ABSTRACT
In fall 2007, two popular US television programs, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart (TDS) on Comedy Central and Desperate Housewives (DH) on ABC, each aired an episode that contained a punch line about Filipinos. The two jokes motivated massive online and offline protests by Filipino viewers. I argue that these two brief scenes in TDS and DH sparked intense outrage among many Filipinos because the legacy of the US’s colonization of the Philippines has interpellated Filipinos into what I call a forced fandom of US media. A forced fandom is a love for the media made by one’s oppressors; it is a fandom primarily imposed from without, in circumstances of political, economic, social, and/or cultural subjugation, rather than emerging from within the media user. In this chapter, I build on Graham Murdock’s (1999) discussion of “cultural citizenship” to frame Filipinos’ protests in fall 2007 as a plea for better representation in the US cultural sphere.
