It may strike one as a curious fact that something like a New World Order not so long ago governed the playing field of the global economy, especially as we are now in the middle of a global economic crisis that threatens the norms of our present economic understanding. By definition, crisis dismantles the rule of order. And in the course of that dismantling, crisis may threaten and irrevocably delegitimize the rationality through which that order is predominantly understood and secured. That, at least, appears to have been the effect of the recent U.S. financial crisis: that is, to put radically into question, if not permanently undermine, the rationality of international economic norms and rules centered around the prescriptive principles of deregulation, privatization, and liberalization, also known as the "Washington Consensus."[1] While it is uncertain what the outcome of the global debt crisis will be, it is expected by many that the hegemonic models of economic understanding that have framed and guided the financial ventures of the last two decades will undergo significant transformation, likely resulting in a new order of understanding and practice for the world economy in the years to come.

Of course, there have long been numerous critiques of the neoliberalist economic model represented by the Washington Consensus. Among those who have sought to undermine the hegemony of this economic model are feminist scholars and activists, who not only vigilantly critique the social and human costs of economic globalization, but also insist on the central importance of gender, race, and sexuality to how these social and human costs are unevenly distributed across different social groups within national economies and in the world economy at large. In this essay I want to reflect on feminist theoretical conceptualizations of the links between these categories of social difference and the economy, particularly on the ways in which questions of international political economy, divisions of labor, globalization, and domestic/affective/sex work are talked about in feminist work. Rather than focusing, however, on feminist economics (as an emerging field of economic thought), I examine non-specialist feminist analyses of these interconnected issues of gender, race, sexuality, and economics to think about the theoretical premises undergirding the more general critical strategies by which the global capitalist order is delegitimated and undermined. I do so to reflect on the political claims feminists make as the basis and guiding objective of their critiques, including but not limited to the political claim for sexual and economic justice. Having contributed to these feminist analyses, I start with a reflection on my own work.

Crisis

Crisis is one way in which new orders come into being or are inaugurated. That is how, in the early 1990s, I accounted for the emergence of the Asia-Pacific community as a fantasy of regional integration under the auspices of the New World Order. In an essay written in 1991, which subsequently became the first chapter of my book, Fantasy-Production: Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Consequences for the New World Order, I argued that the imperialist, first world fantasy of regional economic cooperation among Asia-Pacific nations promulgated since the end of the cold war emerged as a strategy of containment not only in response to the economic threat posed by the rising power of Japan and newly industrializing countries such as South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore, but also in response to the political threat posed by the developing countries of Southeast Asia such as the Philippines, whose ongoing histories of communist and anti-imperialist revolutionary movements and developmental failure represented an ever-present potential antagonism to what I called the first world fantasy of the "free world."[2] More than these overt political and economic threats, however, crisis, in my analysis, characterized the very violent, dehumanizing, gendered conditions of feminized labor and national underdevelopment that served as the constitutive contradiction, or enabling underside, of the fantasy of this new economic network. As a global provider of feminized labor, through a national "prostitution" economy based on sex/tourism, export-oriented light manufacturing, and other female-labor-intensive commodity production and female-domestic-labor export industries, the Philippines' crisis-ridden situation and role within the Asia-Pacific community showed the gendered and sexual lineaments of a dominant international order of political and economic relations and its dire consequences for disenfranchised Filipina women.

Rather than crisis as event, structural crisis was the place from which to denaturalize this post-cold war regional order and, more, to foreground the role of gender and sexuality as the central, though hidden organizing principles of the logic of its emergence and operation. "Sexual economies," in my usage, referenced the libidinal or sexual configuration of the economic and political relations among nations that composed the Asia-Pacific community and the larger international community of the free (market) world of which it was a part. In this emergent regional fantasy of gendered and sexualized relations, the United States and Japan formed a conjugal alliance of political/military and economic/capital power and interests—in a new, post-cold war heterosexual model of regional "security"—the price of which liaison would be paid by the Philippines, as mistress-infant to the first and stepdaughter-servant to the second, in the currency of resource depletion and destruction, sexual labor exploitation, and racist dehumanization. My argument was that this regional familial fantasy, as well as the global fantasy of international relations in general on which it was predicated, is not merely metaphorical, but real, insofar as it grasps an order of political and economic practices at work among capitalist nation-states, a material-imaginary order in which gender, race, and sexuality are constitutive principles of organization as well as practical effects. Bilateral and multilateral political/military assistance and other cooperative security treaties, international trade agreements, and multinational developmental aid projects; national economic policies on foreign capital investment flows and local labor practices; and global financial institutional provisions for international loans—these concrete practices are the means by which Western hegemonic cultural, heteronormative ideals, and the meanings of masculinity and femininity, structure and codify the political and economic norms governing the actions of and relations among particular nation-states.

Nowhere are the dire consequences of the gendered, racialized, and sexual logics at work in this order more evident than in the degrading and violent treatment of Filipina women working in global commodity production, domestic service, and the sex industries. Not mere metaphor, the gendered and sexual language of politics and economics—evidenced in representations of the relations between developing and developed nations in terms of desire, security, interest, involvement, and penetration—can be seen to "translate" into the real material conditions lived and embodied by disenfranchised women. "Sexual economies" thus reconfigures and renames a seemingly objective economic order in such a way as to highlight how gender, race, and sexuality organize normative economic practices within the international capitalist world-system, and further, how such social differences naturalize the displacement of the internal contradictions of that system onto the devalued laboring bodies of Filipina women. Beyond simply emerging out of the structural crisis represented by sexualized Filipina labor, this feminist conceptual model was itself part of a collective political effort to put the ruling economic order into real crisis, and change both national economic practice and the lived conditions of women.

In the wake of the pivotal crisis-events that have arguably reshaped some of the familiar contours of this New World Order and its economy since the early 1990s—including the first Gulf War in 1991, the Asian financial crisis in 1997, and the U.S.-led preemptive war against and occupation of Iraq since 2003 (events that remind us of the structural crises of globalization that local and regional wars have been the indispensable means of resolving)—it would seem time to re-examine this feminist conceptual and political model for the question of its continued relevance to the current moment. Although my point of departure for rethinking this feminist model is my own work, I do not understand this reconsideration of "sexual economies" as one of personal intellectual revision. Rather, it is an effort to rethink some of the broadly shared concepts and theoretical perspectives that I and other feminists have used to think about how gender, sexuality, and race matter to the economy, and further, to take critical stock of both the extant possibilities opened up by some of these theoretical perspectives and the limits posed by our norms of thinking on these matters, norms that also appear to operate in the world of activism and nongovernmental practice.

There are several features in the conceptualization of "sexual economies" that I have tried to highlight in my descriptive summary above. The first is the importance of a different deployment of crisis as a mode of posing the structural role that gender, race, and sexuality play in seemingly purely economic processes. Clearly, this conceptual deployment of crisis owes something to Marxist thought, an important source of critical thinking about the economy that socialist and materialist feminists in particular have tapped for valuable conceptual tools that they have inflected with social difference, such as the division of labor and the category of labor itself. For many feminists, crisis as event and excess dissimulates crisis as structure and norm, temporally containing the systemic unsustainability of the processes of capitalist accumulation, which depend on the continual dispossession of the very populations who serve as the productive resources of the value accumulated. Systemic forms of social and bodily violence, and psychic and emotional violation, are intrinsic to modern structures of capitalist accumulation, and it is by looking at the social groups and identities of those who disproportionately bear these violent consequences—the bodily bearers of systemic crisis—that one can begin to understand the role that categories of social difference play in the political and economic systems themselves.

This is an epistemic framework that is evident in much anti-racist, third world, postcolonial, and transnational feminist thought. It relies on a notion of socially marked groups as the objects of mutually imbricated processes of exploitation and hierarchical oppression. The worker as crisis-symptom of capitalism becomes rearticulated as a social position produced not just in contradictory relation to capital but also through simultaneous intersecting forces or axes of hierarchical social difference. For example, Rose Brewer writes:

Given this, uneven economic development encompasses more than a labor/capital struggle. It is shaped by cultural processes reflecting longstanding definitions, perceptions of what is natural and given around hierarchies of race and gender. It is the issue of who loses. And, increasingly, the answer is young black women and men of American inner cities. Moreover, the concern with the changing division of labor through economic restructuring is matched in this discussion by a concern with racial and gender divisions of labor. Pivotal here is the intersection of race/gender hierarchies and the way contemporary economic restructuring is shaped by existing arrangements of race and gender divisions.[3]

As in my account of Asia-Pacific sexual economies, "who loses" is a question of a division of labor that is constituted through intersecting race/gender hierarchies. Although Brewer raises the important issue of growing inner-city slum populations (what I have elsewhere called the urban excess, developmentalism's human refuse), which remain one of the most undertheorized sites within thinking about the global economy, the central focus and critical standpoint of her analysis of social and economic injustice and inequality is black women's labor. That is to say, the issue of "who loses" or the crisis-symptom of capitalist accumulation can be located in a racialized and gendered category of embodied labor.

Similarly, the intersectional social identity of disenfranchised Filipina women as sexualized labor served both as a critical starting point and guaranteeing evidence of my analysis of the constitutive significance of gender, sexuality, and race to the logic and processes of the international political economy. If the gendered, sexualized figures of relations among the U.S., Japan, and the Philippines were not mere metaphors, then it was necessary to show how the real meanings—conceived as cost and consequence—of this Asia-Pacific fantasy-production could be located in the bodily fates of poor Filipina women workers, the embodiment of devalued, racialized, sexualized, feminized labor.

Their Bodies, Our Subjects

It is worth noting, as a second feature, that this epistemic model was enabled by a theoretical attention to the discursivity of material processes such as economic phenomena, a theoretical attention that was a hallmark of academic thinking in a moment arguably shaped not only by French poststructuralism but also by the increasing financialization of capital.[4] Beyond ideology critiques, scholars like Arturo Escobar, for example, theorized the Western economy as composed of a system of signification as well as a system of production and power, highlighting the role of discursive processes in the constitution of the dominant actors and scripts of action in the world project of development that emerged after the Second World War, including the very object of global economic action, the third world.[5] It is the attention to the role of signification in the constitution of material realities that undergirded a whole host of denaturalizing feminist interventions, not only with respect to the economy but also with respect to the sexed body, as paradigmatically defined by Judith Butler's theory of performativity. In J.K. Gibson-Graham's feminist intervention, The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy (1996), "capitalism" itself could be grasped in terms of what Butler called a set of "regulatory fictions" that script the economic agencies of capital, on the one hand, and workers and consumers, on the other, in the heteronormative sexual identities of, respectively, the heroic male subject of power and violence and the passive female victim or object of that power and violence.[6] Drawing on poststructuralist feminist and queer writings on the body, gender, and sexuality, Gibson-Graham propose to "query" the rape script of globalization, and more generally, to queer the normative bodily identities and subject-positions of capitalism, thereby opening up alternative scripts and other possibilities of economic being and practice.

I will return to this proposal to queer the naturalized economy, and to the specific strategy Gibson-Graham develop in their recent book, A Postcapitalist Politics, of "undoing" the seemingly fixed and monolithic identity of capitalism through a new language of economic diversity.[7] For now, I want to remark on how this feminist reading of the signifying role of categories of gendered and sexual differences in constituting the economic order necessarily entails an invocation of its material effects, often in identifiable social groups of embodied labor. That is to say, the abstract dimensions of the economic system through which feminists are able to read gender, race, and sexuality as intrinsic to its processes demands the location of its effects in the collectively gendered, racialized, and sexualized individual bodies of workers (or, in Gibson-Graham's work, the other embodied economic subject, consumers).[8] Hence, in numerous feminist critiques of globalization, immigrant female domestic and/or sex workers, as well as women workers in other global industries, come to embody the material consequences of the gendered, racialized, and sexualized aspects of the normative logics of the capitalist economy. In such anthologies as Global Woman: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy, edited by Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild, and Women and Globalization, edited by Delia Aquilar and Anne Lacsamana, poor women workers from the global south are the paradigmatic figures and representative bearers of the economic processes known as the feminization of labor and the globalization of reproductive labor, or "women's work."[9]

I want to be very clear that I consider these feminist interventions extremely important, even indispensable, to political struggles against the violence and injustice of the ruling global economic order, and do not contest the terrible facts of women's exploitation and oppression that they present. I do, however, want to probe the conditions and limits of these feminist epistemic frameworks and in particular the political fallout of the norms they inadvertently institute. In this vein, the first point I want to make is that these feminist accounts are predominantly predicated upon a theory and politics of subjects, whose contradistinction with objects rests on or at least resides in enabling proximity with other extant Western philosophical distinctions, such as distinctions between human and non-human, animate and inanimate, and life and death.[10] Despite a great range of theoretical perspectives in these accounts, the subject remains the model and unit for recognizing and thinking about economic as well as sexual activity, identity, and agency. It serves as the axiomatic form of human equivalence that undergirds many feminist critiques of globalization and their respective ethico-political claims. The subject is the protagonist of political-moral tales of agency versus script or structure, freedom versus constraint, suffering versus resistance, which is implicit if not fully evident in these accounts. Grace Chang's analysis of globalization in Women and Globalization argues, for example, that "women of color throughout the world are those who suffer first and worst under globalization," but they are also "the primary leaders in fighting back, in resisting this 'new world order.'" In Chang's analytical principle, "women of color do not merely suffer under, but struggle, survive and forge resistance over globalization," which is echoed in Delia Aguilar's introductory remark that while "economic globalization weighs most heavily upon women and extracts from them the greatest suffering, they have been rendered neither immobile nor quiescent," we glimpse the basic narrative outline of many feminist accounts.

My concern here is not principally about the homogenizing and Eurocentric universalizing ways in which third world women are produced as "subjects outside of social relations," or about the equation of agency with resistance, as the exemplary works of Chandra Mohanty and Saba Mahmood have argued, despite the relevance that such criticism holds in this context.[11] Rather, it is that the subject remains the primary analytical and political locus for feminist accounts of the intersection between economics and categories of social difference. However concretely situated and specified, whether subverting norms or inhabiting them, the subject is the privileged form of political agency. Undoubtedly, the discursive construction of economic subjects continues to be an important site of feminist critical intervention. As I show in "Sexual Economies," the metaphorical construction of nation-states as gendered subjects exerts constitutive force through processes of socialization that regulate the proper actors in, and representatives of, institutions of state and capital and the kinds of power they are authorized to exercise; economic policies that protect and valorize the "productive" activities of capitalist industries over the "non-productive" activities associated with women's subsistence; and social as well as state practices of labor conscription, marketing, and regulation that aid in the so-called feminization of labor.

Subjective ideals in the fantasy of nation-states certainly bear important and often incalculably and irreversibly punitive consequences for people who do not embody these ideals. Moral-political projects of citizenship making as well as state building, which are indispensable to national economic strategies of accumulation, provide the compass for the policing of sexual behaviors in the production of licit subjects and social relations. In the U.S. context, for example, Mary Pat Brady shows how the dovetailing of anti-gay rights and anti-immigrant sentiments in the 1990s (expressed in the channeling of energies from California's long-contested gay rights bill, AB101, to Proposition 187, which denied public benefits to illegal aliens) into the New Nativist nationalism of the 2000s rested on a deep public investment in, and anxiety about, the regulation and promotion of a heteropatriarchal white family structure as the proper site of consumption and reproduction.[12] Itself shaped by the economic assaults on the single-wage "nuclear family" as a result of the financialization and globalization of the U.S. economy, this anxiety was marshaled into new programs of welfare reform, the militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border, and widespread social and state practices of criminalizing immigrants. In the Taiwanese context, Josephine Ho has talked about a similar national anxiety caused by globalization's assault on the middle class, which has been deflected toward renewed forms of parental social and sexual control over an infantilized citizenry, and the criminalization of migrant labor and sexual minorities.[13]

In the current moment, if the U.S. financial crisis is cast in terms of an ailing male body, "analogous to a muscle strain in a champion athlete which could be healed with some rest and physiotherapy—as opposed to a heart attack in a 60-a-day smoker whose cure would require surgery and major changes in lifestyle," these metaphorical constructions certainly delimit sanctioned forms of economic agency and practice while rendering other forms of economic agency and practice either irrelevant or unintelligible with respect to this crisis, and therefore outside of economic rationality.[14] Take the representation of credit card companies' curtailing their credit card offers and extension of credit lines, in the face of borrowers defaulting on payments, as efforts to "stanch the bleeding."[15] The construction of credit card companies as the proper economic subject of loss undoubtedly renders invisible the bleeding objects of economic exploitation, i.e., consumers of credit, and the "losses" (in Marxist terms, the theft) of their future labor, with which they are expected to pay for such credit. But a feminist critique along the lines I've outlined would likely cast working-class consumers of credit (and, if one were to go beyond a U.S.-focused account, the feminized labor in the global south which produces the goods and services that U.S. consumers buy with their credit, and the militarist masculinities across the world ensuring "political stability" by making the world safe for capitalism), as economic subjects whose identities and attendant agencies are inflected by axes of gendered, racial, and sexualized difference. As valuable as such interpretative approaches might be, their focus on the subject as a model for making agency intelligible necessarily confines what we can understand as "economic" activity and agency to given roles and positions in the realm of capitalist exchange. Indeed, it is important to highlight the fact that insofar as the subject is philosophically conceived out of historical relations of equivalence mediated by exchange-value, it restricts our understanding of gender, race, and sexuality to a specific cultural logic, reifying them as empirical forms of identity and difference on the level of exchange.[16]

It comes as no surprise that many feminist critiques of the economy enact some drama of subjects and objects as a version of the dialectical struggle between capital and labor, which is itself constitutively shaped by gendered, racial, and sexual conceptions.[17] Whether as producers/workers, consumers, states, or various kinds of capital, economic subjects are defined against the objectified state of commodities. Hence, female laborers, in the form of sex workers, nannies, nurses and maids, are converted from their global commodity-form, i.e. as objects of exploitation and sexist and racist oppression, on whom the "impacts" of globalization are registered (as bodily sites of this economic order's material effects), into subjects of feminist ethico-political claims. What I am suggesting, however, is that there is a specific political ontology that underlies these feminist interventions, one that reflects and institutes what Sylvia Wynter calls "the bioeconomic conception of the human."[18] I would go so far as to say that it is this bioeconomic conception of the human that also delimits dominant feminist ways of articulating connections between the body, sexual desire, and economic practices.

Divisions of Labor, or It's Gender, Race and Sexuality, Stupid!

We can see the way the epistemic features I have outlined above limit our understanding of how gender, race, and sexuality matter to the economy and vice versa, to the extent that the very terms of our understanding are confined within a dominant cultural logic. Let me briefly illustrate this with respect to one important enabling concept for feminists thinking about the economy: the notion of the division of labor. Feminist theories of the sexual division of labor, which demonstrated the devaluation of certain kinds of work identified with women and known as "women's work" or, more generally, reproductive work, comprise an extremely important corrective to theories focused solely on masculine-identified forms of productive labor as the sole source of capitalist value. This feminist identification of reproductive work as a hidden source of value as well as a devalued and unacknowledged creative force has had enormous implications for thinking about, among many other things, the role of gender socialization in organizing systemic inequalities of resources and income; undercompensated as well as unremunerated forms of sexual, affective, and biologically reproductive labor naturalized as intrinsic capacities of the female body, "freely" available for use, like natural resources (predicated upon the gendered, racialized construction of nature and slaves as "free," exploitable resources); the role of marriage, the heterosexual family, and domestic households as economic strategies and sites of accumulation; socially discriminatory attitudes and exclusionary practices in the proletarianization process, labor movements, and anticapitalist struggle, as well as in the constitution of the social agents and institutions of capital; the uneven dynamics of valorization of different kinds of work and different sectors of the economy; and, more broadly, as the result of these gendered processes of organizing production, the increasing feminization of labor, consumption, and poverty characteristic of the current global situation.[19]

Critiquing the racial and international dimensions of this sexual division of labor, and the role of slavery and colonialism in shaping modern capitalist relations, feminists have also been able to better account for the reorganization of the world economy (and its New International Division of Labour) from the 1970s on, along lines of racial and national differences among women workers (and their respective kinds of gendered labor), and between women workers and women consumers, racial and national differences, that still define the divisions of labor of the globalized economy.[20] This more nuanced, intersectional conceptualization of the social divisions of labor has enabled feminists to make analytically visible the multiple and contradictory sites of exploitation, antagonism, and resistance (a more variegated understanding of "social relations of production" beyond class relations) within contemporary capitalism that would otherwise remain invisible to a "purely" economic perspective. However, even as it has been inflected by hierarchical social differences of race, ethnicity, nationality, and sexuality as well as gender, the concept of divisions of labor has had the detrimental effect of reifying the dominant meanings of these analytical categories as forms of social subjectivity and identity. Hence, the persistent translation of gender, racial, and sexual categories into bodily subjects in the very normative logics that they were meant to critique. Martin Manalansan has critiqued recent social science scholarship on gendered global migration for its increasingly heteronormative framing of migrant "care work—and its related notions of domesticity and affect—as the work and inherent capacities of biologically reproductive heterosexual women."[21] This reification of gendered, racialized labor as the work of third world women limits the very range of meanings, practices, and possibilities of gender and sexuality that might be operating not only within the economic activity we recognize as "care work" but also in and as part of the lifeworlds out of which "care workers," whether normative or non-normative, produce themselves and perform their definitive tasks as providers of this labor.

Such critiques would seem to be answered by Gibson-Graham's proposal to "query globalization," that is, to undo the heteronormativity of a capitalocentric discourse of the economy and to dislocate its unity and hegemony "through a proliferative queering of the economic landscape and construction of a new language of economic diversity." However, this attempt to diversify/queer the possibilities of economic being and activity, in my view, remains within a field of negotiation conceptualized through exchange. While they rightly expand the conception of the economy to include a whole range of economic activities that do not take capitalist forms (wage labor, commodity production) and non-capitalist, non-market, and alternative capitalist practices of production and transaction that operate within the global economy, their analytical resolution of these activities takes place at the level of subjects: "To include all of this work in a conception of a diverse economy is to represent many people who see themselves (or are labeled) as 'unemployed' or 'economically inactive' as economic subjects, that is, as contributing to the vast skein of economic relations that make up our societies."[22]

The fallout of their understanding is evident in their translation of "the subjectivity, motivations, and choices of migrant workers" who have migrated out of, and send remittances back to, their small municipality of Jagna, in the terms of the gains (goods) of citizenship in developed countries. Hence: "Filipina contract migrants working as domestic helpers or live-in caregivers are seeking to fund the necessaries of life that are elsewhere provided as part of a commons . . .. What citizens of host countries are availed as a commons is for Filipina migrants something to be purchased individually, out of the proceeds of their labor (the necessary labor fund)."[23]

Now, the excess (of norms) is not only on the side of impeded possibilities. The dominant social relations of production also enable and license forms of sexuality and sexual practice in excess of the norms of civil society that have grave consequences for the new economic subjects of feminized labor, as exemplified in the mass feminicides in Juárez, Mexico.[24]

As I have argued elsewhere, systemic-oriented, exchange-focused analyses of feminized labor in the context of globalization often fail to recognize the forms of social, communicative, sexual, and affective capacities and cultural practice, particularly when those forms of experiential activity exceed the codes of understanding which derive from the analysis of a dominant cultural logic.[25] I have attempted to suggest that an inordinate attention to the level of exchange, whether in the conception of subjects or the division of labor, draws us away from attending to the range of practices that go into the very making of such subjects (the making of labor) beyond the codes of gender, race, and sexuality as categories of subjectivity and identity, or, for that matter, as unequal social relations of exchange.[26] More than conflating an analytical structure with a structure of experience (or conflating gender with women), we risk making particular sets of relations of difference, which serve as organizing principles and consequences of specific concrete assemblages such as advanced capitalist modernity, the very theoretical meaning of these categories. In this way, we subsume other possible theoretical, political accounts that might be obtained from the practices of labor, sociality, and freedom or flight operating within this order as necessary, tangential, and surplus but also subaltern modes of life.

The problem as I see it would lie in leaving "gender, race, and sexuality" as fixed codes, as if there weren't other social axiomatics—other forms of selfhood and political ontologies&mash;within which the life practices to which they refer (and others we might not recognize as such) might be differently coded, regulated, and transformed. This is not a question simply of uncovering overlooked practices, but of drawing them into another potential project, i.e., recasting them through theoretical frameworks that do not easily translate them into readily available ideals of justice, empowerment, and freedom, but in fact force us to extend our thinking or action to find out what these ideals might yet mean and look like.

More than a failure to uncover hidden cultural resources—the "fugitive energies" that exceed given subjective identities—there is a lack of cultural literacy for interpreting such resources and energies, as well as for recognizing others who would otherwise remain outside of this restorative political purview. Let me now turn to some of my own recent thinking on these matters, and in particular to a few concepts that have preoccupied me for a number of years now, including recent critical perspectives on these concepts and how I view their relevance for feminist reconsiderations of the economic.

Labor and Life

The concept of labor is an extremely important one for understanding the workings of capitalism, and in particular the structure of exploitation under capital inherent in the production of profit or surplus value and the social divisions comprising a class society. Labor exploitation refers to the theft of surplus labor-time, and therefore of surplus value, through what appears to be a practice of fair exchange (the laborer is paid less than the worth of the product he makes, which the capitalist sells to realize profit). Much of the thinking about this process of the production of value and capitalist accumulation had been confined to the labor process within industrial production (the factory) or what is known in the West as Fordist production. Long before thinking about post-Fordist production, and postindustrial capitalism, many feminists had interrogated this theory and criticized it for its marginalization of the sphere of reproduction, embodied by what used to be called "women's work," now known as domestic work. As I mentioned earlier, feminists pointed out that what appeared to be a site of mere reproduction of the worker (the household subsistence activities to sustain the life of labor) was in fact another site for the expropriation of surplus value. While women's work appears, from the point of view of capital, to have no role in the production of surplus value or profit, by being a force of production not only of the worker's basic life but also of the very subsistence of the laboring class as a whole (by growing food, clothes and seeing to other needs of the workers, including psychic, emotional, sexual needs, as well as producing future workers), women's work contributes hidden surplus values to the formal capitalist process (in the form of the extension of the wage, thus enabling capital to continuously "cheapen" labor, that is, to reduce the value of workers and their labor).

The so-called feminization of labor—which is nowhere better exemplified than in the Philippine economy, which has relied on female workers in its export manufacturing and domestic service as well as tourism and sex industries since the 1970s, and is now completely dependent on a largely female overseas labor force for its dollar remittances—this worldwide phenomenon, the feminization of labor, has in part spurred the belated rethinking of the concept of labor that is currently taking place in the West (along with the financialization of capital and the practices of production in the New Economy, comprised of IT industries and speculation). What is now acknowledged is that what used to be considered merely reproductive activities (in contrast to productive labor) are in fact productive of value. Indeed, housework, sex work, affective work, and care work are now profitable global industries, which demonstrates that what used to be hidden sources of value or invisible labor (hidden in the guise of natural forces, such as the maternal and sexual "natures" of women, or couched in racist categories, such as slave and colonial labor) and thereby freely appropriated, are now directly subsumed by capitalist industries. Work that appears to have no material product in the form of a tangible commodity nevertheless produces surplus values that can be accumulated as forms of wealth (economic capital) as well as forms of symbolic, social, and cultural value. Left thinkers such as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, and other Italian Marxists, drawing on this longstanding feminist work, view this phenomenon of what they call "immaterial labor" ("labor that produces an immaterial good such as service, knowledge, or communication") as characteristic of contemporary global capitalism. And they see this evidenced in the rise of the care and service-oriented industries as well as the knowledge, information, and communication industries in the so-called postmodern global economy. The burgeoning call-center industry attests to this subscription of Philippine labor as "immaterial labor," combining affective and cognitive labor in the production of profit for multinational corporations, but also—as in the hospitality industries of the past and in the current domestic and luxury-care services of the present (including hotels, restaurants, hospitals, spas, nail and beauty salons, etc.)—in the production of bodily well-being and life values for a privileged class.

Feminists are skeptical about calling this form of labor "immaterial," as their own analyses of the longstanding work of women have shown us the corporeal costs and consequences of domestic and care work, as well as the very material conditions of violence in which women workers now find themselves as formal labor in the global service industries.[27] In my own work, I've written about the violent conditions of overseas Filipina domestic workers, in which racial difference is inscribed on their bodies, not as a matter of mere prejudice, but as a matter of creating differences in personhood or humanity, which at once results from and enables their objectification as natural resources to be exploited by labor recruiters, the Philippine state, and employers. Racially and sexually devalued through this difference, which is inscribed on their bodies through many kinds of violence (and epitomized by women's so-called vulnerability to rape and other acts of sexual violation and coercive possession, as well as supported by state and church control of women's sexual reproductive capacities), disenfranchised Filipina women perform the reproductive labor necessary for the well-being and maintenance of their employers, thereby contributing to their employers' surplus "value" (which is economic and social) for capital, over and above their own apparent cheap, disposable value or non-value (as reflected in their wages and in their treatment as less than human).

While there are many theoretical issues to disentangle and elaborate upon here (including no less than a rethinking of the category of labor, which is part of the focus of my new book), I want to focus on a few issues that have particular salience for feminist cultural and political analysis. The first is the issue of "labor-time" as the conventional substance of value, that which is stolen from the worker as surplus value. In the model of exploitation in industrial capital, labor-time that is productive of value is confined to the time spent in the production of the commodity. What the condition of domestic labor shows, however, is that it is not any specific amount or quantity of labor-time that is appropriated from the domestic worker; rather, it is her whole bodily being, as a being-for-others, that is appropriated to maintain and enhance the lives of others. Equated with the naturalized forms of reproductive work she embodies (this gendered labor inseparable from her gendered body), she is appropriated as bodily life, as "life-time" spent in the serving and servicing of others.

I would like to propose this concept of "life-time," which draws on but also expands the concept of "labor-time" beyond its masculine, industrial parameters to include gendered forms of labor (women's reproductive work, but also serf or peasant work, or non-modern labor subject to non-economic expropriation), as a useful concept for reckoning with the diverse, unrecognized life-producing capacities that people exercise in the creation of value as wealth and power, which only a small minority of the world's population is able to accumulate and enjoy. Just as women produce themselves as forms of normative femininity to meet the requirements of the industries that exploit their gendered creative capacities (whether as light-manufacturing workers, department store ladies, nurses, maids, or sex workers), people engage in a whole range of socially organized subjective, bodily, cognitive, psychic, and affective practices (that we sometimes refer to as "culture") in the very production of their own lives and beings as particular kinds of labor, and in the production of their material conditions, including their social relations, which are the very conditions of capitalist exploitation. The notion of "life-times" refers to these social and cultural capacities and practices, and the heterogeneous temporalities within which these concretely operate from the standpoint of people's lifeworlds, rather than those activities contained within the homogeneous temporality of abstract labor from the standpoint of capital.

We might think of "life-times" as "living labor," a concept Marx used to denote "labor which is still objectifying itself, labor as subjectivity." For Marx, this "living labor" exists "not as an object, but as activity; not itself value, but as the living source of value." The political relevance of this concept lies in Marx's understanding of this aspect of labor as precisely constitutive of its revolutionary potential. We cannot, however, fully recognize the "living labor" of people's practices, much less the political potential of such practices, if we do not understand them from the perspectives of the lifeworlds within which they concretely operate. Here, subalternist critiques of the categories of labor and value, as exemplified in the work of Gayatri Spivak and Dipesh Chakrabarty, are quite enabling for thinking about the heterogeneity of the cultural systems of value and meaning at work within universal capitalist processes, cultural systems that might appear to be "outmoded" or mere "superstructural" ways of life within a capitalist mode of production, and yet are in fact intrinsic to its process of accumulation—indeed, that serve as unrecognized forces of production.

As I've already suggested, social differences regulated by categories of gender, race, sexuality, culture, and nationality are essential to the process of capitalist accumulation to the extent that they serve as technologies of devaluation, necessary to the expropriation of people's creative powers. These differences structure the division in humanity between disposable, consumable life and privileged, valued life (what Giorgio Agamben has called "bare life" or zoe vs. good life or bios), a division on the basis of which both sovereign power and capitalist value are founded and which, like the traditional category of labor, rests on the distinction between the reproductive, non-political sphere and the sphere of productive, political life. Attempts to abide by the forms of equivalence based on the capitalist value system will necessarily depend on the active and often violent production of differences as differences of value, and therefore on the devaluation of whole ways and modes of life that are not valorized by this order.

My forthcoming book, Things Fall Away, builds on the set of concepts I've outlined (life, labor, value) to develop a theory of social experience as a form of creative or living labor that is subject to expropriation.[28] As I've said, expropriation does not refer to the theft of any specific quantity of surplus labor-time. Rather, it refers to the subsumption of the immeasurable time of social cooperation, which feminists and third world intellectuals have shown to be indispensable to the productivity of labor and therefore to the creation of wealth and power. What Marx understood about land and other natural resources—that they are the fundamental means of people's life production and self-production, which, through processes of force as well as capitalist development, both social and technological, they are continually dispossessed of—Marxist feminists have understood to be true of culture, social cooperation, subjectivities, and sexual/affective and reproductive women's work. Demonstrating that capitalist accumulation has historically and continuously depended on the "primitive accumulation" of "non-capitalist" resources and work, embodied in the naturalized forces comprised of the activities and personhoods of women, colonized natives, and slaves, this thinking builds on Rosa Luxemburg's insight about how in the phases of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century imperialism, capital needed non-capitalist strata in order to reproduce and expand beyond the phases of simple profit. What was beyond Luxemburg's purview is the fact that "non-capitalist strata" continue to be created in, and as, outmoded, backward, or traditional forms of personhood, cultural capacities, practices of social cooperation, and ways of life through new and renewed structures of dispossession and exclusion. That is to say, these seemingly non-economic spheres of life and forms of social experience have become continuing sources of appropriable value. They are in effect productive forces.

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]