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.
- Ruby Palma Beltran and Gloria F. Rodriguez, “Filipino Women Migrant Workers: At the Crossroads and Beyond Beijing.” Quezon City, Philippines: Giraffe Books, 1996. [↩]
- “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. [↩]
