg for scraps, little children run about, giggling and jeering. Meanwhile, Larry trembles in the background, wide-eyed, pale, and anxious. Jenny provides context to the bounty of the occasion: the last time her family splurged for a lechon was when she was a child, indicating the austerity present otherwise. In contrast to this generosity, Larry, in voiceover, says he is afraid he will have “diarrhea problems.” The family tells him he will be the first to taste the lechon and applaud as Jenny’s mother places a plate of the meat in his hands. Larry, visibly shaking, does the sign of the cross, and summons the courage (and God) to eat a tiny sliver of the lechon. He immediately gags and shoves the plate into Jenny’s hands. In hushed Pangasinan, Jenny’s family urge her to explain to Larry that much time and resources had been spent to prepare the lechon for his arrival: “Tell him he must eat. We are all eating and he is not.” In the Philippines, it is considered the utmost offense to refuse to eat what a host has prepared. Sitting between her family and her fiancé, Jenny is frozen in a crisis of translation, her eyes glazed downward, past the camera recording her.⁴⁰

The editing of the scene amplifies the melodrama between Jenny’s family, Jenny, and Larry. The frequent cutaways to each party’s reactions to the lechon produce a sense of chaos, forcing the viewer to volley between the parents’ humble reverence, Jenny’s stress as she attempts to translate the importance of the event to Larry, and Larry’s paralyzing fear at the prospect of having to consume the lechon. Thus, the ambiguity of the scene oscillates between the suggestion that Larry’s visceral reaction to eating the lechon is ridiculous, and that it is in fact appropriate given the abjection of the lechon and its primitive surroundings. The closeups on his trembling face and his anxiety about “diarrhea problems” produce comedic effect. But once Jenny’s father beheads the lechon, the pleasant, vaguely tropical music that had overlaid the video comes to a dissonant halt as the crude butchering begins. Thus, the scene shifts from romantic comedy to horror, accompanied by the ominous chops of the machete on bone, the shots of wild animals and children, and the pastoral setting. Closeups prominently feature Jenny’s father’s bare hands handling the meat and bones of the lechon, his greasy finger slipping into its open mouth as he sets the head upright, the rest of the family picking through the carcass with bare hands, and children happily eating from large bowls, a stark contrast to Larry’s cold fear.

In its depiction of Filipinos’ intimate handling and consumption of the lechon, 90 Day Fiancé intentionally provokes its presumed Western audience’s lack of familiarity with the butchering process. While Larry’s job as a McDonald’s manager may have exposed him to various stages of the food preparation process within an industrialized Western setting, he is unprepared to face the wholeness of the animal in this provincial, third-world setting. The series elicits racialized notions of hygiene associated with black and Asian migrant populations in the West since the times of slavery and coolie labor, and Chen emphasizes the “bizarre bodily intimacy” and deviant sexuality attributed to the domestic space of turn-of-the-century Chinatowns.⁴¹ This dual judgment in terms of private space and cleanliness exacerbates Western anxieties about racial mixture as a threat to the sanctity of the white home and family. Jenny, representative of the Filipina mail-order bride, poses a similar threat to the white home and family to the white subject, who becomes intimate with her (and her meat) and falls victim to contamination. Her proximity to the animal suggests her own animality and Balce’s notion of colonial abjection, but, alongside Larry’s visceral disgust toward the lechon and its surroundings, it also suggests a lack of hygiene—even a morbidity that has historically been associated with the Filipino body. As Choy outlines, the United States implemented nursing programs in the Philippines in the early years of occupation, with health and scientific progress as requisites to “transform Filipino bodies into a people capable of self-government.”⁴² Consequently, US imperialism’s tutelage of the Philippine state necessitated the reinvention of the pre-colonial Filipino body as diseased and racially inferior against the vigorous, healthy, and racially superior US body. Thus, US imperialism benevolently infused vitality into the Filipino body, once perceived as diseased, deathly, contaminated, and contaminating against the superior white body. In turn, the white body had to be protected from foreign contamination. As Anderson suggests, the extermination of Philippine microbial pathogens played an equal role in rationalizing conquest as Manifest Destiny, as people in the US viewed both Filipino guerillas and Filipino microbes as “unhygienic insurrectos” and “invisible foes.”⁴³

Further, Chen cites JL Austin to highlight marriage and sexual intimacy as a nexus in which racialized subjects are deemed animalistic and unassimilable into proper subjecthood.⁴⁴ In the example of marriage as a speech act, Austin describes how the sanctity of marriage as a verbal contract would be violated by a nonhuman, nonverbal participant (a monkey). Austin’s monkey is not merely a rhetorical figure: Chen argues that Austin’s analogy alludes to the use of evolutionary mapping that coincided with European imperialism, and was used to compare colonized subjects to animals, and informed xenophobia and anxieties around miscegenation in 1950s Great Britain, which saw an influx of immigrants from decolonized African and Asian nation-states.⁴⁵ Like Austin, 90 Day Fiancé links the figure of the Filipina with a nonhuman entity to reflect American anxieties about interracial and postcolonial marriage. The melodrama of 90 Day Fiancé establishes itself in the degradation of the white liberal subject, who reaches a crisis point in the prevalence of international and interracial marriage in the globalized era, insofar as the institution of marriage is a cipher for the preservation of American citizenship and society. The Filipina is not only an improper subject to that institution but excluded from political agency. The lechon scene is effectively a marriage ceremony, as Jenny’s family interpret Larry’s consumption of the lechon as his acceptance of their daughter, themselves, and their culture, and as a sign of their daughter’s access to US citizenship and upward mobility via marriage. However, a white Western audience reads his betrothal to a Filipina as his descent into the improper hygiene practices and seductions of the Third World, amplified by cohabitation with animals, an additional metaphor for improper familymaking. His participation in the ritual and his consumption of its racialized participants (the pig, the Filipina) signal his demise. The rural setting of Jenny’s family home further intensifies the white US man’s contamination and descent from civilization, insofar as a Western audience may reduce the Philippines to the underdeveloped provinces, without accounting for the industrialization and modern infrastructure in urban centers.

Hall stresses that the production or encoding of television is highly informed by its reception or decoding by viewers, such that viewers’ consumption of television is “itself a ‘moment’ of the production process.”⁴⁶ 90 Day Fiancé not only plays into the ideological stances of its presumed audiences, but also enables virtual spaces in which viewers can interact with the series and produce their own media that responds to and critiques its subjects. Larry and Jenny’s season of 90 Day Fiancé was especially popular during its airing in the United States and the Philippines, and one scene went viral on social media, a wide range of audience engagement ensuing. These forms of audience participation and cultural production reflect dominant ideologies of US Empire and global capital, dominant ideologies of the Philippine postcolonial state and global capital, and/or critical discourse that aligns with many of the radical Filipinx, Asian American, Marxist, and anticolonial discourses that my own critical method of unsentimental decoding builds upon.

As the lechon scene comes to a close, Jenny’s family glare disapprovingly at Larry, who, clueless, gathers himself with a sense of triumph. Jenny flees the yard, into the perimeter of the family home, toward the surrounding wilderness. Larry follows her, asks what’s wrong, and she tells him, “You’re rude,” pronouncing “rude” like “road.” Through tears, she continues, “They effort for you. You don’t care . . . I see your face. You’re disgusted. My family see that also. They asking me why you acting like that. I don’t know what I tell them.” This clip went viral on social media, turned into a hashtag, #You’reRoad, and edited, autotuned, and memeified across the Internet by both US and Filipino viewers.⁴⁷ In one iteration of the memeification of Jenny, a YouTube account by the name of Latigorapper wrote a song in the Bisaya language entitled “Road – Rude Bisaya with ENGLISH SUBS (A Song For Larry & Jenny Of TLC’s 90 Day Fiancé),” set to the tune of the song “Rude” by Canadian reggae fusion band MAGIC!⁴⁸ The lyrics detail the rapper’s own viewing of the clip, how he woke up one morning to see it trending on Facebook. The rest of the video remixes the original chorus of the MAGIC! song, the main refrain “Why you gotta be so rude?” altered to “Why you gotta be so road?” along with the repeated lyric, “The girl got mad,” accompanied by the same shot of Jenny’s face in the crisis of translation I have described above.

The music video ends with an unaltered clip from Larry and Jenny’s segment of the 90 Day Fiancé episode following the family event, in which Jenny lies leisurely on a bed, staring at her phone, while Larry, sitting above her, says meekly, “I’m sorry I hurt you.”⁴⁹ She replies, not taking her eyes from her phone, “You know, I never cried for a man. Men cry for me.” As the video fades out, a shrill laugh, edited in by Latigorapper, responds to her, implying that Jenny’s statement reveals an unfounded narcissism. This laugh, distorted by computer effects, marks Filipino and US audiences’ harsh critique of Jenny, who ridiculed her speech and pronunciations on social media. The deliberate decontextualizing of the mispronunciation of “rude” from its intended meaning eschews the complex cultural miscommunication that occurred between Larry, Jenny, and her family. The stakes of the lechon scene (Jenny and Larry’s future) are belittled by the audience, who, in their classist, elitist, xenophobic, condescending, and animalizing mockery vilify her as an uneducated Filipina looking to dupe a US man, the implication being that her inability to speak “proper” English makes her an improper, undeserving subject for marriage and US citizenship. Latigorapper’s video critiques Jenny’s “broken” English, not the series’ production, and thus rests within the dominant or hegemonic mode of interpretation, internalizing it and its underpinnings of US Empire and global capital.⁵⁰ Cruz decodes Filipino authors’ use of the heartless Filipina who does not conform to scripts of national care, and their texts’ alignment with the postcolonial nationalist ideologies that replicate Cold War-era US sentimentality and hegemony. As such, both Latigorapper and the texts of Cruz’s analysis demonstrate Homi Bhabha’s concept of colonial mimicry, “the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite.”⁵¹

While Latigorapper represents a dominant, postcolonial-nationalist decoding of Jenny’s viral moment and a subsequent encoding of his memeification of her, a range of other audience responses decode the ideologies of sentimentality, animality, racial and sexual abjection, and racialized and feminized labor, born out of empire and colonial mimicry, that shape 90 Day Fiancé’s depiction of Jenny and Larry. In a scene from episode 12, available as a YouTube clip titled “Larry’s Family Warns Jenny: Don’t Come to the US With An Attitude Like That!” (published on TLC’s official channel), the couple sit side by side at a hotel lounge table, vision trained on a laptop.⁵² Following the lechon reception, they get on a video call with Larry’s cousin Carl and Carl’s wife Analyn, who reiterate their concerns about Jenny’s Facebook conversations with other men, which she emphatically denies.⁵³ When the cousin flippantly calls Jenny “a nice girl” despite stressing her “red flags,” his wife nodding in agreement, Jenny interjects, “Okay, don’t call me a nice girl when you’re saying bad things about me,” at which point the wife, appalled, snaps, “Oh my god!” and her husband declares the title of the video. Meanwhile, Larry, who has been smiling awkwardly, says in a voiceover, “I don’t know what to do. I think my cousin and [his wife’s] intentions are good, they’re trying to look out for me. But it’s a little bit overprotective.” They abruptly hang up and Jenny tearfully asks, “I just don’t understand why they don’t like me.” Larry stumbles: “I don’t…They just don’t know what they like, I don’t think, I don’t know what they want.” In her own voiceover, Jenny reflects: “I’m disappointed that he don’t defend me. I feel like I’m insulted with that and Larry didn’t fight for me.”

While I expected the comments section to reflect Latigorapper’s denigration and dismissal of Jenny’s arrogance and imperfect English, they were overwhelmingly sympathetic to her, hostile toward the cousin and wife, and frustrated with Larry. The post with the most likes (6.1K) states, “Then I learned Jenny’s real story. She’s actually very respectable and kindhearted. But she is unable to express herself due to bad english.” This is representative of many other posts that recognize how dominant Western and Filipino viewerships harshly judge imperfect language skills and associate it with racial, sexual, and colonial abjection. The second most-liked comment (4.4K) gestures to Larry’s haplessness and inability to defend his partner (“Larry is the perfect name for this guy. I don’t know why I think that.”) and perhaps nods to the implicit classism of another, less-liked comment (“Guy looking like he works at wetzel pretzel lol,” 207 likes). The comment with the most replies (98) implicitly defends Jenny at the expense of degrading the other Filipina present in the clip: “Carl’s wife has a face that we Filipinos called as ‘chararat.’” In response to the original post’s use of chararat, a Tagalog slang term meaning “ugly,” other users offer analogous terms in their respective Filipino dialects: pangit (more formal “ugly”), tambakol (“fat,” derived from a species of thick-bodied tuna), dugyot (“filthy” or “piggish,” from Ilocano), shunga (“stupid”). 

While the users who posted these comments may not necessarily claim a radical stance against the ideologies of US Empire and masculinist, postcolonial nationalism that undergird TLC’s depiction of this scene, they certainly decode them, to poignant, comical, sometimes problematic effect. The comment and replies that defend Jenny by way of degrading Analyn recognize the latter’s alignment with dominant ideology, and the irony of her antagonistic position as another Filipina who has completed the K-1 visa with a white US man and thus likely been the subject of the same scrutiny. In their still-problematic word play, these posts reflect an oppositionary discourse to Latigorapper’s mockery of Jenny’s “You’re road” mispronunciation. Returning to Austin, the speech act is both an enactment of law or established social convention, and its utterer must have the proper facilities and endowed agency to enact politics.⁵⁴ The phrase “I thee wed” enacts the state-recognized institution of marriage between two human subjects who utter the phrase before a state representative who then codifies it. A monkey is unsuitable for the political institution of marriage, because it is not a human and cannot speak; so, too, are the racialized and animalized human subjects of 90 Day Fiancé and transnational marriage considered “language-less, cognitively reduced beast[s],” unfit for the institution of marriage and political agency.⁵⁵

Latigorapper’s dismay at Jenny’s claim that men cry for her constitutes a reactionary response to a Filipina feminine subject’s refusal to behave according to heteronormative racial scripts. Jenny’s statement reverses the racialized gender script of Filipina servility and appropriates the script of the Western man who holds all the cards. This unruly feminine figure subsequently constitutes a trope as the heartless, covetous Filipina.⁵⁶ The social media discourse that extends grace to Jenny’s handle on English as a means of expression and derides Larry’s haplessness suggests a collective refusal of this trope, and the Filipina’s right to socioeconomic agency in marriage and global capital.

Tender Loving Care: Global Consequences of 90 Day Fiancé

In my analysis, I have chosen to focus on Larry and Jenny because their narrative arc and the viral online discourse that it begat prominently engage themes and motifs that epitomize 90 Day Fiancé’s overall encoding of the figure of the Filipina. The anticolonial, feminist, and Marxist deconstruction of a great portion of that online discourse aligns with my method of unsentimental decoding. As the memes and comments from the previous section suggest, however, viewers’ investments in the series are just as emotional as they are intellectual. The reasons for the dominant, Western viewership’s investment are obvious: 90 Day Fiancé encodes racial, sexual, and foreign abjection in its representation of postcolonial subjects, and, as Balce demonstrates, the Filipino body’s particular abjection both repulses and seduces US Empire.⁵⁷ But what explains the morbid fascination of Filipino nationals and the Filipinx diaspora, whose own ideological positions are vast and internally oppositional? What is their investment?

As I have noted, through an interplay of sentimentality and practicality, represented by the binary positions of the American man and the Filipina woman, 90 Day Fiance renews the colonial travel narrative defined by Pratt, in which the white subject’s rhetorics of benign extraction or “anti-conquest” neutralize practices of extraction and domination.⁵⁸ Further, the series’ combination of romantic melodrama, intimate portrayals of real couples, and anthropological snapshots of foreign destinations serves as a culmination of TLC’s evolution, from publicly-funded educational program to a mass-marketed cable network infamous for synonymizing reality television with outrageous melodrama. Appropriately, the acronym, TLC, evokes the phrase “tender loving care” which may have originated in a 1950s nursing dictionary, referencing the rehabilitative care that often accompanies medical treatment.⁵⁹ Founded in 1974, The Learning Channel was a federally funded project that aimed to provide educational programming to public schools and universities in Appalachia.⁶⁰ In the 1980s and 1990s, The Learning Channel became available nationally via basic cable, offering science, history, and home improvement content. Acquired by The Discovery Channel in 1991, the newly acronymized TLC shifted to mass entertainment, and by the 2000s became known for reality dramas, with the slogan “life unscripted.”⁶¹ Rebecca Stephens notes that early-2000s marriage and family series enabled “exercises in nostalgia” that “soothe creeping, pervasive social fears by offering normalising rituals that serve to erase ambiguity” of proper gender roles and race.⁶² So followed the late-2000s focus on heteronormative, white families with a twist—Little People, Big World, Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, 17 Kids and Counting, Sister Wives, Jon & Kate Plus 8, to name just a few. 90 Day Fiancé’s emergence in 2014, then, is a logical progression of TLC’s encoding of normative gender, reproduction, and domesticity in American mass media, with a racial, postcolonial, neoliberal twist. To establish this evolution of form, TLC looked to former and ongoing outposts of US Empire, sites that experienced the violent imposition of benevolent tutelage and in turn provided the foil of racial and sexual abjection against which the US subject defines himself—a process that Amy Kaplan calls “Manifest Domesticity,” “how international struggles for domination abroad profoundly shape representations of US national identity at home, and how, in turn, cultural phenomena we think of as domestic or particularly national are forged in a crucible of foreign relations.”⁶³ 

While 90 Day Fiancé has featured foreign partners of European, “First-World” origin, Table 1 below, which tallies couples featured in the original 90 Day Fiancé and 90 Day Fiancé: Before the 90 Days by the foreign partner’s country of origin, organized by geographic region, demonstrates that such examples from Western Europe and Australia are almost statistically insignificant relative to the prevalence of “Third-World” regions that have direct historical ties to US Empire and/or ongoing political or economic relations.⁶⁴ Both Latin American and African countries are collectively more prominent than Asia (the region in which I include the Philippines), but notably, the Philippines is the ultimate first-place country, with 13 couples, which make up 10.7% of the 121 total couples featured across 20 seasons. (The handful of other women from Asian countries would account for just 4% without the Filipinas.)

Table 1. Couples featured in 90 Day Fiancé and 90 Day Fiancé: Before the 90 Days by the foreign partner’s country of origin.

These statistics substantiate the obvious—90 Day Fiancé as a conglomerate prominently features US men coupled with Filipina women, and the ongoing history of US-Philippine relations has always entailed sexual encounters and the potential for miscegenation and “dangerous intercourse.”⁶⁵ The featured men are mostly straight and white, and the Filipina women are mostly cisgender and straight. While most couples are reflective of the dominantly assumed differentials between men and women (race, gender, class, education, language skills, age), there are deviations. Two couples feature African American men—Tarik and Hazel (Season 2 of Before the 90 Days and Season 8 of 90 Day Fiancé, counted twice in the total to account for their prolonged narrative/broadcast) and Jovon and Annalyn (Before the 90 Days, Season 8). One couple features Loren, a queer white US man, and Faith, a transgender Filipina woman (Before, Season 7). Rosemarie, whose relationship with Big Ed in Season 4 of Before the 90 Days went viral, came out as queer after their season and breakup. Some of the men have documented physical or intellectual disabilities: Big Ed has Kippel-Feil syndrome, David of Season 6 of Before the 90 Days is deaf while his partner Sheila has partial hearing loss, Forrest of Season 8 of Before the 90 Days is autistic (and his partner, Sheena, is eight years older and comes from a middle-class, well-educated, Filipino-Chinese family). In various ways, each couple diverges from the dominant codes, narratives, and hierarchies of US Empire and global capital that I have discussed. 

In addition, audience reception has sometimes led to socioeconomic mobility for the Filipina participants. Despite how 90 Day Fiancé also associated Rosemarie with animality and the squalor of the “Third World” in a scene in which she and Ed visit her family’s home and must sleep among exposed, dripping pipes and rats, she is widely celebrated for dumping and humbling him after he accused her and her sister of trying to steal his money, lied about having a vasectomy before their in-person meeting, knowing she wants more children, insulted her breath, and insisted she take an STI test without taking one himself.⁶⁶ Rosemarie’s own memeification (based on the infamous “Can I halik you?” and “I like the view” scenes) enabled her to launch a lucrative social media career. In a rare example of Western media in which a Filipina openly defends herself against the judgment of a white man (much like the scenes I discuss of Jenny), a grief-stricken Ed doesn’t entertain the possibility that his requests were unfair, and declares he no longer believes in love, thus still stubbornly subscribing to the racially and sexually hierarchical sentimentalist attitude afforded to him as a white US male subject, along with the right to defend his assets (marriage, citizenship, and money) against the heartless, extractive Filipina.

As epitomized by Larry and Jenny’s narrative, 90 Day Fiancé employs pervasive themes of the Filipina’s monetary exploitation that imply American men possess more socioeconomic capital. This is mostly true in the series, but Forrest and Sheena offer a rare reversal, as Forrest has been sending money to Sheena for years because she claimed her parents were abusive and insisted she be the “breadwinner,” only to discover that they live in a sizeable, well-manicured house and apparently “borrowed” the money from her.⁶⁷ His mother Molly is flabbergasted that they seem to live better than her own family in Oregon, and accuses Sheena of manipulating and exploiting her son (whose autism, she implies, makes him especially vulnerable). Here, the white mother fears the white son’s contamination by and absorption into the Filipino family.⁶⁸ While such examples reverse dominant codes of US Empire that would otherwise narrate the rehabilitative love of the caring Filipina, materially, they still operate within those codes’ logics. Further, the 90 Day franchise functions along the economies of imperialism and global capital, not merely in its narrative and aesthetic decisions, but in its material production.⁶⁹ 90 Day Fiancé pays its subjects between $1,000 and $1,500 per episode, $2,500 for the reunion special, totaling around $14,500 for a twelve-episode season. The US subjects are paid immediately, but, depending on the filming location, the foreign subjects cannot be paid until they obtain a work permit, leading to delays and some reports of no payment at all.⁷⁰ Thus the series compensates its subjects according to US immigration and labor policies and along the racial, gender, and class hierarchies of empire and global capital.

Returning to my earlier question, however, what is Filipina audiences’ investment in 90 Day Fiancé, despite recognizing the problematic implications that undergird its depictions of Filipinas? Do they take pleasure in representation, particularly when the depicted Filipinas resist or subvert those dominant codes that insist upon their sexual servility and abjection? In another comment on the YouTube clip of Jenny and Larry video-calling his cousin and his wife, a user, likely Filipina, notes: “Carl’s wife is the perfect example of Filipino you shouldn’t be friends with. Jenny and her are both Filipino’s, she see how Jenny struggling to defend herself, she should at least talk to Jenny in Tagalog and just explain it to her husband.” The comment’s defense of Jenny makes a valid critique of Analyn, that she should have extended empathy to Jenny based on their shared experience of pursuing marriage and the K-1 visa with white US men; instead, she replicates her husband’s distrust and scrutiny of the other exploitative, deceptive Filipina. Thus Analyn takes up the model minority position against Jenny’s bad subject, to cite Viet Thanh Nguyen, defining herself in terms of assimilation and servility within dominant culture as a means of incorporation and socioeconomic mobility, while Jenny revolts against such institutions.⁷¹ It is perhaps this tension that animates the range of Filipina discourse around 90 Day Fiancé and renders the series an object of morbid fascination within the Filipinx diaspora, who, “starved” of “good” representational models in Western media, litigate the examples that are available. As Vernadette Rodriguez and Robyn Magalit Gonzalez consider the abject representations of Filipinas on online dating sites, they demonstrate uneasiness about seemingly innocuous forms of representational modes that emerge outside of explicit sexual/labor exploitation, such as the use of markers of femininity on non-mail-order bride social media websites, like “lil” for little, “swyt” for sweet, “QT” for cutie. While these terms allow for some “performativity of identity, a potentially powerful process,” the authors worry that they extend related forms of fetishization, exoticism, infantilization, and appeals to the white, male gaze. In these cases, though, Filipinas do it to themselves, and “reveal the tenuousness of agency when even scripts for self-representation are caught in capitalistic and neoliberal webs of power.”⁷² This type of performative subversion risks uncritical aestheticization of the markers of exploitation within global capital and neoimperialism without historicizing them, toward a subversive position. Thus to define a mail-order bride like Jenny in terms of the “bad subject” because of her resistant affect would obscure or neutralize the institutions that entrap her and establish the postcolonial and global conditions in which marrying a white American man and gaining access to US citizenship is a viable way out. While the subversive position situates itself against the assimilationist one, both risk absorption within a “positive form of cultural exploitation” that delimits both critique and political goals (Jenny, despite her revolt, still wants to marry Larry and attain a greencard).⁷³ For better or worse, 90 Day Fiancé enables Filipinas to extend the discourse over the tenuous nature of agency within the ongoingness of empire and global capital.

Conclusion: Her Heart, Her Face

When I first learned of Jenny’s memeification and the “You’reRoad” hashtag, I wanted to take seriously the double-entendre of Jenny’s declaration. While we cannot verify her intent—she likely meant to admonish Larry’s behavior and poor manners—we can analyze the implications of the audience’s judgment of her accented English as mispronunciation, rather than a difference of dialect. By fixating on her mispronunciation, the audience overrides and invalidates Jenny’s intended assessment—that Larry is rude, displaying improper manners as a Western man visiting a provincial Filipino family’s home. Underneath that invalidation, however, lies a deep anxiety over what Tadiar describes as the coming to roost of colonialism’s project—the revolt of the Other against the West.⁷⁴ The dominant audience’s dismay at Jenny’s utterance betrays the fear that the Filipina subject may fully understand the transactional nature of marriage as an institution that safeguards masculine, Western interests. That Jenny might define Larry as road, i.e., a road to her upward mobility, and indeed a road to US citizenship, provokes Western existential dread that the subaltern may return the favor. That she might view her own care and hand in marriage as a worthy exchange for those resources, and express such an opinion in what is considered “broken” English, violates the spectrum of racial animalization that language and marriage enforce and are built upon.

After their appearance on 90 Day Fiancé: Before the 90 Days, Larry and Jenny were featured on Season 3 of 90 Day Fiancé: What Now?, which follows the next step in the K-1 visa process—the foreign partner’s arrival to the United States, and the 90-day window to marriage.⁷⁵ Upon Jenny’s arrival in Florida, Larry picks her up from the airport and drives her to what will be their home—an RV in a trailer park, which he divulged to her before her arrival, but neglected to say it is reserved mostly for retirees.⁷⁶ Jenny is stoic and stiff, perhaps as a result of her long flight, not featured. But the couple’s drive from the airport to the trailer park is featured, in what I read as an effort to create suspense before the park’s reveal and set up an expectation of Jenny’s negative reaction to her new home, a far cry from the kind of living situation that many people in the US (and the Phillipines) would view as worth moving across the world for. When the couple arrives, Jenny says little as Larry gives her a tour of the RV’s interior. However, when he nervously asks her if she thinks she will be happy living there, she tells Larry, “I like it here, because you’re here.” In an interview, she repeats to the production team that she is happy to be there, but begins crying when she explains how hard it is being away from her family. What the audience might have perceived as dismay in the reality of life in the US—and thus another reason to belittle the heartless Filipina who has deceived a white US man—is in fact melancholy for the life and family she has left behind in the Philippines, a decision based on love for her fiance, but also on potential socioeconomic mobility for herself and potentially her family. Here, the series affords her a version of sentimentality (for home and family) that does not obscure, but possibly intensifies the socioeconomic conditions that necessitated her departure from the Philippines—unlike the sentimentality afforded to Larry and other white US men, which obscures their hierarchical position within global capital.

What makes Jenny’s apparent arrogance potentially threatening and mockable is her recognition of marriage as transactional within the postcolonial, globalized context. Here again, I emphasize that as the subject of a reality television show, we cannot verify her intent in what she says or does on film, but we can deconstruct the implicit ideologies that undergird the series’ production. See’s concept, “the decolonized eye,” offers a praxis that “‘disarticulates’ the empire,” incorporating its histories of dispossession and grammars of violence only to cannibalize it from within.⁷⁷ As such, in my original reading of Latigorapper’s video, I wanted to claim that Jenny’s statement to Larry functions as a critique, subversion, and cannibalization of the structures of empire, race, gender, global capital, and nationalism that entrap her. Latigorapper villainizes her for suggesting marriage is transactional and putting into focus the line between profit and pleasure that marriage and sex entail. #You’reRoad thus demystifies the ideological sentimentality that requires the Filipina to embody a “pure” sentiment of love and that masks the material conditions of the marriage union. Meanwhile, Western men are free to weigh their options between sentimentality and practicality, and negotiate the socioeconomic and affective costs of marrying a Filipina and bringing her to the United States. For Larry, it is acceptable to think of marriage, love, and sex in terms of the gray areas between emotion and economy—the value of Jenny’s love against the cost of flights, paperwork, legal proceedings, and familial conflict. Jenny must be “all in” in love, and discouraged from conceptualizing the cost of his love or her own material agency. Thus, #You’reRoad cannibalizes the proper arbiter of Austin’s speech act, he whose utterance enacts and binds others to normative conventions and politics, transforming  him from the subject to the object of her unsentimental, animal agency.

But, as I have emphasized, the Jenny I analyze is a figure whose representation in television is overdetermined by the ideological constructs of empire and global capital; so, too, are the resistant, “bad subject” discourses that try to recuperate such aestheticized figures within the logics of incorporation and institutionalization that neutralize history.⁷⁸ Robyn Magalit Rodriguez and Gonzalez conclude that online representations of Filipinas enable important intellectual and political critique (as we have seen with 90 Day Fiancé’s proliferation of commentary), but such digital representational modes offer little in terms of actual political and economic agency for exploited and trafficked Filipinas. Entrapped within global capital, they may find reprieves from their conditions through online self-expression, but only insofar as the Internet continues to “circulat[e] and “disciplin[e] them as commodities.”⁷⁹ Further, Isaac suggests “the Filipino American [is] but a set of traces, masks, and misrecognitions in American law, borders, and drama,” who “has roots in the construction of a colonial space rendered invisible to the American polity: the unincorporated territory.’”⁸⁰ Dylan Rodriguez builds upon this notion, along with Denise Ferreira da Silva’s concept of the “transparent I” of white subjectivity, to caution against Filipino American identity formations’ attempts to fabricate a “social materiality” out of the grammars of empire and seek recognition from within them.⁸¹ Josen Diaz furthers this reasoning, arguing that any Filipino American, postcolonial configuration “must be unmade to reveal its making,” which cannot occur if intellectual and political discourse only searches for the “transparent I” of institutionalized, commodified representational modes.⁸²

In Cruz’s definition of the Filipina heart as a Cold-War, sentimentalist motif that ties women to land, home, and nation, it was specifically the lower-caste barrio girl or morena that was the model for loyal care for the motherland, while the upper-caste pensionada or coed, intellectual or trained in healthcare, i.e., educated in the West, was a threat to masculinist, postcolonial nationalism.⁸³ In my own attempt to deconstruct, disarticulate, cannibalize figure of the Filipina in 90 Day Fiancé, I contend that her heart, too, insofar as it is a metaphorical core of the series broadly, is a classed heart, and if unsentimental decoding is to attend to that heart’s historical, ideological, and material construction, it must, as Robyn Magalit Rodriguez and Gonzalez note, “dismantle the celebration of this final, abstract frontier and . . . critique the interlinked aspects of race, gender, class and sexuality as they play out, and are lived through, particular disenfranchised bodies.”⁸⁴ As Tolentino warns, those “bodies” align with no constitutable subject, analyzable only structurally as commodities—thus no soul, to gesture again to Benjamin’s ironic note on capital’s exploitation and horror.⁸⁵

So, let’s leave the heart out of it. But what to do with the lasting impressions of the figure of the Filipina’s face, or its obscuring or digital rendering? Elsewhere, I analyze the poem, “To Conceive Sweetie (10 F Philippines),” in which Barbara Jane Reyes imagines the life of a digital avatar, created by a Swiss humanitarian organization to lure and arrest online sexual predators.⁸⁶ That imagining is fraught, however, as Reyes’s lyric attempt to establish an authentic view of the lives of Filipina girls like Sweetie necessarily employs the same visual and grammatical structures that rendered Sweetie and created the conditions of her (and actual girls’) existence. A section of the poem features a recurring narrator  “we,” a collective that becomes consumed with Sweetie and the afterlife that she provokes for a Filipina diaspora who, if they do not see themselves in her, recognize a shared injury among themselves through their witnessing of her. As a result, this “we” refuses to ventriloquize Sweetie as a reparative figure or sentimentalize her imagined life. Rather, the collective “we” turns inward to investigate their own histories, a process rife with confusion, conflict, heartache, and, hopefully, heartbreak.