If Not Mere Metaphor . . . Sexual Economies Reconsidered

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.” ¹

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,” ² 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. ³ 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. ⁴ 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). ⁵ 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.

1. 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.[↑]
2. Fanny Garcia, “Arrivederci” in Ang Silid na Mahiwaga, Soledad Reyes (ed), Pasig, Rizal: Anvil Publishing Company, 1994.[↑]
3. “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.[↑]
4. 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.[↑]
5. 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).[↑]