Things Fall Away

Philippine Historical Experience

and the Makings of Gwbalization
NEFERTI X. M. TADIAR
DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS DURHAM AND LONDON 2009
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Chapter One
..
Prostituted Filipinas and
the Crisis of Philippine Culture
During the 19
8
0s, a decade since the beginning of Ferdinand Marcos's authori
tarian regime, a bad joke was making rOlmds in the Philippines: "Gas, rice,
sugar-everything is going up! The only things coming down are panties!"
What people were remarking upon in this bit of tendentious humor was the
growth of prostitution that had taken place since the beginning of the
military dictatorship in 1972 and that had consequently earned Manila the repu
tation of being the sex capital of the world. As disclosed by the word "panties;'
the sexual goods on the market were not ungendered; they were almost exclu
sively female. During this period, between three hlmdred thousand and five
hundred thousand prostituted women were working in the areas surrounding
the U.S. bases, impelling one U.S. soldier to remark, "Pussy, that's what the
Philippines is all about."l
In this misogynist, homophobic, racist worIdview, pussy is not only what the
Philippines has, it is what the Philippines is. The interpretation of this particular
nation as "female" sex owes its deplorable truth to what I have elsewhere called a
heterosexist fantasy of political-economic relations and practices at work among
2
nations. In this libidinal new world order, in which gendered sexualities are
'---------------
signifiers of the organizing principles of national economies and their political
status in the international community, the Philippines functions as a hostess
nation, catering to the demands and desires of her clients - multinational capital
and the U.S. government and military. That the national economic crisis should
be depicted by Filipinos themselves as the clearance sale of female sexual goods
thus comes as no surprise.
3
In this period, prostitution became the central meta
phor for the state-directed turning over of the national economy to export
oriented industrialization and tourism, which meant, for those who vigorously
objected, turning the national body-its people, its resources-over to multi
national capital dominated by the United States. Prostituted women thus be
came the symptoms of the crisis of the nation. They were not only specific
instances of the general debasing, corrupt, and corrupting enterprise overseen
by the state, but also the symbolic embodiment of the inconsistencies threaten
ing the ideal consistency of the nation, a consistency conceived in the moral,
political, and economic terms of sovereignty and integrity. The figure of the
prostitute becomes the paradigmatic figure of the crisis of Philippine culture to
the extent that the national economy drlves its people to the same kind ofliving.
As it was once put to me, "We arc a nation of prostitutes." Taking the synec
dochic part of the nation in crisis, the prostituted woman is the figure for the
sacrifice of one's moral integrity, conceived as feminine sexuality, and the tram
meling of one's sovereignty, conceived as masculine authority, losses which the
culture, as a result of its state-keepers' betrayal, now suffers.
The Crisis of Culture
The discourse of the crisis of Philippine culture is not new. It is as old as the
concept of Philippine culture. That is be :ause the anticolonial nation is itself
born ofcrisis, defined by crisis, and, to the extent that it is successful in maintain
ing itself, perpetuating and perpetuated by crisis. Geraldine Heng and Janadas
Devan explain the inclination of postcolonial governments to generate!JArra
tives of national crisis: "By repeatedly focusing anxiety on the fragility of the new
nation, its ostensible vulnerability to every kind of exigency, the state's originat
ing agency is periodically reinvoked and ratified, its access to wide-ranging in
struments of power in the service of national protection continually consoli
dated."4 Certainly, this was demonstrated by Marcos's constant invocation ofthe
26 CHAPTER ONE
communist threat with the intention of securing for himself a permanent presi
dency. The crises that beset the nation are, however, many, and not neCessarily
invoked by the state. Marcos's own narrative was a response precisely to the
crisis posed by a competing narrative of crisis, deployed by the anti-imperialist
nationalisms of bourgeOis and socialist social movements alike. To the anti
imperialist nationalists, Philippine culture was suffocating under the weight of
Western powers, duped by colonial mentality, weakened through brain drain,
alienated and diVided from itself, all to the economic and political detriment of
the people. In Renato Constantino's version of this narrative, a version Widely
held in the wake of national political independence "granted" by the United
States in 1946, true Philippine culture was itself oppressed, prevented from
coming into authentic, ul1alienated, and empowered being: "Victims ofcultural
Westernization, we suffer a crisis ofidentity as well."5
The narrative of cultural crisis deployed by radical nationalists in the I960s
and 1970S and directly addressed by the Marcos regime's Own nationalist cultural
mythology did not take on an explicitly female form. The gendered and sexual
presumptions of this narrative are, however, already implicit in the representa
tion ofa culture rendered impotent by its multiple personality, its lack ofidentity
and sovereignty, what the nationalist statesman Claro M. Recto described as its
incomplete separation from and lingering dependence on the United States and
its servile mentality and hysterical obsession with what Americans thought. Un
der the new international economic order of the I970S and 1980s, years during
which the Philippines mounted develop mentalist economic projects that invited
foreign capital investment, the crisis of culture comes to be expressed through
the gendered and sexual imagery of prostitution. Feminized bodies and naUlral
resources, which are rightfully the territory and domain of the nation, are im
morally used by multinational capital. Under the new global order of the I980s
and I990S, the crisis ofculture comes to be expressed through the gendered and
sexual imagery of overseas domestic work. The threat is now globalization and
diasporic disperSion, and the threatened are conceived less in terms of body and
territory than in terms of capaCity and ethnicity. As crucial elements of the cul
tural order, mothers, Sisters, and daughters who take their reproductive caring
skills elsewhere are seen as causing the disintegration not only of their Own
families, but, by logical extension, of the values and indeed the moral fabric of
Philippine society.6 In short, what is a crisis of cululral sovereignty within a
Prostituted Filipinas andPhilippine Culture 27
world of nationalisms and internationalisms becomes, within a world of post
nationalisms and cosmopolitan isms, a crisis of cultural dislocation, diffusion,
and dysfunction. Throughout, "culture" is the "loss" of the nation, a loss em
bodied and effected by Filipinas and shaped by the forces ofglobalizing capital.
Considerable work has been done on the signifying roles of genders and
sexualities in the making of various nationalisms, whether of revolutions or of
nation-states. Much of this work has been on the representations - tropes and
images - of gender and sex deployed in discourses of the nation, discourses
which are recognized to have material effects on actual men and women. As
bearers, keepers, and guardians of cultural traditions and values and national
identity, women and the meanings of women become foregrounded in dis
courses of crisis. In much of this work, however, meanings of gender and sex
uality are understood to serve as "vehicles of social and political commentary"
about changes which have come about from other causes, causes like moderniza
tion and globalization. 7 Culturally circumscribing concepts such as "sex/ gender
system," "gender relations;' and "gender and sexuality ideologies" take on an
autonomy that forecloses analysis of wnstitutive relations between this thing
called culture and this thing called capital (indeed, of the very gendered and
sexualized thinking about and separation of these incommensurable realms).
Such culturalist and economistic frameworks offer us an untenable dialectic
between culture and capital: capital uses cultural meanings and practices of gen
der and sexuality to create new forms of production; cultural meanings and
practices of gender and sexuality arc in turn transformed by these new forms of
production of capital. Ir effect, although they are shown to interact, culture and
capital are neatly separ .ted in their respective symbolic and material realms.
The "prostitution" of the Philippines conSists, however, of a much more mud
dled involvement of symbolic and material practices. In the follOWing, I analyze
the concept of the feminization of Philippine labor as a crucial aspect of the
prostitution of the nation. I then examine the role ofgender and se:x.'Uality in th,e
constitution of the general category of labor. Finally, I examine the ways i ~
which Fanny Garcia, in a short story, theori7.es the sOciosubjective practices
engaged in by Filipina women which contribute to their feminization and com
modification - in a word, their prostitution - within and outside of their com
munities, practices which might also serve as the means of their transform a
tive power.
28 CHAPTER ONE
Prostituting the Nation: .Feminization
As a receptive, pliable, permeable body, investment in which yields value, the
Filipina seems to be the private simulation of the Philippines, the very corporeal
embodiment of the country's putatively legendary openness and hospitality, ex
cept that in the subcontracting of their bodies they both share the same military
and corporate clients and produce the same surplus values: political power and
capital, values that not only exceed the grasp of their producers but moreover
return as even greater forces for their explOitation. In effecting the restructur
ing of the Philippines into an economic formation of export-processing zones,
the conditionality attached to loans and other forms of financing extended to
the Philippines by international multilateral agencies throughout the 1970S and
1980s directly applied to the individual bodies of female labor who worked in
these zones as well as in other sectors converted to export-oriented production
and services: increasingly, the bodies of Filipinas were employed to satisfy this
conditionality, resttuctured to corporeally conform to the specific forms and
operations oflabor required in tourism, prostitution, manufacturing, and other
export-led industries.
8
On this view, strategies of production which characteri7.e the latest modes
in global capitalism, such as privatization of national industries, decentraliza
tion of corporations, deregulation, informalization, and flexibilization of labor
operations-all these processes are brought to bear on the Filipina body. For
example, particular rones of Filipina bodies are marked and transformed for
export-processing operations-hands, fingers, eyes as well as sexual orifices are
detailed for increasingly specialized and fragmented tasks in the electronics,
garments, textiles, and sex-work industries. The subcontracting of production
processes hence entails the subcontracting of Filipina body parts and their re
Spective skills. Such a correlation represents the national body and the indi
vidual body as sites for the reception and processing of capital-intensive flows
and, therefore, as effects of the same gendered and gendering, sexualized and
sexualizing global production processes. This is the perspective one arrives at
When one proceeds from the presumption of the privileged, unified determining
agency of capital.
The history of these transformations, which are widely recognized as develop
ments concomitant with the establishment ofthe New International Division of
Prostituted Fuipinas and Philippine Culture 29
Labor, cannot be rendered, however, merely as the dire consequences and neces
sary conditions of the actions and processes of capital. The restructuring of
global production also depends, after all, on the restructuring of labor. And
inasmuch as they engage in their own transformation as well as in their own
production, Filipinas are not only products but also producers.
9
Prostituted
Filipinas contribute significantly not only to the maintenance of the U.S. mili
tary, the security system of transnational capital, but also to its almost exclusively
male international managerial class, especially that of the dominant economic
power in the region, Japan.
IO
The sexual as well as domestic services they provide
to their international clientele arc composed of complex skills they must acquire
and refine; in the process of developing these skills and reshaping their bodies in
order to ensure their marketability, they must also develop strategies of self
sustenance _ psychical and social strategies that enable them to go on laboring
under conditions they might otherwise find impossible to bear. 11 Prostituted as
well by transnational manufacturing industries, Filipinas compose a significant
part of the female global labor force whose socially gendered skills and subsis
tence work give it the flexibility and' cheap reproductive cost exploited and
demanded by capital.
Prostitution thus pertains not only to the metaphorical construction of the
Philippines as both female and feminine (signifying its lack of political and
economic power and its status as possessed territory with permeable bounda
ries), but also to the actual conscription of female workers and their sexualized
labor. Recognizing that post-Fordist strategies of accumulation have brought
about a radical shift in the compnsition of the global labor force, including
the feminization and ion of labor in cheaper wage-rones across the
world, Kenneth Surin points our the need to reconstitute the category of labor.12
He assertS furthermore that "it will be possible to reconfigure labor as a category
only if there is first an analysis of the structure of productive social cooperation,
since this structure is the ontological basis for the mode of production."13 The
structure of productive cooperation consists of a complex of noneconomic
tems ofvalue (of gender, race, sexuality), each of which interacts with the others
in the creation, maintenance, and modification of their respective terms of val
ence; each of these systems, including that of economic value, serves as a system
of variables for the others.
Thus feminization is not merely the subsumption by capital of an entirely
separate logic of social reproduction which en-genders labor power. Women are
30 CHAPTER ONE
not products of a traditional sex-gender system, which has oflate been incorpo
rated into the mode of production. This perspective gives rise to attributions of
the overreadiness or ready-madeness of more traditional, less-modernized, i.e.,
third world, women for the "age-old" domestic-related tasks required in the
Taylorist production processes in the "free trade rones." Here, patriarchy and
tradition both function as pre- or non capitalist systems which capitalism has
subcontracted for the cheap production of this custom-made labor. Produced by
older systems on consignment to capital, third world women and children are
treated, conceptually and materially, as component parts that are then easily
inserted into the capitalist mode of production.
14
Apart from ignoring the sys
tematic violence deployed in the manufacturing industries to maintain this labor
force and the militant protests, strikes, and other forms of resistance indefati
gably put up by women workers and their communities (which completely
disprove what is often posited either as the willingness, acquiescence, or pre
disposition of women to the kinds of tasks required in these industries), ac
counts of feminization that view it as the deployment or transposition of older
strm:tures of social cooperation into capitalist production maintain a rigid dis
tinction between the economic and the noneconomic as well as a distinction
between capitalist and traditional patriarchal practices, with which it tends to
converge. IS As such, they cannot explicate the ways in which forms of gender
and sexuality are constructed through (and not just tapped by) production, in
other words, the ways in which gender and sexual logics of cooperation have
been at once product and object ofcapitalist exploitation.
Elizabeth Eviota shows how the gendering of particular skills and kinds of
work in the Philippines has been the result of the historical interaction between
traditional, colonial, and capitalist practices and institutions.
16
Among the in
stitutions and structures introduced through Spanish colonization and subse
quently reinforced by U.S. colonization that figured prominently in the organi
zation of gender roles were Christianity, the Catholic Church, the state form,
private property, commercialized agricultural production (including cash crops
for export), and a national marketing system. Eviota shows, for example, how
the granting ofland titles to men during the Spanish period transformed wom
en's relation to the land and subordinated their agriculmral work to that of their
fathers and husbands. Additionally, the colonial conscription of male labor not
only separated men from shared tasks, but also devalued traditional women's
work, such as handicrafts work. While giving a very useful overview of the
Prostituted Filipinas and Philippine Culture 3I
historical imbrication of political economy and gender ideology throughout the
Spanish and U.S. colonial periods up to the present, Eviota nevertheless sub
scribes to the account offeminization as a process ofgender ideology informing
production, which allows her to conclude that in today's garments industry
"gender has come to determine class:"17
My point is not merely that the organization of gender and sexuality is imbri
cated in the organization of labor and capital, and vice versa; it is also that the
sign systems of gender and value are constitutively related. 18 Luce Irigaray sug
gests this latter relation in positing that Marx's analysis of commodities can be
reconsidered as an interpretation of the social status of women. 19 She asserts that
the analogism of her own interpretation is the means of a "going back" to the
question of sexual difference, inasmuch as the relation of form to matter (on
which Marx's analysis of commodities depends) was determined in the first
place by analogy to the relation between masculine and feminine. Irigarayeffec
tively shows ways in which gender categories are constitutive principles of the
system of value, suggesting that the symbolic system on which patriarchal so
cieties are organized "contain in nuclear form the developments that Marx de
fines as characteristic of a capitalist regime."20 Foremost among these develop
ments is the submission of a nature correlated with women to the labor of men,
whereby that nature is converted into commodities exchanged among men ac
cording to a standard of value which they themselves provide. What Irigaray
postulates, in other words, is the confluence between the money-form and the
phallic function, between the system of economic value of capitalism and the
system of sexual value of what she calls "hom(m) o-sexuality."
This confluence is based on a shared principle oforganization: the masculinity
of its subjects and of its metaphysical representative (the transcendental sexual
standard of value) .21 While Irigaray's analysis precludes understanding women
as labor except as the filling in of a masculine category, her suggestion of the
determining significance of gender in the theory of value can serve as a basis for
reexamining the very constitution of the category of labor. I suggest that a
fundamental dimension of labor is constructed through notions of the feminine
- just as notions of femininity are constru(.1:ed through conceptions of labor
and, further, that the symbolic logic of this construction is,{nextricable from the
logic of social cooperation at work in the constitution of feminized labor. This
understanding enables us to consider the so-called feminization of labor as the
realization of a historical tendency rather than, as the discourse of crisis would
32 CHAPTER ONE
have it, a radically new development and, further, to view the prostiUltion ofthe
Philippines which is predicated on this tendency as the effect of these inter
twined logics.
The Gendered and Sexualized Constitution of Labor
The feminine dimension of labor can be gleaned from Marx's well-known asser
tion that "prostitution is only a specific expression of thegeneral prostitution of
the laborer."22 The usc of the metaphor of general prostitution to characterize the
condition of labor depends on the construction of female prostitution as the
selling of one's body as a commodity. Labor can be said to be prostituted and
thus feminized in its function as a commodity with respect to capital. This
feminine condition of labor is foregrounded in Friedrich Engels's characteriza
tion of marital sexual relations in terms of rclations of production: "Within the
family [the husband] is the bourgeOiS and the wife represents the proletariat ....
[The wife] only differs from the ordinary courtesan in that she does not let out
her body on piecework as a wage worker, but sells it once and for all into
slavery:'23 Wage work is women's work to the extent that it consists of "lerting
out" or selling one's body. The worker thus becomes femini7..ed in his reduction
to mere corporeality.
Marx invokes the metaphor of prostitution in order to show this corporeal
debasement of the worker under capitalism. In capitalist relations, "labour al
ways appears as repulsive, always external, forced labour; and not labour by
contrast as 'freedom and happiness.' "24 The debasement of labor lies in its func
tion as "a mere being for something else"25 and, more particularly, as a mere
bodily being to be used and exchanged by and for capital. To emphasize the
worker's debasement, Marx constructs this condition of labor as a repulsive
condition of feminization and emasculation. On the one hand, existence as a
mere body, as an object of nature, is viewed as feminine inasmuch as nature, as
the object of man's labor, is defined as that which is not man's body. On the other
hand, being used by one's own alienated and objectified labor (capital) is viewed
as emasculating to the extent that capital, as the compotmding of male labor, is
masCuline.
26
Prostitution thus becomes the expression of the unnatural condi
tion of labor which workers must rise against. The unnaturalness of this con
dition is, of course, predicated on the presumption of workers as male and
therefore as entitled to their heteromasculinity.
Prostituted Filipinas and Philippine Culture 33
The construction of the feminine condition of labor through prostitution is
not, however, merely rhetorical. It formalizes a social logic already at work in
capitalist gender and sexual relations. We can see the operations of this social
logic by looking at the symbolic operations necessary in order for the metaphor
to work. Although female prostitution is posited as the specific expression ofthe
general prostitution of the the general prostitution of the laborer is
distinguished from female prostitution in that it entails productive labor while
female prostitution entails "labor as mere service for the satisfaction of immedi
ate needs."27 The difference between female prostitution and the general pros
titution of labor hence lies in the surplus value that is extracted from labor. How
then can nonproductive labor be a specific expression of productive labor? An
other kind ofsurplus must overcome this contradiction, a qualitative leap which
is paradigmatically performed by capital in relation to labor: "Labour must of
course correspond to the particular substance of which a particular capital con
sists as a particular labor; but since capital as such is indifferent to every particu
ofits substance, and is both the totality of all its particularities as well as the
abstraction from all of them, labour confronting capital has subjectively this
same totality and abstraction in itself."28 General prostitution is the condition of
labor qua labor (labor confronting capital) and as such is indifferent to the
particulatities ot specific expressions of its substance. It is the condition of labor
as the totality of all its particularities and the abstraction from all of them. As we
will see later, this totalization and abstraction are essential sOciosymbolic opera
tions in the prostitution of Filipina labor.
The indifference to the particularities of female prostitution, which the meta
phor of general prostitution requires, is, moreover, a sexual indifference. Labor
qua labor must be capable of producing new value. Inasmuch as this value as a
"being-for-itself" is realized in the labor which exceeds necessary or reproductive
labor, labor qua labor is realized in its difference from its feminine condition as a
"mere being for something else."29 Labor for capital is this (potential) value-for
itself that is objectified surplus labor. From the standpoint of capital, labor is
already objectified it resembles the machines that it produced in the past but
that now serve as its conditions. As such, labor is from itself, from itself
as living labor. Labor experiences this difference as "the independent being-for
itself of value vis-a-vis labour capacity, hence its being as capital; the
objective self-sufficient indifference, the separateness of the objective conditions
34 CHAPTER ONE
of labor vis-a-vis living labor capacity."30 The detachment of labor as capital
means also the detachment from the gendered significance ofliving labor, which
Marx implies in his description of "the potentialities resting in living labour's
own womb."31 Inasmuch as labor comes to mean not living labor, but "value
endowed with its own power and will:' it partakes of the masculinity of capital,
the being for whom the laborer is prostituted. 32
The category of labor does in fact assume this masculinity in its distinction
from reproductive or nonproductive activities.
33
The surplus labor-time objec
tified in the surplus value that is extracted from the generally prostituted laborer
is labor-time expended in areas of production and activities that have historically
- within Western industrialized societies - been dominated (and designated to
be dominated) by men. The surplus labor that hence distinguishes productive
general prostitution from reproductive specific prostitution (reproductive in its
mere satisfYing of immediate needs) is gendered as masculine labor. It is this
masculine labor that is represented in the category of abstract universal labor
time, the measure of value which now applies generally to all labor and that
therefore predicates the gendered difference between so-called productive and
nonproductive activity. Thus the se:xual difference which helps to constitute the
category of labor as productive is removed from the category itself, which now
appears sexually indifferent.
Along with other Marxist-feminists, Leopoldina Fortunati argues that within
the capitalist system, the male I female relationship is a formal relation of produc
tion.
34
Capitalism requires the development of sex work as nondireLLiy waged
work engaged in the reproduction oflabor power: "It is the poSiting ofreproduc
tion as non-value that enables both production and reproduction to function as
the production of value."35 In the continuously aggressive expansion of capital
accumulation through increased expropriation of surplus labor, feminization
names the drive toward the increased devaluation of the worker's necessary
labor toward nonvalue, that is, the tendency of labor toward reproductive labor
"which appear [s] to have had all value stripped from [it] by capital."36 This
condition is feminine inasmuch as it is created by work gendered as female,
that is viewed as a "natural force of social labor" engaged in the reproduc
tion of labor power. Moreover, it is "feminine to the extent that it consists of
activities considered inalienable from the body, indeed, commensurate with the
body." This feminine work comes to stand in for other forms of corporeal labor,
Prostituted Filipinas and Philippim Culture 35
embodied in slavery and colonial labor, which might be said to be the paradigm
of the nonvalue of the natural force of reproductive labor. As Fortunati shows,
while such work creates value for capital, this value remains hidden, incorpo
rated, as it were, within the forms of masculine labor power which are visibly
expropriated by capital. It is precisely the disappearance of the value-productive
labor of prostitution in the appearance of the female worker's body as nonvalue
that enables capital to expropriate her labor. Capital's subsumption of the value
produced by female prostitution work through male labor power is a practice
repeated by the metaphorical subsumption of the difference of general prostitu
tion as productive labor from specific prostitution as reprodw.1:ive labor. The
operations that enable the disappearance of the value created by reproductive
work and its hidden expropriation by capital are repeated in the symbolic con
struction of the concept of universal labor. These operations include the simulta
neous construction and sublated negation of sexual difference to constitute the
unmarked yet masculinist category of productive labor. I argue that the masculin
ist and heterosexist logic of the construction of this concept enables the intensi
fied expropriation ofsurplus value outside ofconventional spheres ofproduction
by defining feminine work as free, and, furthermore, that this construction and
its subsumption of feminine labor are determined by the position of labor con
fronting capital.
The feminization of labor is realized, therefore, from the same standpOint
from which it is configured as masculine, that is, from the standpoint of capital.
Hence, the prostitution of Filipinas is not merely the specific expression of the
general prostitution of labor except from this standpoint. The prostitution of
Pilipinas, the country, is realized as a metaphor for the prostitution of Filipinas,
the women, only through its totalization of and abstraction from the particulari
ties of Filipinas. As a corollary of this, the synecdochic deployment of the figure
of the prostitute to signify the third world nation (as a figure of global labor )
rests on the objectifying detachment of this part and the sUbsumption of the
particularities of this part, as part, to signify the whole. I argue that the synec
doche is a crucial apparatus in the logic of social cooperation that underwrites
the historical tendency of Filipinas toward prostitution .. In the movement to
undo this tendency, we must recognize the specific of the prostitution
of Filipinas as constitutive of the general prostitution of the nation. That is, we
must look at the feminized commodification of Philippine labor from the stand
point of Filipinas.
36 CHAPTER ONE
The Experience of Labor
It is important to recognize that even as Filipinas arc produced as commodity
objects from the standpoint of capital, they are never just objects. There is a
dimension of their existence that exceeds this objectification: what Marx de
scribed as "labor which is still objectifying itself, labor as subjectivity."37 The
problem with some feminist critiques of the objectification of women and their
trafficking as goods among men is a too strict adherence to the distinction
between subject and object, often expressed as the psychoanalytic distinction
between having and being. This Western philosophical distinction, which is also
predicated on the related "scientific" divide between animate and inanimate,
enables, for example, Gayle Rubin's argument in her foundational essay "The
Traffic in Women" that "if women are for men to dispose of, they are in no
pOSition to give themselves away," an assertion that implies a necessary passivity
of the exchanged goods and the completeness of their objectification. 38 What
systems-oriented, exchange-focused analyses such as Rubin's fail to recognize is
the role of the subjective activity, that is, the experience ofobjectified women, in
the making of the abstract systems - the very order ofexchange - that appear to
regulate their lives. Such overSight is characteristic of contemporary analyses of
feminized labor in the context of globalization, including so-called sex traffick
ing, which tend to discover women's agency within the system in the form of
women's negotiation of given rules and processes. I am arguing, in contrast,
that it is not simply that women are exchanged through eXisting relationships.
Rather, the structure of exchange and exchange relationships themselves are
produced by women and other members of SOciety in their active mediation,
realization, and socialization of phenomenological differences. To attend to this
activity is to recognize the ontological primacy ofmediation in the production of
the very differences on which relationships of exchange, exploitation and op
pression are predicated. Analyses of the traffic of women that forget this actiVity
(even ifit is meant to be included later, after the patriarchal/ capitalist system has
been fully rendered) erect the system of relationships itself as the cause, the
determining agent, of the oppression of women. As Marx writes, "The exchange
retitionship establishes itself as a power external to and independent of the
producers."39 Moreover, such analyses forger that women are themselves pro
duced as the objeL1:s to be exchanged by men. How they are produced hence
becomes a crucial question, one which the elaboration of a static system of
Prostituted Filipinas and Philippine Culture 37
exchange forecloses. Instead, women are viewed as finished products whose
subordinate status in society is a result of their place in an already operative
system of relationships, which, as Irigaray states, they do not participate in
making. Women are products but they are also producers. As such, they partici
pate in the process of their own production.
In keeping with Marx, the work of Antonio Negri emphasizes that "what
seems an objective structure is in fact the product of subjective activity. The
economy is not a system of 'objective' laws operating independently of social
agents."40 It is in the realm of the subjective that humans will themselves to live
and subsist (and by "will" here I mean the energy they expend in the practical
decision, desire, and work to go on - a form of labor that exceeds the concept of
both necessary and reproductive labor), and it is their lives that are necessary for
the production and operation ofobjective structures. This cannot be emphasized
enough: the myriad fields of signification and orientation of subjective forms
and the structures of sociality and social cooperation that are viewed as now
having been subsumed by capital are themselves produced by the activity of
humans, by labor that has not yet become being. 41
On this view, tlle category of experience as activity, as doing, is crucial if we are
to realize the partiCipation of Philippine labor in the production and transforma
tion of the social reality to which they are subject, that is, in the making of
history. This concept of experience has two registers: first, as tlle psychical,
paSSional, Visceral, cognitive, physical, and social practices ofmediation between
self and environment that individuals engage in as part of the process of produc
ing themselves and their social reality. In this register, experience as subjective
activity is historical to the extent that its elements and operations are collectively
available and at work in a social formation it bears constitutive connections to.
r ~ ~
Second, experience as the concrete articulation of the determinative relations
between subjective activity and socioeconomic structures, a concrete assemblage
of heterogeneous practices and matter. In this register, experience is not an
object to be described but an event to reconstruct through the making of rela
tions, the grasping of connections, among different kinds of practices and struc
tures. It in other words, the making of a socioeconomic fabric, a cotmective
tissue that also images a hisrorical moment.42
The dimension of Filipinas that goes beyond their being-for-something-else,
that is, beyond their objectification for capital and their production of masculin
38 CHAPTER ONE
ist value, lies in the particularities of their experience as subjective activity. This
still-objectifYing living labor is engaged in a complex of systems of signs, values,
and practices in which gender, sexuality, nationality, and race function not
as central organizing principles of production but also as effects of those prac
tices. Fanny Garcia renders this subjective activity and the practices that con
stitute the historical tendency toward the prostitution of Filipinas in "Pina, Pina,
Saan Ka Pupunta?" (Pina, Pina, Where Are You Going?), a short story she wrote
in 1982 about a young woman named Pina.
43
In brief, Pina, a poor, barely
educated young woman, dreams of striking it rich by marrying an Anlerican.
Through a pen pal magazine, she finds Sammy, an Anlerican businessman, with
whom she begins a romantic correspondence. SanmlY comes over, laden with
gifts and money for her and her family, takes her around and enjoys her sexual
companionship for a month and then leaves. Pina finds out that she is pregnant
and that Sammy has no plans to return for her; she aborts the fetus.
"Pina, Pina, Saan Ka Pupunta?" depicts the activities and practices that give
rise to the historical plot of Philippine-U.S. relations: the unalterable fate ofthe
Philippines as kept mistress of the United States. The national allegorical charac
ter of the story is supported by a long epigraph from the speech given by Presi
dent William McKinley of the United States in November I899, in which he
narrates how the decision to colonize tlle Philippines came to him one night in
an epiphany as he prayed for guidance from God.
In depicting the particular activities that give rise to Pina's prostitution before
and as they become totalized and abstracted in the allegorical function of her
story, Garcia reconstructs the particular sociosymbolic operations that allow
Pina's living labor to be objectified as a sexual plaything for Sal1illlY and that also
allow her, as this already objectified being, to stand in for her country, that is, to
serve, symbolically and materially, as a Filipina. Garcia not only shows the pro
cess of expropriation ofFilip ina labor, but also renders the activity and agency of
Filipinas in the production of their national destiny. Such activity by Filipinas
can be viewed precisely in the unraveling of the story's details which, when
brought out of the story, become elements of a historical experience that exceeds
the dominant national plot.
For one thing, what seems to be an allegorical story about 'Pinas (Filipino
slang for Pilipinas, or Philippines) starts with and for awhile remains a narrative
about two fast and firm friends, Carmen and Pina, "the Fat and Thin of Looban"
Prostituted Filipinas and Philippine Culture 39
(Looban, meaning compound, the name residents use to refer to their inner city
neighborhood). In fact, it is Carmen who, as she is looking through the classi
fieds, first stumbles upon the foreigners' ads for pen pals and wives, and while it
is Pina who decides to respond, it is only with the indispensable helD of Carmen
that she is able to do so.
What first Signals and effects a fissure in the coupling of Carmen and Pina,
and the subsequent narrative prominence taken by Pina, is the ads' require
ment of photographs: "half-body, full-body, and there were some that even
asked for bathing-suit shots" (T I2). Reading this, Carmen folds the paper, re
signed to her effective exclusion from this work option. In effect, the pho
tographic representation of the corporeal difference between Carmen and Pina
retroactively realizes the daily enforcement of their fundamental sameness as
women. Both Carmen and Pina are gendered through work, work that is delim
ited by the skills they can learn as girls and also by what they, as members of
the lower classes, can afford to learn. Both "grew into young women on a variety
of small jobs;' that is, on the small, feminine tasks of domestic work. Carmen's
departure from femininity because of her failure to solicit proper sexual demand
for it, that is, because of her failure to meet the definition of a suitable body for
heterosexist reproduction, is based on her prior gendering through domestic
work. Through domestic work, both Carmen and Pina are fitted as domesticated
machines for the replenishment of the needs and natural functions with which
women are identified.
44
While Pina does not fail the feminine corporeal requirement, she does fail to
comply with what Adrienne Rich calls compulsory heterosexuality, refus
ing each suitor with the explanation that she considered him only as a brother.
Thus "in the opinion of the people of Looban, the destiny of Fat and Thin)Vas
fixed: the fast and firm friends would both grow into old maids" (JOS/The
deviant condition of spinsterhood is a fate, however, that, at least for Pina, is
interrupted by the new work option Carmen has discovered. This interruption,
which is also the interruption of the relations between Pina and Carmen, to
gether with the two women's gendered sameness, which enables the interrup
tion, is a fundamental condition of Pina's feminization and her conversion into a
heterosexual commodity. What the community cannot draw from her, through
the daily social practices of approbation and disapprobation, is exacted finally
through the relations she establishes with the international market.
40 CHAPTER ONE
Marketing the Filipina Body for Dreanls of the Spectacular
When Pina posts her picture in the pen pal magazine, she is only marketing
what she has already been used to selling: her domestic labor. But in this medium
she is presented not only as bodily labor but also as a sexually and racially
SignifYing body. She functions both as an exchangeable body and as a means
of exchange.
Pina's susceptibility to becoming a commodity, what Gayatri Spivak calls a
susceptibility to idealization, lies in her gendered susceptibility to a corporeal
identity.45 As a body, Pina can be inserted into various systems of value. She is
hence devalued not only through her corporealization as mere use value and her
commodification, but also through the specifications of that corporeality accord
ing to other systems of value. In her insertion into a foreign pen pal cirCUit, she
becomes a racial commodity as well as a sexual one. Her constructed race (Asian,
Southeast Asian, Brown, Filipino) determines her commodifiability at the same
time that it is itself realized, as a category of difference, through the process of
commodification. Race, like and through gender, rests on even as it creates
corporeality as its devalued base-term, and it is this racialized, sexualized cor
poreality that lends itself to the international female market.
The racial devaluation of and racist desire for the Filipina body are not real
ized only in the moment of its commodification. On the side of the U.S. Ameri
can clientele, the devaluation is inextricably tied to the historical project of the
United States in its aspiration for global power. After the Second World War,
this project was carried out through wars in Korea and Vietnam, wars that
culminated in the development of the tourist industry in Asia. 46 It is not an
inSignificant detail that Sammy himself comes to the Philippines as a tourist, his
arrival recalling the colonial arrival of the United States, which is the context of
an impending event in the story's opening epigraph. The cries of "Victory, Joe!"
that greet Sammy's arrival in Looban allude the fact that the "victorious" War of
Pacification (U.S. colonialism) and the War in the Pacific (the Second World
War) were the instruments of the "freeing" of Philippine labor into the inter
national free market and its subsequent devaluation as cheap (rather than colo
nial, slave) labor. Assimilation into the world system, which is secured through
war, is, after all, the prerequisite of universal devaluation. On the side of the
Filipina, racial valuation is tied to Spanish and U.S. colonialism and its legacy of
Prostituted Filipinas and Philippine Culture 41
mestizoness, the fair-skinned complexion which signifies the power and beauty
that are associated with, because defined by, the elite classes. Indeed, Pina's
ambitions are driven by her desire for the mestiza-like superstardom of the
singer and actress Nora Aunor, whose media-staged "triumph" over her small
ness, poverty, and darkness traces the racialized trajectory of success.
Superstardom is the end of this trajectory, the achievement of spectacular
capital, the visual embodiment of wealth and fame. Pin a's eagerness to respond
to the pen pal ad stems from her desire to attain this spectacularity, which is
achieved as much by her picture being cir<.:ulated in a foreign magazine as it is by
her having an American boyfriend. Her sudden energy shows the ambitious will
she exerts in her photographic conversion into an image-commodity, the ex
change value of which lies in its objectification of the spectacular gaze. Pina's
body acquires its exchange value as a desirable female form through this photo
graphic medium of representation. In this spectacular economy, cinema (and its
derivatives) functions as "the objective medium in which exchange values arc
immersed."47 The media of spectacularity is the screen of political and economic
representation, the scene for the definition and visibilization of value.
Pina's own spectacular value is determined by the gaze of "foreigners seeking
Filipinas." It is this white, masculinist gaze that operates as the abstract equiva
lent of female bodies and that is represented in Filipina image-commodities.
Spectacularity means the reflection of the fairness of power, of the white capital
of this gaze which is materialized in stardom. "WIlen news of her romantic corre
spondence with Sanlmy spreads all over Looban, Pina does in fact seem to
achieve this spectacularity:
How lucky Pina was, they said (raw), because she would have an American
husband and mestizo children, and she would even go live in America! Hey, it was
Pina's destiny to be simply the most in the whole history of Looban. What do you
Pina was the Nora Aunor, the superstar of Looban!
As Pina is proclaimed the Nora Aunor of Looban, she is detached from it and
elevated to a symbol. Raised out of Looban ("maahon na sa Looban si Pina"),
she is set apart as a mirror of the collective, a mirror that refracts a surplus: Pina is
"the most" (pinaka) in Looban's entire history-Looban's showpiece, its ideal
member. Pina becomes the image-object that the entire community desires to
42 CHAPTER ONE
be, the ideal-ego of Looban. Her life henceforth becomes the focus of all atten
tion and energy, the object through which success can be vicariously lived, and,
expectedly, the medium through which that success can be shared.
Pin a serves as the synecdochic part of the collective whole, the part through
which Looban presents itself to the world as desirable. For Looban can see itself
as deSirable, worthy ofinvesrment, only by identifying with the perspective ofthe
desiring transnational subject of spectacular capital. She is the sign of Looban's
spectacular value of and for capital, the representation of its inner resources, its
potential to return the investments of the outside. Through Pina, Looban makes
itself into an attractive commodity. She becomes an image-commodity, which
also operates as the sign of Looban's value in the world at large, and as such she
must serve in a bodily capaCity. Synecdoche, the substitution of Pina's body for
the collective body of Looban, is, in this way, the social and symbolic predicate of
her "prostitution" as well as the condition of possibility for the allegorical, gen
eral "prostitution" of the collective whole of which she is a part.
Pina is able to assume this synecdochic role because she refuses to marry
someone from Looban. Forsaking her reproductive use value to the community,
taking herself out of immediate consumption, she can therefore Visibly function
as Looban's means of exchange. i\s this bodily means, she can also serve as the
medium of expression of Looban's collective subjectivity-that is, as its hob.
liJOb (inside, inner, interior) is an individual's medium of subjective states, of
emotions, attitudes, and perceptions - the matter for their expression, the place
of their realization. Located within the body, loob is a physical surface on which
the visceral as well as the metaphysical realization and expression of subjective
forms occurs.
48
In effect, Pina serves as this physical being, this bodily core
surface through and on which Looban's subjective life is expressed. From the
time the news of her correspondence spreads throughout Looban, every de
velopment in Pina's life is shared with the community: her name becomes a
household word and is "headlined" at every visit of the postman, her dates with
Sammy are described in detail to the nightly gathering ofinterested neighbors at
her house.
The intimate, subjective connection between Pina and Looban is demon
strated in this alacritous participation of the entire community in Pina's affair.
Everyone encourages Pina's ambition and participates in making her body into a
sign of national desirability, indeed, in making her a national body. In prepara-
Prostituted Filipinas and Philippine Culture 43
tion for Sammy's arrival, they insist that she wear a low-cut dress deemed "style
stateside;' do her hair and makeup, and get a manicure and a pedicure; they
encourage her to "pretend" she is Maria Clara, the passive, obedient, faithful
heroine of Jose Rizal's novel who is extolled as the ideal Filipina; and, calling on
her nationalistic duty, they demand that she come out of her room and overcome
her inhibitions: "Would you come out already?! Otherwise Sammy might think
Filipinos are uncivilized!" In effect, the entire community participates in the
"prostitution" ofPina.
The invoking of the national enables this prostitution, for Pina serves not only
as Looban's inner natural resource, but also, by Looban's projection of itself into
the realm of the national, as the bodily resource of Pilipinas. The deployment of
the national to regulate Pina's body merely uses the same relations that enable
the marketing of the Philippines by means of its women, indeed, that allow a for
eigner legally to own a piece of Pilipinas by marrying a Filipina. Pina and Pili
pinas are hence not only embodied structural effects of shared political-libidinal
practices, but also isolated, objectified 1/UJments of dynamic processes which they
themselves constitute. A ~ such, woman and nation function in subsidizing and
structuring relations to each other. It comes as no surprise that among the voices
welcoming Sammy to Looban and cheerfully greeting this new hero as he makes
his way to Pina's house are voices shouting, "Victory Joe! Victory Joe!" Sammy's
relation to Pina is already shaped by the Philippines' national relations and the
history of those relations, but at the same time this sexual relation contributes to
the continued process of making the national relations which provide its con
text and correspondingly to the making of the Philippines itself. Pina is made,
through this battle cry, the object of a quasi-militaristic national enterprise;
Pilipinas is made through the hospitable hosting offoreign desires.
It is as image (the body as signifier) that Pina can insert herself into the
prevailing economy of desire. Her prostitution consists mainly of this provision
of a symbolic service she is the medium ofother people's desires. This is not
any way to diminish the bodily service she renders or the violence of that ser
vice. It is, however, to demonstrate that, for the client, the corporeal service is
also importantly symbolic. It is in this sense that she is realizing a historical
tendency - the tendency toward the image-commodity that women experience
as destiny. But Pina is not only made, she is making. And as she is experiencing
this destiny, she is experiencing in ways that do not constantly or completely
make that destiny and might even serve to break it.
CHAPTER ONE
44
Women's Syncretic Sociability, or Kapwa
Pina herself participates in her own prostitution because she dreams of helping
her fanlily. Pina's dream is part of the dream of her family and of Looban (her
dreamfor them all), just as she is the bodily part, the part-object, through and on
which Looban's subjective life is expressed (its loob) . Pina has already learned to
play this auxiliary part within the family through her domestic work. This sup
plementary form of being or part-subjectivity constitutes what is, in the purview
of modernity, understood as a weak sense ofself, a sense ofself that is inextricable
from a sense of others. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, after Henri WalIon, calls this
form of subjectivity "syncretic sociability; or syncretism, in which there is no
clear distinction between self and others.
49
Such a subjective structure, which is
attributed to an incomplete severing of the maternal bond, serves as the basis of
women's presumed responsibility for the family's cohesion and reproduction - a
responsibility combining maternal and sororal functions, so that a daughter'S
being is considered continuous with a mother's being and, moreover, that this
maternal-sororal being is considered an auxiliary part of the being of the family.
The social connectedness that is constitutive of Pina's self and is expressed as a
continuum, a coextensity, between her loob and Looban is precisely the instru
ment of her explOitation: what is referred to as vulnerability. What might be
negatively described as a nonautonomous, noncentered self is in fact a form of
subjectivity (denigrated as feminine, infantile, or, relatedly, underdeveloped,
i.e., premodern) that is easily manipulated by capital. However, this subjective
form does not exist independently of the workings of capital to which it later
becomes available for exploitation; rather it is the necessarily relegated compo
nent term of the modern, industrialized capital subject. Configured as a more
traditional and hence cheaper because uncapitalized mode of subjectivity, it is
newly deployed in postindustrial production. This syncretism is variously con
sidered to be indicative and characteristic of the incomplete development of or
regression to an infantile ego inasmuch as the self-alienation and alienation from
others which are considered normal processes in the development of a mature
self, that is, in the development of a modern subjective apparatus, are not fully
caiTied out. 50
Virgilio Enriquez describes a similar form of syncretism in his analysis of loob
as the "interior aspect of kapwa" (fellow-being), which he defines as "the unity
of the 'self' and 'others;" "an inner self shared with others," operating among
Prostituted Filipinas and Philippine Culture
45
Filipinos.sl This "extended sense ofidentity" and its pivotal value ofpakikiram
dam (empathy or feeling for or with another), which can be seen to have been
historically developed by and among women as a viable mode of life under
conditions of colonial capitalism, is newly deployed in postindustrial produc
tion, serving as a refurbished means of exploitation via a contradiction. 52 It is
precisely the contradictory constitution of the feminine being as subjectively
syncretic and bodily individuated that allows Pina to be explOited as both matter
and means of exchange.
Pina is vulnerable to exploitation by Sammy because while she acts and desires
as a partial subject, a being-of-community, he treats her as a completely indepen
dent body. His relation to her is based precisely on his own completely sovereign
sense of self, a form of subje<.:tivity that allows, if not compels, objectifying
relations. This contradiction between the so-called traditional, feminine (the
markers of this developed underdevelopment) syncretic self and the modern
individuated body is what underwrites the practice of self-sacrifice, which is
purported to be the learned habit of women. This contradictory constitution
allows the feminine body to be "let out" by and for the collective identity of
which it is a part. The feminine body is thus conceived as a ptoperty of the
collective who, in its interpellation as the true (masculine) subject (as a "free"
nation, as "free" labor), acts as the seller of the creative power which it has
appropriated as its own to the eATent that it is led to identify with the subjectivity
of pmver. 53 In this way Pina's practices of kapwa are objectified, detached, ab
stracted, given a symbolic function in relation to the community from which it is
detached.
Beyond Sacrifice, Beyond Allegory
While there is a dimension of sacrifice for the family and community in Pina's
actions, there is also a dimension of flight. Pina's dream is a dream of flight
literally, a dream to fly out of Looban and to break with her feminine respon
sibility for it. Pina's dreams and experience exceed their being for her family and
Looban and their being for capital. This exceeding can be seen in her dream of
her first sexual encounter. Closing her eyes and detaching herself from the com
munity self, Pina frees herself to enjoy her sexual pleasure. Unlike the other
pleasures of class Sammy offers her, which are already objectified in consumer
goods, Pina's sexual pleasure is immanent in her body. It is in fact conveyed
46 CHAPTER ONE
simply through the description of physical acts pertaining only to her body: the
kissing, tonguing, caressing, sucking, biting of her body - her forehead, her
ears, her cheeks, her neck, her lips, her tongue, her breasts, her thighs - that
culminate in Sammy going down on her: "at pagkuway'y naramdaman niya,
dinidilaan siya) dinidilaan nang dinidilaan." [And she felt herself being licked,
and licked and licked. ]
In the entire story, this is the only passage detailed enough in deSCription to
allow the reader to dwell on Pina's corporeal experience. This scene of her
pleasure is an odd eruption in the story, one that breaks with her politically
symbolic role. The intimate depiction of Pina's bodily enjoyment Significantly
departs from the symbolic-social realism of Garcia's national allegory. Like other
w o r k ~ of the resurgent nationalist movement from the late 1950S to the I970S,
when radical nationalism was forced underground by the imposition of martial
law, Garcia's story draws both on the political allegorical style characteristic of
early anti-imperialist Philippine writing - exemplified by the allegedly seditious
Tagalog plays in the early twentieth century - in which nations as well as classes
are personified by characters with symbolically meaningful names, and on the
invigorated social realism that socially conscious writers championed against the
escapist romanticism of mainstream Philippine literature in Tagalog.
54
Unlike
these w o r k ~ , however, Garcia's story offers a female character as its central na
tionalist protagonist rather than as the embodiment of the imperiled beloved
nation. It therefore puts forth a national subject that evades the heteromasculin
ist virtues typically extolled in similar nationalist genres. Moreover, by combin
ing political allegorical and social realist modes, Garcia's characterization of Pin a
allows for the exploration of the concrete gendered and sexualized significance
of the Philippines' national situation rendered by the metaphor of prostihlted
global labor. In doing so, Garcia does more than articulate the formal socio
symbolic conditions offeminized Philippine labor as a culturally specific histori
cal experience: she deploys and limns sensory energies and experiential modes
that propel and support this historical experience but that are ultimately found
to be tangential to the political movements built upon it.
Garcia's nationalist project of exposing Pina's misplaced or false desire lapses
into a reliving of the experience of enjoyment, which, while it must finally be
excluded from the trajectory of prostitution (just as Carmen is excluded from the
fairy-tale experience of Pina), is necessary to explain Pina's actions. While the
digression is, in other words, essential, it is precisely what is unassimilable in the
Prostituted Filipinas and Philippine Culture
47
____ __
allegorical plot, tangential to the aims of both capital and nation, which conspire
to create this plot. The break is a leap back into what is disavowed to generalh:e
the condition of labor-in this case, feminized Philippine labor-from female
prostitution: the subjective-corporeal experience of women in relation to their
worlds and to each other, not as instances of the same, but as different.
This other dimension of Pina's dreams can also be gleaned in her dreams of the
superstar, Nora Aunor. Pina's desire to be like Nora is produced by spectacular
forms of identification and subjectification, forms which attempt to fully sub
sume the meaning ofher dreams. Whatever dimension ofthat desire might be for
Nora (for Nora to like her, to see her, which is suggested by Carmen, who
jealously tells Pina, "And that Nora AtU10r of yours, even if you watched every
movie of hers ten times, she still wouldn't know you. And even if you saw each
other in person, she might not even glance or smile at you;") is obliterated in
Pina's feminine configuration, just as the meaning of her corporeality to Carmen
(who declares, "aminado 'ko na kun..q sa 'kin lang) maganda'tseksi ka" ["I'll admit,
if it was only for me to say, you're pretty and sexy"]) is subsumed under its
meaning for masculine capital in the spectacular economy. It is only through the
conversion of Pina's relation to Nora into one of equivalence that they func
tion as exchangeable image-commodities, that is, as parts and reflections of the
same55 _ which o m m a n d ~ that Pina's desire be only to be like Nora, to take her
place, the fulfillment of which is declared by Looban. But Nora Aunor is more
than a spectacle reflecting man's labor, for she is the product of an almost exclu
sive female follOWing - as spectacular capital, she is produced by the labor of
loving women. 56 Even as they exist in an economy of semblance and substi
tution, there is a dimension of Filipinas' existence as labor in which they are
not substitutable because they exist simultaneously and already in relation to
each other.
Pina's dreams about Nora and Eva, another star, her dreams of success fot
herself and for Carmen, and her dream of herself and her own pleasure become,
places in which this other dimension can be gJr .tIled. The dream of her own\,
pleasure, especially, demonstrates the way in '" nich Garcia's rclation to Pina as a
female character exceeds her intention to use her as a political allegory. Garcia
explainS the original representational object of her story: "Paano ko kaya maipa
kikita kung paa1w at bakit tayo mapakapit nang husto) kungpaano at bakit gayon na
lang ang paghabol-habol natin sa u.s.? ... Magagamit ko ba ang sex sa pulitikal na
48 CHAPTER ONE
mI: .t1I
pakahulugan?" ["How, I wonder, can I show how and why we arc so attached to
the u.s. and how and why we pursue it in such a manner? ... Could I use sex for
a political interpretation?"] 57 This sexualization of the political, however, takes
on its own life, and empathy (pakikiramdam), with Pina as an embodied person
rather than as a personification of the nation, becomes an uppermost concern. As
Garcia recalls, "I thought, how could the readers better understand Pina if I
couldn't bring out what she enjoyed?"58 In the writing of the scene of Pina's
enjoyment to which she refers, Garcia demonstrates this dimension of being of
women in their relation to themselves and each other, their own bodies and the
bodies of other women, which goes beyond their embodiment of nationalist,
masculinist value. Writing this scene was, for Garcia, also a way of establishing a
more intimate relation with Pina, as the paradigmatic figure of Filipina women.
Her own desire for this intimacy stems from a recognition of the class differences
that exist between women and prevent any easy unity or identification. 59 In fact,
class differences are represented in the story when Pina receives a letter from
Sanlmy's other Filipina lover in the United States. The other woman, who
dashes her hopes that Sammy might yet return to her, bears the recognizable
"good" names of two powerful families. It is this discontinuity between women
that Garcia is, in this work as well as in others, consistently attendant to. Her
own discontinuity wIth women (and not simply the nation), which Pina figures,
thus provokes the extension of her own self and desire to Pina in the attempt to
understand and write a shared experience, one that would account for how and
why we continue to cling to our explOiter.
The description of Pina's pleasure thus goes beyond any simple allegorical
function, becomes in fact its own pleasure - it becomes available to the reader to
savor as well. The reversibility ofsurfaces, oflicker and licked, suggests a relation
to Pina that is not so easily subsumed by a masculine desire. Pin a's pleasure
might in fact be seen to involve Carmen, if only to the extent that this pleasure
must, as a condition of its expression, narratively exclude her. Garcia excludes
Carmen by making her disavow the possibility of becoming jealous after listen
ing to Pina narrate the enjoyable time she has just spent with Sammy. Instead of
jealousy, Carnlen displays an ambivalent envy, which is predicated upon her
potential substitutability for Pina. Carmen then vocally substitutes herself for
Pina. In making tllis disavowal, Garcia frees Pina to experience her pleasure and
frees herself to write it.60 Undoubtedly, the freeing narratively enacted here
Prostituted Fi/ipinas and Philippine Culture 49
conveys the very conditions of the freeing ofa female body for a feminist subject,
conditions which include the disavowal of the reversibility and reciprocity of
female desire.
These narrative operations demonstrate the thematic importance of female
relationships in Garcia's stories, and, more, their determining to the
writing of these stories. The economy of discourse of women portrayed in this
story also operates outside of it, that among her characters, and her
readers. As I show in the next chapter, this discourse ofwomen as well as the turn
to the body in feminist writing has as its condition of possibility the widespread
lmmooring of women from their naturalized social contexts as a result of the
very same tendencies depicted in the story. Within the context of feminized
labor, a state-sponsored prostitution industry, and increasing export of domestic
labor, identity and difference become a central mode of structuring the subjec
tive experience ofwomen in rclation to each other. In her writing, Garcia realizes
a form of connection among women that is not, however, limited by identifica
tory substitution even as it makes usc of it. The strong sense of the need for
storytelling, the form of hearing about and hearsay, in the lives of women shapes
the structure of address of her writing. Participating in Pina's story, readers
become "kau-utang dila" (tongue associates), that is, gossip-mates. Here, talk
ing and licking and hearing become modes of establishing relations that cannot
be contained through spectacular media and that have instead the possibility of
constituting an alternative economy of being and deSire, one which rests on a
different deployment of kapwa, the very same subjective mode on which Pina's
prostitution depends.
In shifting her narrative to Garcia deploys the interconnectedness ofself
and communi tv of kapwa bahae o. as a way of drawing the
vc:u.m;u reader into Pina's so I}at she might recognize and iden
and determination for change. Creating an inside or loob
for her audience that rests on a corporeal experience, Garcia ypres
sivcly realizes the formal condition for an emergent imagined community. Using
the coextensive structure of loob-Looban as the structure of her address, she
prefigures the transformative feminine identification of the nation that was dra
matically displayed in the popular revolt against the dictatorship in 1986.
61
In
deed, in the story, as the community of Looban participates in the making of
Pina into its ideal image-commodity, assuming the feminine work of accom
modation and hospitality, it takes over the very reproductive labor that Pina
50 CHAPTER ONE
herself abandoned, thereby preparing the grounds for a collective feminine iden
tification. Such mutually constitutive relations between self and sociality make
the destination ofPina and )Pinas (the destination implied by the question in the
one that cannot be foreseen but that is created in the struggle to determine
both. This struggle begins in the act of subjective determination. in a will-to
transformation, which the story offers as political counsel.
Pina's abortion is precisely an act of subjective self-determination that sig
nals the end of the inexorability (the of reproduction, both human
and social:
62
At naramdaman at nakita ni Pina) naglandas ang mainit na dugo pahaba sa kan
yang kanang hita) ~ y o y binuhusan niya ng isang tabong tubig) at ang kimpal ng
dugoy lumusot sasiwang ng embonong sahig, bumagsak at sumanib sa pusali. N akati
.':
tig pa rin sa pusali) kinausap ni Ptna ang sariti) "Pina, matuto ka sa mga naging
pagkakamali mo sa nakalipas.
[And Pina felt and saw the warm blood make a path down her right thigh. She
poured a container of water over it and the lump of blood squeezed through
the slits in the bamboo floor, falling and landing in a mire. Still staring at the
mire, Pina spoke to herself, "Pina, learn from the mistakes you have made in the
past" ... Pina took in a deep breath and marveled at how only a moment ago she
felt so beaten down but now she felt so very strong. I
Pina's ingestion of an abortive substance signifies and effects a reappropriation
of her labor, labor that is not already objectified and exchangeable but, rather,
labor as subjectivity.
Pina makes refuse of the fetus and, in doing so, refuses to become bOlmd to a
of transnational power from whose perspective she and her
community imagined themselves loveable, valuable. And she makes her blood
flow. This is an act of what Walter Benjamin calls divine violence: "pure power
over all life for the sake of living." Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt call this
power constituent power, the world-constitutive potential of labor. In
this moment of taking command of her body and her self, the means of produc
tion, Pina defies the of that sign "pussy;' the condensed sign of her living
labor which circulates in the world market. In doing so, she taps the potential of
the collective Pinas to defy the fixity which, as the epigraph shows, is the means
Prostituted Filipinas and Philippine Culture 5I
and end of a colonizing power: "1 sent for the Chief Engineer of the War perspective but a theoretical-polimal perspective from the social position of the
Department (our map-maker) and I told him to put the Philippines on the map marginalized within the dominant mode of production. Garcia's story is, to my
of the United States, and there they are, and there they will stay while I am mind, an experiential articulation of this standpoint.
64
Heeding the literary man
president!" Pina's strength comes from the abortion of Manifest Destiny. Her
date of emergent nations, Garcia mobilizes the historical experience she renders
staring at the mired lump of blood as she speaks to herself depicts the distance as the basis of political action and social aspiration. As historical experience, her
she has made within herself, a differential between her and the parts of her that srory bears a theoretical and political significance that is implied both in its
have been and continue to be fixed, objectified, and devalued in a word, the capacity to give counsel- counsel implying an interventionist rather than a sim
parts of her that are the embodied perspective of capitalist and state power. The ply representational rclation to a real social world - and in its depiction of the
lump also appears as the permanent displacement of her synecdochic function sociosymbolic logics of Philippine exploitation through the allegory of Pina's
for the nation. story. The allegory makes evident that the logic of Signification through which
This distancing that wrests a space of freedom and poSSibility is not the libera Pilla becomes a central character of Looban's as well as Garcia's story is itself the
tion of a sovereign subject, even if this appears to be the proper end of the story. mode of her exploitation - synecdoche is the mode of the hidden expropriation
For Pina does return to Carmen and her family. But she returns differently. Her of value in the feminization of labor. The articulability of an experience through
return is arguably not a reintegration into the community and hence a realign which a collective subject can be constituted thus depends on this signifying
ment ofexisting social strnctures and striations. Pina's self-valorization can mean logiC. The historical experience articulated in a literary work as the basis of
the valorization of a SOcially extended self (an open-ended loob) by that self constructing a political subject will therefore demonstrate the dominant signify
rather than by an external, determining subject. For those of us who experience ing logics that are at work in the constitution of broader social relations, even as
the altered community that her newly found subjectiVity inspirits with freedom they also invoke experiential practices that exceed or are tangential to the signify
and will and recomposes with this difference, her story gives counsel, the wis ing orders on the basis ofwhich the work's social and political claims are made.
dom of which can be fulfilled only outside the story, can be realized only in the As an exploration of the experiential activity of Filipinas which, on the one
world. That counsel is as follows: We Filipinas can transform Filipinas provided hand, helps to constitute the dominant sexual-national trajectory of the Philip
we seize our bodily beings, appropriate our feminine labor, in order to recom pines toward prostitution and, on the other, exceeds this historical tendency
pose our communities for ourselves. In this way can we realize our constitutive determined by a capitalist, masculinist logic, Garcia's story is the process of
potential, our creative power, as producers ofthe world. This potential is the real constituting another, this time liberative, political, and subjective, trajectory
crisis that the discourse of national crisis is a feeble atrempt to quell. for fellow (kapwa) Filipinas. In this way it articulates a radical, transformative
standpoint inasmuch as it enables the recognition of the subjective potential of
feminized labor and of Filipinas as the generalized condition of this labor. It
Making a Difference
also enables a strategy of liberation and empowerment for Filipina labor that
By way of a return to the issues I raised in the beg
i
' .11ing of this chapter, I want ~ is different from dominant strategies against prostitution as victimization and
make some remarks about the significance of this literary exegesis to our under emasculation, which call for state action (and, invariably, state action on and for
standing of the prostitution of Philippine labor and the crisis of Philippine women). By demonstrating the creative, sociosubjective practices ofFilip in as, as
culture, which such prostitution has purportedly brought about. Garcia's short well as the logic of their subsumption, which are at work in the prostitution of
story is not a veritable representation of the real experience of an actual, pros Filipinas and, moreover, by creating an intimate, involved relation to this com
tituted Filipina - a "true story."63 To turn to this literary text for a view of the bined process of production and capture, Garcia theorizes an emergent political
feminized commodification of Filipinas from the standpOint of Filipinas as Phil form, one that can commandeer or "imagineer" the creati ve, libidinal forces that
ippine labor is to posit that the standpoint of labor is not an authentic life produce the world. It is precisely in approaching Filipina women as producers
52 CHAPTER ONE Prostituted Filipinos and Phtlippine Culture 53
that one can view production in its creative, living aspect, an aspect which
nationalist accounts of the crisis of Philippine culture as aproduct of the entry of
Filipinas in the world market ignore in their preferred focus on exchange (view
ing prostitution simply as the trafficking of women resulting from existing inter
national labor relations). Systemic analyses by feminists and nationalists share
this static focus on exchange, which precludes a radical understanding of the
productive capacity of the women who are exchanged and prostituted by others.
What difference does it make to view the Philippines and its crisis from the
side of production rather than from the side of exchange? At the level of ex
change, culture is a matter of identity rather than activity; it is, like the women
who are its symbolic bearers, what is acted upon, danlaged, and defamed. Un
derstood in this way, "the crisis of Philippine culture" can merely call for actions
of saving on the part of management played by the nation-state. Viewing pros
tituted labor at the level of production, on the other hand, enables one to recog
nize the creative and desiring experiential activity - the living labor - of the
exchanged. This recognition contradicts the treatment of Filipinas as
bodies with orifices and the country itself as an orifice ("pussy") receiving and
responding to the potent forces of global capital. From the standpOint of experi
ence as living labor, what Filipinas do exceeds the exigencies of capital (such as
the historical tendency toward feminization) and of their socially learned skills
of accommodation, adaptation, and coping-in short, their experience as ac
tivity exceeds the invaginated role they are seen to play from the perspective of
capital. From this standpoint, culture is this doing, the activity of experiential
mediation whose inventions come under the command of capital, to serve as one
of its hidden productive forces. Put another way, culture comes to be seen as
productive of forms that are predominantly understood to be forms of and for
capital (e.g., commodity) and therefore a crucial component of the actual and
theoretical reconstitution of labor.
In Garcia's story, what from the perspective of .apital appears as the logic ~
the synecdoche at work in the prostitution of Pina by and for Looban - her
assumption of the spectacular form of the image-commodity through which
Looban negotiates for international value becomes, from the point of view of
labor, the structure of kapwa or syncretic SOciability. The sociosubjective struc
ture of kapwa is the form through which Pina and her community desire and
act. The stories many sex workers in the prostitution industry tell about them
selves often demonstrate the importance of syncretiC sociability to their actions.
54 CHAPTER ONE
Women help, emulate, and recruit each other through relations of kapwa. It is
this cultural logic of social cooperation that comes under capitalist command. In
the story, capitalist command uses national identity to place Pina in a form that is
serviceable and exchangeable - a social symbol and national commodity. That
capital needs to do so attests to the real crisis, which it tries to contain. As Negri
writes, "Money as a 'mere symbol', as a 'social symbol', as an 'a priori idea' _ in
short 'the money-subject' - can be the result of the moment ofcrisis, can be one
solution of crisis:" For, as he adds, "to command crisis is the normal situation of
capitalism."65 Under the Marcos regime, this command took the form ofcapital
ist state sponsorship, promotion, and regulation of the prostitution industry in
conjunction with the tourism and military industries. The national promotion
and marketing of Philippine culture in the form of women and their sexualized
labor have generated millions of dollars in profits not only for the Philippine
government but also for countless middlemen connected to the sex industry:
local governments, crime syndicates, tour operators, promoters, hotel and club
owners, etc. This now-worldwide, billion-dollar industry not only attests to the
value-productive character of sex work, which in 1998 the International Labor
Organization finally, though belatedly, acknowledged in its inclusion of the sex
industry as an economic sector.
66
It also attests to the fact that the expropriation
of the creative labor of Filipinas is how agencies of capital take command of the
real crisis ofliving Philippine culture as posed by its Filipina producers.
This real crisis lies precisely in the way the experiential activity of Filipinas ex
ceeds the gendered and sexualized logic of their constitution as feminine beings
for-capital. Within Filipina living labor there persists a dimension of freeing
themselves. Just as Pina frees herself to experience her pleasure, so Filipinas
attempt to free themselves in and through their work as Filipinas - to free them
selves from family, from poverty, and in general from their SOcially preSCribed
gendered and sexual functions and the measures used to enforce them (even if
this is already to ascribe given content to their freeing action). In the acts of
unsanctioned aspiration and enjoyment, in the acts of defiance and violence for
the sake of living which women exercise in their daily work, a will-to-freedom
and will-to-enjoyment obtain that Filipinas can take command of in ways that
liberate their collective subjective potential.
67
And yet, even as un sanctioned,
nonreproductive desire is what propels the collective energies ofher community,
it is also what might most easily fall away from the proper nationalist-feminist
subject that is to be forged out of such energies. The pleasure portrayed in the
Prostituted Filipinas and Philippine Culture 55
story, which, as much as the abortion, expressively realizes the liberative act, is
itself in danger of becoming the refuse of the political allegorical plot. Pina's
sudden renewal of strength upon her purging of the sign and product of her
sexual liaison retroactively casts her enjoyment as a form of weakness that needs
to be overcome in order for her to achieve sovereignty over her destiny. Follow
ing the logic of the constitution of the abstract category oflabor, Pina's constitu
tion as a symbolic figure of a sovereign national subject that is built on a refusal
of sexualized political dependency finally rests on sexual indifference to women's
desires. What falls away is not simply a preexisting experience that is masked or
suppressed by this ideology of sexual indifference (some specificity of wom
en's experience or gendered nature), but rather experiential practices that
must themselves be articulated and invoked (women's desires) in order for the
allegorical political representation to proceed. In this sense these fallout experi
ences are not so much subaltern as they are tangential to the proper historico
political plot.
By depicting Pina's different return to her community, Garcia suggests a strat
egy of transformative political action that entails a detachment from the perspec
tive of capital and, concomitantly, a partial detachment of women from nation
that is different from the kind which allows women to function as synecdoches
for their nation as well as from the kind which posits the universality of women
and their oppression. A,> we will see in the next two chapters, this second kind of
detachment results from and contributes to the feminization of labor and the
export of domestic labor, processes which, in the last decades of the twentieth
century and continuing into the first decade of the twenty-first, have defined the
Philippines' economic role in the global order as well as the condition of Fili
pinas in the world at large. The full detachment of Filipina women from their
nation also significantly shapes the historical experience of the specificity of
women's oppression articulated in more purpos;vely feminist writing.
In contrast to the full detachment of wo" ,en that will obtain at a later mo
ment, the detachment from nation that Garcia suggests is only partial to t ~
extent that it is accompanied by a different return to community. For Garcia, the
difference of this return lies in Filipinas' reappropriation of the very cultural
means of production that are subsumed by capital as the instrument of their
exploitation. Viewed now as mediating a<.:t:ivity, as the creative, living labor of
Filipinas, Philippine culture can be wielded as precisely the world- and self-
constitutive potential that is the other side of lack and the terms in which
56 CHAPTER ONE
the discourse of crisis as well as that of culture itself-which points to the
Philippines' "lack" of venerable sCriptural traditions and civilizational religious
institutions of its own - has long viewed it. If we view culture or, as I cast it,
historical experience as labor, then we recognize the truth of Marx's statement
that "labor is absolute poverty as object, on one Side, and is, on the other side,
the general possibility of wealth as subject and as activity."68
Prostituted Filipinas and Philippine Culture
57
and Sexuality"; and Spivak, "Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value;' Also 5. Constantino,Insight and ForeSight, II 3.
see the authors and works in note 8 of this chapter. 6. See my "Domestic Bodies of the and also 3 in my Fantasy
I2. Shiva, Earth Democracy. Productwn.
7. Sec Atkinson and Errington, eds., Power and Difference.
I4. Democracy, 91.
13. Harding, ed., Feminist Standpoint Theory.
8. For a hiStory of the collaboration of these international multilateral agencies, specifi
tile World Bank and the International Monetarv Fund, and local transnationalist 15. See Tsing, In the Realm ofthe Diamond Queen.
classes in the economic rcstrucmring of the Philippincs development policies, 16. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 97.
see Broad, UnequalAllianee. 17. Greenblatt, "The 'touch of the Real:'
18. See
Arondekar for another perspective on this intcrdisciplinary trafficking in
9
Enloe notes, for example, how the entire military-patronized prostitution
archives. industry can function only "if thousands of Asian women are willing and able to learn
I9. Deleuze, "Literature and Life," 225 what American military men rely on to bolster their sense of masculinity ... [and] to
20. My intention is not to strive for the "ethnographic realism" aimed at by the new be alert to the differences among masculinities?' "It Takes Two:'
historicists, with its objct:tive of being adequate to some "lived life, at once raw and IO. For an account of Japan's economic supremacy, see "The Japanese part 2
subtle, coarse and complex:' Greenblatt, "The Touch of the Real." Although I do in Bello, People and Power in the Pacific, 83-TT r. from bolstering tourism and
attempt to conjure social contexts that are in some mcasure real or out there in the tourism-related industries, including the international civil and military aviation in
world beyond the text, I also participate in a political fabulation that does not have the dustrial complex, the prostitution industry fueled by Filipinas services the "domestic
adequation of a lived reality as its objectivity, but rather the interpretation of possible necds" of the internationally rotated managerial staff of multinational finance and
becomings - immanent futures - in both past and present contexts. industrial capital. "For corporations employing a highly mobile male work force, the
2I. Sylvia Wynter in Scott, "The Re-Enchantment of Humanism:' 207 availability of sexual and household-related services helps reduce the costs of main
tenance of needed labour power traditionally provided through relations:' 22. Foucault,ArchaeologyofKJwwledge,I3.
Truong, Sex, Money and Morality, 128. 23. Quoted in Scott, "The Re-Enchantment of Humanism;" 160.
I I. Personal testimonies of prostinlted Filipinas reveal many of these personal strategies as 24. Ibid.
well as the efforts made to adopt the required technologies of sexual services. Among 25. Lubiano, "What's Porno Got to Do With It?"
the coping strategies, drinking and drug use are very common, as is the sense of 26. Dusscl, Ethics and Community, 202.
proViding for children whose future lives arc viewed as redemptive ends to what many
experience as a sinhrllife. Sec, for example, Sturdevant and Stoltzfus, Let the
Chapter One Prostituted Filipinas and the Cnsis of Philippine Culture
27. Quoted in O'Hanloe, "Recovering the :Sublect:' I I 1.
Good Times Roll.
r2. Surin, "'The Continued Relevance of 42-47.
L Sturdevant and Stoltzfus, Let the Good Time< 1nll, 326.
I3. Ibid., 46.
2.
Sexual Economies in the Asia-Pacific;' in . Jirlik, ed., What's in a Rim?, and my Fantasy
14. As well as fitting into the categories of nontraditional commodities and scmi-
Production. There is no room here to discuss the misogynist, homophobic, and racist
processed products whose processing is completed at the capital-intensive end of the
construction of "female" sex as "Little Brown Fucking Machines" and the infanticidal
global commodity chain. This explanatory account is suggested in the term used to
eroticism inherent in the logic of this fantasy. For a discussion of the sexual
refer to the traffic in Filipinas as sex workers, sex slaves, domestic helpers, mail-order
produced by and impelling sex tourism, see Bishop and Robinson, Night Market.
brides: "warm-body
The joke puts a piece of sarcasm into circulation, which, through the work of self
3
15. Sometimes patriarchal practices take on the universal, totalized appearance
deprecation, realizes a rival masculine subject.
ism itself. E.g., "Capitalism uses patriarchy, and patriarchy is defined by the needs of
and Devan, "State Fatherhood;' in Nationalisms and Sexualities, 343. Moreover,
4
Zillah Eisenstein quoted in Truong, Se.:", Momry and Morality, 59.
"the figure of threat, auguring economic and social disintegration, dismantling the
16. Eviota, The Political Economy of Gender. Dolores Stephens Feria, on the other hand,
foundations of culture, undermining, indeed, the very possibility of a recognizable
discnsses the way in which colonial power is dependent on an entrenched
fumre, is always, and unerringly, feminine" (
gender system: "A colonial invasion ... must be an impregnable realm ofmen's space in
Notes to Chapter One 38 I
380 NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE
order to perpetuate itself:' The Long Stag Party, 3. These two positions might be said to
characterize two major feminist strains in the Philippines: the first views the oppression
of women as the result of the capitalization of traditional gender processes; the second
views the oppression of women as the product of patriarchal ideology which is COm
pletely independent from capitalism even if it might collaborate with it.
17. Eviota, The Political Economy of Gender, rr6. Some of the reservations I have already
expressed in regard to analysis such as Eviota apply as well to the concept of"the sexual
division of labor;' which combines the categories of gender and labor without trans
forming either in any substantial way and which in fact assimilates gender as a variable
of the division of labor. See Eisenstein, Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist
Feminism; Mies, Patriarchy and Capitalist Accumulation; and Mies et al., Women.
18. What Jean-Jacques Goux elaborates as the isomorphism of the subject and the com
modity form and their respective logics and narratives of development seems to me to
be a fantasy construction effect of shared and interrelated, rather than identical, sym
bolic processes. The perfect homology drawn by Goux not only realizes the universal
mode of symbolizing (the logic of general equivalence, in representation) to which he
attributes this isomorphism by ignoring the specific use values of the concepts and
structures of these theories (of the subjt:ct, of value) which he yokes in almost violent
fashion (with his writing as the vanishing mediator), but he thereby disables an inves
tigation of the relations between their elements and operations. Spivak expresses simi
lar reservations about Goux's analysis: "No doubt there are general morphological
similarities between centralized sign-formations. But in order to see in those simi
larities the structural essence of the formations thus analogized, it is necessary to
exclude the fields of force that make them heterogeneous, indeed discontinuous .... It
is to exclude those relationships between the ego/phallus and money that are attribu
tive and supportive and not analogical:' In Other Worlds, 156. I might add that while
both forms are posited to be commanded by the same process, it is the genesis of the
money form that prevails as the paradigm frr this process: "The type of historical
structuration illustrated in the genesis ofth' ,noney form is not simply one type among
many; it is the trajectory of historical structuration itself-in other words, history
itself:' Goux, Symbolic Economies, 41. Perhaps the morphological similarities between
the subject and the commodity should indicate the intercourse of their constitutive
structures and operations rather than the identity of an originary symbolizing l o g i c ~
which takes on an ontological status.
19. Irigaray, "Women on the Market;' 170-91.
20. Ibid., 173.
21. "The economy of exchange-of desire-is man's business:' Ibid., 177. In making
this argument, lrigaray maintains a stable analogy between women and commodities,
rather than demonstrating a more mobile operation of the categories of femininity and
the feminine (categories which are not fully circumscribed by "women"). The analogy
382 NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE
is carefully and consistently pursued to the point that the absolute dichotomy of
gender difference makes for a categorically polar distinction between labor and com
modity. Impelled by this analogizing imperative, lrigaray can regard labor as only the
activity of men, the producer subjects, and commodities as women, the product of
that masculine activity - "commodity-objects that ensured the circulation of exchange
without participating in it as subjects" (174).
22. Marx, "Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts 1857-58:'
23. Engels, The Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State, quoted in Irigaray,
Speculum ofthe Other Woman, 121.
24. Quoted in Truong, Sex, Money and Morality, 3I.
25. Marx, "Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts 1857-58;' 382.
26. In this heterosexist masculinist formulation, to be "used" by a masculine agency is to be
emasculated to the extent that masculinity is defined as agency over "natural" feminine
objects.
27. Ibid., 202.
28. Ibid., 222-23.
29. Labor "posits itself as an insubstantial, merely necessitous labour capacity in face ofthis
reality alienated from it, a reality not belonging to it but to others:' Ibid., 382.
30. Ibid., 381. This detachment of value takes the form of the (in)difference of the
phallus, the symbol of the exchange value of women, the mediator of their exchange.
The phallic standard shows its tendency toward absolute proximity to money: "In
order to realise the commodity at a stroke as exchange value and to give it the general
effect of exchange value ... It must be exchanged for a third thing which is not itself a
particular commodity but the symbol of the commodity as commodity, of the com
modity's exchange value itself .... (Such a symbol presupposes general recognition; it
can only be a social symbol; in fact, it only expresses a social relationship.) ... This
symbol, this material sign of exchange value, is a product of exchange itself, not the
execution of a preconceived idea. (In fact, the commodity which serves as the mediator
of exchange is only transformed into money; into a symbol gradually. As soon as that
has happened, a symbol of the mediating commodity can in turn replace the com
modity itself. It now becomes the conscious token of exchange value.)" Ibid., 82. The
phallus becomes this conscious token in the early twentieth century through psycho
analYSiS, but it was a symbol that came to coincide with money inasmuch as both labor
and capital were dominated by men and moreover, as capital expanded through mili
tary means.
31. Ibid., 383.
32. Ibid., 381.
33. The imperative to distance it from allegedly nonproductive activities is shaped by
gendered and sexual systems of value. We can see the imperative to disavow nonpro
ductive activities as the result of male workers' revolts against their perceived emascu-
Notes to Chapter One 383
lation - that is, what they experience as their feminization, their being-for-someone. to labor, "recreation"
In effect, masculine privilege is conceded by capital as a measure of containment of the
of 1844;' 74-75.
is
turns sexual activity into aglil;reSSJ()n:
male working In this way, the feminine dimcnsion of labor as a mere (Cor virilescent, masculinizing. Since work is an emasculating the
poreal) being for capital is increasingly displaced onto and exacted from female and male worker, configured as that which does not to him, activities defined
cilild workers. See Andrew Parker for a discussion of Marx's repulsion for against work, such as private sexual pleasures, become avenues of aggreSSion. The
theater as the paradigm of nonproductive acts. violence against women has to be viewed in light of this.
34 Forrunati, The Arcane ofReproductwn. See also Mies, and theAccumulation an As domestic skills are feminized, women are feminized through domestic skills. In
a World Scale, and Dalla Costa and James, "Women and the Subversion of Conunu other words, as the household becomes the sphere in and against which masclliinist
labor is produced (the spheres of capital), the activities that pertain to it are made to
35. Fortunati, The Arcane ofReproduetWn, 9. pertain to women. It is these activities that help to make the category of the feminine.
36. Ibid., 55. As Fortunati correctly observes, economists arc mistaken in their assumption itself produced through these practices of feminization, a process defined
that the only commodity circulating in the labor market is labor power as capacity for as bv its presupposition. Such make women into do-
production.
37. Marx, "Economic Manuscripts of 1857-58;" 202.
mestic machines, apparatuses serving prouucnon. \Vomen
clotnlOl!, shelter. In oroducinl! the
other women for
38. Rubin, "The Traffic in Women," 175.
39. Marx, "Economic Manuscripts of I857-58;' 84. home, they produce themselves and each other. It is these subsistence practices which
40. Ryan, "Epilogue;' 19I. women engage in to produce the home that constitute the Filipina - it is this a-.'tiviry
4 I. "The only thing distinct from objectified labour is non-objectified labour, labour still that constitutes her being. As the objectification of her domestic activity, the Filipina
objectifying itself, labour as subjectivity:' Marx, "Economic and Philosophical Manu body resembles the character of her home, which can be subcontracted by foreign
1857-58,n 202. Cf. "[labor] is converted from the form of activity and fixed, clients when extended to the public sector. See Sobritchea, "The Ideology of Female
into that of object, of rest; as it changes its own form Domesticity;' 26-41.
and from becomes 45. Spivak,In Other Worlds, 343.
42. This notion of historical experience can be likened to the Deleuzian notion ofsense: "It 46. Stolzfus and Sturdevant, Let The Good Times Rflll, 3 r 4. See also Truong, StIX) Monry and
does not outside the proposition which expresses it; what is expressed docs not Morality, for a comprehenSive hiStory of this development.
exist outside its expression." DeleU7..e, The Logic ofSense, 21. is, in this sense, 47. Marx, "Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts r857-58;' 104. See also Beller, The
an event - "the boundary between propositions and things" (22).
43 Garcia, "Pina, Pina, Saan Ka Pupunta?" I07-23. References to this text are my 48. . A number of works dcal with the Leonardo N. Mercado written a
translation. being in whim this concept is fundamental, thatloob is
44 The home is invoked for the worker .s the space of being oneself, that is, where the an aspect of self as well as a source and means of power. See The Filipino Mind and
worker is not estranged from his l>c)dy. Sexual intercourse thus assumes the role of a Elements ofFilipino PhiloslJfJhy. For the use of "Ioob" in historical analyses, see Rafael,
spontaneous activity, an activity in which the worker regains his self, the loss of which Contracting Colonialism, and Ileto, Paryon and Revolution.
becomes embodied in the woman who occupies the domestic sphere, from which he is, 49. "Syncretism here is tlle indistinction between me and the other, a confusion at the core
as labor separated. In heterosexist-configured production (with what lrigaray calIs \, of a situation that is common to us both. After that the objectification of the body
hom(m)o-sexuality the regime of relations of production, wherein is the intervenes to establish a sort of wall between me and the other: a partition." Merleau
is alienated as a female object. The relation Ponty, "The Child's Relations with Others," in The Primacy of Ptrceptwn, I20. This
of labor to the a-.'t latter process can be seen in the making of Pilla as the part ( ing) of l.ooball.
to his own DelonglOg to him; it is activity as sutterlOg, 50. It is on this view that in adults, syncretism is pathological. Disorders in cenestheSia, for
strength as weakness, begetting as emasculanng, and men- can be understood as "a 'syncretism' that intervenes in
tal energy, his personal life or what is life other than activity-as an whim relations with others and causes alien voices to inhabit his own ... The patient,
is turned against him, neither depends on nor belongs to him." Karl Marx, "Eco says WaHon, has the impression 'without boundaries' in rclation to the other,
384 NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE Notes to Chapter One 385
and this is what makes his acts, his speech, and his thoughts appear to him to belong to
others or to be imposed by others:' Ibid., I34.
51. Enriquez, From Colonial to LiberatilJn PsyclJology, 44. While Enriquez mentions the
exogamous orientation of Filipino subje(..1:ivity and in doing so alludes to the centuries
of colonialism which cultivated this "xenocenrrism;' he discusses neither the historical
nor the gendercd differentiation in the operation of kajJlPn, but instead discusses it as
the core value of Filipino However, his expostulation of the Filipino subjective
apparanls in contradistinction to the Western
former to processes of Western modernization. Rather than this subjective
infrastructure founded on kapwa as underdeveloped or nrnmnlf'tt'I\! developed in
relation to the Western modern subject, we might instead view it as the creative
persistence of and reinvention of psychic structures which were replaced or desrroyed
by the modern subjcctification processes carried out in colonial and capitalist
of production. See Enriquez, Herrera, and Tubayan,Ang SikolohiyangMalayasaPana
hon ng Krisis; Enriquez and ProtacioMarcelino, Nco-Colonial Politics and Langut1Jc
StrulIgle in the Philippines; Enriquez, Filipino Psveh(lloffY in the Third World.
52. The development of this syncretic SOciability of kapwa in, by, and among women
through emulation is fundamental to this new mode of produ(..1:ion. "Females emulate
each other, which reinforces the value [offeminine skills], and contributes much to the
maintenance of the female child lahor supply in the market:' Rosario, "The
Need for a Gender Analysis of Child Labor;' 10.111is system of production of females
in turn the constitution of labor power in flexible production: "With sub
contracting, many more girls than boys are immediately drawn into the world ofwork
there in their homes, or in small-garments workplaces where, most likely, their
mothers and other female kin are also working" (II). The concept of emulation
doesn't, however, recognize the fact of women deSiring, not just desiring to be like,
other women.
53. It is on this account that the men '.1 Looban put themselves at the lower end of a
continuum with Sammy, resentf ,ly understanding that they were passed over by Pina
because her ambitions were set "so much identify, in other words, with
and must therefore see themselves in a position of lack.
54 Lwnbera, "The Nationalist Struggle and the Filipino Writer;' and Rafael, White Love. ,
\
55. This conversion is made according to the of surrogacy and filiation, the Oedipal""
logic, the logic of imperialism, which is out in the structures of speL1:acularity,
the structures ofcapital, and which hence reaches into individual rclations.
56. Nora Aunor is known for her portrayal of maids and poor women. Her stardom is
produced therefore not only by the loving gaze of these women but also by their very
lives. In fact, Nora Aunor's flagging career received a boost when she por-
Flor Contemplacion, the overseas domestic worker whose execution by hang
386 NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE
by the Singaporean government in March I995 led to massive nationwide rallies of
indignation and protest. For a discussion of Nora Aunor's star power and its relation to
globalization, see chapter 6 of my Fantasy-Production.
57. "Mula Sa Awtor" (From the in Garda, Sandaang Damit at Iba Pang j}fui
kUng Kuwento, xiii.
58. Ibid.
59. 111is attempt to get closer to other women and their lives is a recurrent theme in
Garcia's work. In "Alamat ng Sapang Bato;' a sodal worker tries to a class and
age gap by befriending an old woman squatter, and in "Arrivederci;' the main character
tries to befriend a domestic helper. In hoth of these stories, the attempts to close the
gaps between women fail.
60. This distandng of lesbian desire demonstrated in the submerging of other sexual
desires (in the figure of Carmen) is evident also in Garda's story "Arrivederci;' in
which the possibility of an emotional, desiring relation between the two female charac
ters which goes beyond the avowed emulating relation emerges only as a teasing
remark. Here the distancing of lesbian desire is realized through its presencing and
containment elsewhere, that is, in the "married couple" (mt1J-asaJva), the lesbian
couple who circulate and hover about in the story but who play no active role in
propelling the
61. For a discussion of the gendered dynamicS of this revolt, see chapter 5 in my Fantasy
Production.
62. In a country dominated the Catholic Church, where women have few legal re
..... t"....111rt-i\rp rights is criminalizcd), where divorce is while concubi
nage is legitimate, this act can be considered subversive. For an overview of the status
of women's reproductive rights, see Macagba-Tadiar, "Population and Reproductive
Rights;' II4-26.
63. Sec Scott, "111e Evidence of Experience:'
64. While the theoretical perspective it offers is likely to find concurring support in testi
monies of working prostitutes and prostituted women (J will give one examole be-
it certainly does not represent their particular viewpoints. J want to underswre
that I am arguing for a view of the experiential activity which constitutes Philippine
prostiNtion, which to me means culNral, subjective pra(..1:iccs of prostimted Filipinas,
including but not exclUSively confined to the practices of professional sex workers. In
this way I am writing against an essentialist understanding of prostirution as the
activity and business of sex workers or as the sex work practices that take in the
relation of economic betw(..'Cn sex worker and client.
65. Negri,Ma1XBeyondMa1X, 3I, 40.
66. "Sex Workers Now a Silent Economic Force-lLO," Philippine Daily Inquirer, 19 Au
gust 1998, L As Aida Santos points out, "The ones who least benefit economically
Notes to Chapter One 387
from prostitution are the women and children themselves;' Letter to the Editor, Philip
pine Inquirer, 27 August T998.
67. Linda, a sex worker, narrates how she tried to kill her philandering, money-squandering
husband. Mter kicking him out of her household she became very ill but, with her
mother's encouragement, willed herself back to health. "I thought about becoming
strong. My money went for medicine. I ate bananas and drank lots of milk. I imagined
a beautiful life - that I was rich. I thought about going to a different place that
Upon recovering her health, Linda entered the industry through waitress
ing, and in this way supported her five children on her own. Quoted in Smrdevant and
Stolzfus, Let the Good Times Roll, I46 n. 1. point here is not to refute the violent
conditions ofcoercion that sex workers experience which have led Filipina feminists to
caU them prostimted women rather than prostitutes, to emphasize the forcedness of
their choices. It is, rather, to break with the opposition between forced versus chosen
prostitution, which divides third world and first world approaches to sex work. As we
will see in the next two chapters, by "will" and"desire" I mean to indicate subjective acts
that exceed the volitional notion implied in sovereign subjectiVity.
68. Quoted in Negri,Ma1x ReyondMar.x, 69.
Chapter Th'O Women Alone
Chapter epigraph: Joaquin, "Foreword;' WOMEN, t"litpma I.
l. Barrios,Ang Pagiging Rabat: ay Pamumuhay sa Panahon ng Digma (To Be a Woman Is
to Live in a Time of War). Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations of Barrios's
poems are from this work.
2. Cuyugan, Forbidden Fruit, ed. Tina Cuyugan. Originally published in Filipino
(199 I ).
3 Werholf in Mies, Bel1l1holdt-Thomsen, and Werlhof, Women. Although this charac
teristic of feminine being is understood to have become generaliz(:d I1I1dcr conditions
of postindustrial capitalism, ' "ch that "time becomes the fabric of the whole of being,
because all of being is implicated in the web of the relations of production: being is
equal to product oflabour: temporal bei1lg" (Negri, Timefor Revolution, 34), I will argue
in the next chapter that this generalization obeys what I analyzed in the
dlapter as the operation of sexual indifference (and, as I will argue further, of
dispossession) constimtive of the category of global labor as viewed from the side of
capital.
4 Dayrit, "Unfinished Story;' 75. Originally published in Focus Philippines (1979).
5. As labor commodities, women's bodies are indeed the realization of a specific amOlult
of labor time. The of time and body can be seen in the specific age group of
preferred female labor (eighteen to twenty-five years old) in the manufacmring indus
tries as well as in other sectors. See Eviota, The Political Economy of Gender, 120. As
388 NOTES TO CHAPTER TWO
commodities, women have expiration dates, determined by the decrease in their attrac
tiveness and produL'tivity (often this is dictated by bodily capacity, such as when
garment workers go blind or lose the agility of their fingers).
6. Irigaray, "Women on the Market;" 191.
7 In lagalog, the third person pronoun is ungendered, as are all pronouns, along with
many other words whose eqUivalents in English are gendered. This is what enables the
indeterminacy of Sandali's
8. Cuyugan, Forbidden Fruit. See my review, Tadiar, "The Quest for the Erotic."
9. I use "being" here in the sense that Salazar usesginhawa, which he defines as both life
and the base of one's affective and sense relations with others, having to do with
notions of "'rest; 'breath; 'stomach; 'heart; even 'food' which is necessary for life."
Salazar, "Ang Kamalayan at Kaluluwa;' 90.
10. Bachelard describes the modern subject's psyche in terms of the strucrure of the
with the attic and the cellar symbolizing the respective rooms of "consciousness" and
"the I1I1conscious." Bachelard, The Poetics ofSpace.
I I. See" 'People Power': Miraculous Revolt;' in my Fantasy-Production.
12. Maranan, "Do Women Really Hold up Half the Sky?" Sec also de Dios, "l'articiDation
of Women's Groups in the Anti-Dictatorship Struggle."
13. Santiago, SaNgalan ng Ina, 185.
14. In her keynote address at the National Women's Congress in 1980, sponsored by the
National Commission on the Role of Filipino Women, Imelda Marcos dt'Clared, "At
no time in our nation's history has there been a more critical need to harness the
creative potentials of over half of the tOtal Philippine population in the development
process." Proceedings of the National Women>s Congress, Sponsored by the National
Commission on the Role of Filipino Women, Philippine International Convention
Center, 4-5 January 1980. This movement was
presidential decrees and
provisions for the encouragement of women's greater participation in the labor mar
ket, such as Letter of Instructions No. I066: "Targets and Strategies for the Fuil
Participation of Women in Socio-Economic Development ( 1980- I 985)" and "Update
hilippine Development Plan, 1984-1987;' ill The Women's Decade in the Philippines,
54
IS. See my "The Heretical Power of Nora Al1I1or's Himala
" in Fantasy-
Production.
16. Imelda Marcos notes, in the same speech cited above, women's "prior leadership in the
family;' which is "full of difficulties for it is often obstructed, harassed and
tradition" (6I -62).
I7. See McCallus, "The
18. Maranan, "Do Women Really Hold Up Half the Sky?" MAKIBAKA identified the au
thorities oppressing women as political, clan, religiOUS, and male (so). See de Dios,
"Participation of Women's Groups in the Anti-Dictatorship Struggle"; "The
Notes to Chapter Two 389
--
LSoledad
Brother
The Prison Letters
of George Jackson
.
Foreword by JonathanJackson/Jr.
Lawrence Hill Books