Made in the Philippines

The Philippines is the world's largest exporter of temporary contract labor with a huge 700,000 workers a year being deployed to over 160 countries on either 6 month or 2 year contracts. This labor migration is highly regulated by the government, private, and non-governmental/non-private organizations. Women in particular are channeled into vulnerable occupations, including domestic service and entertainment. This challenging work confronts the darker side of contract migration raising such uncomfortable questions as does the Philippine government permit and encourage the trafficking, exploitation and abuse of women? Drawing upon the writings of Faucault, this work argues that migrants and migrations are socially and politically produced. By controlling meanings and discourses, governments are able to re-position their policies to encourage a more positive reading of their strategies. Tyner delves behind this political facade to examine, on a number of levels, how the 'making' of migrantsfurthers the government's accumulation of capital. Initially documenting how the Philippine government has discursively framed overseas employment since its inception in 1974, the book traces through the many discourses, both dominant and periphery, which represent female entertainers, before finally focusing on a case study of one female migrant and how she negotiates her daily life. Employing a post-structural feminist perspective, this work provides a new direction in the study of gender and migration which ultimately calls for a re-politization of migration studies. Population geographers, feminist geographers and migrations scholars of Asia will find this controversial work both enlightening and thought-provoking.

James A. Tyner is Associate Professor of Geography at Kent State University.