Rowena Guanzon as open text

By Noel Galon de Leon

Rowena Guanzon may be read as an open text circulating in the public sphere, not merely as a person occupying political space but as a field of signs, performances, and symbolic excess that invites continuous interpretation. A text is never limited to ink on paper, and her case demonstrates how a political figure functions as a living discourse composed of speech acts, online performances, public quarrels, and moral posturing. Her visibility did not emerge from institutional authority alone but from her deliberate cultivation of confrontation. She transformed herself into a spectacle of defiance, and that spectacle is what the public consumes, dissects, and endlessly reproduces through digital circulation.

As a former commissioner of Commission on Elections, Guanzon understood the mechanics of power, which makes her later performance of outrage more calculated than spontaneous. Her online presence worked as a continuous text that thrives on conflict, thrives on antagonism, and thrives on the production of enemies. In this sense, she is not only speaking to the public; she is constructing a grammar of political anger. The grammar is simple. Loudness equals sincerity. Vulgarity equals authenticity. Aggression equals courage. This crude equation is now normalized in the digital political culture she helps legitimize.

To understand Guanzon as meaning is to admit that she does not carry a stable essence. Her meaning shifts depending on the political desires of those who read her. For her supporters, she embodies fearlessness against corruption. For her critics, she embodies the decay of political decorum. Both readings are correct because an open text does not offer closure. It invites struggle over meaning. She exists as a site of interpretation, not as a moral constant, and that instability is precisely what gives her symbolic power.

Her most explosive moments do not come from quiet reflection but from public scandal. The controversy involving the Chinese couple in a shopping mall exemplifies this dynamic. The incident, widely discussed in digital spaces, revolved around allegations of arrogance, special treatment, and the familiar pattern of the wealthy and foreign-linked acting above local norms. Guanzon’s anger did not arise in a vacuum. It was fueled by long-standing resentment toward perceived foreign privilege, economic imbalance, and the historical anxiety of local displacement in their own public spaces. When she erupted online, she was not merely insulting individuals but performatively defending a wounded national pride.

The structural source of her outrage lies in her populist instinct. She consistently positions herself as the voice of the ordinary Filipino against elites, foreigners, and institutional hypocrisy. This posture allows her to weaponize her anger. The anger becomes political capital. It signals alignment with the masses while simultaneously feeding a personality cult built around toughness and brutality in speech. Her fury is therefore not accidental. It is functional. It is strategic. It operates as a currency in a marketplace of attention.

Her use of profanity is not a failure of discipline but a rhetorical technique. Profanity destabilizes polite discourse. It shocks. It invites virality. It marks distance from technocratic speech. Through cursing, she crafts an image of rawness that many misread as honesty. In reality, it is a performance of authenticity. It is designed to collapse the boundary between private rage and public speech. That collapse is what turns her into an open text. The audience is not simply reading her words. They are reading the emotional theater she produces.

Virality plays a central role in her construction as a circulating text. Screenshots of her posts, clipped videos of her outbursts, and meme-driven exaggerations of her persona create secondary texts that often overshadow the original statements. She no longer controls the final meaning of what she says. The network does. The crowd does. Algorithms do. She becomes a product of digital repetition, flattened into symbols of either heroism or chaos, depending on the political appetite of the reader.

Her anger over the mall scandal involving the Chinese couple draws from historical layers of Philippine political frustration. Post-colonial resentment, economic competition, and geopolitical tension have produced a fragile nationalism highly sensitive to displays of foreign privilege. Guanzon tapped into this existing wound. She did not create the wound. She exploited it. She amplified it. Her rage was a loud articulation of a quiet, long-brewing hostility that many Filipinos already carried but could not publicly express without fear of being labeled intolerant.

As interpretation, Guanzon functions as a mirror for the reader’s own political temperament. The conservative reader sees her as proof of moral decay in public service. The liberal reader often excuses her abrasiveness in the name of progressive politics. The politically disillusioned reader consumes her as entertainment, a spectacle of democratic decay. No single reading dominates because an open text is structurally incapable of closure. Meaning is produced in the act of reading, not in the source.

Her presence also exposes the poverty of political debate in the digital age. When politics becomes performance, the loudest voice often replaces the most reasoned one. Guanzon capitalizes on this weakness. She does not argue to convince. She performs to dominate. She seeks not deliberation but submission through spectacle. This is why her anger feels theatrical. It is designed for an audience trained by algorithms to reward outrage.

Guanzon as open text also reveals the transformation of ethics in contemporary Philippine politics. Professional restraint is rebranded as weakness. Vulgarity is marketed as authenticity. Recklessness is confused with courage. In this inverted moral economy, she thrives. She does not merely adapt to the system. She helps harden it. She normalizes a political culture where emotional excess replaces institutional credibility.

The mall incident with the Chinese couple serves as a key text within the larger text of her public identity. Her rage exposed not only her personal temperament but the fragility of state authority when confronted by wealth, foreignness, and social media spectacle. She framed the issue in moral absolutes, leaving no room for nuance. This absolutism attracted attention and divided the public. Division, in this economy, is success.

To read Guanzon critically is to resist the temptation to either worship or dismiss her. Both extremes are lazy forms of reading. A serious reading recognizes that she is neither savior nor mere provocateur. She is a symptom. She represents the collapse of trust in institutions, the hunger for aggressive representation, and the commodification of anger as political style. She exists because the system that produced her is broken.

Guanzon as open text does not offer solutions. She offers exposure. She exposes the raw nerve of Philippine political life, the deep frustration, the cultural contradictions, and the collective addiction to spectacle. Her anger, her language, her public feuds, and her viral moments form a single, continuous text that is never closed, never settled, and never innocent. The responsibility lies with the reader to refuse passive consumption and instead confront the uncomfortable truths her figure forces into view.