SOURCE: Lee, Rachel C. “Transversing Nationalism, Gender, and Sexuality in Jessica Hagedorn's Dogeaters.” In The Americas of Asian American Literature: Gendered Fictions of Nation and Transnation, pp. 73-105. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999.

In the following essay, Lee argues that Hagedorn's unique Filipino perspective on American spectatorship and cinematic archetypes in Dogeaters creates a powerful critique of neocolonialism and late capitalism.

[Hagedorn's novels are] the kinds of novels that will be written in the next century. They make the typical American novel look very gray.

—Ishmael Reed

Dogeaters begins in the air-conditioned darkness of Manila's Avenue Theater where the American release “All That Heaven Allows” plays in Technicolor and Cinemascope. Like the narrator, Rio, and her cousin Pucha, Hagedorn's readers sit enthralled to the movie's “perfect picture-book American tableau, plaid hunting jackets, roaring cellophane fires, [and] smoking chimneys” (3). Not until the second paragraph is the reader momentarily...