Speaking From Margins: Subaltern Voice and Resistance in Joi Barrios-LeBlanc's Selected Poems

Abstract

This study examines how selected poems by Joi Barrios-LeBlanc stage subaltern speech and resistance through a postcolonial feminist reading anchored in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's concepts of subalternity, representation, epistemic violence, and audibility, with support from Chandra Talpade Mohanty's critique of the homogenized Third World woman. Using qualitative descriptive literary analysis, the article interprets six poems: Liham ng Pag-Ibig ng Isang Nagsisimulang Feminista, Babae Akong Nagmula sa Bayang Mahirap, Sagot ng Puke, Ang Kapatid na Babae ng Ilustrado, Ang Babaeng Nagsasalita Bilang Kababayan, and Habilin kay Mebuyan. Findings show that the poems construct the Third World Filipina as a historically situated subject who speaks through self-definition, bodily reclamation, historical insertion, public testimony, and collective memory. The article's theoretical intervention is that Barrios-LeBlanc's poetry does not merely confirm Spivak's difficulty of subaltern speech; it shows how lyric address, vernacular naming, embodied language, and communal memory create provisional conditions for hearing. The analysis argues that subaltern speech in the poems is not simple access to voice, but a contested struggle for recognition within systems that misread, overwrite, or silence marginalized women. Barrios-LeBlanc's poetry therefore extends Filipino feminist poetics by presenting resistance as a struggle over audibility, not only as a declaration of empowerment.