Ageing, care, and women's work: A world-systems feminist approach to Filipina literature

This chapter showcases the fruitful findings that a feminist approach to World Literature can produce, using fiction from the Philippines as our case study. Western publishing houses and authors dominate the global marketplace. More is translated from English into other languages than vice versa, and Anglo-American writers continue to be overly represented in international literary prizes and review culture. The subfield of literary studies that focuses upon ‘World Literature’ conceives of this canonical hierarchy as the product of a singular world literary system, at once “one and unequal”, in which forms of international literary dependency correlate loosely with the structures of global politico-economic power. Turning to literature produced outside of this dominant Western context, studies of World Literature depend on works in translation, or written in English as the author’s second language, to consider the literary from the perspective of its peripheries.

Authors from the Philippines are not well-known within Western literary scholarship, in spite of writers often choosing to publish in English rather than Tagalog, both official languages of the Republic. This chapter is interested in this underrepresentation and the ways in which writing from the Philippines registers the related unevenness of material and social conditions within the world-system, specifically in relation to the depiction of gender and migration. As of 2018, 43.3.% women within the Philippines identify as migrants, a result of the Philippine state’s institutionalisation of labour export in 1974 (Philippines Statistics Authority, 2018). The gender-stereotyped and low wage roles that women tend to occupy leave them especially vulnerable to exploitation, sex-trafficking, and abuse.

Against this, our chapter examines the representation of women in Filipina literature, especially in relation to their well-documented patterns of migration to work in low-paid service sectors abroad. How is gendered care represented in these fictions? What perceptions are represented regarding female migrant labour and the families they frequently leave behind and to whom mothers send their wages? Our chapter uses feminist literary analysis and feminist theory to understand literature from the Philippines in the context of labour, women’s subjectivity, and transnational migration. In doing so, we argue that peripheral writing shines a light on the intersections between globalised and gendered distributions of labour and exploitation and the structural occlusion of such issues within the Westocentric horizons of literary production.

In the spirit of maximally widening the inclusivity of writers considered here, the chapter will pay particular attention to the Filipina short story. As Denise Cruz has argued, many Filipina novelists ‘are part of a privileged group, who had access to a university education and travel abroad, who spoke and read English’ (2012, p. 9). The Philippines Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature, however, have awarded prizes to short stories written in either English or Tagalog since 1951, rending the short story a more accessible vehicle for literary recognition.