Revolutionizing Feminism: The Philippine Women's Movement in the Age of Terror

by Anne E. Lacsamana

Revolutionizing Feminism offers the first feminist analysis of the human rights crisis in the Philippines during the Arroyo presidency (2001-2010) and the declaration of the country as the 'second front' in the US-led 'war on terror'. During this period over 1,000 activists, including peasants, journalists and lawyers, were murdered. Lacsamana situates Filipino women within the international division of labour, showing the connection between the 'super-exploitation' of their labour power at home and their migration abroad as domestic workers, nurses, nannies, entertainers, and 'mail-order brides'. In contrast to the cultural turn in feminist theorising that has retreated from the concepts of class and class exploitation, Revolutionizing Feminism seeks to reorient feminist scholarship in order to better understand the material realties of those living in an increasingly unstable and impoverished global south.

144 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2011

Reviews

[KT · Rating 4 out of 5]

Using a historical materialist analysis that is neccesary in order to comprehend the totality of the social, political, and economic conditions characterising Philippine society, I thought the author did a brilliant job locating Filipino women squarely within the international division of labour, making explicit the connection between the superexploitation of their labour power at home and their migration abroad to over 197 countries as domestic workers, nurses, nannies, entertainers, and "mail-order brides", leading to their linkage of domestic and sex workers, arguing that no real separation between the public and private exists because "they are defined in a very real sense by their social relations, characterised by personal dependency on the employer"

By foregrounding the ideological and political praxis of Filipino women's grassroots organisations, the author illustrates how their radical, anti-imperialist opposition to oppressive forces reveals the limits of and offers alternatives to contemporary academic feminist theorising that has steadily retrated from progressive analyses of class and class exploitation, the engine driving neoliberal capitalist expansion, in favour of pursuing the cultural/postmodern turn. Within this reigning theoretical purview, attention to structural forms of oppression and collective acts of resistance is replaced with a focus on discursive abstractions, thereby severing analytical accounts from those organising for social justice outside the academy
Instead the postmodern brand of theorising serves to mask relations of power by substituting a celebratory brand of identity politics in place of a radical historical materialist critique of global capitalism - the lifeblood that sustains the imperial project
Whereas grounded in the social relations of production, historical materialism makes clear that the oppression of various groups located in the global North and South "cannot be separated from the conditions producing individuals; not just the discursive and ideological conditions but most important the material conditions...that shape discourses and ideologies"

Particularly enjoyed the chapter on gendering of the Philippine Export State that critiqued the cultural turn in feminist scholarship - discursive analyses emphasising overseas Filipino women's "agency" and "resistance" that have become the prevailing conceptual lens from which to understand their subordinate position in the global economy, which neatly repackage their nomadic existence into supposedly transgressive acts of desire, power, and pleasure
The contemporary focus on localised activities of individual migrants can be attributed to the transnational framework that underpins the majority of feminist writing in this area. However this postmodern emphasis on agency, resistance, and representation serves to obscure the fundamentally expolitative neo-colonial relationship between the USA and the Philippines - the very reason the latter finds itself as one of the chief exporters of women's (cheap) labour power in the world.
Leaning on Ebert's "Ludic Feminism", the author maintains that any systemic attempt to understand the Philippines and its dependent peripheral status is obscured by the persistent tendency to negate the material (economic) in favour of the cultural (ideological)
Critiquing the analytical formation of the "Global Care Chain" (GCC), which involes the exract and transfer of "emotional labour" from the Third to the First World (Parrenas, Hochschild), which eclipses class and instead pursues a preoccupation with "emotion" and "love" that has the unintended consequence of minimising the exploitative and unequal conditions characterising domestic labour
The author offers the work of Bridget Anderson as an alternative to the GCC literature whose rich and textured examination of the racialised and gendered dimensions of domestic work warns schlars of the inherent danger involved with conflating "care as labour and care as emotion". The inability to distinguish between the two categories can "lead to an argument that care is not exploitative because women want to do it...and because they are doing it of their own free will". In the specific case of domestic work, the lens of care obscures the physical toll of the labour involved, negating the iniquitous relationship between employers and employed.

Failing to account for the Philippines peripheral status vis-a-vis the imperial core could have the effect of misleading people into beliveving that the majority of Philippine women working as OFWs are freely choosing to migrate thousands of miles away from their homeland and families to labour and live abroad, which isn't to say that all migration is involuntary, but rather that the international division of labour wrought by capitalist processes underpins the economic crisis plaguing the Philippines, leading to today's export of "warm bodies"