Desiring images: Representation and spectacle in 'Dogeaters' (Jessica Hagedorn and Imelda Marcos)

The following description of an Imelda Marcos “performance” during a 1965 political rally in Manila suggests the unstable boundaries between politics and spectacle, authority and image making, captivation and captivity: Led to the microphone, she touches it, and prepares to sing her winning repertoire. […] She has lost weight considerably […] it is a slight and vulnerable back that rises above the scoop of her neckline. […] She knows the excitement of power–the crowd waits, like a trapped and unresisting prey, for Imelda to begin using that power. [… T]he old charisma, with its look of suffering, potent tonight as never before, the brilliance of beauty commingling with the brilliance of pain, the haunted, agonized, tragic look encircling the plaza and holding her audience in thrall, (qtd. in Polotan, 59-60). © 2002 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.