Neferti Tadiar, "If Not Mere Metaphor . . . Sexual Economies Reconsidered"
(page 6 of 6)

The notion of "life-times" is an attempt to account for the productivity of social practices of life and experience which appear to lie outside of the formal sites of labor exploitation. It is a concept that contributes to the broadening of the parameters within which "productive activity," and therefore political agency, is defined. Paolo Virno's own contribution to this project is his redefinition of production time as "that indissoluble unity of remunerated life and non-remunerated life, labor and non-labor, emerged social cooperation and submerged social cooperation."[29]

In Things Fall Away, I show the ways in which such forms of submerged social cooperation and non-remunerated life structure the phenomenon of the feminization of labor and its diasporic export, as well as the other material conditions and processes of transformation widely understood as the consequences of globalization. As an example of this analysis, I want to read a short excerpt from my reading of Fanny Garcia's story, "Arrivederci,"[30] a short story that alludes to the fatal losses created by the freedom of individual mobility and sovereign subjectivity figured in the character of Nelly, a middle-class overseas Filipino worker (OFW) in Rome, who shuns the company of the other overseas Filipinas, perceiving their collective life of excursions and diversions on days off as a waste of time in contrast to her own ambitions for a life of enlarged horizons and meaning. Garcia hints at the submerged social cooperation that is a part of the "production time" of capital when Nelly turns away from the loud and rowdy fuss caused by the appearance of green mangoes brought over as pasalubong [homecoming present] from a new "Pinay" (Filipina) recently arrived from the Philippines: "Nangasim, naglaway si Nelly, nanindig ang balahibo sa kanyang mga braso . . .. Tumingin siya sa malayo upang palipasin ang pangangasim." [Nelly's mouth soured, watered, the hair on her arms stood up . . .. She looked to a distance to let the souring sensation pass.] (115). Nelly's visceral response to this gift-act of realizing community, pasalubong (a symbolic present that obeys a distinct sociocultural economy, which overlaps but does not fully coincide with the economy of commodity exchange), points to modes of social experience and cultural technologies of subjectivity that are at work within the dominant social relations of Filipina labor and yet at the same time remain, if not "exterior," at least tangential to its productive aims.

This visceral experience instantiated by that "souring sensation," which Nelly suppresses, is characterized by an involuntary permeability of self that negates and overwhelms, and yet also inheres in, the logic and experience of autonomous subjectivity that she would like to achieve. Nelly looks to a distance to let this momentary dissolution of her boundaries pass, in an evident bodily-subjective effort to eschew the practices of communion and social pleasure that the others engage in. For her, these activities of enjoyment—the sharing of food and stories, watching porn movies, going to church—are forms of idling, part of that time of "waste" which they have made of their lives. During their outings on days off, the other Filipinas' social pleasures appear as "waste" to the extent that they do not produce any use-values, not even the non-material use-values that they produce for their employers as waged domestic work. Just as, during industrial capitalism, the necessary work time in labor's reproduction disappeared in devalued "natural" forms of "non-work" or supplementary "women's work," so here, in the postindustrial context of waged housework, the time of Filipinas' enjoyment, now conducted outside of the home as workplace, in public and other spaces converted into places of leisure, appears as sheer unproductive consumption and therefore a "waste" of time.[31] However, this "time in which labor-power 'belongs' to itself," this time of "waste," is, as Filipina domestic work is in relation to their workers' employers, a new vanishing time of reproduction, often reduced to one day of "rest" a week and expelled from the work week altogether, during which the women are working all the time, as producers of time (both "free" time and additional work time) for their employers.[32] As devalued, racialized feminine labor within the process of reproduction of valorized labor-power (middle-class, racially and economically enfranchised professional and white-collar workers), a position demarcated by the postcolonial international division of labor, Filipina labor reproduces itself and its new social relations not only within the spaces of domestic work, but also in spaces outside of the home, through activities of enjoyment that appear, in contrast to their work as producers of time, as a "waste" of time. The time of "waste" can be viewed as a time of recovery and restoration—indeed, the restoration of life-time lost in the production of time for others.

Within this new time of reproduction, practices of socializing among other Filipinas and other "unproductive" practices of enjoyment do not only support other women "freeing" themselves from their own naturalized reproductive functions, including Filipinas attaining sovereign subjectivity (the proletarian subject of feminized labor, reconceived in literature as feminist). These idle practices also support their own reproduction as waged reproductive labor (indeed, in place of the time-discipline regimes of the factory and the house-workplace, serving as a form of their socialization as "feminized" labor).[33] Equally important, Filipina experiential use of this "free time" bears dimensions of their own "freeing" from commodified reproductive labor. On this view, the visceral "souring sensation" set off in Nelly by the pasalubong of green mangoes calls attention to a mode of experience and organization of subjectivity that is not fully encompassed by either the synechdochal logic through which Filipinas are marketed for international exchange (their commodity-part in relation to the national-whole), or the logic of autonomous subjectivity achieved through detachment from the concrete commodity-function of babae (the feminist subject).

This mode of experience represented by the "souring sensation" that Nelly tries to ignore is also connected to a refusal of closeness with Vicky, another overseas Filipina domestic worker whose ambiguous overtures to Nelly are viewed as part of the weakness, vulnerability, and lack of will and self-possession associated with her status as a commodity. It is also connected to a refusal of the sexual play and sexual intimacies within the overseas Filipina community, which characterize the form of their social communion during their "free time." A similar permeability of self is evident in Luna Sicat's story of an unnamed narrator's erotic union with the female-gendered embodiment of time, and in Elynia Mabanglo's poetry, which imagines a political communion out of the sharing of suffering and the exhilaration of collective passage through death, beyond existential human life. It is also evident in revolutionary poetry, and in the experience of sentient communion with the dead through radical bereavement. From the side of these experiences we are led to see how concepts of freedom and justice are not fully determined by the orders that they contest.

The devalued times of experience and subjectivity exemplified here, and in the rest of my book, are productive times. They are what fall away from the proper political or economic subjects that are assumed or expected to emerge from the new conditions of the global economy, even as they are vital forces and supports for the making of such material conditions. I read Philippine literature for these "fall out" historical experiences, which in tracing the invisible social dynamics of global transformation offer us a hermeneutic for recognizing and understanding peripheral cultural capacities that might otherwise escape political reflection and valorization. To focus on such devalued modes of experience as the socio-cultural resources of people struggling practically to imagine themselves out of their present conditions of life is to foreground the creative living labor of emergent, disenfranchised peoples in the making of the contemporary world, and their unrecognized potentials for forging more open futures.

Endnotes

1. Robert Wade, "Financial Regime Change?" New Left Review 53 (Sept-Oct 2008): 5-21. [Return to text]

2. "Sexual Economies in the Asia-Pacific Community" in What Is in a Rim? Critical Perspectives on the Pacific Region Idea, ed. Arif Dirlik. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993. A longer and updated version of the essay appears as the chapter "Sexual Economies" in my book Fantasy-Production: Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Consequences for the New World Order. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2004. [Return to text]

3. Rose M. Brewer, "Theorizing Race, Class, and Gender: The New Scholarship of Black Feminist Intellectuals and Black Women's Labor" in Materialist Feminism: A Reader in Class, Difference, and Women's Lives, ed. Rosemary Hennessy and Chrys Ingraham. New York: Routledge, 1997. [Return to text]

4. I am suggesting that this new discursive appearance or word-like quality of things might be located within the sociohistorical moment periodized by Fredric Jameson as postmodernity, and related to what he analyses as the operation of the new logic of financial capital in cultural production. Fredric Jameson, The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998. London: Verso, 1998. [Return to text]

5. Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995. [Return to text]

6. J.K. Gibson-Graham, The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. First published in 1996. [Return to text]

7. J. K. Gibson-Graham, A Postcapitalist Politics. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. [Return to text]

8. In postpositivist, poststructuralist feminist economics, an interpretive approach would acknowledge "the ways in which the underlying processes of the economy are discursively constituted" and view gender, race, class, sexuality, and nationality as conceptual, not merely empirical, categories. Drucilla K. Barker, "Beyond Women and Economics: Rereading 'Women's Work'," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 30. 4 (2005): 2189-2209, p. 2191. Although Barker notes the discrepancy between "sex" and feminized labor, the effects of these conceptual categories on the social organization of labor are exemplified by figures such as "ethnic minority women in the West," and "poor Black, Latin, or Filipina women." [Return to text]

9. Delia D. Aguilar and Anne E. Lacsamana, eds. Women and Globalization. New York: Humanity Books, 2004. Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild, Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2002. [Return to text]

10. I do not have the space here to open up these other distinctions. I discuss the politics of a permeable barrier between life and death in the contexts of overseas domestic labor and armed revolution in my book Things Fall Away. [Return to text]

11. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003. Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005. [Return to text]

12. Mary Pat Brady, "The Homoerotics of Immigration Control," The Scholar and the Feminist Online, Issue 6.3 (Summer 2008). [Return to text]

13. Josephine Ho, Talk, "Toward Economic and Social Justice," Barnard College, 29 November 2007. [Return to text]

14. Wade, "Financial Regime Change," 7.

15. Eric Dash, "Consumers Feel the Next Crisis: It's Credit Cards," The New York Times (Oct. 28, 2008). [Return to text]

16. Discussing the work of Adorno, Jameson argues that exchange-value or capitalist exchange constitutes "the abstract value form in which identity is primordially conceived." Fredric Jameson, Late Marxism: Adorno, or the Persistence of the Dialectic. London and New York: Verso, 1999. [Return to text]

17. For a discussion of the gendered and sexualized constitution of the Marxist concept of labor in relation to capital, see my "Prostituted Filipinas and the Crisis of Philippine Culture," Millennium Journal of International Studies 27. 4 (1998): 927-954. Reprinted in Gendering the International, ed. Louiza Odysseos and Hakan Seckinelgin (Hampshire, U.K.: Palgrave MacMillan, 2002). [Return to text]

18. Sylvia Wynter, "Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument," CR: The New Centennial Review 3.3 (2003): 257-337. [Return to text]

19. Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James, "Women and the Subversion of the Community" in Materialist Feminism. Zillah R. Eisenstein, ed. Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1979). Christine Delphy, "For a Materialist Feminism." Claudia von Werlhof, "Women's Work: The Blind Spot in the Critique of Political Economy" in Women: The Last Colony, ed. Maria Mies. Annette Kuhn and AnnMarie Wolpe, Feminism and Materialism: Women and Modes of Production. Routledge, 1978. Ann Ferguson, "On Conceiving Motherhood and Sexuality: A Feminist-Materialist Approach." Leopoldina Fortunati, The Arcane of Reproduction: Housework, Prostitution, Labor and Capital. Trans. Hilary Creek. New York: Autonomedia, 1995. Evelyn Nakano Glenn, "From Servitude to Service: Historical Continuities in the Racial Division of Paid Reproductive Labor." Also see Rose Brewer, fn. 2. [Return to text]

20. Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour. London and New York: Zed Books Ltd.,1986. June Nash and Maria Patricia Fernandez Kelly, eds. Women, Men, and the International Division of Labor (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983). There are too many other feminist analyses of the international division of labor to provide an exhaustive list here. It should suffice to point out that more recent feminist analyses of globalization have only elaborated on or qualified but not theoretically questioned or substantially transformed the notion of the international division of labor as it was proposed in these earlier feminist works. See, for example, Rachel Salazar-Parreñas, "Migrant Filipina Domestic Workers and the International Division of Reproductive Labor," Gender and Society, 14. 4 (August 2000): 560-581. [Return to text]

21. Martin F. Manalansan IV, "Queering the Chain of Care Paradigm," The Scholar and the Feminist Online, Issue 6.3 (Summer 2008). www.barnard.edu/sfonline/immigration/manalansan_01.htm. [Return to text]

22. Postcapitalist Politics, p. 63. [Return to text]

23. Postcapitalist Politics, 177. [Return to text]

24. Ileana Rodriguez, "Perverse Subjects" (Unpublished paper). [Return to text]

25. "Prostituted Filipinas." [Return to text]

26. Conceived within a juridical framework of civil society, intersectionality can in fact be said to have only reinforced the epistemic ground of exchange on which the notions of divisions of labor and bioeconomic subjectivity are predicated. [Return to text]

27. Evelyn Nakano Glenn, personal communication. [Return to text]

28. Things Fall Away: Philippine Historical Experience and the Makings of Globalization (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009). [Return to text]

29. Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life. Trans. Isabella Bertoletti, et al. New York: Semiotext(e), 2004, 104. [Return to text]

30. Fanny Garcia, "Arrivederci" in Ang Silid na Mahiwaga, Soledad Reyes (ed), Pasig, Rizal: Anvil Publishing Company, 1994. [Return to text]

31. "Capital usurps not only free time, but also that part of necessary reproduction work time that appears as non-work time." Leopoldina Fortunati shows how within the process of reproduction, one part "that related to the production and consumption of non-material use-value seems to disappear." This "underdevelopment of reproduction" is the way that capital seeks to increase surplus labor time without lengthening the working day. Leopoldina Fortunati, The Arcane of Reproduction, pp. 159-162. Needless to say, Fortunati is writing about tendencies within advanced capitalist societies, as many feminist involved in the "domestic debates" in 1970s were. See, for example, Maria Dalla Costa and Selma James, "Women and the Subversion of Community." In postcolonial societies, such as the Philippines, where industrialization never took hold on the same scale, "women's work" and continuing older forms of colonial and de-proletarianized labor were very much intertwined with, rather than separated from, waged labor. [Return to text]

32. Fortunati, 161. Time is the general "non-material use-value" produced by waged domestic work. Its specific, concrete forms include bodily and affective care, domestic comfort, and (sometimes sexual) pleasure and companionship. [Return to text]

33. For an account of the time-discipline regimes of the home-workplace, see Nicole Constable, "Filipina Workers in Hong Kong Homes: Household Rules and Relations" in Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild, Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy (New York: Owl Books, 2002). [Return to text]

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