Prostituted Filipinas and the crisis of Philippine culture

Millenium

Volumn 27, Issue 4, 1998, Pages 927-954

  Tadiar, Neferti Xina M ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 11544274147     PISSN: 03058298     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/03058298980270041601     Document Type: Article

References (80)

1. Saundra Pollock Sturdevant and Brenda Stoitzfus, Let the Good Times Roll: Prostitution and the U.S. Military in Asia (New York, NY: The New Press, 1992), p. 326.
2. 'Sexual Economies in the Asia-Pacific', in Arif Dirlik (ed.), What's in a Rim? (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1993). In a longer version of this essay, I discuss the misogynist, homophobic, and racist construction of 'female' sex as 'little brown fucking machines' and the patricidal eroticism inherent in the logic of this fantasy. For a discussion of the sexual fantasies produced by and impelling sex tourism, see Ryan Bishop and Lillian S. Robinson, Night Market: Sexual Cultures and the Thai Economic Miracle (New York, NY: Routledge, 1998).
3. 'Sexual Economies in the Asia-Pacific', in Arif Dirlik (ed.), What's in a Rim? (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1993). In a longer version of this essay, I discuss the misogynist, homophobic, and racist construction of 'female' sex as 'little brown fucking machines' and the patricidal eroticism inherent in the logic of this fantasy. For a discussion of the sexual fantasies produced by and impelling sex tourism, see Ryan Bishop and Lillian S. Robinson, Night Market: Sexual Cultures and the Thai Economic Miracle (New York, NY: Routledge, 1998).
4. The joke puts a piece of sarcasm into circulation which, through the work of self-deprecation, realises a rival masculine subject.
5. Geraldine Heng and Janadas Devan, 'State Fatherhood: The Politics of Nationalism, Sexuality, and Race in Singapore' in Andrew Parker, Mary Russo, Doris Sommer, and Patricia Yaeger (eds.), Nationalisms and Sexualities (New York, NY: Routledge, 1992) p. 343. Moreover, 'the figure of threat, auguring economic and social disintegration, dismantling the foundations of culture, undermining, indeed, the very possibility of a recogniseable future, is always, and unerringly, feminine', p. 356.
6. Renato Constantino, 'Westernization and Identity' in Luis R. Mauricio (ed.), Insight and Foresight (Quezon City: Foundation for Nationalist Studies, 1977), p. 113.
7. See Neferti X. M. Tadiar, 'Domestic Bodies of the Philippines', in Vicente L. Rafael and Itty Abraham (eds.), 'Special Issue on Southeast Asian Diasporas', Sojourn: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia (Vol. 12, No. 2, 1997), pp. 153-191.
8. See Jane Monnig Atkinson and Shelly Errington (eds.), Power and Difference: Gender in Island Southeast Asia (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990).
9. For a history of the collaboration of these international multilateral agencies, specifically the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, and local transnationalist classes in the economic restructuring of the Philippines through development policies, see Robin Broad, Unequal Alliance. 1979-1986: The World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the Philippines (Manila: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1988).
10. Cynthia Enloc notes, for example, how the entire prostitution industry, which caters to the military, can function only 'if thousands of Asian women are willing and able to learn what American military men rely on to bolster their sense of masculinity...(and) to be alert to the differences among masculinities'. In Sturdevant and Stolzfus, op. cit., in note I. See also Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (Derkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990).
11. Cynthia Enloc notes, for example, how the entire prostitution industry, which caters to the military, can function only 'if thousands of Asian women are willing and able to learn what American military men rely on to bolster their sense of masculinity...(and) to be alert to the differences among masculinities'. In Sturdevant and Stolzfus, op. cit., in note I. See also Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (Derkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990).
12. For an account of Japan's economic supremacy, see 'The Japanese Ascendancy, Part IP, in Walden Bello, People & Power in the Pacific: The Struggle for the Post-Cold War Order (Quezon City: Foundation for Nationalist Studies, 1992), pp. 83-111. Aside from bolstering tourism and tourism-related industries (including the international civil and military aviation industrial complex), the prostitution industry fueled by Filipinos services the 'domestic needs' of the internationally-rotated managerial staff of multinational Finance and industrial capital. 'For corporations employing a highly mobile male work force, the availability of sexual and household-related services helps reduce the costs of maintenance of needed labour power traditionally provided through family relations'. Thanh-Dam Truong, Sex, Money and Morality: Prostitution and Tourism in Southeast Asia (London: Zed Books, 1990), p. 128.
13. For an account of Japan's economic supremacy, see 'The Japanese Ascendancy, Part IP, in Walden Bello, People & Power in the Pacific: The Struggle for the Post-Cold War Order (Quezon City: Foundation for Nationalist Studies, 1992), pp. 83-111. Aside from bolstering tourism and tourism-related industries (including the international civil and military aviation industrial complex), the prostitution industry fueled by Filipinos services the 'domestic needs' of the internationally-rotated managerial staff of multinational Finance and industrial capital. 'For corporations employing a highly mobile male work force, the availability of sexual and household-related services helps reduce the costs of maintenance of needed labour power traditionally provided through family relations'. Thanh-Dam Truong, Sex, Money and Morality: Prostitution and Tourism in Southeast Asia (London: Zed Books, 1990), p. 128.
14. Personal testimonies of prostituted Filipinas reveal many of these personal strategies, as well as the efforts made to adopt the required technologies of sexual services. Among the coping strategies, drinking and drug use are very common, as is the sense of providing for children whose future lives are viewed as redemptive ends (to what many painfully experience as a sinful life).
15. Kenneth Surin, '"The Continued Relevance of Marxism" as a Question: Some Propositions', Polygraph: an International Journal of Culture & Politics (Vol. 6/7, 1993), pp. 42-47. While he distances his phenomenology of the new dynamics of labour from any privileging of the 'post-Taylorist' worker, Surin nevertheless seems to suggest that the reconstitution of labour as a category is compelled by the 'radically new situation' of the global labour force which the restructuring of capital has brought about. My own position is that the need to reconstitute labour as a category derives not merely from changed conditions but rather from the inadequacies of the category which have been exposed by such conditions, | in this case, the 'feminisation' of global labour. Surin is, however, attendant to the intertwining of class, race, and especially gender-based formations with the present division of labour, insisting rightly, I think, that 'marxists cannot overlook the functions and effects of gender systems when they analyse the constitution of labour power. The processes of this constitution are central to the extraction of surplus labor, and they have as their site a complex that comprises the division of labor and the multivalent structures of gender and class', p. 46.
16. Ibid., p. 46.
17. Third World Women are also treated as fitting easily into the category of 'non-traditional commodities' and 'semi-processed products' whose processing is completed at the capital-intensive end of the global commodity chain. This explanatory account is already suggested in (he term used to refer to the traffic in Filipinas (as sex- workers, sex slaves, domestic helpers, mail-order brides): 'warm-body export'.
18. Sometimes patriarchal practices take on the universal, totalised appearance of capitalism itself, as Zillall Eisenslein says for example, 'Capitalism uses patriarchy, and patriarchy is defined by the needs of capital'. Zillah Eisenstein quoted in Truong, op. cit., in note 10, p. 59.
19. Elizabeth Uy Eviota, The Political Economy of Gender: Women and the Sexual Division of Labour in the Philippines (London: Zed Books, 1992) and Dolores Stephens Feria, The Long Slag Parly (Metro Manila: Babaylan Women's Publishing Collective, 1991), p. 3.
20. Elizabeth Uy Eviota, The Political Economy of Gender: Women and the Sexual Division of Labour in the Philippines (London: Zed Books, 1992) and Dolores Stephens Feria, The Long Slag Parly (Metro Manila: Babaylan Women's Publishing Collective, 1991), p. 3.
21. Eviota, op. cit., in note 16, p. 116. Some of the reservations I have already expressed in regard to analyses such as Eviota's apply as well to the concept of 'the sexual division of labour', which combines the categories of gender and labour without transforming either in any substantial way, and which in fact assimilates gender as a variable of the division of labour.
22. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York, NY: Rontledge, 1988), p. 156. 1 might add that while both forms are posited to be commanded by the same process, it is the genesis of the money-form that prevails as the paradigm for this process: '[t]he type of historical structuration illustrated in the genesis of the money form is not simply one type among many; it is the trajectory of historical structuration itself-in other words, history itself. Jean-Joseph Goux, Symbolic Economies: After Marx and Freud, Irans. J. Curtis Cage (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), p. 41. Perhaps the morphological similarities between the subject and the commodity should indicate the intercourse of their constitutive structures and operations rather than the identity of an originary symbolising logic which takes on an ontological status.
23. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York, NY: Rontledge, 1988), p. 156. 1 might add that while both forms are posited to be commanded by the same process, it is the genesis of the money-form that prevails as the paradigm for this process: '[t]he type of historical structuration illustrated in the genesis of the money form is not simply one type among many; it is the trajectory of historical structuration itself-in other words, history itself. Jean-Joseph Goux, Symbolic Economies: After Marx and Freud, Irans. J. Curtis Cage (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), p. 41. Perhaps the morphological similarities between the subject and the commodity should indicate the intercourse of their constitutive structures and operations rather than the identity of an originary symbolising logic which takes on an ontological status.
24. Luce Irigaray, 'Women on the Market', in Luce Irigaray, This Which Is Not One, trans. C. Porter (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. 170-191.
25. Ibid., p. 173.
26. 'The economy of exchange - of desire - is man's business'. Ibid., p. 177. In making this argument, Irigaray maintains a stable analogy between women and commodities, rather than demonstrating a more mobile operation of the categories of femininity and the feminine (categories which are not fully circumscribed by 'women'). The analogy is carefully and consistently pursued to the point that the absolute dichotomy of gender difference makes for a categorically polar distinction between labour and commodity. Impelled by this analogising imperative, Irigaray can only regard labour as the activity of men, the producer-subjects, and commodities as women, the product of that masculine activity-'commodity-objects that ensured the circulation of exchange without participating in it as subjects', p. 174.
27. Karl Marx, 'Economic Manuscripts of 1857-58' in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 28, trans. E. Wangennann (New York, NY: International Publishers, 1986), p. 202, emphasis in original.
28. Friedrich Engels, The Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State, quoted by Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. G. C. Gill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 121. Irigaray quotes Engel's reading of bourgeois-proletariat relations in the patriarchal family to explain 'what economic infrastructure governs Freud's conceptions of the role of woman'. Irigaray's analysis of the interaction of modes of sexual relation and economic structures is important for understanding the processes which have brought about the prostitution and feminisation of Philippine labour, to the extent that she shows this interaction as one between symbolic structures, particularly those of psychoanalysis and marxism. Rather than resting her analysis on au independent third structure to which the isomorphism or analogy between the latter systems are due as effects (of the same), Irigaray shows the metaphorical substitutions on which the respective conceptions of psychoanalysis and marxism are predicated.
29. Quoted in Truong, op. cit., in note 10, p. 31.
30. Marx, op. cit., in note 22, p. 382.
31. In this heterosexist masculinist formuilation, to be 'used' by a masculine agency is to be emasculated to the extent that masculinity is defined as agency over 'natural' feminine objects.
32. Marx, op. cit., in note 22, p. 202.
33. Ibid., pp. 222-23, emphasis in original.
34. Labour 'posits itself as an insubstantial, merely necessitous labor capacity in face of this reality alienated from it, a reality not belonging to it but to others'. Ibid., p. 382.
35. Ibid., p. 381, emphasis in original. This detachment of value takes the form of the (in)diffcrence of the phallus, the symbol of the exchange value of women, the mediator of their exchange. The phallic standard shows its tendency towards absolute proximity to money: 'in order to realise the commodity at a stroke as exchange value and to give it the general effect of exchange value...It must be exchanged for a third thing which is not itself a particular commodity but the symbol of the commodity as commodity, of the commodity's exchange value itself... (Such a symbol presupposes general recognition; it can only be a social symbol; in fact, it only expresses a social relationship.)...This symbol, this material sign of exchange value, is a product of exchange itself, not the execution of a preconceived idea. (In fact, the commodity which serves as the mediator of exchange is only transformed into money; into a symbol gradually. As soon as that has happened, a symbol of the mediating commodity can in turn replace the commodity itself. It now becomes the conscious token of exchange value.)'. Ibid., p. 82. The phallus becomes this conscious token in the early twentieth century through psychoanalysis, but it was a symbol that came to coincide with money inasmuch as both labour and capital were dominated by men, and moreover, as capital expanded through military means.
36. Ibid., p. 383.
37. Ibid., p. 381.
38. The imperative to distance it from 'non-productive' activities is shaped by gendered and sexual systems of value. We can see the imperative to disavow 'non-productive' activities as the result of male workers' revolts against their perceived emasculation (that is, what they experience as their feminisation, their 'being-for-someone'). In effect, masculine privilege is conceded by capital as a measure of containment of the male working classes. In this way, the feminine dimension of labour as a mere (corporeal) being for capital is increasingly displaced onlo and exacted from female and (feminised) child workers. See Andrew Parker, 'Unthinking Sex: Marx, Engels and the Scene of Writing', in Stanley Aronowitz and Jonathan Cutler (eds.), Post-Work: the Wages of Cybernation (New York, NY: Routledge, 1998), for a discussion of Marx's repulsion for theatre as the paradigm of 'non-productive' acts.
39. Leopoldina Fortunati, The Arcane of Reproduction: Homework, Prostitution. Labor and Capital, Jim Fleming (ed.), Irans. H. Creek (Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 1995).
40. Ibid., p. 9.
41. Ibid., p. 55. As Fortunati correctly observes, economists arc mistaken in their assumption that the only commodity circulating in the labour market is labour-power as capacity for production.
42. Karl Marx, op. cit., in note 22, p. 202.
43. Gayle Rubin, The Traflic in Women', in Rayna R. Reiter (ed.), Toward an Anthropology of Women (New York, NY: Monthly Review Press, 1975), p. 175.
44. Marx, op. cit., in note 22 p. 84.
45. Michael Ryan, 'Epilogue', in Antonio Negri, Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse, Jim Planing (ed.), (New York, NY: Autonomedia, 1991), p. 191.
46. 'The only thing distinct from objectified labor is non-objectified labor, labor still objectifying itself, labor as subjectivity'. Marx, op. cit., in note 22, p. 202, emphasis added. See also p. 226, '[labor] is converted from the form of activity and fixed, materialised, into that of object, of rest; as change of object, it changes its own form and from activity becomes being'.
47. This notion of historical experience can be likened to the Deleuzinn notion of 'sense': 'it does not exist outside the proposition which expresses it; what is expressed does not exist outside its expression', Gilles Deletize, The Logic of Sense, Constantin V. Boundas (ed.), trans. M. Lester with C. Stivale (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1990), p. 21. Experience is, in this 'sense', an event-'the boundary between propositions and things', p. 22.
48. Fanny A. Garcia, 'Pina, Pina, Snan Ka Pupunta?', The Literary Apprentice (1981-1982), pp. 107-23. References to this text are my translation.
49. Ibid., p. 112.
50. Karl Marx, 'Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844', in Robert C. Tucker (ed.), The Marx-Engels Reader (New York, NY: W. W. Norton and Company, 1978), pp. 74-75, emphasis in original.
51. See Carolyn Israel-Sobritchea, 'The Ideology of Female Domesticity: Its Impact on the Status of Filipino Women', Review of Women 's Studies (Vol. 1, No. 1, 1990), pp. 26-41.
52. Garcia, op. cit., in note 43, p. 108.
53. Her constructed race (Asian, Southeast Asian, Brown, Filipino) determines her commodifiability at the same time that it is itself realised (as a category of difference) through the process of commodification; race, like gender, rests on while it creates corporeality as its devalued base-term. It is this racialised, sexualised corporeality that lends itself to the international female market.
54. Slolzfus and Sturdevant, op. cit., in note 1, p. 314. See also Thanh-Dam Truong, op. cit., in note 10, for a comprehensive history of this development.
55. Marx, op. cit., in note 22, p. 104. Also, see Jonathan L. Beller, The Cinematic Mode of Production (Ph.D. dissertation, Duke University, 1995).
56. Marx, op. cit., in note 22, p. 104. Also, see Jonathan L. Beller, The Cinematic Mode of Production (Ph.D. dissertation, Duke University, 1995).
57. Garcia, op. cit., in note 43, p. 114.
58. There have been a number of works that have dealt with the concept ofloob. See Leonard Mercado, The Filipino Mind: Philippine Philosophical Studies II (Manila, Philippines: The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy, 1994) and Elements of Filipino Philosophy (Tacloban City, Philippines: Divine Word University Publications, 1974). For the role of loob in resistance against colonialism, see Vicente L. Rafael, Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society Under Early Spanish Rule (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993) and Reynold Ileto, Pasyon ami Revolution: Popular Movements in the Philippines, 1840-1910 (Quezon City, Philippines: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1979).
59. There have been a number of works that have dealt with the concept ofloob. See Leonard Mercado, The Filipino Mind: Philippine Philosophical Studies II (Manila, Philippines: The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy, 1994) and Elements of Filipino Philosophy (Tacloban City, Philippines: Divine Word University Publications, 1974). For the role of loob in resistance against colonialism, see Vicente L. Rafael, Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society Under Early Spanish Rule (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993) and Reynold Ileto, Pasyon ami Revolution: Popular Movements in the Philippines, 1840-1910 (Quezon City, Philippines: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1979).
60. There have been a number of works that have dealt with the concept ofloob. See Leonard Mercado, The Filipino Mind: Philippine Philosophical Studies II (Manila, Philippines: The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy, 1994) and Elements of Filipino Philosophy (Tacloban City, Philippines: Divine Word University Publications, 1974). For the role of loob in resistance against colonialism, see Vicente L. Rafael, Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society Under Early Spanish Rule (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993) and Reynold Ileto, Pasyon ami Revolution: Popular Movements in the Philippines, 1840-1910 (Quezon City, Philippines: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1979).
61. There have been a number of works that have dealt with the concept ofloob. See Leonard Mercado, The Filipino Mind: Philippine Philosophical Studies II (Manila, Philippines: The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy, 1994) and Elements of Filipino Philosophy (Tacloban City, Philippines: Divine Word University Publications, 1974). For the role of loob in resistance against colonialism, see Vicente L. Rafael, Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society Under Early Spanish Rule (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993) and Reynold Ileto, Pasyon ami Revolution: Popular Movements in the Philippines, 1840-1910 (Quezon City, Philippines: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1979).
62. In preparation for Sammy's arrival, they insist on her wearing a low-cut dress deemed 'style-stateside', do her hair and makeup, and manicure and pedicure, encourage her to 'pretend' she is Maria Clarn, the passive, obedient and faithful heroine of national hero Jose Rizal's novel who is extolled as the ideal Filipina, and, calling on her nationalistic duty, demand that she come out of her room and overcome her inhibitions: 'Luniabas ka nga 't baka isipin ni Sammy na hindi sibilisado ang mga Pilipino!' [Would you come out already?! Otherwise Sammy might think Filipinos are uncivilised!]. Garcia, op. cit, in note 43, p. 116.
63. 'Syncretism here is the indistinction between me and the other, a confusion at the core of a situation that is common to us both. Aller that the objectification of the body intervenes to establish a sort of wall between me and the other: a partition'. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 'The Child's Relations with Others', in The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays in Phenomenologicat Psychology, the Philosophy Art, History and Politics, James M. Edic (ed.) (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), p. 120. This latter process can be seen in the making of Pina as the part(ing) of Looban.
64. Virgilio G. Enriquez, From Colonial to Liberation Psychology: The Philippine Experience (Manila, Philippines: De La Salle University Press, 1994) p. 44. While Enriquez mentions the cxogamous orientation of Filipino subjectivity and in doing so alludes to the centuries of colonialism which cultivated this 'xenocentrisrn', he discusses neither the historical nor the gendered differentiation in the operation of kapwa. but rather discusses it as the core value of Filipino being. However, his expostulation of the Filipino subjective apparatus in contradistinction to the Western subject points to the resistance of the former to processes of Western modernisation. Rather than viewing this subjective infrastructure founded I on kapwa as underdeveloped or incompletely developed in relation to the Western modern subject, we might instead view it as the creative persistence of and reinvention of psychic structures which were replaced or destroyed by the modern subjectification processes carried out in colonial and capitalist spheres of production. See Virgilio G. Enriquez, Sandra Herrera and Emir Tubayan, Ang Sikolohiyang Malaya sa Panahon ng Krisis (Quezon City, Philippines: Akademya ng Sikolohiyang Filipino, 1991); Virgilio G. Enriquez and Elizabeth Protacio-Marcelino, Neo-Colonial Politics and Language Struggle in the Philippines: National Consciousness and Language in Philippine Psychology (1971-1983) (Quezon City, Philippines: Akademya ng Sikolohiyang Filipino, 1984); Virgilio G. Enriquez, Filipino Psychology in the Third World (Quezon City, Philippines: Akademya ng Sikolohiyang Filipino, 1977).
65. Virgilio G. Enriquez, From Colonial to Liberation Psychology: The Philippine Experience (Manila, Philippines: De La Salle University Press, 1994) p. 44. While Enriquez mentions the cxogamous orientation of Filipino subjectivity and in doing so alludes to the centuries of colonialism which cultivated this 'xenocentrisrn', he discusses neither the historical nor the gendered differentiation in the operation of kapwa. but rather discusses it as the core value of Filipino being. However, his expostulation of the Filipino subjective apparatus in contradistinction to the Western subject points to the resistance of the former to processes of Western modernisation. Rather than viewing this subjective infrastructure founded I on kapwa as underdeveloped or incompletely developed in relation to the Western modern subject, we might instead view it as the creative persistence of and reinvention of psychic structures which were replaced or destroyed by the modern subjectification processes carried out in colonial and capitalist spheres of production. See Virgilio G. Enriquez, Sandra Herrera and Emir Tubayan, Ang Sikolohiyang Malaya sa Panahon ng Krisis (Quezon City, Philippines: Akademya ng Sikolohiyang Filipino, 1991); Virgilio G. Enriquez and Elizabeth Protacio-Marcelino, Neo-Colonial Politics and Language Struggle in the Philippines: National Consciousness and Language in Philippine Psychology (1971-1983) (Quezon City, Philippines: Akademya ng Sikolohiyang Filipino, 1984); Virgilio G. Enriquez, Filipino Psychology in the Third World (Quezon City, Philippines: Akademya ng Sikolohiyang Filipino, 1977).
66. Virgilio G. Enriquez, From Colonial to Liberation Psychology: The Philippine Experience (Manila, Philippines: De La Salle University Press, 1994) p. 44. While Enriquez mentions the cxogamous orientation of Filipino subjectivity and in doing so alludes to the centuries of colonialism which cultivated this 'xenocentrisrn', he discusses neither the historical nor the gendered differentiation in the operation of kapwa. but rather discusses it as the core value of Filipino being. However, his expostulation of the Filipino subjective apparatus in contradistinction to the Western subject points to the resistance of the former to processes of Western modernisation. Rather than viewing this subjective infrastructure founded I on kapwa as underdeveloped or incompletely developed in relation to the Western modern subject, we might instead view it as the creative persistence of and reinvention of psychic structures which were replaced or destroyed by the modern subjectification processes carried out in colonial and capitalist spheres of production. See Virgilio G. Enriquez, Sandra Herrera and Emir Tubayan, Ang Sikolohiyang Malaya sa Panahon ng Krisis (Quezon City, Philippines: Akademya ng Sikolohiyang Filipino, 1991); Virgilio G. Enriquez and Elizabeth Protacio-Marcelino, Neo-Colonial Politics and Language Struggle in the Philippines: National Consciousness and Language in Philippine Psychology (1971-1983) (Quezon City, Philippines: Akademya ng Sikolohiyang Filipino, 1984); Virgilio G. Enriquez, Filipino Psychology in the Third World (Quezon City, Philippines: Akademya ng Sikolohiyang Filipino, 1977).
67. Virgilio G. Enriquez, From Colonial to Liberation Psychology: The Philippine Experience (Manila, Philippines: De La Salle University Press, 1994) p. 44. While Enriquez mentions the cxogamous orientation of Filipino subjectivity and in doing so alludes to the centuries of colonialism which cultivated this 'xenocentrisrn', he discusses neither the historical nor the gendered differentiation in the operation of kapwa. but rather discusses it as the core value of Filipino being. However, his expostulation of the Filipino subjective apparatus in contradistinction to the Western subject points to the resistance of the former to processes of Western modernisation. Rather than viewing this subjective infrastructure founded I on kapwa as underdeveloped or incompletely developed in relation to the Western modern subject, we might instead view it as the creative persistence of and reinvention of psychic structures which were replaced or destroyed by the modern subjectification processes carried out in colonial and capitalist spheres of production. See Virgilio G. Enriquez, Sandra Herrera and Emir Tubayan, Ang Sikolohiyang Malaya sa Panahon ng Krisis (Quezon City, Philippines: Akademya ng Sikolohiyang Filipino, 1991); Virgilio G. Enriquez and Elizabeth Protacio-Marcelino, Neo-Colonial Politics and Language Struggle in the Philippines: National Consciousness and Language in Philippine Psychology (1971-1983) (Quezon City, Philippines: Akademya ng Sikolohiyang Filipino, 1984); Virgilio G. Enriquez, Filipino Psychology in the Third World (Quezon City, Philippines: Akademya ng Sikolohiyang Filipino, 1977).
68. The development of this syncretic sociability of kapwa in, by and among women through emulation is fundamental to production. 'Females emulate each other, which reinforces the value [of feminine skills], and contributes much to the maintenance of the female child labor supply in the market', Rosario del Rosario, 'The Urgent Need for a Gender Analysis of Child Labor', Review of Women 's Studies (Vol. 3, No. 2, 1993), p. 10. This system of production of females in turn shapes the constitution of labour power in flexible production: 'With subcontracting, many more girls than boys are immediately drawn into the world of work right there in their homes, or in small-garments workplaces where, most likely, their mothers and other female kin are also working', del Rosario, p. 11. The concept of emulation does not, I however, recognise women desiring, not just desiring to be like, other women.
69. It is on this account that the men in Looban put themselves at the lower end of n continuum with Sammy, resentfully understanding that they were passed over by Pina because her ambitions were set 'so much higher'. They identify, in other words, with capital and must therefore see themselves in a position of lack.
70. Garcia, op. cil., in note 43, p. 123.
71. In a country dominated by the Catholic Church, where women have no reproductive rights (the criminality of abortion being only one instance of this deprivation), where divorce is illegal while concubinage is legal, this act is unequivocally subversive. For an overview of the status of women's reproductive rights, see Florence Macagba-Tadiar, 'Population and Reproductive Rights', Review of Women's Studies (Vol. 1, No. 1, 1990) pp. 114-26.
72. Garcia, op. cit., in note 43, p. 123.
73. Walter Benjamin, 'Critique of Violence' quoted in Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Labor of Dionysus: A Critique of the State-Form (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), p. 294.
74. Garcia, op. cil., in note 43, p. 107.
75. Negri, op. cit., in note 40, p. 70.
76. Negri, op. cit., in note 40, pp. 31 and 40 .
77. 'Sex Workers Now A Silent Economic Force-ILO', Philippine Daily Inquirer, 19 August 1998, p. I. As Aida Santos points out, that 'the ones who least benefit economically from prostitution are the women and children themselves'. Letter to the Editor, Philippine Daily Inquirer, 27 August 1998. I have no space here to elaborate on the international expansion and diversification of this industry in the mailorder bride and domestic worker industries sponsored by subsequent Philippine administrations.
78. 'Sex Workers Now A Silent Economic Force-ILO', Philippine Daily Inquirer, 19 August 1998, p. I. As Aida Santos points out, that 'the ones who least benefit economically from prostitution are the women and children themselves'. Letter to the Editor, Philippine Daily Inquirer, 27 August 1998. I have no space here to elaborate on the international expansion and diversification of this industry in the mailorder bride and domestic worker industries sponsored by subsequent Philippine administrations.
79. 'Linda', a sex worker, narrates how she tried to kill her philandering, money-squandering husband. Aller kicking him out of her household she became very ill but, with her mother's encouragement, willed herself back to health. 'I thought about becoming strong. My money went for medicine. I ate bananas and drank lots of milk. I imagined having a beautiful life-that I was rich. I thought about going to a different place that was happy'. Upon recovering her health, Linda entered the industry through waitressing, and in this way supported her live children on her own. Quoted in Stolzfus and Sturdevant, op. cit., in note 1, p. 146. My point here is not to refute the violent conditions of coercion that sex workers experience which have led Filipina feminists to call them 'prostituted women' rather than prostitutes, to emphasise the forcedness of their 'choices'. It is, rather, to break with the opposition between forced versus chosen prostitution which divides third world and first world approaches to sexwork.
80. Quoted in Negri, op. cit., in note 40, p. 69.