Introduction

When Filipina domestic worker Flor Contemplacion was sentenced to death in 1995 by the Singaporean government for allegedly murdering a fellow Filipina domestic worker and the child she cared for, thousands of Filipinos in the Philippines and around the world rallied to demand that the Philippine state stop her impending execution. Protesters believed Contemplacion had been falsely accused. The protests were indeed a culmination of many Filipinos' long-standing critiques of the Philippine government's migration policy, especially in relation to migrant women workers. Though the state hails migrants as its "new national heroes" and benefits significantly from exporting labor, civil society actors, including churches, scholars and NGOs, have long contested the government's migration program, claiming that women's migration as low-wage workers in gender-typed and gender-segregated jobs makes them especially vulnerable to exploitation and sexual abuse. Contemplacion's case exemplified thekinds of vulnerabilities Filipina migrants face at the hands of their employers, and, ultimately, host governments.

The highly publicized and transnational nature of the Contemplacion protests, however, produced a political crisis for the Philippine state. At the height of the crisis, the Gancayo Commission, a state appointed commission tasked to evaluate the impacts of women's migration from the Philippines, came to the following conclusion:

[T]he saddest reality as found in the mission is the irreparable damage that has been inflicted to the reputation of the Filipina woman in the international scene because of the indiscriminate deployment of our women as domestic helpers (DHs) and entertainers. Our nation has gained the embarrassing reputation that we are a country of DHs, entertainers, and even prostitutes.... It is said that even in a certain dictionary the latest definition of the word 'Filipina' is a 'housemaid'.[1]

State officials' own anxieties about women's migration, as reflected in the Gancayo Commission report, reveal the degree to which the state's labor export policy was increasingly being questioned internally. The notion that Philippine migrants were "new national heroes" was fast being undermined by the broader public as well as by government officials themselves.

This article's title alludes to the debates that emerged when women's migration, particularly as domestic workers and entertainers, began to rival and even outpace that of men.[2] My use of the term domestic debates here has multiple meanings. It refers to debates within Philippine society around the migration of Filipinas particularly as domestic workers, and it also refers to the nature of those debates, which centered on the effects of women's migration on different sets of domestic matters, namely family life and the Philippines' national subject-status on the global stage. These debates were initially triggered by an earlier death of a woman migrant worker, widely publicized in a way similar to Contemplacion's, that of twenty-two year old Filipina migrant worker, Maricris Sioson. However, many of the representations of domestic workers that were produced around these two women's deaths continue to shape how domestic workers are discussed in the Philippines.

This article offers a discussion of domestic debates in the Philippines, mapping out how civil society and state actors construct the issue of women's employment as domestics in different, yet sometimes overlapping ways. Indeed, civil society actors, including feminist and women-centered NGOs, during the height of the debates produced representations of migrant women that drew on patriarchal logics in their bid to effect reforms to Philippine migration policy. Their constructions of migrant women resonate in important ways with those produced by Philippine migration officials themselves. As a consequence, civil society actors find themselves unwittingly colluding with the state in enacting laws that only serve to discipline women and to conform to dominant notions of gender and sexuality.[3] Without denying the very real conditions of exploitation and violence Filipina women face while working in low-wage, low-status jobs as foreigners overseas, this paper aims to critically evaluate different migrant advocates attempts at struggling against those conditions. As Na Young argues in her study of an anti-trafficking campaign on behalf of Filipina prostitutes in South Korea:

If we continue to position women as vulnerable victims to be protected, women's symbolic position within a patriarchal capitalist society cannot be challenged. The images of helpless exploited prostitutes may reproduce pre-existing gender ideologies to fulfill masculinist national interests, where a woman serves as the symbolic boundary marker of nation and gender. Therefore, we must keep in mind that the feminist task should be to produce critical, radical, and thus subversive theories other than those of oppression—not only to see a more comprehensive picture of transnational prostitution, but also to decolonize the allegories of woman.[4]

Lee's argument is relevant to the this study, as public sentiment around women employed as foreign domestic workers often elicits responses similar to those elicited by sex work.

It is my hope that the research presented here can open up new lines of sociological inquiry on gender and migration. Specifically, there continues to be a paucity of scholarship examining the gendered consequences of migration for the societies that women leave behind. This paper attempts to address this lacuna through an examination of contestations over women's migration in the Philippine context.[5]

The research discussed here draws from a range of methods including interview and archival research, as well as secondary research to analyze what I am calling the domestic debates. I conduct a discursive analysis of empirical studies done by the Social Weather Stations, a non-profit survey research center, and survey and interview research conducted by migrant worker NGOs. While on their own these studies offer important empirical and analytical insights on women's migration from the Philippines, I examine this scholarship, alternatively, to track the ways in which they discursively constructed women's migration.

The SWS was, and continues to be, important in shaping public discourse about specific state policies, and Philippine politics generally, through its sponsorship of major national opinion surveys. Between the years of 1991, when Maricris Sioson was murdered, and 1995, the year Flor Contemplacion was hanged, the SWS conducted several surveys on the issue of international migration more broadly, and women's migration specifically, and published eight reports detailing their results. Though the first set of surveys during the early part of the period that demarcate the domestic debates, were focused mainly on the economic aspects of international migration, that is, whether workers sought work abroad, or whether migrants engaged in self-employment or entrepreneurial activities when they returned, the SWS surveys later became more focused on the public's perceptions of women and international migration. Moreover, the surveys concerned themselves with assessing whether the state was regulating women's migration well enough.[6]

During the same period, a range of migrant workers' NGOs, including church-based and self-described feminist NGOs, conducted and published social scientific research to advocate for migration reforms. While there are dozens of migrant worker NGOs in the Philippines, I focused on three NGOs that exhibited closer ties to state officials, and were therefore arguably more influential in shaping state policy. The Women in Development (WID) Foundation's research for instance, was actually in their words a, "GO-NGO (Government Organization-Non-Government Organization) collaborative project," with the purpose of enabling WID to help the government craft "gender-sensitive" programs.[7] The Philippine Overseas Employment Administration allowed WID access to over three thousand domestic workers over the course of six months to conduct its research.[8] SENTRO (Sentro ng Manggagawang Pilipina or Women Workers' Center), was amongst the conveners of two networks of migrant-serving NGOs including the Women Overseas Workers NGO Network (WOW-NET) and the Philippine Migrants' Rights Watch (PMRW). SENTRO conducted its own research as a means of advocating for women migrants and involved key migration officials in the publication of their research. SENTRO claimed, "This book is part of our advocacy ... aimed at influencing public response and policy for the sector".[9] Alongside social scientific research, NGOs like the Kanlungan Center, participated in policy discussions with migration officials, with transcripts later published.[10]

To understand the state's roles in shaping the domestic debates, I draw on archival research of governmental documents, both internal and public, from 1991 to 1995, to which I gained access during the course of fourteen months of field research in the Philippines from 2000-2001. During my time in the field, I conducted interviews with several dozen migration officials of different ranks throughout the migration bureaucracy. My aim was to understand how bureaucrats interpret and implement different migration policies and laws. I use some of my interview research here.

Domestic Debates: Contesting Women Migrants' Absence from Home(land)

Since 1974, when labor export was first institutionalized by the Philippine government as a developmental policy, it has benefited politically by providing jobs to its citizens and economically through the remittances sent by both men and women migrants earned from employment abroad.

By the late 1980s, Filipina international migration began to significantly increase, and by the early 1990s, it rivaled the migration of Filipino men. A majority of these women worked as domestic workers and entertainers. Women's migration from the Philippines, however, is hardly a new phenomenon as they have migrated, most notably as nurses, since the turn of the 20th century.[11] Moreover, internal migration (i.e. rural-urban) has been a key feature of Philippine women's employment since the 1960s.[12]

Yet, it was only during the 1990s, as women's migration increased in numbers that began to surpass men, and as a greater proportion of women migrants were being deployed to work as entertainers and domestic workers, that anxieties about the migration of women began to emerge and become increasingly widespread in the Philippines. Civil society actors were especially key in inciting and circulating concerns about women's international migration in the broader public, questioning to what extent out-migration was not only detrimental to the women themselves but to the country as a whole.

Indeed, the highly publicized death of Filipina migrant worker Maricris Sioson in 1991 was important in initially setting off public discussions about women's out-migration from the Philippines. Sioson, a 22-year old woman who had worked as an entertainer in Japan, returned to the Philippines dead.Though a Japanese hospital concluded that Sioson had died from Hepatitis, it was a conclusion her family did not believe. A second autopsy performed by the Philippines' National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) revealed that Sioson had died from traumatic head injuries. In addition, the NBI found stab wounds and cuts in Sioson's vagina.[13]

The conflicting medical reports generated a flurry of news reports. While media response to Sioson's murder focused exclusively on the details of the case, or detailed other women migrants' victimization at the hands of unscrupulous labor recruiters and exploitative employers, some civil society actors, particularly national polling institutes, focused less on sensationalized accounts of women's victimization. Instead, they drew on social scientific methods to analyze broad patterns of women's migration examining not only its impact on individual women, but on their families and Philippine society at large.

Gendered Migration and the Family

The Social Weather Stations (SWS) was perhaps most critical in beginning to engage the broader national public directly around the issue of women's migration with several sets of surveys after the death of Sioson and leading up to the execution of Contemplacion. While the media certainly played a role in garnering the public's attention to the issue, the SWS' survey research, by its very nature, would draw individual Filipinos into the debate in more immediate ways.

While the results of the different surveys conducted by the SWS are important, and I will discuss them in more detail below, more significant perhaps is how the SWS surveys framed the issue of women and migration and its impacts on Filipino families. SWS survey questions about women's migration are both constitutive and reflective of gendered anxieties about women's overseas employment. Feminists have long argued that traditional social scientific methods, including survey research, reproduce dominant gender relations through both the processes and outcomes of research.[14] The SWS is no exception, as the very questions it asks of respondents are underlined by patriarchal assumptions of women's labor and women's role in the family.

The 1994 "Public Attitudes Towards Female Overseas Workers: Implications for Philippine Migration Policy" survey asked respondents a total of fifteen questions. While the survey attempted to assess how many Filipino families had a member working abroad and how many individuals aspire to work overseas, a majority of the questions centered on the public's perceptions of Filipina migrants. One of the most notable questions in relation to women migrants and their families was, "When the mother of the household is working abroad, there are many problems and misunderstandings in the family."[15] Querying whether women's employment outside of the home produces familial problems starts from the assumption that family stability depends on women's presence in the home. While respondents had the opportunity to disagree with the test statement, its very framing relies on gendered understandings of women's role in the family.

If the SWS produced women's overseas labor as a problem for the Philippine family, actual survey results affirmed the assumptions made by survey takers. The SWS found that nearly a majority of respondents to the survey believed that, in fact, the absence of Filipina women from their families produces "many more problems and misunderstandings in the family."[16] The author of the survey report points out, "While many of these issues also directly concern male overseas workers, the debate has singled out overseas working women."[17] This quote illustrates to what extent women's migration specifically is seen by the public as especially threatening to family stability. While on the surface it would seem that these "public attitudes" reflect "traditional" notions of men and women's roles in the family, these "attitudes," in fact, run counter to the high prevalence of Filipina's employment outside of the home, whether it is to work abroad, to work in other distant locations in the Philippines, or to simply work in factories or farms.[18] In the next section, it will become clear how what is really at stake here is less women's absence from the home per se, but their presence as low-wage and low-status workers in other nations.

Migrant NGOs' approached their research of migrant women's migration and its impacts on their families similar to the SWS. In a discussion surrounding their research questions and rationale for doing research, SENTRO asks:

Why do women leave their families? Have the Filipinas, especially the married ones, relegated their moral and family responsibilities of being wives and mothers to the background in exchange for monetary gains?[19]

Like SWS, the very questions that SENTRO pose rely on gendered assumptions that women's primary responsibility ought to be to their families. By framing its research of women's migration in this way, SENTRO appears to further assume that women's employment overseas is both selfish and utilitarian. WID's research relied on similar logics. WID describes, for instance, how women migrants had left behind children, "half of whom are in vulnerable and formative ages below 10 years old and needing maternal guidance."[20] By working overseas, WID appears to suggest, women neglect to provide the "maternal guidance" their young children require.

Though Filipinas' earnings abroad go towards the material and financial support of their children and, as Parrenas points out, women migrants continue to play an important role in caring for their children transnationally (even if it requires the labor of other women).[21] Yet, for these specific NGOs, women's absence both from their homes and the homeland is inevitably problematic for their families. Ultimately, migrant women's direct care of children (and husbands) in the home(land) is seen as key to familial stability. The nationalist implications of destabilized Filipino families for different civil society actors become clearer in the following section.

Gendered Migration and the Philippine Nation

Alongside the concerns about the consequences of women's migration on their families were concerns about the consequences of women's migration on the nation more broadly. In the same "Public Attitudes" survey, gauging respondents' perspectives on the impacts of Filipina migration within the context of the family, the SWS also asked respondents to what extent they agreed or disagreed with the test statement, "Women working abroad bring shame to our country."[22] That alongside questions on women's migration and family was a question on national shame relates to McClintock's argument that, "nations are figured through the iconography of familial and domestic space."[23] The questions on the "Public Attitude" survey rest on the logic that women's employment as low-wage, low-status workers has negative implications for the global representation of the Philippine nation-state.

While the "Public Attitudes" survey results revealed that there was little consensus amongst respondents across gender, class and region, the SWS came to the following conclusion:

[O]n the statement that women workers overseas bring shame to the country, the predominant position is disagreement (47 percent). Still, the percentages who outright agree (21 percent) and those who neither agree nor disagree (32 percent) are, uncomfortably high.[24]

By discussing the findings in this way, SWS effectively colludes in producing women's migration as a national shame even as the "objective" figures do not indicate that the feeling of nationalist shame is widespread. Indeed, it can been argued that the SWS' findings reveal that most people (79 percent) either do not believe that women's migration is shameful or are ambivalent, even as they may be concerned about its effects on families. Yet, the SWS concludes that people's sense of shame is "uncomfortably" high. By highlighting the uncomfortable "fact" of nationalist shame, the SWS ultimately produces it as an issue.

Radcliffe notes how, "social identities, including national identities, are constituted through relations of intersubjectivity, that is the (partial) internalisation of others' images of oneself."[25] Survey respondents' (and survey researchers') beleaguered sense of nationalism is shaped by this intersubjective process, but within an international arena. As Neferti Tadiar argues, the migration of domestic workers produces nationalist anxieties about the Philippines' global status.[26] The hypervisibility of Filipinas abroad as domestic workers and their invisibility at "home" (that is, the household and the nation-state) raises concerns about the gendered representation of the Philippine nation-state in the global context. Though Filipina migrants work overseas as caregivers to other children, what is more desirable is that they act as caregivers to their own children in their homes in the Philippines. It is precisely because Filipina migrants care for the children of other nations as low-status domestic workers that anxieties about the Philippine nation emerge.

In a dialogue organized by migrant advocates (which was comprised of both migration scholars and staff members of migrant-serving NGOs) aimed at offering policy recommendations to migration officials who were also participants, concerns about the migration of women as domestic workers and its impact on the nation's subject-status emerged. A representative from Kanlungan, a migrant NGO bemoaned, "More female workers are now going out and what kind of jobs do they get? Domestic helpers."[27]

Implicit in this NGO staff member's critique of the Philippine state's export of domestic workers is a critique of the nature of this particular form of work. Though migrant women activists have often called for the valuation of domestic work, indeed, Filipina migrant activists have frequently called less for the banning of domestic work but instead for better terms of employment, this NGO staffer ultimately shares the perspective that domestic worker is "shameful."[28]

The issue of Filipinas' sexuality is of particular concern in relation to migrants employed as entertainers. Indeed, the dialogue I discuss above was initiated precisely out of a concern that, "the country has been demeaned as the global supplier of maids, entertainers, and in Japan, specifically of prostitutes."[29] In the case of entertainers who are characterized as no different from prostituted women, the nation-state is shamed because it cannot control its women, whose fate is in the hands of foreign men.

In either case, whether women work as domestic workers or as entertainers, the state is shamed for its inability to ensure that women live up to idealized notions of femininity and sexuality. Even when shame is not at issue, but rather concern for victimized women, civil society actors come to the same conclusion, that is, that the state must better protect women migrants.

Vulnerable Women and the Paternal State

If the SWS survey constituted and reflected gendered notions of women's labor in families and constructions of Philippine nationalism in a global context, it also produced gendered understandings of the state's relationship and responsibilities toward women migrants. Returning to the 1994 "Public Attitudes" survey report, it states:

[T]he character of female emigration has changed. There are many more young and single women, originating from further flung Philippine provinces. Hired as housemaids, singers and dancers, these women work at jobs that are inherently difficult, dangerous and are unprotected by labor law in many receiving countries.[30]

In this quote, migrant women are characterized as innocent, young and nubile. The report appears to suggest that because the profile of migrant women is younger and more rural than previous cohorts, they have less control over their migration decisions because they lack experience and skills.

Migrant-serving NGOs produced similar constructions of women migrants. Amongst the conclusions SENTRO makes in its study of migrant women is that they suffer from "values disorientation." They suggest that the "adverse effects on the migrant workers and his/her family can be minimized if they have the necessary skills and competencies to deal with the challenges and situations they are confronted with."[31] Despite the seeming gender neutrality (he/she) of this recommendation for reform, SENTRO was quite specific in other parts of this report (which I cite earlier in this article) that migrant women were the ones who suffered from "values disorientation."

In a study included in WID's published collection of research on women's migration, a similar observation is made by one researcher. The study notes that women migrating as domestic workers overlook the psychological costs their work overseas have for their children. Instead they chose to "advance a rationalization by entertaining the emotional pain by those grandiose visualizations of material things at that moment (similar to applying an emotional band-aid over a deep emotional wound)."[32]

These constructions of Filipina migrants are aimed at compelling the state to respond with migration reform. They rely, however, on specific gendered logics. Because women choosing employment abroad do so either out of youthful and/or rural ignorance or as a consequence of deficiencies in their values systems, they ultimately require intervention by the paternal state to prevent them from harming their families and the nation.[33] Whether women lack moral gumption or are simply infantile, the state must assume better paternal custody over them. It must control its innocent, if sometimes wayward, daughters.

State actors, however, were initially ambivalent about the domestic debates produced and circulated by civil society actors and continued to be fairly ambivalent when the Flor Contemplacion case first erupted in public protests. A policy analysis produced by the Department of Labor and Employment, in response to the initial news about Contemplacion's imminent hanging, states:

It is the exception to the norm that makes the news, and in recent days we have been flooded with media accounts of the travails of some of our overseas workers. But the truth is that only a very few—less than one thousand—of all our migrant workers ever get into trouble. The great majority are an unalloyed benefit both to their host countries and to their homeland.[34]

Here, the state characterizes Contemplacion's case, and other similar cases, as anomalous and not a consequence of inherent problems with women's out-migration. Moreover, state officials believed that communist insurgency would have a greater impact on the Philippines:

At present the country is reeling from the political fallout of the Flor Contemplacion case.... Against these headaches, however, there is one major political benefit that is well-nigh uncalculable. And this is that overseas employment—in mopping up part of our labor surplus—provides for greater political and social stability in the country. One study of the effect of the OCW program on the Communist insurgency notes that the program has deprived the movement of many recruits. And the misery index, which the insurgents count on, has been immeasurably affected by the remittances of OCWs to their families and their communities.[35]

Here the state takes a very different understanding of the Filipino family and national stability. Whereas for civil society actors, Filipino families, and the nation more broadly, are destabilized by the absence of women, for the state, the presence of remittances in the family is what secures the nation's stability. Families are the nation's bulwarks against the threat of communism.

Eventually, however, the state was compelled to respond to the growing protests against Contemplacion's hanging, which were expanding far beyond the Philippines. It is perhaps precisely because the "domestic debates" spilled over into the international area, with the globalization of migrants' protests, that the state felt obliged to finally act.

Republic Act 8042 (RA8042), passed very soon after the execution of Flor Contemplacion, was a watershed insofar as it mandated many policies very specifically related to better protecting women migrants. Significantly, RA8042 appears to directly incorporate the sorts of reforms advocated in SWS documents over the years. For instance, it states in RA8042 that, "The State recognizes that the ultimate protection to all migrant workers is the possession of skills. Pursuant to this and as soon as practicable, the government shall deploy and/or allow the deployment only to skilled Filipino workers."[36] For domestic workers, who the state officially categorizes as "vulnerable workers," this has meant mandatory training programs prior to deployment overseas. In addition to skills training, the state also expanded its worker education programs, attempting to better disseminate "information of labor and employment conditions, migration realities and other facts, and adherence of particular countries to international standards on human and workers' rights which will adequately prepare individuals into making informed and intelligent decisions about overseas employment."[37] Post-deployment, in countries of destination, RA8042 mandates government services on-site that offer additional training and skills upgrading programs. Moreover, the state provides legal and welfare services for migrant workers in distress. Because the state has officially incorporated a "gender sensitive" approach to migration policy, it means that all of these programs attempt to address the specific problems faced by migrant women.

Interviews of migration officials several years after RA8042 was passed, however, reveal how migration reform is ultimately less about the regulation of women's migration, but more about the regulation of women migrants themselves.[38] Interestingly, the ways bureaucrats and other state officials attempt to regulate migrant women echo the very same gendered ideas that the public and migrant advocates deployed in their calls for migration reform.

A migration official in the POEA explains the purpose of women workers' training, as well as their education through the PDOS, "Our concern is that often these workers do not send money to the Philippines or don't try to take care of family problems at home. These kinds of seminars emphasize workers' responsibilities to their families." Yet another migration official, a very high-ranking official of the POEA in fact, explains that the state must provide domestic workers and entertainers specific kinds of programs because, "There are lots of social costs when a mother or elder sister is missing."

For these officials, state migration programs are aimed at orienting women migrants toward the Philippines to actively cultivate their sense of familial responsibility. The assumption is that women are not already orienting themselves to their families' needs. As a consequence, families suffer a number of "social costs." If the public and migrant advocates pointed to increasing problems in migrant women's family lives as a means of calling for migration reform, the bureaucrats attempt to address these problems by trying to inculcate certain kinds of family values amongst migrant women.

Indeed, if civil society actors ultimately called for the state to assume better (paternal) custody of migrant women, it was clear in my other interviews of officials that these gendered understandings about state-citizen relations characterized their own views. In an interview with a high-ranking migration official, who began to weep profusely during the course of our discussion, she states:

We really need to take care of them. When I see the DH [domestic helpers] and the OPAs [overseas performing artists], I just cry. They're so innocent ... I really hope things change for them. We really have to reach out to them, to give them self-respect and confidence ... you know, when we are on the airplane or in the airport traveling, when we have them next to us, deep inside we're ashamed.

Here the official uses what can be characterized as familial language in describing the state's role in regulating women's migration. The state, in her words, must "take care of" domestic workers and entertainers because they are "innocent." By doing so, she suggests, the state will not only equip them with the ability to better negotiate the challenges of working overseas, but also that the state may be able to deal with the deep-seated sense of nationalist shame women's migration produces.

Conclusion

International migration has become an important developmental strategy in the Philippines, as the state benefits from the millions of dollars in remittances generated yearly by its citizens employed abroad. Specifically, women migrants have come to play an increasingly significant role as overseas workers. Women's migration in particular, however, has become a critical site for national debate as people in the Philippines have contested the meanings of gender as it has been transformed by international migration.

Different civil society actors have been concerned with the negative consequences of women's migration including the extreme forms of violence and abuse women suffer while working and living abroad and have attempted to advocate for migration reform. Research produced to support demands for reform, however, reify problematic, ultimately patriarchal, notions of femininity. Paradoxically, civil society actors, some of whom were ostensibly feminist, characterize women's migration as undermining the social and moral fabric of the Filipino family, and ultimately the Philippines, as women fail to perform traditional feminine roles in their bid for migration policy reforms.

The state, though initially ambivalent about civil society's concerns, even with the highly graphic and violent death of Maricris Sioson, is ultimately compelled to address them, particularly when migrants in the labor diaspora bring the issue of women's migration to a global stage with the protests against the hanging of domestic worker, Flor Contemplacion. When the Philippine state finds its gendered subject-status tested in the global arena, it finally responds to the broader public and migrant advocates' call for migration policy reform. Indeed, it incorporates many of the same representations circulated by civil society actors in its construction of new migration laws. Yet the paternal logics on which civil society actors' demands for migration reform rest, lead not to the increased regulation of the state's migration apparatus, but to the regulation of migrant women themselves.

Endnotes

1. Ruby Palma Beltran and Gloria F. Rodriguez, "Filipino Women Migrant Workers: At the Crossroads and Beyond Beijing." Quezon City, Philippines: Giraffe Books, 1996. [Return to text]

2. "Entertainer" refers to women migrants who work as singers and dancers in restaurants, lounges and bars. Generally women migrate to Japan to work as entertainers. [Return to text]

3. What Sonia Alvarez identifies in the Latin American context may have some relevance for the Philippines. Alvarez finds that neoliberal economic restructuring in Latin America can, "potentially undermine" NGOs' "ability to advocate effectively for feminist-inspired public policies and social change." Sonia E. Alvarez, "Advocating Feminism: The Latin American Feminist NGO 'Boom'." International Feminist Journal of Politics 1, 1999, 181209. Instead, states turn to NGO workers as gender experts, rather than citizen advocates. Moreover, they treat NGOs as surrogates for civil society, rather than attempting to fully incorporate broader segments of civil society actors. Finally, the state devolves some of its activities to NGOs, which are subcontracted to implement women's programs. [Return to text]

4. Na Young Lee, "Gendered Nationalism and Otherization: Transnational Prostitutes in South Korea." Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 7, 2006, 456471. See also, Helen Schwenken, ""...they decided to follow a completely different track—the one of trafficking". The challenges of framing women migrants' rights in the European Union." La Revue Européenne des Migrations Internationales. REMI, Sharma, Nandita, 2005; and "Anti-Trafficking Rhetoric and the Making of a Global Apartheid." NWSA Journal 17, 88-111. [Return to text]

5. Amongst the few studies that do examine the consequences of women's migration in "home" countries is Petra Dannecker's work on Bangladeshi women's migration. Dannecker has found that the increasing out-migration from Bangladesh can "mean a challenge to the existing gender order" and that it can "initiate transformation of gender relations in this Islamic country" (Dannecker 2005, 657). Dannecker documents how an organization of male Bangladeshi migrants and an Islamic organization called for the banning of women's migration because they believed that women's honor could only be protected if they were prevented from leaving their families and the homeland. While the government instituted policies to regulate and hinder women's migration since the 1980s in order to respond to issues raised by these groups, protests from other civil society actors and recruitment agencies ultimately led to the repeal of a recent government ban. Contestations over the restriction of women's migration reveals to what extent the Bangladeshi gender order has been destabilized. See also, Nana Oishi, Women in Motion: Globalization, State Policies and Labor Migration in Asia. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005. [Return to text]

6. Ma. Alcestis Abrera-Mangahas, "Public Attitudes Towards Female Overseas Workers: Implications for Philippine Migration Policy." Social Weather Stations, Quezon City, Philippines, 1994; Ma. Alcestis Abrera-Mangahas, "Violence Against Women Migrant Workers: The Philippine Experience," in Filipino Workers on the Move: Trends, Dilemmas and Policy Options, Ed., B. Carino. Quezon City, Manila: Philippine Migration Research Network, Philippine Social Science Council, 1998; Lopez, Ma. Glenda S Lopez. 1995. "SWS 1994 Surveys on OCWs: Danger and Deployment Bans." Social Weather Stations, Quezon City, Philippines, 1995; Mahar Mangahas, "Perceptions of Risks Faced by Female Overseas Contract Workers," Social Weather Stations, Quezon City, Philippines 1995; Social Weather Stations, "Filipino Workers' Aspirations for Overseas Employment," Social Weather Stations, Quezon City, Philippines, 1991.[Return to text]

7. Ruby Palma Beltran and Aurora Javat De Dios, "Filipino Women Overseas Contract Workers ... At What Cost?" Quezon City, Philippines: JMC Press, Inc., 1992. [Return to text]

8. Ibid. [Return to text]

9. Ruby Palma Beltran and Gloria F. Rodriguez, "Filipino Women Migrant Workers: At the Crossroads and Beyond Beijing." [Return to text]

10. Solidarity, "Filipinos Overseas: Is it Worth All Those Dollars?" Solidarity 27, 1994. [Return to text]

11. Catherine Ceniza Choy, Empire of Care. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. [Return to text]

12. Sylvia Chant and Cathy McIlwaine, Women of a Lesser Cost: Female Labour, Foreign Exchange and Philippine Development. Quezon City, Philippines: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1996. [Return to text]

13. Bana Batnag, "Maricris Sioson, 'Japayuki'." Philippines Free Press, November 2, 1991. [Return to text]

14. Sandra Harding, Feminism and Methodology. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987. [Return to text]

15. Ma. Alcestis Abrera-Mangahas, "Public Attitudes Towards Female Overseas Workers: Implications for Philippine Migration Policy." [Return to text]

16. Ibid. [Return to text]

17. Ibid. [Return to text]

18. Eviota Uy Eviota, The Political Economy of Gender: Women and the Sexual Division of Labor in the Philippines. London, Zed Books, 1992. [Return to text]

19. Ruby Palma Beltran and Gloria F. Rodriguez, "Filipino Women Migrant Workers: At the Crossroads and Beyond Beijing." [Return to text]

20. Ruby Palma Beltran and Aurora Javat De Dios, "Filipino Women Overseas Contract Workers ... At What Cost?" [Return to text]

21. Rhacel S. Parrenas, Servants of Globalization. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001. [Return to text]

22. Ma. Alcestis Abrera-Mangahas, "Public Attitudes Towards Female Overseas Workers: Implications for Philippine Migration Policy." [Return to text]

23. Anne McClintock, "Family Feuds: Gender, Nationalism and the Family." Feminist Review 44, 1994, 61-81. [Return to text]

24. Ma. Alcestis Abrera-Mangahas, "Public Attitudes Towards Female Overseas Workers: Implications for Philippine Migration Policy." [Return to text]

25. Sarah Radcliffe, "Gendered Nations: Nostalgia, development and territory in Ecuador." Gender, Place and Culture 3, 1996, 5-21. [Return to text]

26. Neferti Tadiar, "Domestic Bodies of the Philippines." Soujourn 12, 1997, 153-91. [Return to text]

27. Solidarity, "Filipinos Overseas: Is it Worth All Those Dollars?" [Return to text]

28. UNIFIL, an organization of self-organized Filipina domestic workers in Hong Kong has been struggling for many years for better wages and working conditions (Migrante International, 2005). [Return to text]

29. Solidarity, "Filipinos Overseas: Is it Worth All Those Dollars?" [Return to text]

30. Ma. Alcestis Abrera-Mangahas, "Public Attitudes Towards Female Overseas Workers: Implications for Philippine Migration Policy." [Return to text]

31. Beltran, Ruby Palma and Aurora Javat De Dios. 1992. "Filipino Women Overseas Contract Workers ... At What Cost?" [Return to text]

32. Ibid. [Return to text]

33. Young offers an interesting argument about the paternal state with specific reference to President George W. Bush and his actions post-9/11. Her definition of the paternal state, however is can be applicable here (Young 2003). [Return to text]

34. Department of Labor and Employment, "White Paper on Overseas Employment." Department of Labor and Employment, Republic of the Philippines, Philippines, 1995. [Return to text]

35. Ibid. [Return to text]

36. Philippine Overseas Employment Administration, Migrant Workers and Overseas Filipinos Act of 1995. Mandaluyong City, Philippines: Philippine Overseas Employment Administration,1995. [Return to text]

37. Ibid. [Return to text]

38. In Tyner's study of policies specifically regulating Filipina entertainers' migration from the Philippines he makes a similar argument about the state's role in regulating women migrants. He argues that state policies have addressed women's migration as entertainers, "not within the sites of employment, but rather within the internal character of migrant women." That is, women's exploitation as entertainers is understood not as a consequence of abusive employers, but rather as result of women migrants' own moral deficiency (Tyner 1997). My aim here, however, is to highlight how specific civil society actors are critically implicated in the state's policies. [Return to text]