If Not Mere Metaphor . . . Sexual Economies Reconsidered
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.
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