Aswang Sense-making: Theorizing Flesh and Contemporary Violence in the Philippines

In recent years, flesh has emerged as a rich and significant analytic for thinking about corporeality, especially concerning race, violence, and politics. It also becomes useful for illuminating the social and political consequences of violence in postcolonial states like the Philippines — the main focus of this paper. First, I delineate what I found helpful and compelling from various interpretations of flesh in black feminist thought. Then I examine how flesh emerges in Filipino peoples’ sense-making through the aswang concept in Philippine folklore. Lastly, I theorize how the aswang as flesh both furthers and complicates our understanding of state terror in the Philippines. By converging these points into a conversation about violence and its agentic role in Philippine political life, I contend for a postcolonial theory of flesh that invites new sense-makings of material, affective, and discursive encodings of violence and makes room for new iterations of politics to emerge.