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Invisible labor, invisible bodies: how the global political economy affects reproductive freedom in the Philippines
Abstract
Feminist scholars have critically demonstrated the links between the global political economy, social reproduction and gender-based violence. This article builds on this scholarship by investigating restrictions to reproductive freedom and their connection to the depletion of women’s bodies in the global political economy. Specifically, I use the Depletion through Social Reproduction (DSR) framework to reveal how the work of social reproduction is harnessed to service economic activity at the cost of rights to bodily integrity with the aid of religious fundamentalist ideologies that (re)inscribe discourses of female altruism such as the “self-sacrificing mother” ideal. Drawing on the case of the Philippines, I argue that the control of women’s bodies is integral to the Philippines’ economic strategy of exporting care workers in a competitive global political economy. This strategy is abetted by local Catholic religious fundamentalists who challenge reproductive rights reform at various levels of policy-making and legitimize the lack of investment to sustain social reproduction in the household, community and country as a whole. This article suggests that the neoliberal global economy is increasingly reproduced through women’s labor at the cost of their bodily integrity and reproductive freedoms.
... practices of everyday life and of social reproduction, and the insights they offer us into gendered political economies [18][19][20][30][31][32][33][34][35][36] where the government requires external support and declares a state of emergency [38]. ...
... 70 percent of the population is also estimated to be working in the informal economy [57], and low wages typical of both formal and informal employment mean that people commonly engage in several income-generating activities simultaneously to make ends meet. As elsewhere in the world, during times of crisis, the burdens of creatively managing household assets tend to be carried by women, who in addition to reducing their personal food intake (by skipping meals for example) also take on multiple jobs known as 'sidelines' to generate additional incomes [58] (see also [35,36,59]). Lindio-McGovern [60] similarly notes 'that poor Filipino women, who generally are the ones to attend Ramalho -Engendering disaster risk management and resilience-building: the significance of the everyday in evaluations of the exceptional to the daily needs of the family, are the first to suffer the social psychological impact of the price escalation of food and of other basic daily needs'. ...
... Indeed, labours of social reproduction, both material and affective, are intrinsically linked to the operationalisation of resilience in people's everyday lives [18,19]. Given that there is no 'consensus on what resilience means in practice for different stakeholders, how it is best achieved, and who is, and/or should be responsible for it' [19], particular attention must be paid Given the extent to which resilience has permeated the lexicon of international agendas and is therein implicated in the global political economy, an understanding of how this neoliberal imperative [76,77] is infiltrating the social reproductive sphere and reconfiguring the Ramalho -Engendering disaster risk management and resilience-building: the significance of the everyday in evaluations of the exceptional everyday is of great importance given the 'blurred lines between the global and the household' [34] (see also [32,35,36]). Furthermore, as Elias and Roberts [30] poignantly assert: ...
This article argues for greater consideration of ‘the everyday’ within evaluations of ‘the exceptional’ and presents this as a practical means of engendering disaster risk reduction and management (DRRM) and resilience-building. Building on scholarship from feminist geography, gender and development and feminist political ecology, it charts a new way of theorising disaster risk and resilience from a gendered perspective through the analytic of the everyday, and substantiates this with findings from ethnographic research conducted between 2016 and 2017 in disaster-prone informal settlements in the Philippines. As this case reveals, a focus on the everyday helps to uncover the multiple subjective embodiments of risk and insecurity and the structural systems that underpin related inequalities and exclusions. Crucially, the lens of ‘the everyday’ also exposes the social reproductive labours and power hierarchies embedded in community-based DRRM and resilience-building programmes; insights which are vital to advancing more inclusive, sustainable and socially just approaches to disaster risk governance and climate change adaptation.
... Under these circumstances, the responsibility to ensure the well-being of their communities is pushed disproportionately onto the shoulders of women. In this way, 'female altruism' (Tanyag 2017), in particular motherhood, is harnessed for military purposes to prop up both military institutions (through material reproduction) and individual soldiers (through physical reproduction) as a substitute for welfare provisioning. However, the lack of social provisioning leaves many women without access to adequate healthcare, rest, and replenishment. ...
... However, the lack of social provisioning leaves many women without access to adequate healthcare, rest, and replenishment. This dependency on women as hardworking and loyal daughters and mothers heightens the vulnerability of the parastate, as the very gendered bodies situated the centre of this political economy of war are threatened (Tanyag 2017;Hedström 2018). This is a very real material contradiction in the political economy of gendered nationalism that women experience viscerally in their bodies and in their everyday lives, with implications far beyond the individual body. ...
... Resultantly, control over women and girls' reproductive freedom cuts across many revolutionary movements, and suggests that military objectives, rather than religious or moral beliefs as commonly argued, play a critical role in perpetuating restrictions to female bodily autonomy. Restrictions on reproductive rights 'perpetuate harmful norms that effectively deny women and girls the means to take better care of their own bodies' (Tanyag 2017), and moreover obscure the violence that women may endure within marriages, or indeed within armed forces associated with revolutionary movements (Roy 2006(Roy , 2008. Young female soldiers interviewed in Kachinland talked about taking turns watching the door of their all-women unit at night. ...
This article brings together research on civil wars and militarization with feminist scholarship on the household in order to push theo-rization on civil wars in new directions. By introducing the concept of militarized social reproduction to capture the multiple ways in which women's everyday labour in both the household and the army underpins militarization processes, this article proposes that parastate armed conflict is enabled, at least in part, through women's everyday gendered activities. It suggests that this labour is particularly important in parastates experiencing long-term civil wars. In these settings, public funds, to the extent that they exist, are diverted from social welfare services to enable the expansion, or simply survival, of military power. Under these circumstances, the duty to reproduce both the individual soldier and the army writ-large is placed disproportionally on the shoulders of women. Several general types of this gendered labour, though interrelated, can be distinguished from one another through a typology of militarized social reproduction. This typology considers not only physical labour, but also the emotional and symbolic labour used to resource and legitimize armed conflict in non-material ways. It is therefore not only the physical effects of the labour that have consequences for the war, but also the ways in which women are called upon to symbolize and legitimize warfare. Such a focus enables important insights into the nexus formed between the everyday space of the gendered household and conflict, and furthers knowledge about the relationship of gender to different modalities of militarization. ARTICLE HISTORY
... Further, the global household is maintained by 'ties of economic and emotional interdependence' despite and because of geographic dispersion (107). Global households are important sites where macro-level economic processes take shape and they are integral to the reproduction of a neoliberal global political economy (Safri and Graham 2010;Tanyag 2017). They are increasingly relevant in understanding the global dimensions to post-disaster response and recovery. ...
... Our findings raise caution to overstating the importance and contribution of remittances to post-disaster recovery. Unlike long-term development assistance and investments in social welfare, they typically augment household daily care provisioning and rely on the assumption of unending altruism of mostly women migrant workers (Tanyag 2017). Overseas labour migration is also uneven throughout the different regions of the Philippines (Philippine Statistics Authority 2014). ...
Disasters, as forms of crisis, offer opportunities to place in sharper focus historical and ongoing inequalities in the production and reproduction of everyday life. The opportunity for transformative change, however, risks being lost when representations of disaster increasingly obscure and silence the full costs and complexity of post-disaster recovery. This article identifies the construction and subsequent proliferation of survival myths in the context of the Philippines after the 2013 Typhoon Haiyan disaster from a feminist perspective. Using data from in-depth interviews and surveys, we examine the experiences of middle and lower-class households in three heavily affected communities in Tacloban City to challenge three dominant survival myths: the local culture of mutual assistance (bayanihan), the endless resourcefulness of Filipinos in times of crisis, and the positive contributions of overseas migrant remittances. We argue that these myths have served as tools for reinforcing gendered inequalities during and after the disaster because they render invisible the feminisation of care burdens, and contribute to gender gaps in ensuring accountability for post-disaster governance. The evidence from this research underscores the importance of interrogating how similar survival myths are being globalised in disaster governance at the expense of forging substantive gender equality in post-disaster settings.
... Los resultados muestran variaciones distintas en la respuesta de los individuos; es posible que el aumento de la percepción de las mujeres se deba a las condiciones adversas que estas experimentan en el plano económico (Tanyag, 2017). Los derechos económicos de las mujeres han experimentado una liberación gradual a nivel mundial desde el inicio del siglo XX (Chatfield, 2018). ...
Los emprendedores están familiarizados con la incertidumbre y el riesgo, es decir, su naturaleza apunta a tolerar situaciones en las que no es posible anticipar o predecir con precisión el futuro. Sin embargo, el proceso constitucional que vivió Chile durante los años 2020 a 2022, los ha expuesto a un tipo diferente de incertidumbre que afecta de forma distinta dependiendo del género. Esta investigación exploratoria tiene como objetivo analizar cómo este proceso ha generado dicha incertidumbre y afectado las percepciones de los emprendedores, especialmente en relación con los cambios propuestos en la nueva Constitución. La muestra del estudio incluye a emprendedores y ejecutivos de PYMES, con una atención especial en las diferencias de género y la percepción de la incertidumbre institucional. Los principales resultados revelan que el proceso constitucional ha generado preocupación e incertidumbre entre los emprendedores, especialmente debido a los cambios propuestos en materia de derechos sociales y económicos. Se destaca una mayor susceptibilidad entre las emprendedoras, que puede ser explicada por las obligaciones domésticas y las barreras de género en el acceso a recursos. Además, se observa una disminución en la confianza y la percepción de estabilidad en el entorno empresarial, especialmente durante el período de debate constitucional. Los resultados de esta investigación pueden ayudar al diálogo basado en evidencias entre el sector público y privado respecto a los efectos que la incertidumbre que surge de los procesos de cambio institucional tiene sobre el emprendimiento y las decisiones de los emprendedores.
... As part of this logic, gender equality is championed in so far as it can discursively enable neoliberal economic policies that promote state retrenchment and austerity for social welfare, privatisation of land, and intensified resource extraction. Emphasis on individualising women's struggles through 'self-help' has been in exchange for improvements in women's collective status and well-being through genuine redistribution of political and economic resources including land, in state and society (Arora-Jonsson, 2014;Mukhopadhyay and Prügl, 2019;Tanyag, 2017). For the most marginalised and vulnerable groups, self-help emerges out of necessity and in conditions of hardship because state support is absent. ...
... The Philippines' government has established policies and programs to facilitate the employment of Filipinas abroad (Garabiles et al., 2017). This includes the socialization of Filipina women as mothers and wives to financially prioritize family and national interests (Tanyag, 2017). Filipina women who are more educated or skilled at domestic work are often hired to work overseas as substitute mothers for an employer's children. ...
Critical action—defined as actions and behaviors aimed at disrupting systems of oppression—is a developmental asset for Black and Latinx youth. Over the past two decades, research on Black and Latinx youth’s critical action has proliferated, particularly with respect to the development of quantitative measures. In this chapter, we review current conceptualizations and measures of critical action. We then highlight potential barriers (e.g., citizenship status) and facilitators (e.g., ethnic-racial identity) of critical action for Black and Latinx youth, with special consideration of differences during childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. Our review reveals the need for further measurement development that accounts for (1) experiences unique to specific ethnic-racial groups, (2) a wider spectrum of critical action, and (3) intention, frequency, and risk of critical action. We also assert that future research should consider how various contextual and demographic factors impact critical action across the lifespan. We conclude with recommendations for research on Black and Latinx youth’s critical action.KeywordsCritical actionBlack youthLatinx youthMeasurementRacismSociopolitical development
... The Philippines' government has established policies and programs to facilitate the employment of Filipinas abroad (Garabiles et al., 2017). This includes the socialization of Filipina women as mothers and wives to financially prioritize family and national interests (Tanyag, 2017). Filipina women who are more educated or skilled at domestic work are often hired to work overseas as substitute mothers for an employer's children. ...
This chapter applies critical multiracial theory to advance the conceptualization and measurement of multiracial experiences and identity in developmental science. We aim to illustrate the complexity in how multiracials navigate, negotiate, and challenge (mono)racism and white supremacy in the United States. First, we investigate the historic exclusion and invisibility of multiracials in developmental science, as well as how multiracials complicate traditional understandings of racism, racial formation, and racial identity. Next, we review past and present approaches taken to study the theory and measurement of multiracial experiences and identity. In addition, we introduce a new Model of Multiracial Racialization that situates multiracial racialization experiences (including racial identity, racial identification, and racial category) within six ecological levels: (1) Individual Characteristics; (2) Interpersonal Experiences; (3) Contextual Factors; (4) Social, Economic, and Political Environments; (5) Systems of Oppression; and (6) Time. Finally, we offer specific examples of research topics and questions that attend to each level of our model with the hope of stimulating future research and advancing our developmental science understanding of multiraciality.KeywordsMultiracial Racial identity Multiracial racialization Racial formation Critical race theory
... The Philippines' government has established policies and programs to facilitate the employment of Filipinas abroad (Garabiles et al., 2017). This includes the socialization of Filipina women as mothers and wives to financially prioritize family and national interests (Tanyag, 2017). Filipina women who are more educated or skilled at domestic work are often hired to work overseas as substitute mothers for an employer's children. ...
Children, youth, and families who are displaced from or voluntarily leave their homelands, such as refugees, migrant workers, third culture children and adults, international students and scholars, and transnational adoptees, are largely overlooked in developmental science. Based on their unique migration histories, they experience mixed feelings about their real or imagined homelands, different forms of discrimination and racism, and challenges to developing a sense of place and belonging in hostlands across generations. In this chapter, we provide a conceptual lens to understand how diaspora as a social and psychological phenomenon can affect different domains of human development (e.g., acculturation, parent-child relationships, ethnic-racial identity development, and ethnic-racial socialization) and highlight correlates and consequences of the diaspora experience (e.g., discrimination, health, and well-being). We present a person-level perspective that attends to the diversity of lived experiences for diasporic individuals and families, positioned within specific sociohistorical contexts and structural forces of racism, classism, and sexism. Throughout this chapter, we also situate ourselves as authors from unique diaspora communities. We conclude with recommendations for how to best study this growing but overlooked population.KeywordsDiasporaImmigrant communitiesIndividual differencesAcculturationEthnic-racial identityEthnic-racial socialization
... However, echoing scholarship on reproductive justice (Macleod, 2019), our research shows that overcoming symbolic and material inequities exceeds the mere procurement of services and embraces the range of women's experiences before and after pregnancy resolution. For instance, the Reproductive Health Law has suffered stunted implementation beneath the weight of widespread fundamentalist Catholic discourses adamant in their rejection of contraceptives as inherently wrong (Melgar et al., 2018) while promoting "self-sacrificing" ideals of motherhood (Tanyag, 2017). ...
Women negotiate gendered discourses of reproductive agency in resolving unplanned pregnancies. Invoking an intersectional lens, this paper examines how these discursive dynamics differentiate across social class in the Global South context of the Philippines. Utilizing a novel mixed methods strategy, we triangulate quantitative findings from a Q sort task and qualitative accounts of pregnancy resolution to identify classed discourses of reproductive agency as (a) reclaiming maternal virtue and (b) asserting autonomous choice. Statistical analysis reveals significant discursive divergence across class, wherein working-class women primarily adopt maternal virtue discourses while middle-class women disproportionately subscribe to autonomous choice. Interpretative analysis of women’s accounts complicates this bifurcated characterization by surfacing the diverse ways by which women negotiate both discourses in narratives of abortion and carrying to term. We discuss our contributions to the literature in terms of multilevel theoretical engagement with classed complexity in gendered issues like reproductive agency as well as innovating mixed methods in intersectional research. We conclude with reflections on advancing reproductive justice, especially in Global South societies like the Philippines.
... Provision is complicated by issues of sovereignty and the tension between international commitments, state law, community practice, religious observance, and colonial legacies of eugenics and population control. All of these factors are used as justification to resist advancement in reproductive health services (Tanyag 2017;Allen and Shepherd 2019;Harman and Davies 2019). The new barrier is how efforts to advance reproductive health services have been frustrated by (predominantly) right-wing populist movements to resist such advancement (Korolczuk and Graff 2018;Paternotte and Kuhar 2018). ...
Failure to access reproductive health care is a threat to the security of women around the world. This article offers three propositions to recognize reproductive health as a matter of international peace and security. The first is to recognize current processes of advancement and backlash politics as a silent security dilemma that undermines rights, justice, and public health based approaches to reproductive health. The second is to draw on the human security origins of global health security to reorient the concept away from protecting states to protecting individuals. Finally, a feminist approach to security is incomplete without recognising reproductive health as a threat to women's security and as a barrier to their participation in international peace and security processes. Reproductive health is central to effective peacebuilding yet remains curiously absent from the international peace and security discourse. We discuss how and why reproductive security should become integrated within the Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda in order to hold states to account for reproductive health access. Reproductive security defines the urgency and threat of restricted reproductive health care to the lives of women, health-care providers, and sustained international peace and security.
... While this harm is embodied in the individual, enmeshed as she is within household or community relations, depletion may have broader consequences. For example, the care-work remittance-driven economy found in the Philippines are dependent on women's social reproductive labor, yet the depletion of women's bodies risk undermine "the well-being of households, communities and states" dependent on their work (Tanyag 2017). This research emphasizes that depletion emerges from unequal social structures that constrain women's access to socioeconomic opportunities, justice, and rights (True 2012). ...
This article explores the gendered dynamics of Myanmar’s post-war economic reforms through an analysis of women’s experiences of development in Kayah (Karenni) state. In Myanmar, ceasefires and a reduction of armed violence combined with state-driven economic liberalization reforms are conditioned by, but also contribute to remake, gendered relations of power, privilege and marginalization. While new land legislation and development projects have contributed to loss of land and livelihoods among rural populations in general, our study demonstrates that women living in conflict-affected border areas are disproportionally affected. Drawing on interviews and participant observation, we show how this is directly related to an overarching gendered political economy defined by legacies of conflict, discrimination and uneven processes of development, which positions women as particularly vulnerable to new forms of insecurity, dispossession and depletion generated by post-war economic transformations. We argue that the political and economic legacies of war in the state has produced a gendered division of labor that positions women as responsible for unpaid and underpaid informal and social reproductive labor, weakens women’s access to land, and results in physical, material, and emotional depletion. Through this focus, our study adds to research on development and economic restructuring in post-war contexts in general, and to emergent scholarship on Myanmar’s economic reforms in particular.
... These levels are interrelated in many ways. For example, maternal mortality is a sign of depletion through social reproduction that has obvious individual repercussions, but also immediate consequences in terms of household, community, as well as national indicators (Tanyag, 2017). The trajectories presented in this chapter illustrate how maternal and child mortality often reflect the breakdown of systems of social reproduction, and have the potential of exacerbating their deterioration, and prompt human mobility under significant strain. ...
This dissertation asks: how does intimate labour interact with the mobility and political subjectivities of Haitian migrant women and women of Haitian descent in the Dominican Republic (DR)? It answers this question in three specific ways. First, it explains the relationship between intimate labour and the spatial trajectories of women of Haitian ancestry who work as domestic workers. Second, it examines how the interaction between intimate labour and human mobility plays out in the Dominican border regime. Third, it explains how these subaltern women act politically in the midst of the intersections between borders, mobilities, and intimacy. The dissertation proposes the use of 'intimate-mobility entanglement' as a concept that explains the deep interrelation between intimacy and human mobility. Intimate labour requires a certain immobility, while it also affects the pace and motivations of mobility. In tandem, mobilities may set the conditions under which social reproduction occurs and intimate labour is provided. The dissertation argues that the intimate-mobility entanglement has relevant geopolitical implications that affect the ways borders function, demonstrating, among others, some of the ways sexual violence is used as a form of control that is enacted by diverse state (i.e. border officers) and non-state (i.e. smugglers) actors and affect black women of Haitian ancestry. The dissertation identifies two ways of acting politically in the midst of the intimate-mobility entanglement. It argues that embodied struggles for survival and bodily integrity are a primary form of political claim-making that coexists with discursive claim-making practices such as labour union activism, and local-international grassroots organizing by and for subjects that experience precarity of status. These contributions are the result of fourteen weeks of fieldwork, and qualitative analysis based on ethnographic methods that include participant observation, interviews, and focus groups with 165 domestic workers, migrants and activists in the DR, in communities located in 4 different geographic regions of the DR including the Haiti-DR border strip. One of the main contributions of the dissertation is to bridge scholarship on transnational social reproduction (which is mostly grounded on global political economy, iii feminist geography, and international political sociology) with scholarship on migrant studies, geopolitics, and the mobilities paradigm. In particular it contributes to Hyndman's embodied mobilities, and Sheller's reproductive mobilities, by emphasizing the centrality of the sustenance of life to why we move, how we do it, as well as how mobility is controlled. Thinking about the intimate-mobility entanglement brings livelihoods to the forefront of international relations and identifies existing ways of acting politically in a global context where new forms of differential inclusion and gradations of belonging continue to emerge. This research may be further developed by looking at the relationship between sexual and reproductive health, human mobility, and border politics in contexts of forced migration and denationalization.
This article elaborates the connections between women's roles in household and community social reproduction and their leadership in resistance against land dispossession. Drawing on interviews with women land activists in two rural provinces, situated in south and central Cambodia, it examines the beliefs and processes of meaning‐making underpinning women's activism against state‐sanctioned land acquisitions through an examination of the symbols, discourses and imaginaries of land, home and social reproductive labour that embed their struggles. It argues that rural women's resistance makes visible gendered moral economies—moored to agrarian social relations and shaped by the modalities of social reproduction—that legitimate contestation against state‐sanctioned land dispossession.
This article explores the relationships between social reproduction, depletion, and geopolitical processes, drawing on two case studies: Iraq and Palestine. It underlines the importance of social reproduction to geopolitical processes and of particular geopolitical contexts to how states intervene in social reproduction, with differential implications for depletion. It argues that Iraqi state measures targeting social reproduction have sought to organize and instrumentalize the life of Iraqi citizens in the service of postcolonial state building and war-making, whilst, by contrast, Israeli state measures targeting Palestinian social reproduction have largely sought to erase Palestinian life in line with a settler colonial logic.
Exceptionalism as a framing discourse reveals socio-historical insights on postcolonialism and postnationalism, providing fertile ground for articulating and investigating the multiplicities and historical vicissitudes constituting Filipina feminist articulations of social identities and engagements with multi-scalar politics. Historical and contemporary Philippine/Filipino exceptionalism claims have inspired and galvanized transnational feminist spaces, processes, and practices, creating ideoloscapes (ideologies and discourses) and practiscapes (actions). Using framing theory to compare exceptionalisms’ discursive practices and their entanglements with feminisms, this paper analyzes episodic historical accounts, documents, and interviews with feminist leaders to demonstrate how Filipina feminists mobilize exceptionalisms as reference frames in different logics, spaces, and political opportunities. It examines three framing episodes of Filipina feminist politics – suffragist frames during the American colonial period, nationalist feminists’ frames from the Marcos to the Duterte presidencies, and transnationalist (state) feminists’ frames within multi-scalar spaces and the context of imperial and other exceptionalism variants. These episodic framing practices demonstrate the formation and reproduction of dominant feminist politics and publics that have yet to acknowledge their shared traumatic histories and fully decolonize their narratives and engagements.
In a crisis-prone world, the number of internally displaced persons (IDPs) uprooted by both armed conflicts and environmental disasters has drastically increased and displacement risks have intensified. Despite the growing attention within global security and development agendas to sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR), there remain striking gaps in addressing SRHR in crisis situations, particularly among IDP women and girls. This article examines the continuum between social reproduction in times of crisis and the material and ideological conditions that restrict women’s bodily autonomy in everyday life. Using the case of the Philippines where millions of people are routinely affected by conflict and disaster-induced displacements, it argues that the failure to recognise the centrality of women’s health and bodily autonomy not only hinders the sustainable provision of care and domestic labour during and after crisis, but also fundamentally constrains how security is enacted within these spaces. Thus, the article highlights an urgent need to rethink the gendered political economy of crisis responses as a building block for stemming gendered violence and depletion of social reproductive labour at the household, state, and global levels.
Natural disasters are increasingly causing displacements globally, and such negative impacts of climate change are expected to increase exponentially. Women and girls in particular distinctly endure long-term or gradual harms while in displacement, such as heightened risks of sexual and gender-based violence, including exposure to sexually transmitted infections and HIV/AIDS, maternal mortality, and forced or unwanted pregnancies. This article examines the Philippines as a case study to unveil the growing gendered security threats embodied by disaster-induced displacements. In the aftermath of the disaster caused by supertyphoon Haiyan, which struck in November 2013, the mantra of developing a “disaster-resilient nation” has gained currency among national and international actors in the country. Building on critical feminist political economy analysis, this article argues that the Haiyan postdisaster relief and reconstruction efforts constitute gendered processes that intimately rely on and mobilize women’s unremunerated social reproductive labor, particularly through their role as primary caregivers. Data for this research is drawn from twenty-six interviews with key informants and from secondary sources such as official reports of governmental, nongovernmental, and international humanitarian organizations. The findings underscore the importance of deploying a feminist lens to critique the material and discursive power of “resilience” through which norms of female altruism are harnessed at household and community levels while postdisaster responsibilities are increasingly diverted away from the state. In so doing, resilience discourses may serve to reinforce the structural roots of gendered vulnerability, including political, cultural, and economic barriers to accessing sexual and reproductive health services and supplies-thereby undermining bodily autonomy.
Human rights instruments have enabled women's movements to access a normative and analytic framework for fighting discrimination, and rights discourses have been deployed to legitimise women's demands for social and economic rights, political representation and well-being. Maxine Molyneux spoke to Deniz Kandiyoti about the new trends and threats to women's rights and UN frameworks. Deniz Kandiyoti: As we enter 2013, we are assailed daily by news of violence against women, as well as sharp popular reactions against these incidents. Yet the climate for a level headed discussion of gender equality and women's rights seems more unfavourable than ever at the international, regional and national levels. Shall we start with what is happening at the international level? Maxine Molyneux: Yes, there are certainly some very worrying trends. We are at some distance from the high period of liberal internationalism in terms of human rights and democracy. The spirit of optimism that accompanied both the successive waves of democratisation in various parts of the world, and the gains made by the international women's movement during the Beijing process, had drained away by the latter half of the 1990s, and even more so after 9/11 when women's rights were caught up in the so-called 'war on terror'. While almost all governments have signed up to UN frameworks on women's rights, and there have been many positive changes as a result, there has also been growing resistance to rights agendas and diminishing trans-national activism in support of women's rights. One indication of this was the passing without notice of the Beijing Plus Ten (B+10) events in March 2005 in marked contrast to the Fourth World Women's Conference in 1995 held in Beijing which was attended by more than 30,000 participants. No full-scale international conference could be contemplated for B+10 for fear of risking the gains won in Beijing and strenuously defended in the Beijing Plus Five negotiations in 2000. B+10 was confined to an intergovernmental meeting where the mood was defensive, and the main achievement – an important one-was to reaffirm the broad consensus encoded in the Platform for Action approved ten years earlier. And there are now concerns about holding a 5th Women's World Conference in case those gains are overturned. What explains these changes? Two things are significant here: one is that there has been a critical reassessment of the Beijing process itself, with doubts variously expressed as to its representivity, the content of its proposals, and the universalist pretensions of the overall project. All these questions can be and should be debated, but ultimately there may be no agreement on core values. The strongest critiques of international rights frameworks coming from within the relative safety of the Western liberal democracies are joined by positions allied with varieties of anti-imperialist, religious and/or conservative positions and these are less interested in discussion than in rejecting the very premise of universal rights. So where these ideas have influence, they have helped to weaken commitment and have divided activists. The second important factor is one far less widely analysed and discussed in these debates over human rights-namely the growing influence of illiberal, religious and conservative forces worldwide. In recent decades these became increasingly effective in the battleground over women's rights and at the very moment when women's movements were losing their vitality, purpose and leadership. It is striking that in contrast to the outpouring of critiques of feminism, trans-national women's movements and advocacy, there has been so little commentary on, or analysis of, the trans-nationalization of conservative forces and their international alliances, often but not always religious in character, mobilizing against women's rights.
Situating data from a pilot study conducted in the Philippines within the research literature, we examine the impact of the recent global economic crisis on the experiences of Filipino migrant workers and their families in the context of previous economic upheavals. In so doing, we highlight the gendered effects of shifts in the global economy and detail government response to the premature return of migrant workers to the Philippines primarily due to retrenchment impelled by the global economic crisis. While the current conditions of migration and return are significant, we argue that these are not the result of a new global economic crisis, but are instead the ongoing effects of neoliberal globalization that have resulted in sustained multiple crises with which residents of the Global South have had to contend. Moreover, the reputed solutions offered to returned migrants are rooted in the same faulty paradigm that will be destined to produce only further hardship.
In this article we explore the concept of depletion through social reproduction (DSR). We describe depletion, identify its key indicators and suggest different methodologies that could be used to measure it. We discuss issues having to do with gendered harm as well as questions about how depletion might be reversed. We conclude that recognizing DSR in this way can be a powerful tool for understanding the consequences of non-recognition of the value of domestic work to national economies, as well as the harm that might accrue in the doing of this work at both a systemic and individual level.
This article addresses the rise of faith-based emergency relief by examining the US President's Emergency Plan for HIV/AIDS (PEPFAR), a public health intervention focused on the AIDS epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa. It argues that the theological turn in humanitarian aid serves to amplify ongoing dynamics in the domestic politics of sub-Saharan African states, where social services have assumed the form of chronic emergency relief and religious organizations have come to play an increasingly prominent role in the provision of such services. In the context of an ongoing public health crisis, PEPFAR has institutionalized the social authority of the Pentecostal and charismatic churches, leading to a semantic confluence between the postcolonial politics of emergency and the Pentecostal/Pauline theology of kairos or event. Far from being confined to the space of foreign aid, however, the faith-based turn in humanitarianism is in keeping with ongoing reforms in domestic social policy in the United States. While on the one hand the sustained welfare programmes of the New Deal and Great Society have been dismantled in favour of a system of emergency relief, on the other hand the federal government has intensified its moral, pedagogical and punitive interventions into the lives of the poor. The wilful transfer of welfare services to overtly religious service providers has played a decisive role in this process. The article concludes with a critical appraisal of the links between African and North American Pentecostal-evangelical churches and questions the revolutionary mission ascribed to Pauline political theology in recent political theory.
This article examines new patterns of workplace inequality that emerge as transgender people are incorporated into the global labor market. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 41 transgender call center employees in the Philippines, I develop the concept “purple-collar labor” to describe how transgender workers—specifically trans women—are clustered, dispersed, and segregated in the workplace and how their patterned locations in social organizational structures serve a particular value-producing function. These patterned inclusions, I argue, come with explicit and implicit interactional expectations about how “trans” should be put to work in the expansion and accumulation of global capital. In this way, the study examines the production and extraction of queer value and the folding of trans women’s gendered performances into commercial exchange. Data show how the affective labor of transgender employees is used to help foster productivity, ease workplace tensions, and boost employee morale. This study of transgender employment experiences opens new lines of inquiry for understanding gender inequalities at work, and it builds on scholarship that combines political economy approaches with transgender studies.
Feminist scholars have been highly attentive to the ways that crises have become an everyday technique of global governance. They are particularly sensitive to the mechanisms through which ‘crisis management’ entrenches the power of particular economic orders and constrains the possibilities, and space, for contestation and critique. This paper seeks to contribute to but also to extend existing feminist research on financial crisis by arguing that, over the course of what has commonly been labelled the ‘global financial crisis’, the emergence of ‘crisis governance feminism’ has enabled existing structures and mechanisms of gendered privilege, such as the global financial industry, to suppress calls for their overhaul and to re-entrench their power in the global political economy. Adopting a discursive approach to gender and governance that situates gender centrally in understanding governance discourses and their reproduction of common sense (about what people do, how they labour, where they invest and so on), this paper argues that the governance of crisis in the contemporary era, in particular the various actors, institutions, policies and ideas that have sought to describe and ‘contain’ the global financial crisis, are gendered. Gender has become, in the contemporary global political economy, a technique of governance, and with deleterious effects. Despite inciting more discussion of ‘gender’ in economic systems than ever before (particularly in terms of discussions of ‘economic competitiveness’), this paper argues that the ‘global financial crisis’ has precipitated and continues to reproduce techniques of governance that trivialise feminist concerns while further embedding a masculinised, white and elitist culture of global financial privilege.
From the World Bank's ‘gender equality is smart economics’ to The Economist's ‘womenomics’ and Nike's ‘girl effect’, feminism seems to have well and truly penetrated the business world. Government action on behalf of gender equality is well institutionalized but private corporations appear as a new actor in this cause. This article asks: What do businesses and their public partners do in order to advance gender equality? What motivates their engagement now and how does it fit into existing public and private relationships of power? What do they mean for feminist agendas? How legitimate are they? And how effective are they? To address these questions the article examines four exemplary initiatives involving businesses in advancing gender equality and women's empowerment: the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Women Global Initiative, the World Economic Forum's Women Leaders and Gender Parity Program, the European Union's Programme on Gender Balance in Decision-Making Positions, and the UN Global Compact-UNIFEM Women's Empowerment Principles for Business. Our purpose is to conceptually locate these initiatives as new private forms of governance involving partnerships with governments. We assess these initiatives employing criteria of feminist evaluation and find decidedly ambiguous results. We argue that the new attention to gender equality in business and global economic governance is both an expression of and a key process in the transformation of states and corporations in the context of global competition and restructuring.
On the twentieth anniversary of the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD), activists, governments and diplomats engaged in the fight for sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) are anxious to ensure that these issues are fully reflected in the development agenda to succeed the Millennium Development Goals after 2015. In inter-governmental negotiations since 1994 and particularly in the period 2012-2014, governments have shown that they have significantly expanded their understanding of a number of so-called 'controversial' issues in the ICPD agenda, whether safe abortion, adolescent sexual and reproductive health services, comprehensive sexuality education or sexual rights. As in the past and in spite of an increasingly complex and difficult multilateral environment, countering the highly organised conservative opposition to SRHR has required a well-planned and determined mobilisation by progressive forces from North and South.
For many years, feminists throughout the world looked to the United States for the most advanced theory and practice. Today,
however, US feminism finds itself at an impasse, stymied by the hostile, post-9/11 political climate. Unsure how to pursue
gender justice under current condition’s, we are now returning the favor, by looking to feminists elsewhere for inspiration
and guidance. Today, accordingly, the cutting edge of gender struggle has shifted away from the United States, to transnational
spaces, such as „Europe“, where the room for maneuver is greater. The consequence is a major shift in the geography of feminist
energies.
Based on ethnographic research, this study investigates the meaning and impact of women’s involvement in South Korean evangelicalism. While recent works addressing the “paradox” of women’s participation in conservative religions have highlighted the significance of these religions as unexpected vehicles of gender empowerment and contestation, this study finds that the experiences and consequences of Korean evangelical women’s religiosity are highly contradictory; although crucial in women’s efforts to negotiate the injuries of the modern Confucian-patriarchal family, conversion, for many women, also signifies their effective redomestication to this family/gender regime, which helps maintain current gender arrangements. To address this tension, the article explores the meaning of religious submission in the Korean context, focusing on the motivations behind women’s consent to patriarchy, which are rooted in women’s contradictory desires regarding the family system and the ambivalent subjectivities that they evoke.
This article employs anti-essentialist Marxist analysis to shed light on the diverse economic activities that Filipina contract migrants are engaged in at home and overseas. We point to the limitations of dominant representations of these women as 'heroes' of national development or 'victims' of a global capitalist economy, which tend to foreclose a discussion of multiple class processes engendered by transnational labour migration. In drawing on a fluid theory of class, we investigate how contract domestic workers are involved in multiple class processes that allow them to produce, appropriate and distribute surplus labour in innovative ways. We also discuss the activities of the Asian Migrant Centre, a non-governmental organization working with domestic workers in Hong Kong, whose efforts to inspire the entrepreneurial aspirations of these women reflect the importance of recognizing migrant workers' multiple economic identities. This analysis has implications for how we imagine the agency of contract workers, as well as the performativity of research and advocacy work.
Violence against women is a major problem in all countries, affecting women in every socio-economic group and at every life stage. Nowhere in the world do women share equal social and economic rights with men or the same access as men to productive resources. Economic globalization and development are creating new challenges for women's rights as well as some new opportunities for advancing women's economic independence and gender equality. Yet, when women have access to productive resources and they enjoy social and economic rights they are less vulnerable to violence across all societies. The Political Economy of Violence against Women develops a feminist political economy approach to identify the linkages between different forms of violence against women and macro structural processes in strategic local and global sites - from the household to the transnational level. In doing so, it seeks to account for the globally increasing scale and brutality of violence against women. These sites include economic restructuring and men's reaction to the loss of secure employment, the abusive exploitation associated with the transnational migration of women workers, the growth of a sex trade around the creation of free trade zones, the spike in violence against women in financial liberalization and crises, the scourge of sexual violence in armed conflict and post-crisis peacebuilding or reconstruction efforts and the deleterious gendered impacts of natural disasters. Examples are drawn from South Africa, Kenya, the Democratic Republic of Congo, China, Ciudad Juarez in Mexico, the Pacific Islands, Argentina, Eastern Europe, Central Asia, Haiti, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, New Zealand, Ireland, the United Kingdom, the United States and Iceland.
The global migration and trafficking of women is anchored in particular features of the current globalization of economies in both the north and the south. Making this legible requires that we look at globalization in ways that are different from the mainstream view, confined to emphasizing the hypermobility of capital and to the ascendance of information economies. The growing inmiseration of governments and whole economies in the global south has promoted and enabled the proliferation of survival and profit-making activities that involve the migration and trafficking of women. To some extent these are older processes, which used to be national or regional that can today operate at global scales. The same infrastructure that facilitates cross-border flows of capital, information and trade is also making possible a whole range of cross-border flows not intended by the framers and designers of the current globalization of economies. Growing numbers of traffickers and smugglers are making money off the backs of women and many governments are increasingly dependent on their remittances. A key aspect here is that through their work and remittances, women enhance the government revenue of deeply indebted countries and offer new profit making possibilities to `entrepreneurs' who have seen other opportunities vanish as a consequence of global firms and markets entering their countries or to long time criminals who can now operate their illegal trade globally. These survival circuits are often complex, involving multiple locations and sets of actors constituting increasingly global chains of traders and `workers'. A central point of the article is that it is through these supposedly rather value-less economic actors low-wage and poor women that key components of these new economies have been built. Globalization plays a specific role here in a double sense, contributing to the formation of links between sending and receiving countries, and, secondly, enabling local and regional practices to become global in scale.
In recent years it has been claimed by human rights advocates that an “unholy alliance” has emerged internationally to counter the equality claims of the transnational women's rights movement. Using the literature on transnational social movements and counter-movements, this article assesses the interaction between what are conceived of as state and non-state-based conservative patriarchal actors with the transnational women's movement at a series of UN conferences throughout the 1990s and into the new millennium. It suggests that a transnational counter-network has indeed emerged and outlines the prevailing political opportunity structures that have made its mobilisation possible. It also outlines the alternative frames which the counter-network has used in presenting its arguments. The paper indicates that accounts of domestic-level counter-movements hold some explanatory power for studying the emergence of such a movement at the transnational level, but it also suggests that the literature needs to be supplemented with an analysis of the crucial role played by governments as allies or even as network members in influencing this process.
The Beijing Platform for Action (1995) and its companion documents - those of the Vienna Conference on Human Rights (1993) and the International Conference on Population and Development (1994) - took important steps toward securing recognition for what we might call human rights of the body. These are affirmative rights relating to sexual expression, reproductive choice and access to health care and negative rights pertaining to freedom from violence, torture and abuse. But ten years later, the violated male bodies of Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo, and Gujarat seem to mock certain of Beijing's most basic premises: that women are primarily the victims rather than the perpetrators of bodily abuses; and that, as such, women are, or should be, the privileged beneficiaries of bodily integrity rights. This paper re-examines these premises in the shadow of the "war on terrorism", religious extremism, and practices of racialised, sexual, and often homophobic violence against men that emerge in wars and ethnic conflicts. In particular it looks at the war in Iraq and how that war configures such practices in both old and new ways. My purpose is not to repudiate feminist visions but rather to challenge the exclusive privileging of women as the bearers of sexual rights and to open up discussion of new, more inclusive coalitions of diverse social movements for rights of the body.
This article explores how religion as a political force shapes and deflects the struggle for gender equality in contexts marked by different histories of nation building and challenges of ethnic diversity, different state-society relations (from the more authoritarian to the more democratic), and different relations between state power and religion (especially in the domain of marriage, family and personal laws). It shows how 'private' issues, related to the family, sexuality and reproduction, have become sites of intense public contestation between conservative religious actors wishing to regulate them based on some transcendent moral principle, and feminist and other human rights advocates basing their claims on pluralist and time- and context-specific solutions. Not only are claims of 'divine truth' justifying discriminatory practices against women hard to challenge, but the struggle for gender equality is further complicated by the manner in which it is closely tied up with, and inseparable from, struggles for social and economic justice, ethnic/racial recognition, and national self-determination vis--vis imperial/global domination.
The goal of this article is to introduce a new category into international political economy-the global household-and to begin to widen the focus of international political economy to include nonmarket transactions and noncapitalist production. As an economic institution composed of transnational extended families and codwellers (including international migrants and family members left behind in countries of origin), the global household is engaged in coordinating international migration, sending and receiving billions of dollars in remittances, and organizing and conducting market- and non-market-oriented production on an international scale. We first trace the discursive antecedents of the global household concept to theories of the household as a site of noncapitalist production and to feminist ethnographies of transnational families. In order to demonstrate the potential significance and effect of this newly recognized institution, we estimate the aggregate population of global households, the size and distribution of remittances, and the magnitude and sectoral scope of global household production. We then examine the implications of the global household concept for three areas of inquiry: globalization, economic development, and the household politics of economic transformation. Finally, we briefly explore the possibilities for research and activism opened up by a feminist, postcapitalist international political economy centered on the global household.
A survey, conducted by the PILIPINA Legal Resources Center (PLRC) in the Philippines, on the extent of usage of, and the attitudes, aspirations and behavior of Muslim women in relation to the Code of Muslim Personal Laws (CMPL) found that the majority of Muslim women were not familiar with their official legal rights. The solution to the problem of lack of legal literacy is easy. The greater problem, as the survey indicated, is that women’s lack of autonomy is largely cultural, and justified by invoking customary laws and religious traditions. This worldview affects the individual’s ability to participate in every level of social life—from decision making within her home and family, to education, employment and public office. This chapter will discuss the implications of this research and what outreach projects have been implemented (including engagement with the UN Cedaw Committee) since it was undertaken, to overcome the problems revealed concerning Muslim women’s understanding of their legal rights in the Philippines.
This chapter examines the social dimensions of the recent global economic crisis through the prism of social reproduction, allowing us to examine the invisible, unpaid parts of economies, as well as the much more visible paid parts. The crisis has been a crisis of capital accumulation, with falling investment, output and employment. But it has also been a rupture in social reproduction, understood as ‘the process by which all the main relations in the society are constantly recreated and perpetuated’ (Mackintosh 1981: 10) This process requires non-market and not-for-profit activities as well as market and for-profit activities, and includes unpaid work in families as well as paid work in businesses (Elson 1998). Social reproduction involves the reproduction of labour as well as of capital. It is a contested and contradictory process, and, from time to time, action by the state is required to try to safeguard it. In the recent crisis, there was swift action by governments to safeguard some aspects of social reproduction, but not of others. This chapter asks why, and examines some of the consequences.
This article examines the political contestations over sexual and reproductive rights reform in the Philippines from an intersectional perspective. Specifically, it considers the Reproductive Health (RH) Bill which was enacted in 2012 to unpack the various competing interests and identities of coalitions that are mobilised by sexual and reproductive freedom in the Philippines. It demonstrates how the distinct reform agenda contained in the RH Bill is a direct outcome of the power differentials between and within coalitions. This suggests that the bill serves to benefit some at the expense of others based on how different actors are situated within the intersections of class, gender, sexuality, religion and nation. Data for this research comes from the triangulation of various sources including semi-structured interviews, the RH bill text, and official government and non-government publications. The case of the RH Bill in the Philippines highlights the interdependence between the recognition of sexual and reproductive freedom as a human right and the redistribution of power and resources in society.
Girls and women have become the public faces of development today, through the success of “Gender Equality as Smart Economics” policy agendas and similar development narratives that mediate feminist claims through market logic. Women, these narratives assert, are more productive, responsible, and sustainable economic agents for future growth in the context of global financial crisis and therefore their empowerment is economically prudent. In this article, I provide a feminist reading of Foucault's critique of human capital to examine the discursive terrain of the “Smart Economics” agenda and to understand the knowledge it produces about female bodies, subjectivities and agency. Through a discussion of the World Bank's 201234.
World Bank. 2012. World Development Report 2012: Gender Equality and Development. Washington, DC: World Bank.View all references World Development Report on gender equality, I argue that the current narratives of women's empowerment are premised on a series of gender essentialisms and their “activation” through biopolitical interventions. The activation narrative of human capital appears, under feminist eyes, to reflect the notion that the supposedly intrinsic responsible and maternal nature of women can be harnessed to produce more profitable and sustainable development outcomes and, by extension, “rescue” global capitalism.
While Christianity and feminism may seem at odds with one another, both make normative claims about justice and addressing the needs of those on the margins of power. This article explores what feminism contributes to Christian realism. The current revival of Niebuhrian Christian realism highlights how much it still has to offer as a theoretical underpinning for policy and governance. However, Christian realism remains wedded to masculinist abstractions and power structures, such as the balance of power, that are ultimately harmful to those on the margins. Thus, this article uses feminism to argue for a greater acceptance of vulnerability and obligation in Christian realism.
This short commentary aims to think through the need to return to a more “integrated” feminist IR through a focus on some of the ways in which feminist political economy (FPE) scholars, such as ourselves, might better integrate a focus on gendered forms and practices of violence into our analysis. We do this via an intervention into debates about the nature of the “everyday” political economy. At the same time, we hope that this intervention might also draw attention to the need for a clearer understanding of the gendered structures and practices of the global political economy in feminist security studies (FSS).
Synopsis
Historically, governments and social movements have evoked images of mothers as nurturing, moral, peaceful, or combative agents. But how is a maternalist frame deployed in different contexts? Who deploys this frame, for what purposes and to what ends? In this article, we present a classification scheme to elucidate the diversity and versatility of maternalist frames through the examination of four distinct categories of cases of women's mobilization from the global South as well as North. Drawing on secondary literature and our own ongoing research, we construct a typology of maternalism-from-above and maternalism-from-below to demonstrate how maternalist frames may serve patriarchal or emancipatory purposes with implications for gender justice and the expansion of citizenship rights.
Sex discrimination in property rights, marriage and divorce, inheritance, and parenting thwarts women’s quest for equal rights, violates international conventions, and contradicts many national constitutions. While many countries have reformed family and personal status laws to promote equality, dozens continue to enforce discriminatory provisions. What explains variation in the degree of sex equality in family law? Analyzing an original dataset on the characteristics of family law in 70 countries between 1975 and 2005, we show that the political institutionalization of religious authority is powerfully associated with the degree to which family law discriminates against women. State involvement in religion offers a better account of variation in sex equality in family law than a wide variety of religious and non-religious factors such political parties, women in parliament, democratization, and economic development.
Like many other developing countries, the Philippines is preparing for the gradual phase-out of donated contraceptive supplies by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and other international non-governmental organizations (NGOs). This comparative study reviews the experiences of countries that have either initiated or completed contraceptive self-reliance programs, assessing the sustainability of strategies, identifying the stakeholders and examining the socio-political and legal environment in which CSR strategies were designed and implemented. This study concludes by extracting lessons and best practices from the experiences of other countries that might inform local government units (LGUs) as they design and implement CSR strategies in the Philippines. __________________ Executive Summary The Philippine Government intends to respond to the phase-out of external donations through the implementation by the Department of Health (DOH) of a Contraceptive Self Reliance (CSR) strategy, which provides for the gradual replacement of externally donated contraceptives with domestically provided contraceptives. For the Philippines, a country that has decentralized most of its services, this means that the Local Government Units (LGUs) will assume primary responsibility for assuring that sufficient quantities of contraceptives are available for free distribution to those users without means to pay for their contraceptives. There are three fundamental components of CSR strategies: clients, commodities, and sustainability. CSR requires that LGUs develop the ability to forecast demand, finance, procure, and deliver quality contraceptives to all individuals who need them, when they need them. While CSR is often framed as a technical problem, strategy outcomes are influenced by the political and institutional environment. In other words, the success of CSR strategies are influenced by the actors that design, implement and manage CSR policies and the internal and external environment in which the policies are promoted.
This brief note clarifies and expands upon the power and implications of intersectionality on the level of method, focusing upon its use in the hands of Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, its originator and premier practitioner.
This paper sets out a framework for thinking about the gender dimensions of the economic crisis. It considers the likely impact of the crisis, as well as the responses to it, on the part of both individuals and collectivities, in three spheres of the economy: finance; production; and reproduction. It identifies the kinds of 'gender numbers' that we need; sex-disaggregated statistics of various kinds. It also argues that we need to pay attention to gender norms - the social practices and ideas that shape the behaviour of people and institutions. The norms may be reinforced in times of crisis; but they may also start to decompose as individuals transgress norms under the pressures of crisis. In addition, there may be opportunities for the transformation of norms, through collective action to institute new, more egalitarian, social practices and ideas.
This article is about how women's organizations constructed “the Filipino woman” as part of the feminist project of addressing prostitution as a women's issue in the Philippines from 1985 to 2006. Despite the radical positions of women's activism, the eternal binary of the woman as victim/agent, martyr/advocate or martyr/activist haunted the discourses about Filipino womanhood. Feminist engagement with these binary categories was fraught, ambivalent and contradictory. In unpacking the grand narrative on women, victimization was raised as the reason for the low status of the ‘second sex’ and therefore the call to reject victim status was important. Thus, women's organizations used oral testimonies and the theatre as advocacy to transform ‘survivors’ into activists. And yet, feminists deployed the victim narrative in the campaign to pass the Anti-Trafficking Act. Material from three women's organizations will be used to provide empirical evidence for the arguments made above.
This paper examines the techniques and networks that enable the transnational movement of migrant laborers from Indonesia. Theoretically, the paper argues that governmentality is an effective concept through which to understand political economic relations across national borders and outside state institutions. The concept is useful not only in analysis of abstract policy prescriptions, but also in the apparently mundane methods that are intended to rationalize the training, delivery and security of migrant laborers. The intervention herein is in part methodological, in so far as the paper argues that the concept is useful in analyzing the everyday practices that are a frequent focus of ethnographic fieldwork. Empirically grounded in interviews and observational fieldwork in Indonesia, the paper describes the networks that facilitate transnational labor migration from the country and demonstrates the interconnection of the "global" economy with localized moral economies. Thus, the paper argues that transnational flows of migrant laborers are in fact dependent upon supposedly traditional patron-client networks. Furthermore, I suggest that some NGOs advocating for the rights of migrant workers are not inimical to state power, but in fact work to enhance it. Strategies to protect the rights of migrant laborers may bring about greater state intervention in their lives. The paper proposes two technologies deployed by non-state entities, specifically human resources companies and NGOs, that facilitate transnational labor migration. The first are termed technologies of servitude and are intended to impart the skills and attitudes necessary to conduct domestic labor. The latter are technologies for rationalizing labor flows to wealthier countries of the Indian and Pacific Ocean regions.
In this article, I examine the discursive construction of the family in the Philippine economic and legal system. I show that the state economypromotes the formation of split-apart families but that the state also uses the patriarchal nuclear family as a symbol of national identity in the modernization-building project of the Philippines. This disjuncture comes at the expense of the nation. Questioning the motives behind state efforts to achieve patriarchal order amid the increasing outflow of women migrants, I argue that the moral disciplining of women aggravates the subordinate and weak status of the Philippines in the global economy.
Drawing on domestic and international law, as well as on judgments given by courts and human rights treaty bodies, Gender Stereotyping offers perspectives on ways gender stereotypes might be eliminated through the transnational legal process in order to ensure women's equality and the full exercise of their human rights. A leading international framework for debates on the subject of stereotypes, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, was adopted in 1979 by the UN General Assembly and defines what constitutes discrimination against women. It also establishes an agenda to eliminate discrimination in all its forms in order to ensure substantive equality for women. Applying the Convention as the primary framework for analysis, this book provides essential strategies for eradicating gender stereotyping. Its proposed methodology requires naming operative gender stereotypes, identifying how they violate the human rights of women, and articulating states' obligations to eliminate and remedy these violations. According to Rebecca J. Cook and Simone Cusack, in order to abolish all forms of discrimination against women, priority needs to be given to the elimination of gender stereotypes. While stereotypes affect both men and women, they can have particularly egregious effects on women, often devaluing them and assigning them to subservient roles in society. As the legal perspectives offered in Gender Stereotyping demonstrate, treating women according to restrictive generalizations instead of their individual needs, abilities, and circumstances denies women their human rights and fundamental freedoms. Copyright
Filipina domestic workers in Hong Kong are viewed as sexually threatening and thus in need of strict discipline. In this article I present and analyze the discourse on the sexuality of Filipina domestic workers, arguing that their reputation is linked primarily to their ambiguous social and class identities, and to broad changes in the familial and economic landscape of Hong Kong. Clothing serves as one forum in which sexuality is expressed, discipline is enacted and resisted, and various forms of power are exercised, [sexuality, Filipina domestic workers, discipline, resistance, clothing, Hong Kong].
This paper adopts a transnational, ethnographic vantage point in examining cultural politics, gender, and class relations in the provisional Philippine diaspora constituted through women's labour migration. Emphasis is placed on women's agency and how their experiences are embedded in layers of economic and social support flowing from and to female kin. Cultural capital is acquired from the migration experience, but domestic service migrants remain subject to what Bourdieu calls symbolic violence, both in their places of work and through conventions of Philippine femininity. Diaspora formed by the potentially permanent migration of Philippine women to Canada is fraught with tensions from Philippine familial expectations and, in this sense it remains provisional.
Typescript. Thesis (Ph. D.)--American University, 1995. American University, School of International Service. Dissertation chair: Hamid Mowlana. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 387-423). Diss. Abstracts: 57:1879A, Oct. 1996. University Microfilms, Inc. order no. 96-25833.