'Matona'

PINOY KASI


‘Matona’
By Michael Tan
Inquirer

Last updated 11:35pm (Mla time) 04/10/2007

A friend of mine sent a text message last week, complaining that it was already April and she still didn’t know what a “matona” was.

“Matona”? I thought it was some abbreviated text-message word, and then I remembered that I had mentioned it in one of my columns, about emerging genders in the Philippines, together with a promise to describe those categories. I wrote, then, that genders are social constructs that expand the biological “male” and “female.” They are created and defined differently, from one society to another.

I also did that column, concerned that people were equating gender with sexual orientation, which should not be the case. To give an example, I described the “manang” as a gender construct. The term used to refer, with respect, to older women, but has since evolved to refer now to older women (and lately, to men as well) who tend to be dour and humorless, constantly poking into other people’s affairs (sexual and non-sexual) and passing judgment with all the self-righteousness they can muster. We can see here that “manang” has nothing to do with sexual orientation, but it does pick out some attributes around “maleness” and “femaleness” to label people.

Changing times

Once we’re assigned to one gender category, most of us conform to society’s expectations about what we can -- and can’t -- be, what we can -- and can’t -- do. When someone proclaims, “Lalaki ako” [literally, “I am a man”] he is saying many other things, for example, “I can swear any time I want to, and go out and stay out late.” “Lalaki ako” also negates many other behaviors, for example, “I will not cry in public.” These are all very culture-specific; in many societies, the equivalent of “lalaki” [man] does not forbid the person from showing his emotions in public, for example.

We learn our gender roles from a very early age. I was watching a grandfather chiding his wife the other day for allowing their infant grandson to play with a hair brush. That, he felt, was “pambabae” -- behavior of a girl! Gender is taught and incorporated into our very core of being, into our bodies, all the way up to the way we hold the newspaper, and cross our legs, as we read my column.

Yet, powerful as gender may be, societies are constantly revising these categories and definitions. All this does not happen whimsically. The gender categories are responses to the times, to changes in economic structures, political systems. Often enough, the new categories are in a way “secessions” of people who feel “trapped” by the norms and who dare to defy the norms.

This takes me to the focus of today’s column: the “matona.” Last semester I asked my students in a course on gender and sexuality to pick out and define new gender categories in the Philippines. One student wrote about the “matona.” a term I hadn’t been aware of until I read it in the student’s paper.

When I asked other students in the University of the Philippines about the “matona,” most were unaware of the term, but when I checked with an urban poor community in Quezon City, it sparked off a long discussion. Almost as if it had been scripted, just as we were discussing the “matona,” a motorcycle came into the street where we were. As the driver got off, taking off her helmet, my friends pointed to her and said, “Ayan, ayan [There, there]. Matona.”

People in the community explained that “matona” is a feminine derivation of “maton,” or hoodlum. But we have to be careful about the word “hoodlum” here, which tends to have connotations of delinquency, even criminality. People use the term “matona” with different tones. It can be tongue-in-cheek, it can be part mockery, but the tone is never totally negative. In fact, the term is sometimes used almost affectionately.

It’s also interesting that people distinguish between two types of “matona.” There’s the “matonang tibo,” which refers to a tough lesbian, what they would call in the West a “butch lesbian.” This seems to be used almost interchangeably with an older word, “tomboy.”

More intriguing is that there’s the almost redundant term “matonang babae,” who is not necessarily lesbian. “Lumalaban siya,” my urban poor friends told me, meaning she fights back, or she fights for her rights. Often, they explained, these are women who have been abused, even raped, and who are now fighting back.

‘Matona,’ Madonna

I suspect the “matona” ties into changing women’s roles, in the urban poor context. The life of a woman in an urban poor community is tough. Besides dealing with poverty, many women in the slums have been abused, battered and abandoned by their fathers, brothers, husbands, lovers. In response, many have learned to be quite independent and now show this independence with a “masculinization” of their body movements, their clothing, their speech, even their occupations.

There is a sharp class angle to this use of “matona.” Among the upper classes in the Philippines, an assertive woman is, well, an assertive woman. It’s becoming almost a norm, with women occupying many senior positions in universities and corporations.

Among our lower classes, assertiveness may not be as acceptable. No doubt, our lower-class women have always been strong, taking on many responsibilities that men have abdicated, but they had to do this with meekness and patience as is expected of being “babae.” Today’s urban poor women are changing, thanks in part to the influence of community organizing and women’s groups. Urban poor women are asking questions, speaking out and, yes, fighting back.

In rural areas, assertive women would be called, contemptuously, “agresibo,” or even risk being labeled as “aswang” (loosely translated, a witch) and getting marginalized. Today, urban poor communities are more philosophical about it. “Matona” reflects some ambivalence, a feeling that the assertive woman is “different,” and yet accepting that, yes, maybe it’s a good thing for women to move on from the old Madonna stereotypes (a la docile Virgin Mary) to, yes, Madonna the singer, the borderline dominatrix.

It will be interesting to see what happens to this word, but what’s more important is to see how the word evolves in relation to the changing status of women not just in urban poor communities but in the Philippines in general. Those developments will give the context to the way “matona” is used -- whether tongue-in-cheek as it is being used today, falling into disuse maybe because it becomes irrelevant, or, who knows, turning into a badge or honor, maybe even turned into a song like that one about the Waray-Waray woman. That last term, too, is a gender category, something I can discuss in future columns as I deal with the other fascinating genders we have in the Philippines.