The Term Vaginal Economy Was First Used by a Feminist Columnist of A

Guest Editor’s Introduction

Vaginal Economy: Cinema and Sexuality in the Post-Marcos, Post-Brocka Philippines

The term vaginal economy was first used by a feminist columnist of a leading newspaper in the Philippines to refer to “how the otherwise legitimate deployment of Filipino women entertainers has deteriorated into their massive trafficking into sex work.”1 In the dominant Philippine — as well as the global — context, the term, however, evokes a much larger scope than sex trafficking, though certainly this subaltern sphere is essentially constitutive of the economy. About half of the 2.45 million people trafficked worldwide, 1.36 million, are from the Asia-Pacific region.2 Vaginal economy refers to the female sex as the primary instrument of national development and is char- acterized by the massive deployment of overseas contract workers (OCWs; as much as two-thirds are women), the greater sexualization of female domestic labor (sex work and trafficking as an extreme yet common feature; pigeon- holed in “3D” jobs that are “domestic, degrading and demeaning”), the

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feminization of male labor (also entering domestic work as the main thrust of OCW, and suffering a decline in employment in developed nations), and the double- or triple-feminization of female labor (breadwinning yet absent mother, transnational mothering and care, transnational economy of emotions and devotion; or being woman, foreign, and doing socially reproductive work). In the Philippine case, this is a legacy of the Marcos dictatorship (1965–86), which sought to ease national unemployment and other social problems by the export of Filipino labor, and labor’s further exploitation in the homeland via servicing multinational corporations, using their “nimble fingers and perfect eyesight” to do “dirty, dangerous, and difficult” jobs, mostly in garment and electronic factories inside export-processing zones. The rise of the vaginal economy in the Philippines is analogous to the rise of neoliberal globalization. What is happening in various national economies — the greater feminization of labor, poverty, and migration, for example — is emblematic of a Philippine phenomenon that is not isolated. The growth of vaginal economies elsewhere, even in first world sites, is related to the kind of substantiation of the vaginal economy in the Philippines. A discussion of the Philippine vaginal economy can illuminate the ways in which other growths are experienced relationally and globally. This anthology focuses on the filmic representations of the vaginal economy, where sexuality becomes integral in its substantiation. By marking the pathing of sexuality in this most recent capitalist subdevelopment, the conditions of the vaginal economy are foregrounded, laying bare the matrix of power of global capital, which in turn, makes possible and impossible the conditions of dialogue and contest for both hegemonic signification and counter-citizenship claims within this economy. While the vaginal economy is made to substantiate the phenomenon of neoliberalism as experienced in both intersticial and mainstream facets of the nation and its transnational experience, in citizens and their bodies, it is not intended to reify and objectify the “biologistic and normative conception of the Philippine labor diaspora.”3 By historicizing the global era, including its most recent effect — the 2008 global economic crisis — the systemic operations and contradictions of the vaginal economy and neoliberalism are laid bare, making contestations possible. In this sense, the vaginal economy is

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Jailed overseas contract worker Flor Contemplacion (Helen Gamboa) is interrogated by Singaporean police in Bagong bayani (New Hero, Tikoy Aguiluz, director, 1995). Personal collection of Cesar Hernando

the condition of possibility in neoliberalism to flourish and to be subverted. While the vaginal economy — precisely because of its massive deployment of female labor and feminization of labor — bears the marks of female labor and its material biologism, its discursive analysis presents simultaneous possibilities in which, at least in the Philippine case, biologism is reified, con- tested, and subverted. In mapping out the hegemonic operations and their subversion, the vaginal economy becomes “increasingly less about the vagina

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and more about forms of embodied practices, affect, emotions and feelings that are both political and economic, and cultural, and do not neatly map into gender binaries.”4 What film provides is a kind of effect and affect of the vaginal economy — on the one hand, to represent the collective experience of a people in tran- sit, or the desire of new characters — like the entertainer, domestic worker, Moro — to move elsewhere, and even feature film representations of the Filipino American and Chinese Filipino as contendable figures in filmic and historic imaginations; on the other hand, to make the worst conditions of human experience in recent capitalism and national development vicari- ously and historically pleasurable, privatizing the social desire for mobility, and even at the expense of holding at the disposal of the state, bodies and identities earmarked for integration. With or without film, sexuality is reworked for the vaginal economy through a reassignment and negotiation of transnational families, surrogate mothering and domestic relationship, and the production and reproduction of Filipino transnational automatons, ready to struggle within massive displacements and niche opportunities to survive and realize versions of middle-class mobility, among others. With film, however, the experience of the vaginal economy is materialized in bodies in film that retransform themselves, in audiences that witness the possibilities of their own bodily transformations, in audience-citizens and film artisans and producers as citizens dealing and betting on affective and emotional dreams of the conditions of the possible in the transnational experience, and the state that both oversees the further materialization and nega- tion of such dreams.

Beginnings and Rise of the Philippine Vaginal Economy Global financial institutions instigated structural development policies to mitigate the limits of national development, first along the Cold War Keynesian capitalist lines, then toward neoliberalism under the global order initiated and proliferated by the tandem of Reagan and Thatcher. From the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank (WB), to its satellite in the Asian Development Bank (ADB), and the new flagships, the World Trade Organization (WTO) and General Agreements on Trade and Tar-

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iff (GATT), and the Multilateral Agreement on Investment, the present experience with global economic integration has remained within the rubric of a capitalist development trajectory: “In 1976, 80 percent of all international transactions involved the buying and selling of goods and services. By 1997 only 2.5 percent of international transactions involved the buying and selling of goods and services. 97.5 percent were for speculation. . . . In the Philippine experience, this is reflected in the following data: in 1993, 66 percent of investment inflow was portfolio. In 1994, its share to total foreign investment reached 70 percent, 75 percent in 1995 and 86 percent in 1996.”5 Paradigmatic shifts in academe have, in turn, refocused attention from stra- tegic studies to area studies to an integrative interdisciplinarity and toward a critical cultural studies. Historical conditions of Spanish and Japanese, but more so U.S. colonial- isms, have reengineered the state to be accessible to transnational development — from the Galleon Trade that enabled commerce among Mexico, China, the Philippines, and Spain, to the first U.S. empire-building project outside the mainland, and to the Philippines’ strong alliance with the United States during the Cold War then and its global war on terrorism now. From its position as the second most prosperous nation in Asia next to Japan, the Philippines continues its economic decline, the result of Cold War, U.S.-infused economic policies.The early years of Marcos martial law, backed by mammoth loans from IMF-WB and aid from the U.S. government, sought to produce a boom period. The Marcoses complemented the U.S. policy of maintaining Cold War generals among its allies to control the military and elite factions and subsume its national economy to that of the United States. The Marcoses, in turn, would play on U.S. favors by woo- ing its enemies, with showcase visits to Libya, Cuba, the People’s Republic of China, and the Soviet Union. However, Marcos remained loyal to the United States by carrying the U.S. agenda in Southeast Asia and elsewhere. With massive corruption and misplaced structural adjustment programs, the Philippines would even lag behind Bangladesh and other poorer Asian economies in basic indicators of human development. Following the export of professionals in the 1960s, specifically to the United States when it liberalized its immigration policy, Marcos democratized access to foreign jobs ini- tially through the deployment of male laborers to the oil-boom economies of

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The most successful biographical film version about Flor Contemplacion, the domestic worker in Singapore, is the Flor Contemplacion Story (Joel Lamangan, director, 1995), which stars Nora Aunor. Personal collection of Cesar Hernando

the Middle East, and then through the export of women entertainers, with the first Japayuki (Filipina entertainer) landing in Japan in 1979. From thereon, the signs of the times have remained prominent in this vaginal economy. Some 10 million citizens, 10 percent of the Philippine population, are overseas contract workers. Nearly three thousand OCWs leave the country every day as part of the government policy of deploying “at least one million people” abroad annually.6 With 992,000 families having an OCW member, this far outweighs the households who do not have an OCW member.7 Foreign currency remittance is steadily increasing, despite global economic downturns, the most recent of which are the 1997 and 2008 crises. In the 1990s, the Philippines was already the second largest exporter of labor in the world, and close to one in six or 4.1 million Filipino migrant workers are overseas; 1.8 million of these are undocumented workers.8 Tied to

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familial love, the overseas workers act as sacrificial lambs to provide for the basic needs of their families and loved ones on a more or less regular basis. Their remittance supports 6 percent of the total number of families,9 making the country the second largest foreign currency earner from its export of labor in the world. The 2007 remittance of $14 billion is nearly half of the national budget, above 10 to 13.5 percent of gross domestic savings. The ADB estimates the remittance to be between $14 and $21 billion, dwarfing the $2 billion in foreign direct investments the country received in 2006.10 In terms of numbers, the Philippine overseas contract labor predominates in the niche markets of socially reproductive labor: domestic, entertainment, sex, medicine and nursing, and blue collar work. One in four seafarers is a Filipino OCW.11 Women represent the trajectory of this labor-export development. Fil- ipinas outnumber the male OCWs twelve to one for Asian destinations but are less than a third of those going to the Middle East.12 Of the total land- based deployment of newly hired OCWs in 1992, 50 percent were women; in 1994, this increased to 58 percent; in 1999, 64 percent; and in 2001, 72 percent.13 They found niche areas in global jobs — 80,000 entertainers in Japan (before the cut in 2005 that reduced the official number to 8,000), 150,000 workers in Hong Kong (2002), 20,000 in Malaysia, 34,602 in Taiwan, and 60,000 in Singapore. In Taiwan, for example, by the end of May 2003, there were 6,206 maids and 113,655 nursing workers, most of which were Filipi- nas.14 The United States is the biggest employer of Filipino OCWs, with 2.7 million Filipinos.15 The underside of this development involves women and children. Some five hundred thousand women are involved in sex work, the same size of the manufacturing sector in the Philippines. Of the 25 million Filipinos between five and seventeen years old, some 4 million are economically active, that is, one out of six children has been forced into the labor force.16 As many as 2.2 million children work in hazardous conditions, and 60,000 to 100,000 minors are sexually exploited.17 The present demand for child labor intensifies the low graduation rate in the educational system — out of one hundred students that enter the first grade, only sixty- six will finish their elementary education; fifty-eight will continue, but only forty-three will complete high school; twenty-three will proceed to college, but only fourteen will finish.18

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Filipinas outnumber the men in OCW, making up 70 percent of newly hired workers from 2000 to 2005.19 In top deployment spots, the female workers’ population is staggering: 93 percent of OCWs in Hong Kong, 74 percent in Kuwait, and 53 percent in Japan are Filipinas.20 The median age of women OCWs is thirty-two, three years younger than men.21 Nearly half of OCWs come from Luzon, the main island in the Philippines; four out of every ten OCWs have reached college level while three are high school grad- uates.22 OCWs are reshaping national and individual educational drives and employment focus. Fifteen thousand health professionals, including 3,500 nurses, leave the country every year.23 As to the preferred OCW employment, in 2004, an estimated six thousand doctors enrolled in nursing schools to work as caregivers or nurses abroad.24 Such downgrading of education for OCW is not new; in 1995, there were some 152,000 migrant workers in Hong Kong, 85 percent from the Philippines, with some 130,000 “college educated.”25 Migration work is also bleeding the nation’s health services, as 88 percent of its health professionals have gone abroad. One hundred thousand of its nurses left the country from 1994 to 2003,26 exacerbating the national situation and leaving half of the population with no access to health care.27 Also astonishing is that “about twenty thousand Filipino nurses go to thirty-one countries all over the world and only about eight thousand nurses enter the profession each year.”28 About one-third of the annual Philippine budget is tied up for debt servicing, while an additional 20 to 30 percent is lost to corruption. Foreign debt, after all, financed the needs of multinational development (infrastructure, textbooks, and establishment of agencies, among others) and sustained tra- ditional national politics (corruption and pork barrel to support patronage politics). The structural adjustments of global financing agencies, especially during the Marcos period, dictated macro and micro policies to guarantee approval of new loans, including economic development emphasis on new collegiate programs, literacy and numeracy skills for each grade level, stan- dardized exams for college entrants, and so on. These structural adjustments would maximize the competitive advantage of Filipinos — cheap labor, pro- ficiency in English, army of surplus bodies, high literacy rate — and together with Marcosian fascism, would substantiate the being of the modern citizen. The glaring fact remains that, despite the massive migration, most Filipinos

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Mila (Nora Aunor), a nurse, waits for the New York subway in Merika (America, Gil Portes, director, 1984). Personal collection of Cesar Hernando

are poor: 26 million Filipinos, or 30 percent of the population, are poor; and in November 2006, a survey reported that 2.9 million families have had nothing to eat.29 Furthermore, between 1989 and 1998, some 150,000 Filipina fiancées have migrated overseas for marriage.30 The Philippines is regarded as the “most dependent on overseas remittances in the world.”31 The vaginal economy is not just a residue of a third world development gone wrong. It is not just a subsphere of global development. It is in itself the matrix of Philippine development in the Marcos period and thereafter, so much in dialogue with global development experimentations. Especially in politics and economics, the Philippines became the laboratory of global intelligence and financial agencies. In the 1970s and 1980s, the “low-intensity conflict” of the Central Intelligence Agency that fostered the proliferation of vigilante groups and death squads, which spread throughout the country to neutralize both legal people’s movements and the underground insurgency. In the 2000s, this policy would later be transformed into the “preemptive

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war” doctrine that also sought to cut people’s support to the insurgency. It included political killings, and so stunning is this action that since current Gloria Macapagal Arroyo’s assumption of power in 2001, more than a thousand activists have been systematically murdered and hundreds abducted. The Philippine state underwrites the violence as part of a surveillance and discipline mechanism.

Sexuality and Cinema in the Vaginal Economy Filmmaker Lino Brocka primarily challenged the megalomania of the Mar- coses through an aesthetics of poverty, that is, the proliferation of counter- images of abject social realities and people struggling against systemic oppression. Marcos and Brocka would become major arbiters of Philippine postmodernity, and their critical legacies continue to the present day. Their contest for nation building would interestingly begin at a time in the 1970s when Reagan and Thatcher were invoking and engineering neoliberalism — with key concepts such as deregulation, privatization, and commercialization — as a newer modality of a global national development. This neoliberalism would reverberate in the post-Marcos administrations, seemingly countering Marcos’s legacy of excess and yet unabashedly assuming for the Philippines a supplementary conduit role in global development. Marcos and Brocka would become bookend geopolitical markers of the imperative for the discourse of a transnational national development — their legacy of critique of and complicity with state formation remains emplaced in the present Philippines. More than any other president, Marcos bureaucratized the national movie industry, creating the most number of regulating bodies that still continue to woe the film industry. He and his predecessors controlled the appoint- ment of the censorship board or its equivalent in future agencies, thereby also scrutinizing film and television images for their representative worthi- ness in nation-building efforts. Brocka led protests against state censorship and other forms of oppression, even as his films would be entangled in some of these cases. He challenged Imelda Marcos’s dictum of “truth, good, and beautiful” in her sense of official nation building by proliferating images of poverty and systemic disenfranchisement on the screen. Metaphorically,

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these figures head locked in contesting claims in the representation of the nation. The Marcoses’ departure from the presidency paved the way for a major restructuring of the national economy that would be more amenable to global neoliberalization. With the economy bankrupt, neoliberalism’s withholding of state participation in economic ventures went amiably in post-Marcos affairs. Succeeding presidencies of Corazon Aquino (1986–92), Gloria Macapa- gal Arroyo (2001–to date), and especially that of Fidel Ramos (1992–98), intensified privatization of state assets and companies. Aquino returned the electric distribution company to its premartial law owner, along with other companies taken over by Marcos during his nationalization of key industries. Ramos executed the most massive privatization and deregulation of the various oil, water, and telecommunications industries. With the opening of the telecommunications industry, the cell phone has become a marker of middle-class lifestyle, but of a Philippine variety — the cell phone is used for the short message system (SMS), and so popular is this function that the country has been given the title of “texting capital of the world” whose vol- ume of text messages exceeds that of the European Union three-fold. When actor and Senator Joseph Estrada (1998–2001) became president, his nationalist ideals were eroded wholesale. Estrada voted for the abroga- tion of the military-base treaty with the United States when he was senator. As president, he continued the free-trade agreements and other policies of the WTO and GATT. The military base sites would become showcases of resurgent special economic zones, attracting a new clientele of business- men and tourists to nightclubs and sex workers. Later, when Arroyo became president, she harped on macro-politics to reengineer the national economy, but was primarily attuned to satisfying global competitiveness and intensifying labor export. Brocka intermittently played on commercialism and social critique to further his political vision in film. With his untimely death in 1991, and also of another auteur pillar in the film industry, Ishmael Bernal in 1996, the second golden age of Philippine cinema came to a close by the mid- 1990s. It is ironic that the Marcoses’ massive support for the film industry at a time of Ferdinand Marcos’s deepening suppression would produce a golden age. Films were artistically astute and were in indirect dialogue with

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Legal and illegal Filipino migrant workers in Italy gather in a much-anticipated reunion in Milan (Olivia M. Lamasan, director, 2004). Personal collection of Cesar Hernando

the Marcos developmentalism; they included scenes replete with poverty, a claustrophobic feel, nighttime scenes, and the fall of the hero and heroine. For over a decade after Brocka’s and Bernal’s deaths, Philippine cinema searched for a visual idiom to articulate for its own and the international audience a synecdoche of national realities. Brocka would use poverty as this contrapuntal imagery; Bernal, the middle-class bind of disempower- ment and nihilism. With emphasis on the global competitiveness of the Fili- pinos and their diligence, the succeeding generation of directors used both similar and experimental forms of showcasing poverty but with very little local and international acclaim. By the end of the 1990s, the film industry was already on a decline. The production that peaked at two hundred films per year dwindled to thirty-six in 2005. The light at the end of the tun- nel, however, came in the proliferation of independent films — funded by individuals, businesses, and cultural institutions — and newer documentary

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film collectives (movement-based) that sought to articulate divergent stories of becoming selves and nation. Using nonmainstream actors but sup- ported by a few major ones, shooting in digital cameras, and working on low-installment budgets ($10,000), a newer and younger crop of directors, actors, scriptwriters, cinematographers, and editors are paving the way for a new Philippine cinema via the digital independent cinema. The envagination of the Philippine economy, from its beginnings in the Marcos–Nixon-to-Reagan era to its massive mobilization in the Arroyo- Bush moment, attests to the entrenchment in the nationalizing operations of global neoliberalism. The global economic crisis of 2008 results from the core value of neoliberalism: “a belief that markets are self-adjusting and that the role of governments should be minimal.”32 In the global schema of things, the Philippines provided the female labor for the growing demand for domestic jobs. In exchange for the U.S. vote of geopolitical confidence, Philippine presidents offered resources and key industries and services to U.S. banks and businesses. After the Marcos dictatorship and into the Aquino period (1986–92), the economy lagged behind most of its Southeast Asian neighbors. The full weight of neoliberalism wasn’t felt until the post- Marcos period jump started its implementation. By 1995, key businesses, such as telecommunications and banking, were being liberalized. By 1997, public services, such as water distribution, were being privatized. These maneuvers aggravated the problems of employment and quality of life of Filipinos in the onslaught of the 1997 Asian financial crisis. The Philippine state emplaced the country and its citizens within the matrix of neoliberalism, and what would be the U.S. global war on terror. After the rejection by the Philippine Senate of the extension of the U.S.-Philippines Military Bases Treaty in 1992, and under the guise of the Mutual Defense Treaty, the 1998 Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA) allows the joint staging of military exercises of a minimum of six months every year. Arroyo (2001–to date) became one of Bush’s main allies in his staging of the United States’ global war on terror. The economic crisis of 2008, a conflation of errors in the high-tech, housing, banking, and financial institutions on the one hand, and the global war on terror on the other hand, elucidates the far-reaching scope of unprecedented well-focused effects. By December 2006, the derivatives market had ballooned to $414.8 trillion, and

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by June 2008, it further skyrocketed to $683.7 trillion.33 Also in the same year, a United Nations study reports that “the richest 2% of the world’s population own more than half of all household income . . . and the poorer half of the world’s population own barely 1% of global wealth.”34 The soaring oil prices have made the production of recreational vehicles (RVs) virtually extinct, leaving thousands of workers in Elkhart, Indiana, the “RV capital of the world,” and nearby areas without jobs.35 Nearly half of the 8,610 toy companies operating in 2008 in Guangdong, China, which produces half of the world’s toys, are now closed.36 It is also no historical accident that the Philippine sites chosen for joint military exercises in the VFA have serious ongoing insurgency movements. The road to the 2008 crisis, tangentially, is analogous to the rise, deployment, and development of, as well as the sufferance experienced in, the Philippine vaginal economy. The analysis of the contestations of the vaginal economy, as a Filipino/cultural production, can be rendered as a way of mobilizing the possibility of a more expansive critique of neoliberalism and capitalism in the light of the ongoing global crisis, and beyond. A word of caution, however, remains imminent in any undertaking of a discourse of the vaginal economy: the danger of “using the female body for feminist ends,”37 or the heteronormative trajectory of the economy, and its tendency to universalize the experiences of woman in the Filipina body. This is neither a project of constituting the political economy of structures that primarily define newer women’s experiences nor a concrete adaptation of Jacques Derrida’s quintessential gesture of deconstruction via envagination of the hymen. The discourse of the vaginal economy is a historical and geographic mapping out of power and its diffusion in both nation-states and collective bodies, a cultural “vaginal” politics of the most recent develop- ments of the transnation in neoliberalism. It is not simply expressed in the language of dissemination and contamination, but in the cultural politics, of the neoliberal logic that ensures the continuity and flows of, as well as dis- ruption and raptures in, individualized kinetic movements and containment of the conditions of the nation-state. The heteronormative casting and reproducibility of the state and capital of the vaginal economy precisely sutures woman, female labor, and femininity within a universalizing transnational discourse of privatization, commercialization, and marketization. Through

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an analysis of film — the visual, aural, its digitization, as a program and contest of the state and capital — some of the hegemonic contradictions in the calibration of the vaginal economy are foregrounded, making alternative meanings and substantiation possible.

Representations of the Cultures of the Vaginal Economy The anthology examines the popular representation of film in the vaginal economy in the post-Marcos, post-Brocka Philippines. As the nation was resexualized for national and global development, so too was sexuality mobilized in young workers’ bodies. Since the 1990s, films introduced the OCW character, his or her story in various parts of the world, or their families in the nation. Brocka’s mise-en-scène and narrative, in which images and subplots tackled the diasporic lives and the transnational links, led to a closure that, more often than not, tackled individualistic options to social antagonisms. What becomes of recent Philippine cinema is the overt display of transnational linkages and an examination of these issues through a slower pace of story telling, including the use of modernist conventions and a “life goes on” neorealism instead of life ending in high drama. Documen- taries are refocusing on advocacy work, or are even becoming educational tools to politicize a disenchanted public. In this collection of thirteen articles, the scope, depth, and substance of the vaginal economy in film are explored, especially focusing on issues of sexuality that overdetermine this field. While discussing specific films and concepts, the articles begin with larger issues of transnationality and violence, moving to issues of cultural identity formation, and to specific symp- tomatic issues of feudal desire, star creation, and envaginated and visual- ized economies characteristic of Philippine cinema and sexuality in the post-Marcos, post-Brocka era. Francisco Benitez’s article, “Transnational Questing Desire in Star Cinema’s Kailangan Kita and Milan,” analyzes the transnational cultural politics embedded in the vaginal economy, where cultural labor — both affective and emotional — becomes the primordial undertaking in the organization and mobilization of social networks and OCW bodies. What is interesting in the two diasporic films analyzed is the modality of articulating and speaking for the condition of the present,

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asking about need and love in the filmic narrative as ways of probing into questions of patrimony and social justice. Such necessity of double-speak is rooted in state violence, and to which Jonathan L. Beller’s “The Martial Art of ‘Cinema’: Modes of Virtuosity à la Hong Kong and the Philippines” addresses the vectors of cinema (in another double-speak, as a form of social- ization and weapon) in the “relentless capitalization of sensuality.” The real is produced through the visualization, digitization, and materialization of the image through farce in cinema and capital. As the real wanes, cinema- as-weapon produces a counter-farcical imaginary. His article provides a timely discussion of the rise of new Chinese cinemas and Philippine digital independent cinema as tropes to decipher the most recent representations of farce and state violence in the neoliberal age of capitalism, and of course, the people and artists’ struggle and resistance. The partisanship of cinema — described by Ryan Canlas as a kind of “subjective cinema” in “The Time of Poverty and the Image of Refusal” — becomes the political artistic intervention in the national condition of violence of the state and its massification of poverty in people’s lives. Using the documentary film Masakit sa Mata (Eyesores), about street children, Canlas reframes the Marxist concept of labor through “labor time” as the parallel revalidation of state power and counter-citizenship claims, voiding and devoiding the most disenfranchised laborer in street children’s work. The film implicates the web of imperialist globalization, which, in the first instance, predetermines the national conditions of massive poverty. This, however, is undermined by the collective refusal of the documentary image against labor time’s annihilation of actual people’s lives. The ensuing corruption of both image and reality is explored in succeeding articles that deal with the particularity of violence in issues of spirituality, masculinity, and of being Chinese, Moro, Filipino Americans, and domestic and entertainer OCWs. The experience of an imperialist neoliberal-induced development perme- ates every sphere of people’s national and transnational lives. One result of the massive experience with state violence and poverty is the rise of the spiri- tual film. In Patrick D. Flores’s “Peripheral Visionaries: Corruptive Mysti- cism and the Problem of Miracle,” the turn inward is made spectacularly feminine, mystical, and miraculous. Flores historicizes the collective reliance

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Actress Carmi Martin is packing while revealing a thought to her lover in a scene in To Saudi with Love (Emmanuel Borlaza, director, 1997)

on filmic miracle work through the rise of media-encouraged religiosity, and examines particular counter-takes in filmic representation that fore- grounds a divergent reading on the production of spectacle amidst massive poverty. The production of a new belief system, this time in masculinity, is also questioned by Reuben Ramas Cañete’s “The Macho Machine: Male Sexual Commodification in Philippine Realist Film.” Particularly using the filmic representations of the “macho dancer” or male dancer for a gay clientele, the macho machine represents the incorporation of young men into sexualized work to realize their mobile dreams, and in turn, these films get to be heralded as representations of a global Philippine cinema. The allegorical turn illuminates the ways in which an effeminate national masculinity becomes the representation of the nation in imperialist globalization, one that is complicit in the marketization of macho-induced services in imperialist globalization.

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What would also proliferate in cinema as a kind of postmodern detour to subcultural identities and communities that get to be downplayed in the flattening experience of imperialist globalization are disparate hyphenated identities whose valuation is overdetermined by their economic status and contribution. In Richard T. Chu, it is the effete Chinese identity; in Gladys Nubla, the Moro; and in Elizabeth H. Pisares, the Filipino American. These three articles unmask the issues of social visibility and invisibility in films representing a kind of cottage industry built into the stereotyping and debunking of historical social communities. Chu’s “Strong(er) Women and Effete Men: Negotiating Chinese-ness in Philippine Cinema at a Time of Transnationalism” analyzes the process of formation and negotiation of Chinese identity in the national body and cultural politics. Through the popular Mano Po film series that represents various epochs leading to con- temporary Chinese presence, Chu historicizes the filmic takes on exclusion and control of Chinese population as the transnational matrix of cultural hegemony that makes possible localization, domestication, and negotiation by the Chinese themselves. Nubla also historicizes the Moro presence as a pejoratively perceived existence in “Managing the ‘Moro Problem’: Fractured Nation/Narration in Bagong buwan.” The film is read as both symptom and embodiment of the contradictions of the state and other players — where a reactive peace agenda becomes the convenient prescription to deal with the Moro problem. Thus the Moro presence — represented in film as the trope of the woman — becomes the necessary condition of the fractured nation, able neither to sustain a harmonious religious tolerance and integration nor to militarily and politically enforce a silencing of the Moros. Pisares’s “The Social-Invisibility Narrative in Filipino-American Feature Films” reexamines the rise of Filipino-American filmmaking from short pedagogical documentaries to full-length fictional films, and the elaboration of the social-invisibility narrative in the latter becomes vital in the tactic of a gender divide in community formation. Two other articles further focus on the diasporic movements of Filipinos elsewhere as OCWs. In Nobue Suzuki’s “ ‘Japayuki,’ or, Spectacles for the Transnational Middle Class,” the Filipina entertainer’s abjected working body in Japan becomes the locus for a rereading of racial, national, and gender discourses of commodity transformation of labor itself and their

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bodies. The drives to traffic and control the traffic of sexual bodies in Japan becomes incidental in the greater drive to realize that these bodies are trans- formative commodities, with the same high hopes of uplifting — through the sacrificing OCW body — the bodies of loved ones in the homeland. Like the tragic death of the entertainer Maricris Sioson in Japan, the subject of Suzuki’s bio-film analysis, a corollary death is analyzed in Filipina domestic workers’ bodies in Benjamin McKay’s “The Politics of Mirrored Metaphors: Flor Cotemplacion and The Maid.” Contemplacion becomes another failed heroism, executed in Singapore for killing two people. Contending national- isms are analyzed in McKay’s article as especially represented in the successful Singapore horror movie, The Maid, which has a young Filipina domestic worker as the central terror-subject. The film is interesting for posturing an alternative dialogue with and critique of Philippine nationalism via a Singaporean articulation of the contestable Contemplacion incident, foreign workers, and its own national antimony. The last three articles particularize the vaginal economy in related libidinal fronts — real, risk management, sexualization, and transnational imaginary. The last wave of soft-porn films in Philippine cinema produced a series of sex-oriented films bearing titles of agricultural produce, set in the rural, and with contending patriarchal and feudal values. Alvin Yapan’s “Feudal Desires: Sexualizing Agriculture in the Philippine Film Industry” reframes the most recent soft-porn films in the context of the liberalization of Philip- pine agriculture under pressure from the WTO-GATT. Under pressure from cinema complexes to come up with non-R-18 movies, soft-porn films virtually disappeared. In that moment where they proliferated, the global and national desires for women’s and men’s bodies, and agriculture itself, became sexualized in the rhetorical and historical contest for the epochal interpretation. Such narratives, practices, and realities are based on issues of risk management, a kind of “casino capitalism” even or especially in a nation such as the Philippines. In Jema Pamintuan’s “Risk Management, Probability, and the Theory of Games in Segurista (The Insurer) and Kubrador (The Bet Collector),” the mobilization of sex in women becomes the libidinal drive for domestic and national mobility. Finally, in Sarah Raymundo’s “In the Womb of the Global Economy: Anak and the Construction of Transnational

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Imaginaries,” the transnational imaginary becomes the formative site for the dual export of poverty and possibilities of resistance. The article is attuned to the neoliberal agenda in the film industry and national development drives that fuel the proliferation and acceptance of discourses on the historical and filmic domestic characters. As an offshoot of Marcosian strategy of labor export, the more recent OCW films reify both the perpetuation of the labor developmentalist model in the cultural sense and the ensuing “form of spectatorship constantly mined by capital for its continued stability” in the economic sense. By highlighting sexuality and cinema in social analysis, the historic moment of the formation and transformation of the vaginal economy is foregrounded. The articles in this anthology attempt to grapple with the contest in the rise and development and even the transnational growth of the vaginal economy in various sites, all, whether directly or not, alluding to the national state and imperialist globalization as the dialectical libidinal drives that emplace hegemonic and resistant social and filmic representations. Within these frames, the farce of it all is made pronounced, uttering a particular Philippine idiom in the age of imperialist globalization on the one hand, and in future scholarship, a more glaring parallel and asymmetri- cal rise of the vaginal economy in other global sites, on the other hand.

Global Vaginal Economy There are some 191 million people living elsewhere outside the nation of their birth, representing 3 percent of the world’s population.38 Generally, there are more women than men immigrants. Although most migrants are legal, some 30 to 40 million people are undocumented (15 to 25 percent of the immigrant population). Most data show that there are more undocumented men migrants than women. Even if 42 percent of the 10 million undocumented workers in the United States are women, the number is still enormous. The movement remains unilateral as 86 million economically active migrants have moved from developing to developed countries, popu- lating the bottom and top employment ranks in the developed countries.39 Global remittances in 2005 have reached $233 billion worldwide, of which

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$167 billion went to developing countries, twice as much as the money for official development assistance.40 U.S. culture especially in the age of satellite media will remain the soft- sell push for the U.S. nation-state’s ideology. Hollywood has dominated the global film and entertainment market, eroding once-robust national film industries. Cable media remains in the hands of the big entertainment conglomerates. Neoliberal dreams will be more privatized than ever, foregrounding dreamwork in the geoscape of pleasure rather than its dialectics with pain and anguish. If, as John Carlos Rowe states, “late capitalism thrives in fear, even employing fear as the principal marketing strategy,” then the logic of “U.S. imperialism since Vietnam has worked steadily to ‘import’ the world and to render global differences aspects of the U.S. nation — in short, to internalize and ‘hypernationalize’ transnational issues.”41 What then this results in, for the rest of the world, is a greater contestation for the residu- als of U.S. transnationalism. Academe that moves along U.S. hegemonic nationalist trajectories of transnationalism is also implicated for either its entrapment in negotiations (especially in migration, diasporic, and trans nationalist studies) as the end result of an imperialist globalization or its zero-grounding in U.S. hegemony, both of which do not seek a “relational logics” and positioning with other especially contending discourses.42 Yet downsides in the vaginal economy abound, especially in areas where sex is integral. In Hong Kong, for example, the imprisonment of women, especially those engaged in sex work, become a migration mechanism control. With 188 inmates for every 100,000 in population, Hong Kong’s imprisonment rate, with the exception of the United States and Singapore, is highest in the rest of Asia and most developed countries.43 In Lesotho, the presence of detergent boxes in house windows is a signal that the husband or boyfriends of women are visiting, and “that the men who have been sup- porting them in exchange for sex should lie low.”44 The privatized public life of women working in the garment industry and engaged in part-time sex work with multiple partners and benefactors helped propel the highest incidence of AIDS in women. Fifty-seven percent of those infected in sub- Saharan Africa, including Lesotho, are women.45 As a result, there are one hundred thousand AIDS orphans in Lesotho, up by thirty-two thousand

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in two years.46 Thus, it is not improbable to state that part of the movement toward heightening imperialist globalization is also the growing feminization of epidemics, particularly AIDS.47 While OCW remains in demand, immigration policies and labor laws are becoming more stringent for the foreign worker. Alex Varona, a migrant advocate, says, “Compared to ten years ago, Korean immigration procedures have gotten more complicated and discriminatory against people suspected of becoming undocumented migrant workers.”48 In Singapore, domestic workers do not fall into the category of “foreign workers” and therefore are not subject to the nation’s labor laws. Post-9/11 United States remains one of the most stringent countries, if not the most stringent country, in terms of immigration for OCWs and tourists with nonpreferred status. Its global anti- terrorism war has made terrorism a national drive for its allies, and a transnational endeavor. Even as neoliberalism projects a more fluid movement of people, goods, and products, the nation-state remains protective in weeding out or disenfranchising the historically marginalized to keep wages low and middle-class living conditions fully ungraspable. In this context, gains by social movements become feats, as in the resistance of migrant workers in Hong Kong to the authorities’ attempts at huge pay cuts on foreign domestic wages — by 35 percent in 1998 and about 15 percent in 2001 — although the government succeeded in shaving 11 percent in 2003.49 Within the services privileged in neoliberalism, the contest for entertainment and domestic commodities and services remains intense. The Philip- pines suffered the biggest drop of more than 50 percent in theater admis- sions, from 131 million in 1996 to 65 million in 2004, with the number of movie houses also decreasing, 970 screens in 1997 to 600 in 2006.50 Enter- tainment desires have been privatized via piracy, with $33 million lost due to pirated movies.51 The piracy loss of P4.5 billion or $92.8 million in 2005 is more than the P2.8 billion box-office receipts from local movies.52 Outside the purview of Hollywood, independent digital filmmaking is flourishing in the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, and Thailand. Not closed to the idea of being circulated in international film festival markets, these independent films attest to newer social experiences and identities, especially ten years after the Southeast Asian region was hit by its biggest financial crisis.

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What the vaginal economy attests to is a newer international, sexual, and social reproductive division of global labor — who gets to work for whom and under what conditions. The Age of Migration may seem to have diverted the attention to the recipient nation-states, where flexibilization, casualiza- tion, and feminization of labor remain prevalent through the outsourcing of the global assembly line — a newer relation of production that is getting to be more efficient for global multinational businesses still into commodity production. In the Philippines, “due to contractualization, 60,000 regular workers lost their jobs in 1996, another 62,736 in 1997, and yet another 129,965 in 1998 and an average of 4, 000 workers lost their jobs daily since 1997.”53 “Currently, almost 10 million Filipinos, approximately one-third of the entire labor force are unemployed and actively seeking jobs.”54 A relational growth in flows is experienced in the ways OCWs from particular nation-states work in particular sites and jobs. There are 3 million workers in seven major labor-importing states (Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, Tai- wan, Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand), with workers coming from four countries (China, Indonesia, Philippines, and Thailand).55 In 1993–94, for example, with some 2 million migrant workers from Southeast Asia, the biggest flows were from Thailand to Taiwan, and the Philippines to Hong Kong, Japan, and Taiwan.56 The contribution of women OCWs to the “pro- fessionalization of domesticity” remains emplaced and problematic.57 Sixty percent of children of Filipino OCWs dream of becoming one themselves in the future.58 If what Rebecca Saunders says of immigrants, that “the foreigner [is] at the gate of globalization,” is to be held true, then “global foreigns” consti- tute the uncanny in the seemingly seamless capitalist mode of production.59 They are constitutive of the unconscious of capitalism and Western civilization in general, yet are perceived as “material objects: they are the subjects of reification, their value assessed in terms of capacity for physical labor or embodied service, their presence confined to the body.”60 Such materiality of the body, where sexuality is underscored, is dialectically related to a relational transnationality, where unequal contestation for being, experience, and signification are poised through transnationalism. The foreigner is no longer at the gate, the foreigner is among us. The anthology illuminates the dialectics of the self and foreign, nation-

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ality and transnationality in the crucial presence and present state of the Philippine and global states in the intensifying episode of imperialist globalization. The vaginal economy provides the nexus and affect to engage in the ongoing heightened flows and counterflows of neoliberalization, where bodies and sexualities are transformed and retransformed individually and col- lectively, and with the figure of the OCW and multinational laborer in the confines of the nation-state, how sexuality is being socially reproduced for passage and hopes of social mobility. If as “globalization in late capitalism changes relations of production marked by a labor strategy that stresses min- imizing cost and maximizing flexibility,” then foregrounding more recent globalization allows for the mapping out of power structures and relations in which new identities and social formations are productively, albeit prob- lematically, transformed.61 The Philippine vaginal economy traces one such complex route, which reverberates in other related sites, relationally foregrounding the violence and struggle in the state and corporation-induced conditions of the possible and impossible in the transnational predicament, especially in these times of great economic, political, and cultural crises. — Rolando B. Tolentino, Guest Editor

Notes

1. Rina Jimenez-David, “From ‘Vaginal’ to ‘Phenomenal,’ ” Philippine Daily Inquirer, May 14, 2002, reprinted in Kapatiran: Newsletter of Philippine Solidarity Network of Aotearoa, Issue 22, January 2003, www.converge.org.nz/psna/Kapatiran/KapNo22/Kap22Art/art79.htm, (accessed May 9, 2011). 2. Veronica Uy, “1.35M Trafficked Persons from Asia — ILO Estimates,” Inquirer.net, January 26, 2007, globalnation.inquirer.net/news/breakingnews/view/20070126–45807/1.36M_traf ficked_persons_from_Asia_ — _ILO_estimates. 3. I am thankful to the blind reviewers for calling to my attention the reproducibility of the vaginal economy within discourses of female biologicism and normativity, allowing me to rethink the conceptual framework and possibly recast it with greater clarity and discursivity. 4. This eloquent comment comes from one of the blind reviewers. I could not have phrased it in a better way. 5. EILER, Inc., Labor Flexibilization and Imperialist Crisis: Intensifying Exploitation, Disman-

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tling Job Security, Liquidating Unions (Manila: Institute of Political Economy, 2000), citing ILRIG 1998, quoted in Ligaya Lindio-McGovern, “Neo-Liberal Globalization in the Phil- ippines: Its Impact on Filipino Women and Their Forms of Resistance,” www.sssp1.org/ extras/global%20symposium/McGovern.English.pdf (accessed March 28, 2011). 6. Kanlungan Center Foundation, Fast Facts on Filipino Labor Migration (Quezon City: Kan- lungan Center Foundation, 2000), cited in Odine de Guzman, “Overseas Filipino Work- ers, Labor Circulation in Southeast Asia, and the (Mis)management of Overseas Migra- tion Programs,” Kyoto Review, October 2003, kyotoreview.cseas.kyoto-u.ac.jp/issue/issue3/ article_281.html. 7. “The 992,000 households or 4.7 million members with a family member who is an OCW enjoy more leisure activities and acquire more gadgets than households without one.” Syn- ergy Business Consultancy, cited in Manila Bulletin (March 19, 2011), Pinoy-OFW, www .pinoy-ofw.com/news/7263–research-shows-higher-quality-life-families-ofws.html (accessed April 22, 2011). 8. Jan Jindy Pettman, “Women on the Move: Globalisation and Labour Migration from South and Southeast Asian States,” Global Society: Journal of Interdisciplinary International Studies 12 (1998): 393. 9. Soriano, “Truths and Myths.” 10. “One million Filipinos join diaspora,” Agence France-Presse, globalnation.inquirer.net/ news/breakingnews/view/20070123–45044/One_million_Filipinos_join_diaspora (accessed April 22, 2011). 11. Maruja M. B. Asia, “The Philippines’ Culture of Migration,” Migration Policy Institute, www.migrationinformation.net/Feature/print.cfm?ID=364 (accessed November 16, 2007). 12. Pettman, “Women on the Move,” 395. 13. de Guzman, “Overseas Filipino Workers.” 14. Shu-ju Ada Cheng, “When the Personal Meets the Global at Home: Filipina Domestics and Their Female Employers in Taiwan,” Frontiers 25 (2004): 33. 15. “One million Filipinos.” 16. National Statistics Office, quoted in “Suffer the Children,” Philippine Daily Inquirer, May 15, 2002, available at www.lifeissues.net/writers/edi/edi_01childlabor.html (accessed April 22, 2011). 17. Ibid. 18. Department of Education, quoted in “The Present Educational Crisis and Our Campaign,” Alliance of Concerned Teachers, www.actphils.com/2007//educsit (accessed April 22, 2011). 19. David Dizon, “Study: Number of Female OFWs increasing,” tubagbohol.mikeligalig.com/ national/number-of-female-ofws-increasing/?PHPSESSID=074acb90ea7cca88a7dca9739a3 517ef;wap2 (accessed April 22, 2011). 20. Ibid. 21. Quoted from State of Philippine Population Report 4: Filipinos beyond Borders, Popula-

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tion and Development Dimensions of Overseas Labor (Manila: Commission on Population, National Economic and Development Authority, 2008), in Noel Sales Barcelona, “Femi- nization of Labor Migration in RP,” Migrant Watch 7 (2007), Bulatlat, www.bulatlat.com/ main/2007/12/09/feminization-of-labor-migration-in-rp/ (accessed March 28, 2011). 22. Ibid. 23. World Health Organization, quoted in Ibid. 24. Ibid. 25. Pettman, “Women on the Move,” 395. 26. Dr. Jaime Galvez-Tan, cited in Aubrey S. K. Makilan, “Poor Pay, Working Conditions Are Driving Health Professionals Abroad,” Bulatlat Vol. 5, No. 43 (December 4–10, 2005), www.bulatlat.com/news/5–43/5–43–poor.htm (accessed April 22, 2011). 27. Health Alliance for Democracy, cited in Aubrey S. K. Manikan, “Devolution and Corpora- tization of Health Services: The Solution or the Problem?” Bulatlat Vol. 5, No. 43 (Decem- ber 4–10, 2005), www.bulatlat.com/news/5–43/5–43–services.htm (accessed April 22, 2011). 28. Also astonishing is that “the annual outflow of Filipino nurses is now three times greater than the annual production of licensed nurses of 6,500 to 7,000 year.” Dr. Jaime Galvez Tan, cited in Patricia Adversario, “Nurses’ Exodus Making Health System Sick,” Inter Press Service News Agency, ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=18202 (accessed April 22, 2011). 29. Rosilyn Baraquiel, “Work on Quality of Jobs, Not Just on Statistics,” letter to the editor, Inquirer.net, December 19, 2006, opinion.inquirer.net/inq7viewpoints/letters/view_article .php?article_id=39089. 30. GABRIELA Philippines, “Some Basic Data on Philippine Women,” Manila, 1998, in Can- ada: The New Frontier for Filipino Mail-Order Brides, Philippine Women Centre of B.C., www.dsp-psd.pwgsc.gc.ca/Collection/SW21–62–2000E.pdf (accessed March 28, 2011). 31. Sonny Africa, IBON Foundation, “ ‘A cause for alarm’: RP most dependent on overseas remittances in the world,” news release, January 17, 2007. 32. Joseph E. Stiglitz, “The Economic Crisis,” Vanity Fair, January 2009, www.vanityfair.com/ magazine/2009/01/stiglitz200901. 33. Bank for International Settlement, cited in J. S. Kim, “Derivatives: A $700+ Trillion Bubble Waiting to Burst,” Seeking Alpha (April 19, 2009), seekingalpha.com/article/131597 –derivatives-a-700–trillion-bubble-waiting-to-burst. 34. World Institute for Development Economics Research, cited in Andrew Walker, “Richest 2% ‘Own Half of Wealth,’ ” BBC News (December 5, 2006), news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/6211250 .stm?lsm. 35. Independent, cited in Nick Turse, “Tough Times in Troubled Times,” Huffpost Business (Feb- ruary 25, 2009), www.huffingtonpost.com/nick-turse/tough-times-in-troubled-t_b_169896 .html. 36. Agence France-Presse, cited in “Gloomy Figures Show Scale of Meltdown,” Manila Times, Feb- ruary 10, 2009, www.manilatimes.net/national/2009/feb/10/yehey/top_stories/20090210top4 .html.

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37. Janet Wolff, “Reinstating Corporeality: Feminism and Body Politics,” in The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, ed. Amelia Jones (London: Routledge, 2003), in Susan E. Bell, “Vaginal Politics: Tensions and Possibilities in The Vagina Monologues,” Women’s Studies International Forum 28 (2005): 430. 38. International Organization for Migration, www.iom.int, cited in Nancy V. Yinger, “The Feminization of Migration: Limits of the Data,” Population Reference Bureau, www.prb .org/Articles/2007/FeminizationofMigrationLimitsofData.aspx (accessed March 28, 2011). 39. International Labor Organization, www.ilo.org, cited in Ibid. 40. World Bank, Global Development Finance 2003 (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2003); and World Bank, Global Development Finance 2004 (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2004), cited in Ibid. 41. John Carlos Rowe, “Culture, US Imperialism, and Globalization,” American Literary His- tory 16 (2004): 581 and 576. 42. For a discussion of “relational logics,” see Tani Barlow, “ ‘green blade in the act of being grazed’: Late Capital, Flexible Bodies, and Critical Intelligibility,” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 10 (1998): 119–58. 43. Maggy Lee, “Women’s Imprisonment as Mechanism of Migration Control in Hong Kong,” British Journal of Criminology 47 (2007): 847. 44. Michael Wines, “Women in Lesotho Become Easy Prey for H.I.V.,” NewYork Times, July 20, 2004, www.query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C04EEDF103AF933A15754C0A96 29C8B63 (accessed November 19, 2007). 45. Ibid. 46. Ibid. 47. See Agence France-Presse, “Women’s Empowerment Key to Curbing AIDS — UN,” July 5, 2007, www.newsinfo.inquirer.net/breakingnews/world/view_article.php?article_id=75059. 48. “Korea Should Go Easy on Illegal Aliens,” Korea Times, September 20, 2004, www.lexis nexis.com/us/lnacademic/results/docview/docview.do?risb=21_T3088847091&format=GNB FI&sort=RELEVANCE&startDocNo=1&resultsUrlKey=29_T3088847096&cisb=22_T30888 47095&treeMax=true&treeWidth=0&selRCNodeID=28&nodeStateId=411en_US,1,10&docs InCategory=3&csi=174045&docNo=3 (accessed November 19, 2007). 49. Ibid. 50. European Audiovisual Observatory, cited in Carlos H. Conde, “Filipino Movie Business Fading Out? Piracy, Hollywood Competition and Low Incomes Take Their Toll,” Interna- tional Herald Tribune, February 12, 2007, www.lexisnexis.com/us/lnacademic/search/home submitForm.do (accessed November 19, 2007). 51. Ibid. 52. Ibid. 53. Edberto M. Villegas, Global Finance Capital and the Philippine Financial System (Manila: Institute of Political Economy, 2000), 54, citing Department of Labor and Unemployment estimates, quoted in Lindio-McGovern, “Neo-Liberal Globalization.”

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54. Although the government reports unemployment at 2.8 million, the research group Ibon quotes it at 4.16 million due to a revised definition of unemployment. Ibon Foundation, “With 4.16 million Jobless, High Unemployment Still Cause for Concern for Aquino Gov’t,” www.ibon.org/ibon_articles.php?id=122, accessed on April 22, 2011. Crispin Bel- tran, “Message to the International Migrant Conference” (paper presented at the Interna- tional Migrant Conference on Labor-Export and Forced Migration Amidst Globalization, November 4–8, 2001, Manila, Philippines), quoted in Lindio-McGovern, “Neo-Liberal Glo- balization”; Edberto M. Villegas, Global Finance Capital and the Philippine Financial System (Manila: Institute of Political Economy, 2000), quoted in Lindio-McGovern, “Neo-Liberal Globalization.” 55. Pettman, “Women on the Move,” 393. 56. Ibid. 57. Cheng, “When the Personal Meets,” 36. For another aspect of recent transformation of bodies — from sex workers in U.S. military bases to being umbrella girls in golf courses in these transformed sites — in the Philippines, see Vernadette V. Gonzalez, “Military Bases, ‘Royalty Trips,’ and Imperial Modernities: Gendered and Racialized Labor in the Postcolo- nial Philippines,” Frontiers 28 (2007): 28–59. 58. Pulse Asia, cited in Maria M. B. Asis, “The Philippines’ ‘Culture of Migration,’ ” January 2006, www.migrationinformation.org/Profiles/display.cfm?ID=364. 59. Rebecca Saunders, “Uncanny Presence: The Foreigners at the Gate of Civilization,” Com- parative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 21 (2001): 88–98. 60. Ibid., 92. 61. Evelyn Hu-Dehart, “Globalization and Its Discontents: Exposing the Underside,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies 2 (2003): 61.

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