eTropic: electronic journal of studies in the tropics (Mar 2022)
Pornotopia
Abstract
The poetry sequence “Pornotopia”—in coupling the words “pornography” and “utopia”, a world infused and suffused with desire—is an attempt to respond to the idea of “porno-tropics” where the white conqueror “feminizes the earth as a cosmic breast, in relation to which the epic male hero is a tiny, lost infant, yearning for the Edenic nipple” (McClintock, 1995, p. 22) and connects the “relationship between pornographic fantasies of the tropics and the brutal, often violent facts of conquest” (Balce, 2016, p. 40). “Pornotopia” continues the legacy of literary resistance that uses the linguistic tools of the master to subvert the insatiable lust of the empire, like in the poem “Land of Our Desire” by the Philippine poet Amador T. Daguio (1934/1989, p. 195), whose early works mark “the turning-point in Filipino poetry from, rather than in, English” (Abad, 1993, p. 23). Borrowing lyrical and stylistic tools from the 1984 poem “Sex Without Love” by Sharon Olds (p. 57), “Pornotopia” also explores the topography of voyeurism and the landscape of loveless sex.
