Philippine Reproductive Fiction and Crises of Social Reproduction

The quietest, most docile worker could, behind her apron or her uniform, be sharpening a blade.

—Mia Alvar, "The Miracle Worker"1

On July 19^th, 1994, Sarah Balabagan, a fourteen-year-old overseas Filipina domestic worker in the United Arab Emirates, killed her employer, a sixty-seven-year-old widower, in self-defense. Having endured his relentless sexual harassment, she protected herself against attempted rape by stabbing him to death. Only two months earlier, Balabagan had left her home in Mindanao as a minor with illegal documents falsifying her age. Contracted to work as a maid, she boarded a plane bound to Dubai hoping to send remittances home: as she later stated in an interview, "I wanted to help lift my family out of poverty."2 Following the execution of another overseas Filipina domestic worker, Flor Contemplacion, in Singapore earlier that year, Balabagan's legal trials in 1995 galvanized the Philippines. When she was sentenced to death by firing squad, Filipinos sought political accountability from their government and implored it to intervene on behalf of Balabagan.3 Responding to public pressure and mass political mobilizations, the Philippine government had Balabagan's sentence commuted to one hundred cane lashes, "blood money" restitution, and one year in an Emerati prison.4 She returned to her family and a hero's welcome in the Philippines in 1996.

Sarah Balabagan's harrowing experience encapsulated the plight facing many overseas domestic laborers from the Philippines. Her story actually began twenty years earlier in the gilded presidential halls of Malacañang Palace. On May 1, 1974, International Worker's Day and almost two years into martial law, Ferdinand Marcos signed Presidential Decree 442 into law, inaugurating the Philippines' state-sponsored labor export policy.5 Among the decree's three hundred articles, the policy explicitly states the intent to "insure careful selection of Filipino workers for overseas employment in order to protect the good name of the Philippines abroad" and formalize the "mandatory remittance of foreign exchange earnings" through the official conduits of the Philippine banking system.6 In so doing, Robyn Magalit Rodriguez argues, Marcos turned the "Philippine state's transnational migration apparatus" into "an 'export-processing zone'" for a singular commodity: workers.7 Many of these Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) perform waged reproductive labor: the service work done by domestic helpers, child- and elder-caregivers, nurses, household workers, cooks, charworkers, cleaners, etc. While all of these occupations are gendered, domestic work remains the most disproportionately so with new hire female laborers outnumbering males 55 to 1.8 Marcos's transformation of the Philippines into a "labor brokerage state" was an effort to solve a number of intractable problems at once.9 The brutal historical legacies of colonialism and imperialism — what David Harvey calls "accumulation by dispossession" — had left the Philippines (along with the rest of the Global South) without a strong social welfare state, and thus rising un- and under-employment in the Philippines had produced what Rodriguez describes as "perennial economic and, consequently, political crisis."10 As a result, the promotion of overseas employment, which not only fulfilled the "state's promise of jobs to its citizens" but also ensured the return of their wages to the national economy in the form of remittances home, "helped the Philippines avert a major social catastrophe."11

If state-sponsored labor export forestalled social catastrophe, however, Flor Contemplacion and Sarah Balabagan's stories threatened to reveal the traumatic consequences of this "solution." In the midst of the political mobilizations for Contemplacion and Balabagan, the Philippine government attempted to save face by signing into law the "Migrant Workers and Overseas Filipinos Act of 1995 (Republic Act No. 8042)," which purported to increase state protections for OFWs.12 Discursively, the state also reinforced the narrative of OFWs as the nation's bagong bayani, or "new heroes," thus linking "national feeling with a globalist economic agenda."13 Strategically exploiting OFWs' sense of filial obligation, a responsibility most exemplified by the psycho-sociological concept of utang na loob (debt of gratitude/inner debt), the bagong bayani narrative portrays OFW out-migration as a voluntary, individual, and decisively feminized sacrifice for the nation-as-family (inang bayan/motherland). Thus although Contemplacion's execution in Singapore and Balabagan's trials in the UAE brought the difficult conditions of OFWs to a much broader public awareness, the Filipino state's calculated response to this grief ultimately served, in Vicente L. Rafael's words, as an attempt at "containing the dislocating effects of global capital through the collective mourning for its victims."14 Critics have noted that the bagong bayani nationalist narrative functions "within the symbolic field of fantasy-production"; as an "imaginary deception and a symbolic identification"; as a "discursive tool to manage and justify labor export"; and as a way to "normalize its citizens' out-migration while simultaneously fostering their ties to the Philippines."15 In other words, by renarrating OFWs as the bagong bayani the Philippine state provided what Fredric Jameson has described as an imaginary resolution to a real social contradiction.16

Philippine literary fiction has likewise been read as participating in a mythic or symbolic attempt to resolve ongoing economic and national crises. Cristina Pantoja Hidalgo, for instance, argues that contemporary Philippine novels in English allegorize the nation's "desperate struggle for survival" but "finish on a note of affirmation" intended to "retriev[e] the nation's fragmented past and mak[e] it whole."17 Hidalgo's characterization of late twentieth-century Philippine novels in English retains its rhetorical force; however, the last two decades have seen the development of a body of Philippine literature that refuses unifying nationalist affirmations. This essay takes up what I identify as an emergent literary archive which, far from seeking to make the "nation's fragmented past" whole again, instead tracks the subtle ways nationalist fantasies of reconciliation have become increasingly untenable in the era of global capital's turn toward flexible accumulation. I argue that the contemporary fiction of authors like Mia Alvar, Jose Dalisay, Sophia G. Romero, Marivi Soliven, and Catherine Torres in fact functions as a self-conscious counterpoint to the fantastic affirmations of the bagong bayani narrative. In the bagong bayani story, the "heroic" success of the individual OFW is sutured to the success of both the national economy and the national imaginary. What I term "Philippine reproductive fiction," by contrast, registers the dislocated experiences of transnational flexible labor in an era of attenuating support for domestic social reproduction and seeks to imagine a transformative mode of negative agency.18 By foregrounding the flexibility, precarity, contingency, and diasporic dispersal of OFWs, this twenty-first-century literature locates the contemporary instability of Philippine nationalist identity in the unstable experiential qualities of Philippine reproductive labor itself.

In this essay, I argue that the literary archive comprised by Philippine reproductive fiction indexes a nation-in-crisis.19 Philippine reproductive fictions, I contend, figure such crisis as currency both formally and thematically. They offer self-conscious meditations on the individual heroism of the bagong bayani narrative by imagining more complex character economies in which reproductive workers circulate as both labor and money. Stretching relations of care across asynchronous temporal zones, Philippine reproductive fictions also illuminate the fragmented content of reproductive labor time through formal experiments in temporally disjunctive narrative. Charged with restoring both a national imaginary and a national economy as a heroic act of care — a narrative that would naturalize economic growth as a kind of heteronormative biological reproduction — the reproductive laborers in this twenty-first-century literary archive become instead a way to imagine the negative agency of refusal. In the quiet, isolated, domestic spaces of Philippine reproductive labor, the refusal of care emerges, in Mia Alvar's words, as an "intimate but fierce rebellion" (IC 45).

Circulating Expendable Characters

Whereas the bagong bayani nationalist myth flattens OFWs into what Martin F. Manalansan terms a "painful litany of expendable characters," Philippine reproductive fictions focus our critical attention on the combined and uneven development of characterization.20 In his analysis of minor characters in the realist novel, Alex Woloch argues that the "configuration of narrative work — within the context of omniscient, asymmetric character-systems — creates a formal structure that can imaginatively comprehend the dynamics of alienated labor, and the class structure that underlies this labor."21 Configuring the "relationship between minorness and alienation" at the level of narrative form therefore creates a series of "subordinate beings who are delimited in themselves while performing a function for someone else."22 While the "asymmetric character-systems" of the nineteenth-century realist novel "expose[d] structural class inequalities growing from the industrial process, I want to suggest here that asymmetrical characterization in twenty-first-century Philippine reproductive fiction reveals the disparities within the international division of reproductive labor.

Within this archive's interdependent field of character development, the promotion of what might have been, in the nineteenth-century novel, mere "minor" characters to protagonist positions necessarily transforms the character economy. Philippine reproductive fictions depict the imbalanced relations between disparate characters across transnational locations, while simultaneously illustrating the shared social and economic inequality among characters of different classes that affects their relative development. Philippine reproductive fictions foreground political-economic reproductive inequalities as subordinated characters are transferred along transnational links of reproductive labor. These texts therefore position OFWs as the paradigmatic characters of a racialized international division of reproductive labor.

Existing theories of social reproduction have been productively complicated by accounts that privilege racialized and transnational differences in reproductive labor. In her well-known intersectional analysis of race and gender in the context of paid reproductive labor in the United States, Evelyn Nakano Glenn posits the "racial division of reproductive labor."23 Extending Glenn's account, Rhacel Salazar Parreñas theorizes what she terms "the international division of reproductive labor": "[When] class-privileged women purchase the low-wage household services of migrant Filipina domestic workers, these women simultaneously purchase the even lower-wage household services of poorer women left behind in the Philippines," women who perform, for a still lower wage, the household labor that ostensibly would have been done by the overseas worker.24 Philippine reproductive fictions complement these recontextualized accounts of social reproduction insofar as the characterization of Philippine reproductive labor in these texts vitally depends on both racialized and transnational exchangeability. This literature grants interiority and round characterization to domestic helpers (katulong), nannies (yaya), care-givers/care-takers, nurses, special needs teachers, sex workers, and mail-order brides. Yet even as Philippine reproductive fiction promotes reproductive workers to protagonists, this contemporary archive simultaneously deploys Woloch's "asymmetric structure of characterization" through the ubiquitous presence of peripheral minor characters who "take the place" of the OFW main character.25 In these novels and short stories, substitution follows promotion as a self-reflexive critique of the persistent racialized and transnational exchangeability of Filipina bodies along global chains of reproductive labor.

Many of these texts explicitly thematize the differences in status not only between OFWs and their employers but also among OFWs themselves. In Catherine Torres's short story "The Bag Lady," Alice de Leon, a Filipina domestic worker in Singapore, sends a portion of her monthly remittances to "the maid from the province whom her mother-in-law had insisted they hire to help with the housework while Alice was gone."26 Deprived of a name, Alice views this minor character in purely utilitarian terms, as merely "the maid she'd been paying to help keep the house."27 Marivi Soliven's novel The Mango Bride follows two Filipina protagonists pushed toward out-migration for different reasons — one because of her family's shame over her abortion, and the other to become a mail-order bride. Both women are materially and affectively cared for by the indefatigable labor of a maid, Marcela Obejas, a minor character functioning as both protagonists' "surrogate mother."28 Mia Avar's "In the Country" more self-reflexively registers the formal quality of minorness through one of the short story's peripheral characters. Vivi, a domestic helper, works for the story's protagonist — herself a nurse performing socially reproductive labor — and her broken family.29 Holding this domestic fragmentation together, Alvar writes, that "Vivi kept the house so they could live in it" (IC 314). Denied interiority, Vivi's opaque character flattens into the tools of her labor: "Barely taller than the broom they gave her [...] They had only a vague sense of where Vivi was from: the provinces, as city people said" (IC 314). Exemplifying Woloch's claim that "the abstract expression of utility" produces "the functionalization of minor characters," Vivi, her name incongruously alluding to life itself, functions in Alvar's narrative as a mere service utensil.30 Extending Tadiar's account of the Filipina "DH-body [domestic helper-body]" as kasangkapan (tool) to Alvar's minor character from the provinces, we find that Vivi flattens into "an artificial organism designed to perform the work of reproduction."31 Vivi is less even than a subordinated character; she is flattened into an object.

Being reduced into functional objects, however, also allows the characters of Philippine reproductive fiction to move. Indeed, the reduction of differences among individual workers enables their mobility as a mass, rendering them what Filomeno V. Aguilar, Jr., in writing about the reduction of linguistic and ethnic distinctions in OFW contexts, terms "a roving Filipinoness overseas."32 Philippine reproductive fictions depict this "roving Filipinoness" by attenuating individual particularity and by emphasizing the exchangeability or substitutability of individual OFWs within the international division of reproductive labor. These fictions produce what we might term a kind of circulating minorness, revealing in their settings what Caroline Levine terms "the overlapping of multiple networks."33 Destinations receiving Philippine labor — like Bahrain, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Saudi Arabia — become inextricably linked to the Philippines, as Philippine reproductive fictions contradictorily disrupt and expand the spatiality of the bounded Filipino nation-state. Just as capital's expanded circulation depends on abstracting commodities into the universal equivalent of money, so too does the Philippine state's labor brokerage depend on the flattened equivalency of its overseas reproductive laborers.34 Philippine reproductive fictions foreground the relationship between the circulation of individual characters as both (waged) bodies and as (embodied) capital. The promotion of minor characters to protagonist-status in these narratives registers the way OFWs move outward (and even potentially upward) via global labor supply chains. The frequent appearance of characters' monetary remittances, balikbayan boxes and pasalubong, emphasizes the circulating currency that returns back and down via those same transnational chains of care.35

In "The Miracle Worker," Mia Alvar brings her reader into the intimate domestic spaces of two Filipina reproductive workers in Bahrain. The protagonist, Sally Riva, is a special needs teacher contracted to tutor a developmentally delayed Bahraini child. Minnie, a minor character, is a live-in domestic worker in the household of Sally's employer. When Alvar writes of Minnie, through Sally's first-person narration, that "servitude had become a habit and posture of her body," the reader confronts not merely the division of, but also the division within, reproductive labor (IC 34). Sally's special needs teaching becomes a very different form of affective care than Minnie's dehumanized, always-on demand, live-in housework, a difference Mignon Duffy maps as the distinction between "nurturant" (Sally) and "nonnurturant" (Minnie) reproductive labor.36 In Alvar's story, Sally's superior status in the character economy (her role as protagonist) is mirrored by her superior status in the labor economy (her capacity to earn a higher wage than her nonnurturant counterpart).37 Sally is not only paid more than Minnie, she is also the beneficiary of additional gifts from her Bahraini employer. These luxury commodities (pearl necklaces, diamond-encrusted tie clips, gold golf tees, silk scarves, and perfumes) become ancillary payments for Sally's nurture.

Sally's gifts also circulate down through Minnie to Minnie's dependents in the Philippines. Thinking of Minnie's devalued labor and wanting to "offset some imbalance in the world" (IC 61), Sally takes the gifts and passes them on to her friend:

I passed these gifts along to Minnie. (I wanted her to use them, to dress up for karaoke night at the Gulf Hotel, or even go on a date with Mrs. Mansour's Filipino chauffeur. But she too passed them on, to her sisters and nieces in Manila, or to raffles that the church held for charity.) These fancy things, I told myself, were like the riches Robin Hood would redirect to those who worked harder or had less than he. I didn't deserve them, but someone did (IC 46).

Much as Sally's status as protagonist/nurturant depends on Minnie's relative attenuation as minor character/nonnurturant, more peripheral characters in the Philippines are even further attenuated. Existing on the absolute fringes of the narrative's attention, Minnie's relatives become what Woloch calls "minor minor characters."38 Functioning as mere recipients of a minor character's transnational reproductive care, Minnie's sisters and nieces (their gender seems an intentional detail) are the unrepresented end of a reproductive labor chain.

The circulation of exchangeable reproductive labor thus both produces and is analogized by the circulation of money and commodities.39 While the international division of reproductive labor mediates characterization within Philippine reproductive fictions, it also maps the inverted flows of remittances, suggesting that the character-form and the money-form are constitutively linked.40 In "The Miracle Worker," an OFW labor strike ends when a nameless Filipina domestic worker commits suicide and the informal OFW "union" refocuses its organizing efforts towards "finding the girl's family and raising the funds to fly her body home for burial" (IC 57). In a tragic twist of fate, the funds the maid would have remitted to her family are instead supplanted by the "remittance" of her dead body back home to the Philippines. Living labor leaves the Philippines in massive droves of out-migration, while capital and expendable dead bodies are "remitted" home.

While Alvar ends her labor strike in Bahrain with the "remittance" of a deceased domestic worker back to the Philippines, Jose Dalisay begins his novel Soledad's Sister with the arrival of a dead body at Manila's Ninoy Aquino International Airport. In the first few pages of Soledad's Sister, a novel shortlisted for the 2007 Man Asian Literary Prize, Jose Dalisay chronicles the arrival of a casket from Jeddah carrying the body of a dead Filipina domestic worker. In a chapter entirely devoid of the novel's two protagonists, Dalisay begins Soledad's Sister with the embodied circulation of Filipino "minor minor characters." Stating that the Gulf Air 747's "cargo manifest put the dead woman's name down as 'Cabahug, Aurora V.,'" Dalisay proceeds to write in a meticulously statistical form, mirroring the style of a manifest log.41 The excessive use of numerical figures in the novel's opening scene suggests an indifferent efficiency and detached calculation in the depiction of a moment one would expect to be rendered in a tenor more amenable to the expression of grief. Instead, the exact distances in kilometers and miles, the passage of time marked in precise military format, the exhaustive counting of passengers, pilots, and flight attendants, create a formal quality tinged with the language of accountancy ledgers, balance sheets, and the terse statistical reports of the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA). This preoccupation with quantification, a stylistic convention Dalisay almost immediately abandons after the novel's first chapter, evocatively renders equivalent the "minor minor characters" on the plane (both alive and dead) with the import-commodities onboard: the tiger orchids and apricots stored in the bulkhead beneath "the Filipino workers [who] clapped and cheered in their seats as the plane's wheels touched the runway" in the Philippines.42 Dalisay's quantified language burdens the return of the dead character who sets his novel in motion with the spectral weight of an economic remittance.

In both its narrative and its circumstances of production, Soledad's Sister can be understood as what Paul Nadal calls "remittance fiction." Nadal's innovative work on the economic and historical conditions of Philippine literary production defines "remittance fiction" as both "work produced abroad (as program fiction) and valorized at home (as national literature)," and work in which motifs of "remitted or repatriated capital" are "encoded into the narration."43 Soledad's Sister qualifies as "remittance fiction" in both Nadal's formal- and content-oriented registers. Dalisay wrote the majority of the novel abroad with the support of various writing fellowships, and the narrative itself incorporates economic remittance relations at the level of its plot.44 Moving his "minor minor characters" through the official immigration bureaucracy which a balikbayan must clear, Dalisay establishes a narrative setting that figuratively evokes the movement of remitted funds from OFWs through the official institutions of the Philippine national banking system. As his "minor minor chracters" disembark the plane, Dalisay writes:

The rest of the living, prized possessions in hand, marched into the steamy welcome of passport control, baggage claim, customs, the grinning mob across the arrivals fence, the purring taxicabs and jeepneys, and a tumultuous downpour that blurred glasses and windows and drove people to quick and convenient and sometimes disastrous decisions. (3)

Through this processing infrastructure, the return of Aurora V. Cabahug's expendable dead body to Manila blurs into insignificance, since in "the year just past, more than 600 of these bodies had gone through the airport" (11). The staggering number of dead, "which sounded like another media exaggeration designed to embarrass the government," metaleptically recalls other unbelievable figures like the billions of dollars in personal remittances sent home to the Philippines each year.45

Aurora V. Cabahug's return from a live-in domestic labor contract in Saudi Arabia becomes even more inconsequential by the fact that "nobody had come to meet her; nobody had known she was there, because a Filipino vice-consul in Riyadh had mixed up his homebound corpses" (SS 5). When Dalisay writes that "there was a problem with her body," the bureaucratic confusion morbidly suggests the inherent interchangeability of overseas Filipina domestic workers in the global service economy (SS 4). Yet an even more fundamental problem of misidentification also occurs: the real Aurora V. Cabahug is alive and working as an entertainment hostess singing American songs for Korean engineers in a small town in Quezon Province. We later learn the mislabeled OFW body is actually Aurora's older sister, Soledad. After becoming pregnant during a previous contract in Hong Kong, making her unable to secure work with her legal name, Soledad borrows her younger sibling's passport documentation to secure a second domestic labor contract in Jeddah. This figurative exchange of identity registers the novel's formal self-reflexivity, both thematizing the interchangeability of the minor character with the protagonist, and indexing the material relations of dependence across the international division of reproductive labor.

Reading Dalisay's "double displacement" not just through selfhood but also through economic form reveals the mutually constitutive relationship between living labor and dead labor.46 For Marx, living labor is "labour-power in action," whereas dead labor is "vampire-like" because it "lives only by sucking living labour."47 More specifically, dead labor is the containment of expended concrete labor in the commodity: "living labor stands in opposition to 'dead' labor — which is capital, the accumulation of expended labor in the form of money."48 The obfuscated character of money qua capital is therefore dead labor. Soledad's Sister renders the asymmetrical spatial flows of living labor as the out-migration of OFWs and dead labor as the "in-migration" of monetary remittances. Dalisay represents Filipino living labor in its unique particularity by referring to both the specific forms of concrete labor done by outbound OFWs and to their individual receiving destinations in a manner similar to Martin F. Manalansan's "painful litany of expendable characters"49:

These were the maids, cooks, drivers, dancers, plumbers, draftsmen, welders, able-bodied seamen, and other purveyors of sundry services and trades who had left their kitchens, pigsties, classrooms, fruit stands, videoke bars, shoe factories, and vulcanizing shops in search of better jobs — in roiling sea and burning sand, from Singapore to Stockholm, London to Lagos, Riyadh to Reykjavik, in backstreet bar and oil rig, in nursing home and cannery, in wave after leaping wave across all the seas and oceans that ringed their island (SS 18).

Against this depiction of living labor's concrete form and individualized particularity, Dalisay figuratively counterposes the image of the "zinc casket," whose metallic luster is reminiscent of some perverse currency and which stands for the abstracted monetary form of dead labor's "remittance" to the Philippines (SS 2). Evoking the liquid equivalency of the more than one trillion Philippine pesos in overseas remittances circulating throughout the national Philippine banking system, the six hundred OFW caskets circulating through Ninoy Aquino International Airport each year are devoid of context and indistinguishable from one another in their universal interchangeability. Thus, while Dalisay's overseas Filipina domestic worker, Soledad Cabahug, toils abroad as living labor, through both her monetary remittances to her sister Aurora and her expendable body that arrives at NAIA, she returns as dead labor(er).

Dalisay's protagonists' inquiry into the mysterious nature of Soledad's death thus becomes a more general reflection on capitalist circulation and its "schemes involving the disappearance of people and the appearance of money" (SS 123). Intuiting that a kind of circulation time structures the gendered logic of exchangeability — turning disappeared-characters into appeared-money — Dalisay's protagonists nevertheless fail at reconstructing the temporal sequence of events leading up to Soledad's enigmatic death. Dalisay's readers learn little more than his characters: although the novel's narrative present is occasionally interrupted by stories of Soledad's past experiences in Hong Kong and Saudi Arabia, these cannot fully reflect "the story that the dead woman's bruised lips would never get to tell" (SS 104). The novel's final irresolution, its refusal to depict a complete narrative of Soledad's obscured time abroad, thus symptomatically reveals the more expansive economic invisibility of what I will call in the next section "Philippine reproductive labor time."

Philippine Reproductive Labor Time and Permanent Reproductive Crisis

In this section, I explore the ways that the peculiar forms of emplotment and narrative configuration emerging in Philippine reproductive fiction reflect a contemporary Philippine reality transformed by the disjunctive temporalities of migrant reproductive labor. Compared to the time of traditional productive work, the labor time of reproductive work is at once less regular and more constant, less predictable and more concrete, less abstract and more flexible.

The Marxist historian Moishe Postone persuasively argues that the historically specific "temporalities of capitalism" emerge from the very structure of capitalist labor.50 Because human work is organized and structured according to what Marx terms "abstract labor time," Postone argues, capitalism is a system in which people are dominated by time.51 Postone's account powerfully illuminates the system of productive work; however, Marxist-feminist theorists have noted that it is less clear how social domination by abstract time works in the context of reproductive labor.52 In examining what she terms the "hidden labor-time in the reproduction of the worker," Neferti X.M. Tadiar challenges the historical invisibility of reproductive labor within capital's expanded valorization process and provocatively claims "DHs [domestic helpers] do not have time, they are time."53 Rhacel Salazar Parreñas reminds us that "without set working hours, live-in workers can receive orders from employers at all times of the day or night."54 The domestic worker's reproductive labor time is always on-call and on-demand. Their entire time indexes the absolute exploitation of reproductive labor time and they become "producers of valorizable life-times for others."55

The labor time of the Philippine reproductive worker, in particular, is still more complex. Because the bagong bayani (new heroes) are also, in their out-migration, compelled to reproduce the inang bayan (motherland), they experience the "social domination" not only of capitalist labor time but also of what Benedict Anderson famously calls the "homogenous, empty time" of the nation, an "imagined community" whose continuity and coherence they are called upon to safeguard.56 To fully capture the appropriation of Philippine reproductive labor by both capitalist and nationalist social domination, I argue, Philippine reproductive fictions deploy a fragmented narrative emplotment. I read the resulting narrative fragmentation not as postmodern experiment but rather as a means to represent both a nation in permanent crisis and the experience of performing labor at once devalued for existing solely in the reproductive sphere and necessary to the reproduction of the nation.

Set during martial law, Mia Alvar's novella-length "In the Country" utilizes disjunctive emplotment to depict the evisceration of what Harrod J. Suarez describes as the coherent, normative "time of the nation."57 Twenty-seven subsections comprise the short story, each headed by a particular date between 1971-1986; the period begins one year before Marcos's declaration of martial law and ends with Corazon Aquino's ascension to the presidency in the wake of the People Power movement. The story follows a nurse, Milagros Sandoval, through a series of life-changing events directly related to the turbulent politics of the period. Alvar explicitly links Philippine crises of national reproduction to biological reproduction when she writes: "Milagros was pregnant again. Two children, bracketing martial law like bookends" (IC 315). Bounded by these temporal "bookends" — which frame not only Milagros's reproductive history but also the nation and the narrative itself — Alvar's partitioned story leaps forward and backward, reflecting the asynchronous nature of the reproductive labor performed by Milagros throughout the text. Milagros's story begins in 1971, when the Manila City Hospital nurse initiates a strike against pay disparity between Filipina nurses and their American expat counterparts. Identifying the nation with the maternal as she rejects out-migration, the young, nationalistic Milagros fervently exclaims "migration's not for me. [...] Your mother gets sick, you don't leave her for a healthier mother. She's your mother!" (IC 267). Despite her disdain for the gendered nature of domestic work — "I enjoy being paid for my work, she used to say, against marriage" — Milagros is nonetheless reinscribed into the heteronormative, patriarchal circuits of the household when the Marcos regime imprisons her husband (IC 272). Concerned only with her ability to transcribe and faithfully reproduce his clandestine anti-Marcos writing outside of the prison walls, Milagros's incarcerated husband disregards her reproductive labor in raising their son, keeping their home, and earning their family's only income. Like Milagros's husband, the Philippine government only concerns itself with feminized reproductive labor insofar as it maintains the masculine state. Thus, when her husband finally returns home after martial law ends in 1981, Alvar writes:

[Milagros] struggled to fit the two halves of her life back together. Separating [her husband] and their marriage from all she had to do at home and at the hospital was how she'd managed not to break down at the nurses' station, or lie awake all night in their bed. She'd lived her life with him only in designated rooms, boxes of time: the Sunday theater, the conjugal cabins, the basement where she printed all his work. Now here he was, colliding into everything she didn't know she'd been protecting from him (IC 312-313).

While Milagros's separation of her life, marriage, and work into discrete "boxes of time" suggests the varied forms of her reproductive labor, it will ultimately turn out to be the impossibility of separating domestic and reproductive labor either from the reproduction of the household, or from the (economic as well as ideological) reproduction of the nation, that gives Milagros a particular kind of insight into the terrain of crisis.58

Milagros performs both waged (nursing) and unwaged (housework and childcare) reproductive labor, and each of these forms represent different temporal and scalar registers of work. Milagros's waged work reproduces labor power for the present (patients/workers) and is social (nation), while her unwaged work reproduces labor power for the future (her children) and is individual/familial (home). In a narrative that explicitly links home to nation, Alvar's disjunctive emplotment seems to suggest the inextricable intertwinement of the different temporalities and scales Milagros's reproductive labor inhabits. This intertwinement complicates reductive accounts of reproductive labor, such as Arlie Russell Hochschild's analysis of "the second shift," which locate reproduction only during distinct times (before or after waged work) and at distinct scales (home).59 Against this separation into distinct "boxes of time" and through Alvar's metaphor of the home-as-nation, the distinctions among Milagros's multiple reproductive labor times and scales are indiscernible: her housework and childcare figuratively reproduce the nation, while her hospital care blurs into the maintenance of her fractured family.60 What remains discernible, however, is the explicitly gendered quality of Milagros's reproductive labor.

Alvar's narrative reveals the gendered disparity in the qualitative experience of temporality vis-à-vis reproduction. Milagros's dissident husband exists within the longue durée of time charged with reproducing nationalist history. He fulfills his role as a character of "Historical Significance" in the nationalist drama between the Filipino people and the Marcos regime, at the ultimate cost of his young son's abduction and murder by government forces (IC 325). Because of her subordinate position within the gendered division of labor, Milagros exists instead within the immediate time charged with reproducing daily life. Numbed by grief after the death of her son, Milagros realizes this gendered difference:

They're all the same to her now, this fraternity of men, who televise their hunger strikes, print articles after they're told to stop. They prize their causes and their names, their principles and legacies, above all. They eat the rice without wondering how it got cooked and to their table. They name sons after themselves and never once worry about those sons' fingernails (IC 316-317).

Whereas men of "historical significance" like Ferdinand Marcos, Benigno Aquino Jr., and her husband see reproduction only in their future legacies and passed down patrilineal names, women like Milagros perform social reproduction in an increasingly unstable present. Collapsing the distinction between Marcos and anti-Marcos actors, Alvar implies that while the political-economic casualties in the Philippines are engendered by this "fraternity of men," the reproductive labor of Filipina women bears the heaviest burden of a nation-in-crisis.

Moreover, the image of Milagros's dead son does more than simply represent the kinds of conditions — both structural and individual — that drive Filipina reproductive workers to leave the disintegrating domestic spaces of both home and nation. Rather, in Alvar's story the death of the child comes to figure what Marxist-feminist theorist Silvia Federici describes as a "permanent reproductive crisis."61 For Federici — as, indeed, for Alvar — capital paradoxically tends to destroy the feminized reproductive body on which the reproduction of labor power (and thus capital itself) depends. Capitalism's immanent tendency toward crisis thus moves along two simultaneous axes: first, the biological limits attendant to a crisis in the reproduction of labor, the result of capitalism's voracious appetite for additional cheap labor, and, second, the structural limits attendant to a crisis of overaccumulation, the result of capitalism's equally voracious desire to pay workers less than it costs to reproduce them or to expel them from waged work entirely. Not only are these two tendencies to crisis co-constitutive, they are also both predicated on a gendered division of labor: thus, David McNally reminds us that "every crisis in the reproduction of capital is simultaneously a crisis in the reproduction of labor power."62 While these two crises are co-constitutive at the level of the world-system, they still nonetheless manifest asymmetrically in the Global North and South. On this asymmetry, Neferti X.M. Tadiar writes, "the permanent crisis of the third world [...] has been the very motor of development of (and ever-immanent menace to) the capitalist first world."63

Reflecting the multiple co-constitutive crises — biological, structural, and international — in the reproduction of labor, overseas Philippine reproductive labor time therefore operates across three distinct temporal registers. First, Philippine reproductive labor time inhabits the absolute "present-time" of concrete reproductive labor appropriated by an employer overseas. This produces the dislocations of (narrative) personhood we saw registered via "minorness" in "The Miracle Worker" and Soledad's Sister, in which narrative or readerly time are unevenly distributed along the same logic as differential labor exploitation. Second, reproductive labor time sustains the "future-time" of familial dependents in the Philippines as well as the "homogenous, empty time" of the national imaginary, which must be rendered continuous and coherent despite — indeed because of — national crises. These are the dual temporalities of maternity and nationalist history that fracture Milagros's narrative in "In the Country."64 And third, the remittances of overseas reproductive workers reproduce the nation through servicing indebted "past-time."65 In 2016, the Philippines was the third-largest remittance-receiving economy in the world after only India and China.66 When taking into account both the aggregate volume of these remittances (third-largest in the world) and their percentage of GDP (highest in Asia), the Philippines is arguably the single domestic economy most dependent on overseas remittances from its laboring diaspora.67 These remittances thus also play a central role in alleviating debt servicing. In 2016, multilateral debt accounted for 14% of the Philippines' total external debt (fourth-highest in Asia) and the nation paid $779 million in multilateral debt service payments in that year alone.68 By contributing to the reproduction of the Philippine national economy by helping repay the past debt of the nation via present labor outside the nation, the personal remittances of OFWs thus produce their own forms of temporal disjunction. Through this temporal and structural relationship to debt, reproductive labor comes to fully embody — both literally and figuratively — the contradictions Federici and Tadiar describe, and moves from the logic of continuity to that of permanent crisis.

The relationship among crisis, national debt, and the labors of overseas reproductive workers was particularly evident during the presidency of Corazon Aquino, often called "The Mother of Asian Democracy." Ushered into Malacañang Palace by the People Power movement and its toppling of martial law, Aquino became the first female president of the republic in 1986 but also inherited the staggering "$28 billion external debt bequeathed by the Marcos regime."69 This debt made the Philippines the second-highest debtor country in the Global South by external debt to GDP.70 Aquino never seriously considered defaulting on the debt service payments incurred through Marcos's "debt-for-development strategy."71 To abort the nation's outstanding debt obligations would have resoundingly discredited the "legitimacy of the debt itself."72 Outright default would have been the legitimate termination of external debt relations, yet international financial institutions coerced the Aquino administration into accepting and reproducing the illegitimate debt.

This context profoundly informs the way Philippine reproductive fictions not only link overseas Filipina reproductive labor as socially reproductive to birth as biologically reproductive, but also explicitly treat crises of biological reproduction — "illegitimate" birth, miscarriage, delayed development, and abortion — as allegorical recodings of the transnational out-migration of feminized reproductive labor from the Philippines.73 These contemporary texts therefore trouble, in Martin Joseph Ponce's formulation, the relationship between "reproductive heterosexuality and national futurity."74 In Mia Alvar's "Shadow Families," for instance, a katulong (domestic worker) nicknamed Baby mysteriously becomes pregnant, an event which threatens to shatter her diasporic community, while in Alvar's "The Miracle Worker," a Filipina special needs teacher's care of a developmentally delayed child serves as a metaphor for the failure of the Philippines itself to "develop" along the normative telos of national economic advancement. In Sophia G. Romero's novel Always Hiding, likewise, an adulterous birth pushes a middle-class Filipina to leave the country and become an undocumented (tago ng tago) maid in New York City, while in Catherine Torres's "The Bag Lady," a pregnant and extremely distraught domestic worker intentionally throws herself onto the floor, which produces a "burial mound rising from her middle."75

The allegorical connection between crises of feminized biological reproduction and crises of national economic reproduction is most complex in Marivi Soliven's The Mango Bride. In Soliven's Palanca Award-winning novel, set in the midst of Aquino's presidency, the wealthy Guerrero/Duarté family exiles Amparo Guerrero after she is coerced into "a poorly executed abortion" (MB 232). Afraid Amparo's premarital pregnancy will compromise his father's campaign for a seat in the Philippine Senate, the brother of Amparo's boyfriend offers to pay for an abortion: "I'll pick up the tab on this one. But you'll owe me big-time" (MB 225). The proximity of feminized debt (proxy payment for the abortion) to the masculine figures of the Philippine state (her boyfriend's Senate-candidate father) suggests that we can read Amparo's abortion as symptomatic of the relationship between the country's female laborers and its masculinist state government. More specifically, her abortion — which results in permanent reproductive damage — metaphorizes the internal limits to the social reproduction of Filipino labor power in the aftermath of Marcos's debt-driven economy.76 Her mother callously laments: "the procedure may have caused permanent damage to Amparo's cervix. An incompetent cervix means she will be unable to carry a pregnancy to term. [...] I've been cheated of grandchildren. She could not even give me a bastard" (MB 234). Amparo herself resignedly says: "No one recovers from this" (MB 235). Embodying Federici's "permanent reproductive crisis," Amparo's abortion is planned and implemented by figures linked to the Philippine state. The cervical damage that forecloses the possibility of biological reproduction in the Philippines immediately results in Amparo's forced exile abroad. Amparo's coerced abortion forces her into out-migration, as her mother goes into "crisis control" and exiles her to the United States (MB 234). The Filipino state's complicity in the creation of a debt-driven national economy makes social reproduction increasingly untenable in the domestic space of the Philippines and subsequently pushes Filipinas into overseas, transnational labor precarity.

Historicizing Amparo's permanent reproductive damage against the backdrop of Corazon Aquino's calculated "fantasy-production" of the nationalist bagong bayani narrative allows for a gendered account of the relationship between the Philippines' domestic crises of social reproduction and the intensification of the transnational remittance economy birthed in its wake. Whereas Amparo is prevented from giving birth in the Philippines and forced into exile, President Aquino is prevented from aborting the Philippines' external debt and figuratively forced to birth a people in exile: OFWs as the bagong bayani. Economically expelled from the inang bayan (motherland), the bagong bayani become the overseas children charged with the heroic, yet ill-fated, task of reproducing the domestic economy. Yet, like Amparo's own "permanent reproductive crisis" and exile, Aquino's nationalist narrative of the OFW as the bagong bayani — the first Philippine reproductive fiction — proves merely to be a short-term solution to the Philippines' more expansive crises of social reproduction.

Imagining Refusals of Care

Philippine reproductive fictions often depict overseas Filipina reproductive laborers refusing roles in the bagong bayani nationalist narrative and, in Denise Cruz's formulation, its "rhetoric of the caring Filipina heart [that] gives life to the contemporary overseas Filipina worker, a woman glorified as her country's most valuable export."77 As socially symbolic acts, Philippine reproductive fictions imagine refusals to the material contradictions engendered by the Philippines' crises of social reproduction.78 Linking such structural crises to the intimate spaces of reproductive labor, these texts figure the Filipina reproductive laboring body as the bearer of contemporary capitalism's crises of valorization and overaccumulation. Seen from this more expansive distance of the world-system, the individual refusals of care in Philippine reproductive fictions aggregate into the collective refusal of capitalist reproduction.79 Yet as these refusals scale up, they encounter their structural limits: these fleeting attempts at unsettling capitalist logics conclude with the reinscription of overseas Filipina workers into their character roles in the real fiction of capital's reproduction. 

In Alvar's "The Miracle Worker," Sally Riva "imagine[s] all the soft, subtle weapons a worker might employ" and begins to refuse the responsibilities attendant to her special needs reproductive labor in solidarity with the OFW labor strike mentioned earlier (IC 45). Yet just as Sally begins to refuse her care, the OFW strike wanes, reinserting Sally into her reproductive role. At the story's close, Sally invites the child's mother to spend an afternoon by the pool in her housing compound. As Sally swims with the child, she tries to tell the Bahraini mother the truth about her daughter's stagnant developmental state. In this moment of attempted resolution, Sally understands her ethical "need to come clean was of no concern" to her employer (IC 61). Alvar ends her story with Sally's foreclosure of hope:

What I had thought of as deception was my duty. If I cared to keep [the child] in my life, this was the service I had to keep providing, whether or not I'd thought better of it. And so I held my tongue and treaded water, looking up at where [the mother's] eyes were hidden from me. From a distance perfect strangers could assume that [she] was my amo [master], and I a servant at her feet (IC 62).

In Alvar's remarkable ending, diasporic Filipina reproductive labor keeps the nation afloat in the era of global capital's financial liquidity. The state's crucial dependence on overseas care work forecloses any idealized restoration of a cohesive nationalist identity. Sally realizes her reproductive labor literally becomes the duty of deception; her provided service is the transnational labor charged with maintaining the inherent lie, the "fantasy-production," of the bagong bayani narrative. Sally's work abroad reveals the truth of her name, the name "only [her] birth certificate had ever called [her]," Salvacion as the Philippines' salvation (IC 28). As the "new hero" protagonists of a transnational myth, overseas Filipina reproductive laborers carry the burden of the Philippines' more expansive crises of social reproduction. Thus, at a different scalar level, "from a distance," all such migrant Filipina reproductive laborers are, in the words of Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, "the global servants of late capitalism."80

While the characters in Philippine reproductive fictions express varying degrees of negative agency through their refusals of care, most fail, like Sally, to escape permanently from the structural logics subtending their exploitation. The temporary experiences of autonomy in these texts quickly evaporate and the cost of refusal amounts to either the tragic loss of the means to materially support kin in the Philippines or the catastrophic loss of life. Thus, the other protagonist of Marivi Soliven's The Mango Bride, Beverly Obejas, refuses her subjugation as a mail-order bride only to be murdered in a domestic space thousands of miles away from home. Jose Dalisay's Soledad transgressively explores her budding sexuality in Hong Kong only to be sent home early, in breach of contract and pregnant, and on her second labor deployment, Soledad mysteriously dies after she disobeys domestic restrictions. Catherine Torres's Amy, in "Blown Glass," refuses her racialized commodification and walks out of a domestic labor contract in Singapore only to confront the immense gravity of her defiant actions:

She knelt on the floor in the middle of the shoebox room where she'd slept every night for close to two years, dreaming her outsize dreams. She shut her eyes, thinking of home, and saw the sagging walls and rusty roof, the outstretched hands and baffled looks that would greet her on her return. Her eyelids fluttered but she willed them to stay closed, until the clutter of hovels and the clamor of faces disappeared, and all that was left was the sea.81

Remembering her economic dependents, Torres's reproductive worker tragically realizes that her refusal to work also implies a refusal to repay a filial debt (utang na loob). Writing across the circuits of the international division of reproductive labor, Philippine reproductive fiction painfully reveals the economic, social, and corporeal costs of refusing care.

Philippine reproductive fictions imagine the contradictions exposed by the refusals of care. But they also represent the limitations of these refusals, which are unsatisfactorily reincorporated back into dominant nationalist and capitalist logics. Withholding reproductive labor and denying the bagong bayani nationalist narrative comes at a cost. Expendable characters circulate throughout these texts in a flattened exchangeability approximating money's own universal equivalency. Global capital and overseas employers exploit Philippine reproductive labor time to the point of its absolute appropriation. Biological reproduction, in turn, reduces to feminized national allegory. While twenty-first-century Philippine reproductive fictions undoubtedly deploy a particularly bleak variation of "capitalist realism,"82 their attempt to imagine refusals of care does serve to remind us that the limits to reproductive labor's negative agency are, in Tadiar's words, "not mere metaphors," but "real meanings — conceived as cost and consequence — [...] located in the bodily fates of poor Filipina women workers, the embodiment of devalued, racialized, sexualized, feminized labor."83 That Philippine reproductive fictions do not grant their characters positive agency is no failure of the literary imagination. Instead, Philippine reproductive fictions figure this agential absence as a critique leveled at the failure of the political imagination in the era of global capital's flexible accumulation and its dependence on overseas reproductive labor. The temporariness of autonomy in Philippine reproductive fiction reaffirms imaginary refusals precisely as imaginary, suggesting that permanent autonomy for Philippine reproductive workers can only become possible through the real refusal of capitalist social relations and nationalist mythos.

 

Alden Sajor Marte-Wood is a PhD candidate in English at the University of California, Irvine. His research focuses on Philippine Anglophone and Pilipinx American literatures, transnational labor migration, social reproduction theory, and political economy.

 

Banner image is Flor 1974 (Excelsior Fog), 2008, Jenifer K Wofford

 

References

I would first like to thank Annie McClanahan for her exemplary editorial work and consistently supportive feedback on multiple drafts of this essay. I also wish to thank Christine Bacareza Balance, Christopher Tzechung Fan, Dorothy Fujita-Rony, Richard Godden, Joseph Jonghyun Jeon, Paul Nadal, Palmer Rampell, and, especially, Michael Szalay for their helpful comments. Special thanks to participants at the "Migrations and New Mobilities in Southeast Asia" conference, co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Center for Southeast Asia Studies, the UCLA Center for Southeast Asian Studies, and the Asian Institute at the University of Toronto, for the invaluable feedback on an earlier version of this essay.