Archipelagic Monstrosity: The Manananggal in Isabel Yap’s “Good Girls”
Kam Tou Pang
Discussions about the monster have always hinged on the modes of othering or assimilation, yet through mobilizing negative and positive affective registers respectively, they both objectify the monster in service of a normativizing agenda of managing the abnormal, eventually inhibiting the monster’s potentialities in feeling and relating otherwise. This essay traces the historicities of the manananggal, a Philippine folkloric monster, and compares key cultural and literary representations within