Domestic Debates: Constructions of Gendered Migration from the Philippines
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.
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