Working Feminism 9781474471756

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Working Feminism Malta

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Working Feminism

Working Feminism Malta

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For Keiron, who reworked my feminism

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Working Feminism

Geraldine Pratt

Edinburgh Universit y Press

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© Geraldine Pratt, 2004 Edinburgh Universit y Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh Typeset in Goudy Old St yle and Gill Sans Light by Pioneer Associates, Perthshire, and printed and bound in Malta by Gutenberg Press A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0 7486 1569 5 (hardback) ISBN 0 7486 1570 9 (paperback) The right of Geraldine Pratt to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Contents List of Figures

vii

Acknowledgements

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1 Putting Feminist Theory to Work

1

2 Spatialising the Subject of Feminism

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3 From Registered Nurse to Registered Nanny

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4 Liberalism, Universalisms and Democratic Feminist Politics

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5 Working at the Borders of Liberalism

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6 Gleaning the Home

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7 Trafficking across Borders

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8 Song Flies Home

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References

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Index

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List of Figures

Figure 1.1

Figure 1.2

Figure 2.1 Figure 2.2 Figure 2.3

Figure 3.1

Figure 3.2 Figure 5.1

Figure 5.2

Figure 6.1

Interpreting domestic workers’ experiences in the shadow of Flor Contemplación: a Vancouver protest against the execution of Flor Contemplación in 1995. Photograph courtesy of the Philippine Women Centre. Collaborating with the Philippine Women Centre in 1995. Photograph courtesy of the Philippine Women Centre. Gendered bodily comportment in the 1970s. Photographs by Marianne Wex (1979). Gendered bodily comportment on display in 2003. Photographs by Amelia Butler. Regulating the production of maquila workers’ bodies: a regulated stretch break in Tijuana, Mexico. Photograph by Sandy Huffaker. A graphic representation of the deskilling process. Reprinted from Centre Update, Newsletter of the Philippine Women Centre, Vancouver, Canada (Summer 1998) 8(1). Reprinted with the permission of the artist, Carlo Sayo. Agents classify different t ypes of nannies in the 1993 Vancouver Yellow Pages. A research participant steps into the public sphere. Reprinted with permission of The Georgia Straight. Photograph by Lorne Bridgman. The Filipino Nurses’ Support Group protests the Live-in Caregiver Programme. Photograph courtesy of Leah Diana. Heart-shaped potatoes in The Gleaners and I. Photograph courtesy of Zeitgeist Films.

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7 23 25

29

45 51

102

109 122

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Figure 6.2 Figure 6.3 Figure 6.4 Figure 6.5 Figure 6.6 Figure 6.7

Figure 7.1

Figure 8.1

Figure 8.2 Figure 8.3

Figure 8.4 Figure 8.5

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List of Figures

A clock without hands in The Gleaners and I. Photograph courtesy of Zeitgeist Films. Representing loss through air travel, programme cover of Breaking Ground. Writing the Filipino communit y onto the Vancouver landscape. Asian-in-fluency. Cover design by Denise Fong and Emily Kajioka. Reprinted courtesy of Perspectives. A mall landscape in Richmond that exacts Chinese language. Photograph by Amelia Butler. Pikachu on the horizon, a detail of Perspectives. Cover design by Denise Fong and Emily Kajioka. Reprinted courtesy of Perspectives. The Filipino-Canadian Youth Alliance perform experiences of forced migration in Breaking Ground. Photograph courtesy of FCYA. Narrating experiences during the 1995 focus groups at the Philippine Women Centre. Photograph courtesy of the Philippine Women Centre. A house in East Vancouver. Photograph by Amelia Butler. Research in the basement of the Philippine Women Centre. Photograph courtesy of the Philippine Women Centre. Pedalling through the employers’ landscape in Shaughnessy. Photograph by Amelia Butler. Shaughnessy at night. Photography by Amelia Butler.

123 128 129 135 136

139

165

174 175

176 177 178

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Acknowledgements This book is an attempt to draw together an ongoing research programme and a graduate course that I have taught for years on Feminist Geographies. I want to thank the graduate students who provoked me so many years ago to teach this course: Debby Leslie and Becky Elmhirst were among this first group of graduate students who initiated it informally as a readings course. As years went on, the course drifted away from its beginnings, rooted in these students’ interests in political economy and development studies, to one on poststructuralist feminist theory. It is with great pleasure that I can recognise how a close engagement with my empirical project has returned me to the course’s beginnings. I thank Derek Gregory for encouraging me to tackle this project and, although I have undoubtedly failed to achieve his objective of writing a book that one would want to take to the beach, I held on to this image in an effort to temper some of the excesses of theoretical writing. A number of friends and colleagues read chapters at various stages of draft form and I thank them for their time, encouragement and exceedingly helpful suggestions. These include: Luningning Alcuitas-Imperial, Trevor Barnes, Nick Blomley, Cecilia Diocson, Nicky Gregson, Susan Hanson, Chris Harker, Dan Hiebert, Jennifer Hyndman, Cindi Katz, Sallie Marston, Deirdre McKay, Katharyne Mitchell, Alison Mountz, David Ley, Eric Olund, Allan Pred, Rose Marie San Juan, Juanita Sundberg, Nigel Thrift, and my department’s Performance reading group. Several chapters benefited from audience reaction to oral presentations. In particular, I thank those who offered critical feedback in the geography departments at Edinburgh Universit y, Glasgow Universit y, St Andrews, the Universit y of Reading, Sheffield Universit y, Universit y of California, Berkeley, Universit y of Washington, and the Universit y of Ohio. Chapter 6 was first written for the Geographies of Home conference held in London in 2000, organised by Alison Blunt and Ann Varley, and I thank them for their invitation and enthusiasm for the piece. I thank Miranda Joseph for the invitation to present aspects of this work at the Sex, Race and Globalisation Conference at the Universit y of Arizona in 2002, and Nayan Shah for his question there about the melodramatic nature of my presentation.

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Acknowledgements

The research builds from two collaborations, with the Philippine Women Centre and then the Filipino-Canadian Youth Alliance. I hope that this book does justice to at least some of what I have learnt through this collaboration, and I thank members of both groups for all of their hard work as co-researchers, and their gentle insistence that I ‘deepen’ my analysis in ways that are meaningful to them. I have been helped over the years by excellent research assistants (and the age and professional seniorit y of some is testimony to how long this project has been underway). I thank: Trina Bester, Michael Brown, Nicky Hicks for performing the numbing but critically important task of transcription. Special thanks to Chris Harker for helping me wrestle the manuscript into final form. I would like to acknowledge the financial support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the Vancouver Centre of Excellence for Research on Immigration and Integration in the Metropolis. Some of the material has been published elsewhere. I gratefully acknowledge permission to print short passages from the following: N. Blomley and G. Pratt (2001), ‘Canada and the political geographies of rights’, Canadian Geographer, 46: 151–66; and Pratt in collaboration with the Ugnayan ng Kabataang Pilipino sa Canada/Filipino-Canadian Youth Alliance (2003), ‘Between homes: displacement and belonging for second generation Filipino-Canadian youths’, B.C. Studies, 139: 41–68; G. Pratt (1997), ‘Stereot ypes and ambivalence: the construction of domestic workers in Vancouver, B.C.’, Gender, Place and Culture, 4: 159–77 (http://www.tandf.co.uk); G. Pratt in collaboration with the Philippine Women Centre (1998), ‘Inscribing domestic work on Filipinas’ bodies’, in H. Nast and S. Pile (eds), Places through the Body, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 283–304. I thank Clark Universit y and Pion, London, for permission to reprint the following (in slightly revised form) in their entiret y: G. Pratt (1999), ‘From registered nurse to registered nanny: discursive geographies of Filipina domestic workers in Vancouver, B.C.’, Economic Geography, 75: 215–36; and G. Pratt (2000), ‘Research performances’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 18(5): 639–51, respectively. I also very much appreciate permission to reprint the following images: Figure 2.1 from Marianne Wex’s ‘Let’s Take Back Our Space’; Figures 2.2, 6.6, 8.2, 8.4, 8.5 courtesy of Amelia Butler; Figure 2.3 with permission of Sandy Huffaker; Figure 3.1 courtesy of Carlo Sayo; Figure 5.1 with permission of The Georgia Straight and the photographer Lorne Bridgman; Figure 5.2 courtesy of Leah Diana; Figures 6.1 and 6.2

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courtesy of Zeitgeist Films; Figures 6.5 and 6.7 with permission of Perspectives, Figures 6.3 and 7.1 with permission of the Filipino-Canadian Youth Alliance; Figures 1.1, 1.2, 8.1 and 8.3 courtesy of the Philippine Women Centre. Finally, my thanks to Javier for his good graphic sense, and willingness to subject himself to textualisation, to Elspeth and Denise for their running companionship, and to Tohmm for his irreverence, patience and support.

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CH A P TER 1

Putting Feminist Theory to Work

At a conference on Sex, Race and Globalisation in 2002, two of us, who had both presented work on Filipino overseas contract workers, were asked to reflect on the melodramatic nature of our presentations. The question was not elaborated but I understood it to be a comment on our heavy reliance on emotional testimonials from Filipina domestic workers and their family members, and our own efforts to draw in the audience emotionally through direct quotation and vivid descriptions of the depth of feeling with which the testimonials were given. As we quoted and mimed domestic workers’ words, it is possible that we were producing an academic version of ‘the weepies’. The question articulated for me what had been only vague impressions about the artfulness of the storytelling of the Filipino domestic workers with whom I have worked in Vancouver. Domestic workers often told rich, compelling stories about hardship and employer abuse. They framed their fears of returning home in a box, rather than an airline passenger seat, within stories of the real-life fates of Sarah Balabagan and Flor Contemplación. They told stories of local, exploitative entrepreneurs who preyed upon naïve, newly arrived domestic workers. These included a salesman who sold expensive sets of unnecessary tableware to live-in caregivers, and others who persuaded domestic workers to buy costly insurance policies by cynically playing up their fears of physical vulnerabilit y and feelings of responsibilit y for family in the Philippines. In some of these stories, pleasure was taken in the absurdit y of life. One story described the process of literally assembling the local cast of villains at a fundraising raffle organised by a Filipina women’s group. The prizes for the raffle consisted of the very goods and services that the predatory entrepreneurs ordinarily sold to domestic workers. Part of the pleasure of this story for me – beyond staging a black joke at the entrepreneurs’ expense – was the process of rendering real life as truly fantastical. That my own writing might have taken on characteristics of a genre of excess (L. Williams 1991) seemed an observation worthy of consideration. To have one’s academic work characterised as melodramatic is not,

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on first reflection, a compliment. Melodrama is often conceived as low, sentimental ‘schmaltz’ that uses manipulative, somewhat dishonest techniques to stimulate response (Mendelsohn 2003). Melodrama operates through simplified renderings of easily identifiable villains and hero(in)es. The characters have little complexit y or depth. In Peter Brooks’ phrasing, the logic of the excluded middle is ‘the very logic of melodrama’ (1976: 18). Mendelsohn’s concern about what appears to be a wider cultural return to melodrama in the United States in recent years turns around its political implications, all too apparent in the language of ‘the axis of evil’ and ‘coalitions of the willing’. Excess emotionalism and simplified moralistic stories about villains and vulnerable hero(in)es do not provide the means for distanced, dispassionate and, above all, nuanced critical thought. Further, melodramatic narratives t ypically reach a resolution by recognising and recovering the hero(in)es’ virtue, and punishing and expelling evil. ‘It works to steel men [sic] for resistance, it keeps him going in the face of threat’ (Brooks 1976: 206). But melodramatic resolution involves purification rather than altering the societal context or working towards reconciliation between protagonists. Thus melodrama contains within it a politics of restoration rather than social transformation. And yet domestic workers with whom I have worked over the last decade are anything but committed to conserving the status quo, and critics of Filipino-American fiction often note the revolutionary potential of a kind of excess they detect in some of this writing. The carnivalesque juxtaposition of official documents and popular forms, such as gossip and melodrama, is used within this fiction to destabilise official histories because it has the effect of rendering official accounts as fabrications or fabulations. The pastiche of melodrama and documentary evidence thus opens a space to tell other, non-official, counter-histories of the Philippines (Balce-Cortes 1995; Lowe 1996a: 113). Feminist critics more generally have been alert to the gendering of traditional interpretations of melodrama. Rey Chow, for example, counters the negative interpretation of the emotionalism of melodrama by arguing that it can offer an ‘enlarged and amplified’ view of sentimental emotions that causes not a mindless identification, but a mixture of distant fascination and immediate bodily reaction. Feminists have been particularly attentive to the way that melodrama involves audiences’ bodies in a mimetic way: ‘we lose control of our bodies – we cry’ (Chow 1996b: 214). Although it is precisely this embodied reaction that leads to criticisms of melodrama as manipulative,

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feminists such as Chow have been loathe to theorise the audience/spectator as passive and easily manipulated, and invite fuller consideration of this ‘body genre’ (L. Williams 1991). I begin with this story about stories because it encapsulates many of the themes and methodologies pursued more systematically throughout the book. Just as feminist theorists have rethought conventional approaches to melodrama, this is a book that puts feminist theory to work on non- or not explicitly feminist theory, and returns this theorising repeatedly to a case study of Filipino domestic workers in Vancouver, Canada. The question that recurs throughout this book concerns the prospects of elaborating a vigorous materialist transnational feminism. There is now a voluminous literature on this topic, but what possibly distinguishes my approach is an insistence on bringing scholarly debate to bear on the concrete struggles of domestic workers. Simply, I put feminist theory – and especially poststructural theory, which many feminists have taken as irrelevant to practical political organising – to work in this concrete case to see how well it works, and what it is capable of producing. I will continue to consider how my theorising itself may have been written by conventions within and beyond the case material. But, just as my conference interlocutor productively invited me to examine my interpretation in fresh ways through a different theoretical lens, I hold an appreciation for the empirical in tension with a respect for the work that theorists can and have the responsibilit y to do. A distinctive characteristic of my particular theoretical lens comes from my disciplinary location in geography.1 Like social theorists more generally, feminists have tended to think about process through time. Rethinking social processes through space (what geographers now call space-time)2 offers opportunities to side-step some unproductive feminist standoffs about, for instance, the materialit y of discourse and the possibilities of universal norms across difference. I have found the case study of domestic workers in Vancouver to be especially productive to think with and through. I began to work on this topic precisely because of the discomfort it created for me – as a middleclass white woman with a young child. The figure of the racialised domestic worker forces white middle-class feminists to face their privilege and think concretely about the difficulties of feminist alliance, especially because their gains in gender equit y in the labour market (such as they are) often rest on the availabilit y of low-waged domestic labour. Furthermore, the complexities go beyond this; Ann Stoler (1995), for instance, argues that modern discourses of bourgeois femininit y historically have been

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intimately interwoven with the figure of the racialised domestic servant. From another perspective, I was also intrigued by claims that domestic workers possess a t ype of ‘doubled vision’, forced as they are to move between their own intimate worlds, and those of their employers. To cite one of the more dramatic claims, Bhabha has argued that Filipino migrants by the late twentieth century ‘embody the Benjaminian “present”: that moment blasted out of the continuum of history’. As subjects of ‘cultural displacement and social discrimination’, he argues that they become ‘the best historical witnesses’ and ‘are the grounds on which Frantz Fanon . . . locates an agency of empowerment’ (1994: 8). Bhabha’s phrasing also suggests how awkward it might be to bring the abstractions of academic theory to practical circumstances. Oren Yiftachel tells a story of a visit by a delegation of British geographers to Israel/Palestine in 1995. He writes that the British geographers presented their work, which reflected the most current of theoretical concerns, on ‘sexualit y in the cit y, men’s magazines . . . the discursive construction of “children” and the body . . .’ The Israelis and Palestinians presented work that ‘invariably focused on the evolving geography of their troubled land’ (2003: 140). After a few days of meetings, a British geographer reportedly banged on the table in despair, declaring, ‘please, no more presentations on Arabs and Jews, please! We have had enough of this conflict!’ (140). This is a funny story. And it is not a funny story. Yiftachel contrasts the ‘oversophisticated language’ of the British geographers to the empirical work of the locals, and tells a story of a failure to connect.3 Rather than such an awkward encounter, I am hoping to force a closer interaction between feminist theory and empirical analyses of domestic workers. Like the locals in Yiftachel’s story, I stay with the same empirical problem, and continuously re-examine it with different theoretical instruments at hand. This is one way of expressing the fact that this is not an empirical situation from which domestic workers can walk away. Domestic workers have limited opportunities for registering that they have had ‘enough of this conflict’, and no inclination to move on to another empirical focus. As much as an author is able, I am attempting to force the reader into a longer, more lasting, closer association, from which there is no immediate release. There are also aspects intrinsic to the case study that force feminist theory into a close encounter. Let me briefly elaborate four. First, one criticism of the ‘cultural turn’ in feminist theory through the 1990s echoes Yiftachel’s criticism of British geographers’ intense interest in

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culture and discourse. This is that labour and the hard facts of material existence receded from view: ‘[t]he body that eats, that works, that dies, that is afraid – that body just isn’t there’ (Bynum 1995: 1). The labouring body and the economy are irrepressible when considering domestic workers’ lives. As a consequence, a case study of domestic workers provides an opportunit y to better assess what strands of poststructural theory, including discourse analysis, can bring to materialist analysis.

Figure 1.1 Interpreting domestic workers’ experiences in the shadow of Flor Contemplación: a Vancouver protest against the execution of Flor Contemplación in 1995. Photograph courtesy of the Philippine Women Centre.

Second, facing the embodied pain of forced migration has allowed me to better understand the geography of the case study, which is transnational rather than national in scope. It is a case study that forces feminist theory into a dialogue with those who originate outside of ‘the West’. I first conceived this study within a multicultural problematic of exploring

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differences among women in Canada. It took me a remarkably long time to understand – really understand – that a study of migrant workers is a study of the processes that create global inequalit y (see Figure 1.1), and, in the case of Filipino migrant workers, a study of the ongoing repercussions of American neo-colonialism. This difficult y of focusing on US neo-colonialism in the Philippines is in fact widespread and a matter of some debate. Writing within the US context, San Juan (2000) argues that the marginal status of Philippines studies within area studies in the United States is bound up with a remarkable and dogged failure on the part of US citizens to critique their nation’s imperialist strategy. He also argues that it is actually in inverse relation to the Philippines’ historical geopolitical significance to the United States: ‘it was in the Philippines that crucial US imperial policy initiatives, as well as the entrepreneurial ethos of its relations with Asia, were first tried out and instituted’ (5). What evolved was a model of ‘collaborative empire’, which required an ‘elaborate ideological and cultural platform, with their requisite state apparatuses of surveillance, coercion, and carceral quarantine’ (5). The migration of Filipina domestic workers to Canada today is an outgrowth of this platform – conditions of economic underdevelopment and national debt propel domestic workers from the Philippines, and competency in English, which reflects the Americanisation of their educational system, enables their entry into Canada. It is not just that Filipinos bring American processes of empire into view. The Philippines is a nation for which nationhood has been both facilitated by, and blocked and deferred through, a long history of colonial conquest. This intertwined history of nation-building and colonial conquest is a persistent reminder of the interconnectedness of the world. This is not a world of fused and fluid hybridit y (which I critique in Chapter 6), but one of specific political, economic and cultural articulation, of nations and individuals articulating their ‘nationhood’ and identities in relation to each other. San Juan’s description of a US model of collaborative empire already suggests how imperialism works on individual subjectivities and bodies. The rich opportunit y for thinking through scale is a third factor that makes the case study of Filipina domestic workers such a useful theoretical resource. One of the fascinating spatial contradictions lived by Filipina domestic workers is the juxtaposition of long-range migration(s) and daily experiences of spatial constraint. To some extent confined in employers’ homes by long days of labour, in which they may feel comfortable only in parts and only at certain times of day, they also seek to control a kind of

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leakiness and invasion of their bodily boundaries within that space. Domestic workers’ efforts to define and cross boundaries at a number of scales is an issue to which I will attend, and the contradiction between spatial mobilit y and cramped existences at a variet y of scales makes this a provocative case study with which to explore the prospects of spatialising feminist theory.

Figure 1.2 Collaborating with the Philippine Women Centre in 1995. Photograph courtesy of the Philippine Women Centre.

Fourth, possibly the most significant factor that has forced theory into a working relationship with the case study is the manner in which the latter was accomplished. The heart of the case study has involved collaboration with the Philippine Women Centre (PWC) in Vancouver from 1995 on, in what some call participatory action research (see Figure 1.2). In Chapter 8, I consider in more detail the practicalities, ambiguities and dilemmas of such collaboration. At its most basic, this sustained collaboration has forced a responsibilit y to theorise in concrete ways. Working with any communit y group would have this effect, but the responsibilit y

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is doubly present when working with a Filipino one. The struggle not to be generalised is ever present. Filipino activists in Vancouver struggle for their specificit y against the efforts of Canadian bureaucrats to enfold and administer their experiences in Canada within a multicultural framework. In the US context, Filipino activists have also resisted becoming submerged within an Asian-American identit y (Bonus 2000; San Juan 2000). This insistence on specificit y is no doubt tied to ongoing commitments to social and political transformation in the Philippines, and continuing resistance to US neo-colonial ventures there. To merge Filipino experience within a multicultural or pan-Asian perspective obscures the long history of Filipino revolutionary struggle for national autonomy. Working with Filipino activists’ groups is to be continuously reminded of the limits to generalisation, and the value and necessit y of theorising within the everyday rather than viewing the empirical merely as an illustration of or a vehicle for abstract theorising. Theorising concretely both exposes the limits to the particular theory being used and requires the creative rearticulation of critical concepts. Putting feminist theory to work on Filipino struggles in Vancouver has allowed me to rethink the thorny issue of agency in relation to Foucauldian – and by extension Judith Butler’s – discourse analysis (Chapter 3), gain a different perspective on the limits and potentials of human and citizenship rights (Chapter 5), reconsider multiculturalism (Chapters 6 and 7), and think about the conservative limits of my epistemological framework (Chapter 8). I would be trivialising the challenges of moving between the abstractions of academic debate and political strategising if I did not admit that there have been both high and low moments in this translation process. The first paper on which the PWC and I collaborated involved thinking through theories of ‘the body’ in relation to the testimony of domestic workers (Pratt in collaboration with PWC; 1998). I had a niggling fear that my collaborators had been polite rather than genuinely enthusiastic about the enframing theory, and was thus relieved when a colleague reported being teased in a friendly way at a PWC social gathering by the director’s husband, who asked whether she was another academic who wrote about the body. I took this as evidence that poststructuralist theory could, after all, speak to Marxist-inclined activists. I even reported it as such (Katz 1998). Engaged in another project in summer 2002, one of the original research collaborators confessed that the theoretical discussion on the body in the earlier paper had no meaning for her; it was irrelevant to her experience and struggles in Vancouver. It is important

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for academics to have this kind of disappointment, and to be reminded both of the difficult y of bringing feminist theory to practical matters and the importance of doing so. I am under no illusions; this book is one step in such a process of translation. It is a series of dialogues between highly abstracted theoretical and less abstracted empirical analyses. Ideally, it is also a means to other dialogues outside the text. Working with an activist group has a further salutary effect on feminist theorising. It brings with it a tremendous optimism and energy for social transformation. Feminists have been persistent critics of overly abstracted theory, including new variants that arose through the 1990s. Feminist critiques of theorisations of transnationalism, postnationalism, multiculturalism,4 globalisation,5 and Empire 6 t ypically turn on the need to specify these processes in particular places, and to acknowledge the indeterminacy of their effects. Nonetheless, Meaghan Morris remarks on the tendency within feminism ‘to know in advance that any event is just more of the same old story, more of the same patriarchy, the same racism, the same form of class exploitation’, and she notes that this unwillingness to register nuance and change ‘too easily becomes that old familiar feeling that nothing ever can change’ (1998: 199; original emphasis). The ethical, utopian, political impulse of feminism is the belief that things – the systemic production of social difference – can and must be changed. Feminist theory is a limited resource if it lacks the subtlet y not only to diagnose the specificit y of this production, but the vitalit y to animate social change. Theorising within the concrete in the good company of those who have committed their daily life to social change returns some of this vitalit y. The book is organised by two objectives: of working on feminist theory as a geographer and putting feminist theory to work on a concrete struggle. The structure of the book formalises the dialogue between theory and practice, but the links between theory and the empirical are thought about differently in different chapters. Chapters 2 and 4 consider what spatial readings bring to debates in feminist theory on theorising subjectivit y and universal norms. These are interleaved with chapters that examine the relevance of these theoretical debates for understanding the long-term ghettoisation of Filipino domestic workers in the Canadian labour market, and domestic workers’ organisations’ use of human-rights discourse. The empirical chapters are not simple demonstrations or illustrations of theory. Chapter 3 shows how occupational ghettoisation is understandable within discourse analysis, but also how imagining discourse

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in the concrete allows fresh opportunities for conceiving agency. In Chapter 5, I argue that it is impossible to think through adequately the possibilit y of rights discourse in the abstract. Chapter 6 problematises the theory/empirical divide more completely by considering how empirical objects are in part produced through theory, and how flawed theories can be used in other empirical contexts in fresh ways. In particular, the empirical object of transnational migrant produced within theories of transnationalism, though flawed, can be re-used to rethink the potentials of multiculturalism. Both empirical objects and theories are treated instrumentally, as imperfect objects with which to think concretely, to imagine alternative pasts, futures and modes of attachment and settlement. The theme of re-imagining multiculturalism within a transnational frame is pursued through a fuller range of feminist theory in the chapter that follows. The final chapter considers how epistemological conventions constitute empirical evidence, and it is my collaboration with Filipino grassroots activists that allows me to see this. I attempt to think through some of the personal and political difficulties of a white, middle-class, Western academic collaborating with Filipino migrants, as well as the productive challenges that such collaboration poses to academic scholarship. Recognising the limits imposed by academic convention enables me to think about producing other kinds of empirical objects, through role playing for instance, that encourage flights of fantasy and are attuned not simply to documenting existing patterns of exploitation and social inequalit y, but to transforming them.

Notes 1. For introductions to feminist geography, see IBG’s Study Group in Gender (1997); Domosh and Seager (2001); McDowell (1999); Pratt (2000a); Rose (1993). 2. Massey (1997) outlines the tendency to attribute all of the processual action to his-

tory and to conceive of space as a static container. She calls attention to the creative effects of ‘spatial disruptions’, chance encounters between people, narratives and material histories and advises that, rather than claiming too much for either time or space, it is more useful to conceive of space-time. See also May and Thrift (2001). 3. Unfortunately, there are many such examples to draw upon: for example Nagar (2002); Raju (2002). 4. Some of these feminist critiques are reviewed in Chapter 7. See also Grewal and Kaplan (1994); Mitchell (1997a); Pratt and Yeoh (2003). 5. The discursive framing of globalisation actively discourages this attention to specificit y. It is a discourse, as the authors known as Gibson-Graham (1996) have argued, that is badly in need of rescripting in order to open possibilities for agency and

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organised political opposition. In standard narratives of globalisation, capitalism is masculinised, globalisation is read through a metaphor of penetration and rape, and workers absorb the politics of fear in ways analogous to rape victims. Following Sharon Marcus’ rescripting of rape, Gibson-Graham considers ways of rhetorically diminishing the perceived power of multinational corporations by exploring their vulnerabilities. They rewrite the male body to see how this might reshape our understanding of capitalism and globalisation. They envision seminal fluid as leaky, often misdirected and wasted, and – violating the norms of heterosexualit y – they imagine the male body as penetrable. By analogy, they want us to consider that money (as capitalism’s semen) might also misfire, and that non-capitalist enterprises have the capacit y to penetrate capitalism. ‘Queering’ globalisation in this way, they claim, liberates alternative scripts, which enable the expansion of non-capitalist economic and social forms. For addition feminist critiques of the globalisation literature, see Fernandez-Kelly and Wolf (2001); C. Freeman (2001). 6. See Lisa Rafael’s (2001) critique of Hardt and Negri’s (2000) Empire.

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CH A P TER 2

Spatialising the Subject of Feminism

In 1999 Martha Nussbaum published in The New Republic a remarkable polemic against the influences of French poststructuralist theory on academic feminists in the United States. She charged American academic feminists with an almost total disregard for the struggles of women outside of their own country and ‘the virtually complete turning from the material side of life, toward a type of verbal and symbolic politics that makes the flimsiest of connections with the real situation of real women’ (38). ‘These developments’, she ventured, ‘owe much to the recent prominence of French postmodernist thought . . . Many have . . . derived from the writings of Michel Foucault (rightly or wrongly) the fatalistic idea that we are prisoners of an all-enveloping structure of power, and that real-life reform movements usually end up serving power in new and insidious ways’ (38). It invites a ‘quietism’ that ‘collaborates with evil’ (45). Nussbaum comes to some of her conclusions through her attempts to work with the theory: ‘Try teaching Foucault at a contemporary law school, as I have’ ( 42). In this chapter, I take up Nussbaum’s challenge to develop the implications of Foucault’s thinking for feminism. I trace some of the different ways that feminists have redeployed Foucault’s analysis of the discursive construction of subjectivit y and the workings of power in modern societies to pursue their own questions about gender norms. If there is some truth to Nussbaum’s claims about US academic feminism, it may result from the fact that some feminists have not taken from Foucault as fully as they might. Foucault was an astute observer of the spatialit y of social life and geographers take great pleasure in his admission that: ‘Geography must indeed necessarily lie at the heart of my concerns’ (1980a: 77). This geographical imagination is muted in some of the most significant feminist extensions of Foucault’s theorising, notably in the writing of Martha Nussbaum’s main target: Judith Butler. I will argue that a fuller geographical account returns some of the materialit y for which Nussbaum yearns. At the same time, at another geographical scale, feminists such as Gayatri Spivak and Ann Stoler have developed analyses

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of the geographical particularit y of Foucauldian theory. Their insistence that Foucault’s analysis be framed within histories of imperialism and colonial encounter has forced a renewed engagement with political economy and worlds outside the borders of the West. By working with rather than against Foucault, I intend to arrive at Nussbaum’s destination: a cosmopolitan materialist feminism, by which I roughly mean a feminism that engages ‘real situations’, life beyond texts, and worlds beyond ‘the West’. In doing so, we can retain Foucault’s profound insights into the workings of power and knowledge, ones that force a continual questioning of feminist complicities in structures of domination. Unlike Nussbaum, I view this as an enabling rather than a ‘fatalistic’ outcome.

Foucault and Discourses of Sexuality For many feminists, the most influential of Foucault’s books has been the first volume of The History of Sexuality. It is within this book that Foucault clearly articulates his theory of biopower, and traces the centralit y of sexualit y to the circulation of modern power. Foucault traces a remarkable proliferation of discourses about sexualit y within European societies, from the seventeenth century on. There was an ‘institutional incitement to speak about it [in public], and to do so more and more’ (1978: 18), first by the Catholic Church, then by the state and educational, medical and psychiatric institutions. These discourses multiplied because sexualit y became ‘an especially dense transfer point for relations of power . . . useful for the greatest number of maneuvers and capable of serving as a point of support, as a linchpin, for the most varied strategies’ (103). In particular, discourses of sexualit y produced four ‘objects of knowledge that were also targets and anchorage points of the ventures of knowledge’ (105): the ‘hysterical woman’, the Malthusian couple, the masturbating child of the bourgeois family, and the adult pervert. Foucault argues that women’s bodies became saturated in sexualit y, pathologised in medical discourse and regulated through state discourses on fertilit y and population control; children’s sexualit y was more closely monitored at home and in school; homosexualit y was pathologised and criminalised. What emerged was biopower, a merging of two forms of power ‘over life’: the disciplining of individual bodies (to optimise their capacities, usefulness and docilit y) and the regulation of the population or ‘species body’. Foucault’s analysis of biopower has been extremely influential, in particular, the understanding that the subject is constituted through

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discourse. Discourses of sexuality literally brought new subjects into being. Homosexualit y, for instance, was transformed from a sexual practice to a defining identit y: ‘it was implanted in bodies’ and given ‘an analytical, visible and permanent realit y’ (44). More generally, the multiple pleasures of the body were knit together in a fictitious unit y, that of sex. But instead of being recognised as an effect of discourse, sex was given definitional, causal power: agency. Sex became the key to subjectivit y and the major secret to be uncovered (through the confessional or psychoanalysis, for example). ‘In the space of a few centuries, a certain inclination has led us to direct the question of what we are, to sex’ (1978: 78). Giving agency to sexualit y veils and perpetuates the workings of power. We understand our sexualit y to be repressed and yearn for liberation from this repression for authentic self-expression. Foucault urges us to rid ourselves of this popular juridico-discursive representation of power. This is power that is negative (prohibitive) and acts by laying down rules (legislative). We tend to hold on to this representation of power, he argues, because it allows us to persist in our belief in a domain of freedom outside of power, in the idea that we are autonomous subjects ‘subjected’ to power. He also argues that this language of power developed historically to establish the legitimacy of the nation-state. Bourgeois nation-state institutions, in opposition to feudal ones, represented themselves as agencies of regulation that function in universal ways on the basis of principles of rights and justice. Law, Foucault argued, is not the central mechanism of modern power. Modern methods of power operate through normalisation, not law; technique rather than right; control rather than punishment; and throughout societ y rather than through the state alone. It is not that the state is no longer an important locus of power but that it draws upon independent disciplines of knowledge, and these knowledges inhabit bodies in ways that exceed state control. Power is not a thing held by institutions or individuals; it is relational, exercised ‘in the interplay of nonegalitarian and mobile relations’ (94). ‘The condition of possibilit y of power, at least of the point of view that allows its exercise to be made intelligible . . . is the moving base of force relations that, by their inequalit y, incessantly induce states of power’ (quoted and translated by Spivak 1993: 31; Spivak’s emphasis). Strategies of power operate in relation to and are made visible by techniques of knowledge: ‘we will start, therefore, from . . . “local centers” of power-knowledge’ (Foucault 1978: 98). There is an incessant ‘back and forth movement’ between schemes of knowledge

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and subjugation. Psychiatric classifications of homosexuals as deviant, for example, became one mechanism for subjugation. Spivak directs our attention to the ‘can-do’ness of the word pouvoir (usually translated as ‘power’). ‘If power/knowledge is seen as the only translation of ‘pouvoir/savoir’, it monumentalizes Foucault unnecessarily’ (1993: 34). She argues that if we get a ‘homely verbiness’ into pouvoir we ‘might come up with something like this: if the lines of making sense of something are laid down in a certain way, then you are able to do only those things with that something which are possible within and by arrangement of those lines’ (34). We are able to do something only as we are able to make sense of it. Discourses – the power/knowledge – of sexualit y are the lines through which we make sense of ourselves and others. What Spivak calls the ‘homely tactics of everyday pouvoir/savoir’ also set the terms for resistance. Foucault was sceptical about calls for sexual liberation because they operate so completely within the discourse of sexuality. To seek liberation through sex is to persist in attributing agency to it. Foucault persistently redirects inquiry away from the interests and over-all domination served by discourses of sexualit y, towards analyses of linkages, supports and the effects of power, arguing that there is no one stable form of subjugation. It is for this reason that he frames his analysis as antagonistic to Marxism; he refuses the argument that discourses of sexualit y developed first of all or primarily as a means of labour control and served only to dominate. He ventures that the techniques of sexualit y were first deployed among the bourgeoisie as an affirmation of self. Why? They supported a new political ordering of life insofar as they supported bourgeois status claims. Whereas aristocrats claimed status through the purit y of their bloodline, the bourgeoisie could claim it through their genetic integrit y, their strength, vigour and health (which required the intense monitoring of women’s bodies – in particular their fertilit y). Only towards the end of the eighteenth century were these tactics and techniques extended to the working classes as a means of subjugation and control. But what eventually became a strategy of class formation and regulation emerged historically from a disparate set of local power relations, situated in the confessional, the school, the psychiatric hospital, the family, among other institutions. ‘We will start, therefore’, writes Foucault, ‘from what might be called “local centers” of power-knowledge . . . [though] no “local center”, no “pattern of transformation” could function if, through a series of sequences, it did not eventually enter into an over-all strategy’ (1978: 98–9). ‘One must conceive of the double conditioning of a strategy

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by the specificit y of possible [local] tactics, and of tactics by the strategic envelope that makes them work’ (1978: 100).1 Feminists might note that the strategic envelope that Foucault eventually delineates involves a rather singular class analysis. He argued that discourses of sexualit y supported and relayed bourgeois status claims, and then functioned to regulate the working classes. Foucault demonstrated little interest in how the hysterisation of bourgeois women, for instance, was so easily accomplished. Feminists have wondered: is power as diffused as Foucault suggests? And is not gender domination another over-all strategy worthy of commentary? These are not questions that would have interested Foucault. His ‘ostensible problem with feminism’ (Butler 1990: 95) emerged from his refusal to take sexual difference as a starting point of analysis and his insistence that sexual difference, and sex more generally, are social constructions, effects of discourse rather than agents of social change or personal transformation. A feminism that valorises ‘womanly’ qualities and holds as its ideal the liberation of women from discriminatory social practices echoes the fantasies of sexual liberationists. It rests on a juridical representation of power that reads contemporary social practices, codes and norms as purely restrictive. A Foucauldian would reverse the analysis and ask: what and how do social practices and conventions produce sexual difference and gender in this form? This is precisely what Judith Butler has done.

Butler and the Discursive Construction of Sex/Gender Judith Butler unsettles the assumption that gender is a social construction built on the foundations of biological difference: sex. Ironically, then, she identifies the way that conventional social constructivism is partially foundational insofar as biological sex differentiation is assumed. It is the production of binarised and hierarchised gendered meanings that is t ypically of concern in feminist analyses. Butler cites (1990), however, the small but not insignificant number of babies born with indeterminate sex characteristics and the societal impossibilit y of leaving them in a space between the binaries of male and female. The compulsory norms of heterosexualit y – heteronormativit y – dictate two sexes. In a move that reverses the standard feminist account of the relations between gender and sex, Butler argued that gender norms dictate two sexes and not vice versa. This is different from a conventional feminist social constructivist position insofar as she is arguing that biological sex itself is produced and it is not just gender that is socially constructed. Gender,

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including the category woman, thus loses its interiorised, biological foundation (that is to say, sex). Butler reconceptualises gender as performative. We come to understand our identit y as girl/woman or boy/man because we repeatedly perform it: ‘There is no gender identit y behind the expression of gender; that identit y is performatively constituted by the very “expressions” that are said to be its results’ (Butler 1990: 25). These performances are not arbitrarily chosen. They are compelled and sanctioned by heteronormativit y, the compulsory norms of heterosexualit y. Butler’s re-examination of the story of Herculine Barbin makes this point abundantly clear. Herculine was a nineteenth-century hermaphrodite, famously discussed by Foucault (1980b), whose sexual ambiguit y was discovered and disallowed by the medical profession, the church and the state. S/he was forced to assume an unambiguously male body and identit y, and her/his life ended in bitterness and suicide. Herculine could not embody norms of heterosexualit y predicated on the paternal law of kinship, [B]ecause s/he cannot provide the occasion by which that law naturalizes itself in the symbolic structures of anatomy. In other words, the law is not simply a cultural imposition on an otherwise natural ‘heterogeneit y’; the law requires conformit y to its own notions of ‘nature’ and gains its legitimacy through the binary and asymmetrical naturalization of bodies. (Butler 1990: 106) Gender norms are materialised by the body. One can read from Butler’s analysis of Herculine that the body is not just ‘invested’ with gender norms but is ‘in some sense animated by the norm, or contoured by a norm’ (Butler 1996: 111). Gender norms are materialised by the body. So, for example, parents of babies born with indeterminate sex characteristics are almost immediately asked to determine a sex so that the ambiguit y of their baby’s body is removed. The impossibilit y of Herculine’s life was that s/he could not embody that nature. Butler thus attempts to occupy the conceptual space between biological determinism and constructionism because she is arguing that, although gender norms act on the materialit y of the body to produce sexed bodies, sex differentiation is not automatically ‘there’ before gender. ‘There is a tendency’, she writes, [T]o think that sexualit y is either constructed or determined; to think that if it is constructed, it is in some sense free, and if it is determined,

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it is in some sense fixed. These opposites do not describe the complexit y of what is at stake in any effort to take account of the conditions under which sex and sexualit y are assumed. (Butler 1993: 94) In an effort to describe this complexit y, Butler welds Foucauldian to psychoanalytic theory. In Butler’s view, Foucault’s theory of the subject undertheorises the ‘instabilities of identificatory practices’ (Butler 2000b: 151). She takes from Lacan the idea that the psychical image of the body plays a fundamental role in the constitution of the subject and is the means through which we apprehend our body. The body image defines the boundaries of what Butler calls the bodily ego by uniting disconnected sensations that do not yet make up a body. Bodies constructed within hegemonic, heterosexual culture are bounded within the terms of heterosexual exchange, so as to close down certain sexual practices. Thus we understand certain organs and bodily surfaces as sexual, and there are normalised boundaries and acceptable points of penetrabilit y and contact. Butler understands the instabilit y and hence the incessant policing of the boundary of the body through the psychoanalytic concepts of repression and abjection. In order to achieve a hegemonic gender identit y we must reject some of our sexual attachments (that is to say, non-heterosexual ones). What we expel becomes alien, defiled, or abject, and we develop a strong sense of boundaries in order to stabilise a self purified of its disruptive, abjected elements. The loss of these abjected attachments can be neither avowed nor grieved by heterosexuals in a heteronormative societ y: homosexualit y ‘produces a domain of unliveable passion and ungrievable loss’ (Butler 1997: 135). Butler takes from psychoanalysis the understanding that the unconscious sets limits on what we can perform: ‘What is exteriorized or performed can only be understood by reference to what is barred from performance, what cannot or will not be performed’ (1997: 144–5). While this is hardly a model of conscious agency – quite the opposite – it provides one way of understanding slippage across performances, the passion with which many of us cling to gender roles and the virulence of homophobia. The troubled melancholic heterosexual psyche that she describes also provides an important rationale for subverting the t yranny of gender roles. Because heterosexuals cannot consciously grieve the loss, homosexual desire is never resolved and thus continues to ‘panic gender’ (136); hence the incessant, insistent performance of a gender ideal that can never be stabilised or finally achieved. Of course Butler recognises the existence of openly gay identifications

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and a range of queer politics, and there has been much controversy around her discussion of drag performance as a subversion of heteronormativit y. I draw attention to her analysis of heterosexual melancholy because it subverts the conventional psychiatrisation of ‘the homosexual’ by returning a troubled psyche to heterosexuals. Despite the psychological complexit y of Butler’s theory of the subject, it has many critics. I want to engage with four of their criticisms by reading them geographically. The criticisms are: that Butler theorises a fully determined subject; is only concerned with a purely discursive, non-material world; provides an individualistic theory; and, finally, is US-centred in unacknowledged ways. Several geographers have rightly expressed dissatisfaction with the abbreviated spatialit y of Butler’s theory and I want to argue that by building this spatialit y into Butler’s theory, these four criticisms can be at least partially addressed. In Thrift and Dewsbury’s (2000: 414) assessment: ‘Butler makes little room for space. Period.’ Nelson’s position is that Butler’s attenuated reading of agency actively prevents geographical analyses: ‘The kinds of questions many geographers ask cannot be adequately addressed by a strictly performative understanding of identit y, an approach that assumes an already abstracted time and placeless subject’ (1999: 351). Rather than abandon Butler, I want to consider what a geographical imagination brings to her theory.

Reading Butler as a Spatial Theorist The critique concerning agency is one that Butler shares with Foucault. Addressing Butler in particular, Benhabib asks, If we are no more than the sum total of the gendered expressions we perform, is there ever any chance to stop the performance for a while, to pull the curtain down, and let it rise only if one can have a say in the production of the play itself ? (1995: 21) That is, are we fully determined by discourse, and what role can we play in producing different ones? There are a number of ways of responding to these questions (for example, Smith 1988). One is to argue that discourses have many meanings, producing diverse effects, some unintended by their users. Discourses produce subject positions that not only regulate but are the medium for power relations. Discourses of sexualit y may have created the stigmatised, marginalising identit y of homosexual, for example, but

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the identity of homosexual has been taken up in radicalised ways to decriminalise homosexualit y, and alter the meaning and practice of marriage.2 In other words, a stigmatising identity that disciplined and criminalised can be redeployed in liberating ways. Feminism itself is a politics of resistance and social transformation that emerges out of a regulatory discourse of sexualit y. Further, Butler’s theory of performativit y is based on the understanding that, although we have no capacit y to stand outside discursive conventions, we do have the ‘possibilit y of reworking the very conventions by which we are enabled’ (Butler 1995: 136). There are possibilities of subverting norms through each performance. Individuals are also produced by multiple, sometimes contradictory, discourses. Managing these contradictions, or bringing one discourse into relation with another, can open points of resistance. Lisa Lowe argues, for example, that the liberal principles of American democracy are at odds with the various ways that Asian-American citizens enter discourse: as ‘the model minorit y’ or ‘the invading multitude, the lascivious seductress, the servile yet treacherous domestic, the automaton whose inhuman efficiency will supercede American ingenuit y’ (1996a: 18). Placing a discourse of egalitarian liberal democracy in tension with discourses that stereot ype and differentiate creates a possibilit y for criticising constructions of the American nation and an economic system ‘that profits from racism’ (1996a: 26). These are essentially aspatial ways of thinking about the agency of a discursively produced subject, and they can be enhanced through a geographical imagination. Butler intimates this when she recognises that the capacit y for agency is not a static propert y of human beings secured through theoretical debate but, rather, is contingent upon and bound up with historical conditions. For Butler, the pressing question is specific and concrete rather than metaphysical: her question is, ‘what are the conditions under which agency becomes possible?’ (Butler 1995: 136). Butler does not develop this idea but one way of doing so is to consider that discourses emerge as situated practices in particular places; they are inherently geographical (Pred 1992). There are socio-spatial circuits through which cultural and personal narratives are circulated, legitimated, and given meaning. Contradictions within and across discourses come to light through the day-to-day practice of living within and moving through them. If we understand discourses as situated practices produced in particular places, we can also understand agency and critique in more embodied ways. Moving through places may involve moving between discursive formations and be one way that individuals become aware of the contradictions between discourses. Travel from a working-class neighbour-

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hood to do domestic work in affluent homes, migration, transnational identifications, economic globalisation – these all involve travel across materialised discursive formations, and offer opportunities for critique. For example, the critiques that domestic workers living in Hong Kong have developed about their experiences as exploited labour there have led them to rethink the collectively owned businesses that they are starting in the Philippines. In particular, they are attempting to build social values beyond profit maximisation into these business ventures (Gibson et al. 2001). Butler has also been criticised for her ‘refusal to acknowledge anything outside discourse’ (Rose 1999: 251). Cheah (1996) argues that Butler fails to theorise adequately the extra-discursive and thus posits a thoroughly cultural human body. He argues that she thereby inadvertently produces an ‘anthropologistic’ theory that reinstates the very dualities of nature and culture that she seeks to overcome. Addressing this criticism, the point needs to be made that it is not only that theorising ‘beyond’ the discursive is underdeveloped, but that the materialit y of discourse, so evident in Foucault’s writing, is less apparent in that of Butler. Foucault noted that his ‘spatial obsession’ (1980a: 69) allowed him to come to his understanding of power and knowledge. He argued that Metaphorising the transformation of discourse on a vocabulary of time necessarily leads to the utilisation of the model of individual consciousness with its intrinsic temporalit y. Endeavouring on the other hand to decipher discourse through the use of spatial, strategic metaphors enables one to grasp precisely the points at which discourses are transformed in, through and on the basis of relations of power. (1980a: 69–70) But Foucault’s spatial obsessions were more than metaphorical. Discourses of sexualit y involved a literal respatialisation of sexual practices: legitimate sexualit y was consigned to the private parental bedroom and illegitimate sexualit y to the asylum and prison, where it could be controlled and contained. Psychoanalysis created a new, safe space for sexualit y ‘between couch and discourse’. When new discourses on children’s sex developed in schools, this discourse was as much written into the bricks and mortar of the schools as spoken through speech. Take the secondary schools of the eighteenth century, for example. On the whole, one can have the impression that sex was hardly spoken of

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at all in these institutions. But one only has to glance over the architectural layout, the rules of discipline, and their whole internal organization: the question of sex was a constant preoccupation. The builders considered it explicitly . . . The space for classes, the shape of the tables, the planning of the recreation lessons, the distribution of the dormitories (with or without partitions, with or without curtains) . . . all this referred, in the most prolix manner, to the sexualit y of children. (Foucault 1978: 27–8) Things and the spatial and discursive relations established among them materialise, relay and stabilise networks of power relations. There is some intimation that context ‘matters’ in Butler’s theory of identit y formation, for example, in her recognition that what counts as subversive of heteronormativity is entirely dependent on context. Whether speech is deemed ‘hate speech’, or drag is subversive, depends on context: who is speaking/performing, where the speech/performance is staged, who is the audience, and how the audience interprets the speech/performance (Butler 1990: 139). However, there is little doubt that she deciphers discourse and subject constitution first and foremost through the vocabulary of time. Her theory of performativit y, [M]oves the conception of gender off the ground of a substantial model of identit y to one that requires a conception of gender as a constituted social temporality . . . If the ground of gender identit y is the st ylized repetition of acts through time and not a seemingly seamless identit y, then the spatial metaphor of a ‘ground’ will be displaced and revealed as a st ylized configuration, indeed, a gendered corporealization of time. (1990: 141; original emphasis) The ground that Butler seeks to ‘unground’ is a biological, internalised gender, and she does this by theorising that both sex and gender are produced through repetition over time. But her preoccupation with time also has the effect of ungrounding processes of subject constitution from the networks of objects and spatial relations – from the full materialit y – through which power and knowledge work. This seems to me an omission but not a necessary one, and it is possible to bring this materialit y to Butler’s analysis. Mundane contemporary examples that draw upon a fuller spatial vocabulary to show how gender norms come to be might include some of the following. From the

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Figure 2.1 Gendered bodily comportment in the 1970s. Photographs by Marianne Wex (1979).

moment of birth a child is socialised into a gender norm and schooled in bodily comportment. These norms come to inhabit everyday practices, like throwing a ball, or sitting at a bus stop. Figure 2.1 shows four photographs taken from an extended photo essay by Marianne Wex (1979), which chronicles the differences between feminine and masculine body postures. Feminine postures are t ypically closed and protected: arms close to the body, knees held together, toes turned inward. Masculine poses are expansive. A photo project by Amelia Butler in Vancouver in 2003 demonstrates that these conventions endure (see Figure 2.2)3. Not all men and women inhabit these norms equally and it is interesting to consider how you read bodies that do not conform. These bodily practices inhabit the psyche. Iris Young (1990), for example, has argued that boys and men spend less time than do girls and women observing themselves as objects in space, in large part because they are less closely observed, monitored and commented upon as objects in space. They are thus freer to be in space as subjects rather than objects, and tend to see themselves as ‘creating’ space and spatial relationships rather than being positioned in space. These ways of moving the body affect self-perceptions of competence and cognitive abilit y. So too, it was documented in the late 1970s in Britain that by the age of eight, (middleclass) girls were kept much closer to home than were boys, in part because of parental fears about sexual vulnerability (that is, a discourse of sexualit y). Gendered differences in environmental experience were soon evident within the classroom, registered as differences in spatial aptitude in ways that likely affect brain development (Matthews 1987). Some forms of

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spatial aptitude are prerequisite for maths competency and thus have long-term implications for career choices (Self and Golledge 1994). One might argue then that sex differences are literally inscribed in and on our bodies and mental processes, not only at birth but through a slow, daily process of reiterating gender norms. Sex difference is produced through this process of repetition but it can be destabilised. Self and Golledge’s list of pedagogic exercises to improve spatial reasoning within the classroom provides just one example. Spreading parental fears of ‘stranger danger’ that are changing norms and reducing boys’ relative spatial freedom (Valentine 1997) may also destabilise these particular sex differences, although boys’ greater access to computer technology may rematerialise them in new ways if particular spatial aptitudes can be tied to video use (Globe and Mail 2003). McNamee (1998) found that middle-class British boys have this superior access to computers because of parents’ gendered norms: in households with one computer it is t ypically located in the boy’s bedroom and female siblings must gain entrance to this room in order to access computer technology. Bodily and cognitive sex differences are produced through the repetition of everyday practices, and these practices are constituted through a moving field of force relations that eventuate in well-defined, seemly stable sex differences. These sex differences are constituted as innate through and by networks of productive power. This mundane interdependence of the symbolic and material on the materialisation of middle-class children’s bodies comes close, I think, to the process of ‘mattering’ described by Cheah (1996: 128), suspended ‘between active and passive’, oscillating ‘undecidedly between the passive weightiness of nature and the active variabilit y of culture and history’. The weightiness of this nature is secured, not only in and on the body and through psychic processes of boundary maintenance, but through glances of strangers, parental restrictions on walking to school, and brothers’ control over their bedroom territories; it is relayed and supported through fully materialised discourses acted out in, and concretised on and through, environments. Pushing the implications of anti-foundationalism further, Gregson and Rose (2000) have argued that we must think of these environments as themselves produced through performances. The space of a young boy’s bedroom, for instance, is brought into being through enacting gender norms, even as it supports and relays these norms. The need to consider more fully the social environment beyond the individual leads us to a third criticism. Critics alert us to the individualism

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Figure 2.2 Gendered bodily comportment on display in 2003. Photographs by Amelia Butler.

of Butler’s theory, to ‘the aloneness of Butler’s theoretical body’, to a body that is ‘entirely self-referential’ (Rose 1999: 251). Heteronormativit y is dictated by the paternal law of kinship, instantiated through individuals’ repetitions of gender norms, de- and re-stabilised through psychic processes of repression and abjection. In Rose’s view, Despite her crucial denaturalization of the bounded corporealit y of the straight Western subject, Butler’s own corpus seems strangely marked by that same corporeal topography. Her work appears to contain the

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very notion of the substantial sovereign subject (sovereign because an autonomous agent) and his body (sovereign over his own, bounded, corporeal territory) that she is at such pains to deny. (1999: 251) Rose argues that Butler theorises the subject within a simplified model of social space, a space of ‘zonalit y’ (253), and focuses her geographical imagination almost exclusively on the boundaries that define the heterosexual body and stabilise gender identity. These boundaries enable and enforce the construction of the categories of interior/exterior, innate/learnt, biological/ psychological, body/mind; and a line between what is intelligible and abject. In Rose’s assessment, this focus on the force of boundaries is intertwined with another problem: this is that Butler provides no theoretical resources for imagining a psychic space in which difference is not only engaged but desired.4 The need to more fully spatialise – and simultaneously socialise – Butler’s theory draws us back to Foucault’s assertion that ‘metaphorising’ discourse through a vocabulary of time necessarily leads to a model of individual consciousness. This is an important criticism for feminists to consider because of the pervasive tendency within feminist scholarship in the 1990s to focus attention on processes of identit y formation. Consider, for example, Rey Chow’s remark in a 1997 interview that it was only recently that she had become interested in the latter part of The History of Sexuality where Foucault outlines his theory of biopower. You know people tend only to concentrate on the first part about the repressive hypothesis, and Victorian sexualit y and so forth. If you read [the book] again the most fascinating parts of the book are towards the end where he moves into a discussion of biopower . . . I look at Foucault more and more as a population theorist, a biopower theorist who sees sexualit y as a major component, at least in the modern era. (Discipline and Place Collective 1997: 517) 5 These remarks may be read as symptomatic of a particular feminist reading of Foucault, which initially disengages a Foucauldian analysis of the disciplining of individuals from the other form of biopower, the regulation of the species-body. To ignore Foucault’s full reading of biopower is also to miss the moment at which he embeds the history of sexualit y within an explicitly

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capitalist society. Foucault sees biopower accomplished through discourses of sexualit y as ‘without question an indispensable element in the development of capitalism’ (1978: 140–1), a different element than the Protestant ethic but one that had ‘perhaps a wider impact than the new moralit y’ (141). Recall that Foucault understood discourses of sexualit y to have linked, supported and relayed various moments of the formation of the bourgeoisie and the liberal nation-state and, eventually, the regulation of the working classes. A partial reading of Foucault may be relevant, along with her reliance on psychoanalysis, to a tendency for capitalism to recede in Butler’s analysis of the performativit y of gender. This need not be so. A good number of feminists work very effectively with poststructural theories of the subject and Marxian political economy. But how poststructural theory and political economy are to be conjoined remains a matter of debate. It is instructive to consider Lynne Segal’s assessment that, It is a socialist imaginary, combined with feminism, which has always stressed the sufferings caused by the material exploitation, deprivation and social marginalization, of women and other oppressed groups around the world. These cannot be either superseded or replaced by battles over discursive marginalization and invalidation. The two objectives, though strategically distinct, are also intricately interwoven, the one turning feminists outwards toward women in struggle, the other directing us inwards, toward refiguring a hitherto abjected femininit y. (1999: 34; original emphasis) Segal’s use of geographical metaphor, of inside and outside, is unfortunate because she seems to be saying that discourse analysis focuses attention inward, on the individual and psychological, and not outward to processes of material exploitation. To frame the integration in this way misses the importance of discursive formations to the workings of capitalism. Subjectification in and through discourse is crucial to the processes of producing individuals as skilled and unskilled workers, to the ‘branding’ of consumers, and as a supplement to the economy (Joseph 2002).6 As one example, Melissa Wright (1998, 1999a, 1999b) details the repeated devaluation of Mexican women working in maquiladora (export-processing factories) in Ciudad Juarez, working a taut negotiation between Butler’s theory of performativit y and Marxist political economy. Managers draw upon a discourse of sexual difference to produce men as trainable skilled

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labour and Mexican women as untrainable. Mexican women’s untrainabilit y and intrinsic suitabilit y to unskilled labour is a self-evident ‘cultural thing’, which rests on a potent concoction of discourses of excessive heterosexualit y and motherhood, and about which (it is assumed) there can be no institutional remedy (such as training programmes for Mexican women). Trapped in boring, repetitive, physically demanding, low-paid jobs, Mexican women are produced as high turnover ‘quitters’ and the materialit y of their body – stiff fingers and strained eyes – takes shape through the process. Their bodies thus are actively produced as lowskilled bodies of limited value through performing this low-valued labour (Figure 2.3). A flexible workforce is created because injuries and low commitment to dead-end jobs encourage high turnover. Wright places alongside this story of turnover, narratives about the hideous murders of over 200 women maquiladora workers over the last decade, whose mutilated bodies have been found in the deserts surrounding the maquila factories. She understands the relative lack of official attention given to these murders through similar narratives about Mexican women’s excessive heterosexuality (was she a good girl worthy of concern?) enframed by stereot ypes of macho men and the corruption of traditional values by American cultural influences. What links these narratives is their reliance on cultural explanations – ‘death by culture’ – which call up gendered, sexualised stereot ypes and simultaneously absolve institutional actors – maquila managers, politicians, police – of the need to make institutional investments in ‘human capital’ and public infrastructure (for example, adequate street lighting). Wright considers the repetition of these stories of waste: ‘the repetitive telling of wasting women in the turnover and murder stories is requisite because of her ambiguit y: the waste is never stable or complete’ (1999b: 471). It is not a singular story of waste. The anticipated physical deterioration of female maquila workers, which confirms in advance their low value, is a different narrative than those told about the murdered women, which also plays upon the erosion of traditional values. But they lead to the same conclusion. Following Butler, she reads the repeated performance of Mexican women as waste as ‘the repeated inculcation of the norm’ (1999a: 471). Wright’s analysis is a powerful example of the rewards of working with the resources offered by Butler’s theory, rather than dismissing the theory for what it fails to accomplish. The connections that Wright makes between discourse and the degradation of maquila workers’ bodies, the latter accomplished through both

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Figure 2.3 Regulating the production of maquila workers’ bodies: a regulated stretch break in Tijuana, Mexico. Photograph by Sandy Huffaker.

the more subtle workings of repetitive strain injuries and grotesque acts of rape and torture, raise doubts about the earlier criticism of discourse analysis – that it leads away from materialit y. Nonetheless, I want to pursue this argument as it is framed by Pheng Cheah, because he locates it within a larger critique of the geographical specificit y of Butler’s theorising about not only power, but politics.

Locating Power and Politics Cheah understands Butler to take the model of gender identification as the paradigm of oppression.7 ‘It is, however, not at all clear that all aspects of oppression can be reduced to or explained by the paradigm of regulatory identification/internalization of norms and, hence, that all subversion be inevitably centered on the contestations of forms of identit y’ (Cheah 1996: 120). Cheah notes that this becomes most apparent ‘in scenarios of

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oppression where material marks are constituted through physical and not ideational ingestion . . . such as the tracings of the digestive tract by inequalities in food production and consumption’ (120–1).8 Cheah maintains, further, that Butler’s theory of oppression shapes her understanding of politics and that she tacitly presupposes ‘an established culture of democratic contestation within the constitutional nation-state form . . . and passive capitalist relations’ (121). Butler ‘has little to say about scenarios of contestation where the constraints on and enabling conditions for the resignification of identit y are primarily material rather than discursive, economic rather then ideational’ (134).9 In Cheah’s view, this theory does not work very well in a situation of ‘global neocolonialism’ in which oppression works ‘at a physical level’, ‘transnational corporatism’ distorts and attenuates cultures of democracy, subversion involves ‘protracted negotiations’ with various actors (from nation-states to unorganised peasant labourers) within ‘the economic imperatives of the global system’ (121). By forcing attention on the geographical specificit y of Butler’s analysis,10 Cheah echoes Spivak’s (1988) earlier critique of Foucault’s theory of power. Spivak drew attention to the fact that the historical transformations in the mechanisms of power described by Foucault were secured by means of territorial imperialism. If in Europe the mechanisms of power were transformed to biopower, this was because European military power was exercised elsewhere, as was the super-exploitation of labour and resources. Spivak is arguing, not only that power and politics worked differently in different places, but that the transformation in the mechanisms of power in Europe was intertwined with European imperialism: ‘to buy a self-contained version of the West [a position that Spivak attributes to Foucault] is to ignore its production by the imperialist project’ (1988: 291). As Stoler (1995: 208) notes, if Foucault was prolific in his use of spatial metaphor, he was decidedly ‘sloppy about place’, specifically the geographical limits to his theorising. Stoler has responded to this sloppiness by ‘rerouting the history of sexualit y through the history of empire’ (1995: 8). She arrives at a surprising destination: this is to claim that discourses of sexualit y emerged in the colonial context first and were bound up with discourses of nation and race. Foucault understood state racism to be an effect of discourses of sexualit y; he considered it to be a modern strategy of biopower administered by a normalising state. Stoler reverses this chronological and geographical sequencing to argue that sexualit y developed out of and in relation to colonial discourses of race and nation. Concerns about securing

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national European identities, white degeneracy, hybridity and miscegenation, white women’s choices of sexual partners, the instability and porosit y of the white middle-class body – all especially acute in colonial contexts – were implicated in the development of discourses of sexualit y in ways that remain unexamined by Foucault. What is at issue in the discourse of sexualit y is not only the unproblematic cultivation of the bourgeois self already formed, but . . . a more basic set of uncertainties about what it means to be bourgeois, about the permeabilit y of its distinction and what constituted its vulnerabilities. All of this was most uncertain in the colonial context. (Stoler 1995: 93; original emphasis) Stoler is not reducing discourses of sexualit y to racism but is attempting to understand how they developed in relation to, and as supports and relays of discourses of race and nation; she is re-imagining and increasing the densit y of relations of power flowing through them. Gendered prescriptions of motherhood for middle-class women were an exceedingly important ‘part of the scaffolding’ (93) on which racialised and nationalist discourses of sexualit y rested. Although gender is unexplored by Foucault, the middle-class woman appears in two of the four ‘objects of knowledge’ produced through discourses of sexualit y: the ‘hysterical’ woman and (half of) the Malthusian couple. But to Foucault’s list of objects of knowledge created through discourses of sexualit y ‘students of empire would surely add at least one more’ (Stoler 1995: 6): this is the domestic servant or nursemaid. It was not only that relations between children and parents were sexualised and brought under increased self-scrutiny and the surveillance of medical, psychiatric and state institutions. The relations between white family members and their servants also required close vigilance. The perceived dangers were legion, from wet nurses’ transmission of race via breast milk (‘whitened blood’, 143), to servants masturbating their charges, to the effects of the pandering and submissive servant on the development of children’s moral character. Stoler’s identification of a fifth object of knowledge produced through discourses of sexualit y not only opens up a complex field of power relations among women but traces the relationalit y of gender, racial and class differences. That is, middle-class women were produced not only through discourses of gender difference that domesticated middle-class women through surveillance of their fertility and supposed psychological

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fragilit y – a standard feminist narrative – but in relation to their female counterpart, the racialised servant (and vice versa). This is interesting to consider alongside Nussbaum’s assessment that the effect of Foucault’s writing on American feminism has been to create a scholarship narrowly focused on the United States. Stoler and Spivak problematise Nussbaum’s assertion, insofar as they have been among the most insistent that Western discourses of sexualit y, in which gender constructions are embedded, cannot be understood outside of the relations of imperialism. The domestic servant was an object of knowledge and scrutiny in Europe as well, a cipher for bourgeois and middle-class social anxieties, an unstable figure through which racial, gender and class categories flowed. Stoler cites Donzelot’s (1979) claim that ‘the problem of house servants was “the guiding thread” of eighteenth century debates about the ills of urban migration, the decadence of cities, the ill-health of bourgeois children’ (Stoler 1995: 147). McClintock (1995) argues, with reference to Victorian England, that the female domestic servant was such a productive site of discursive construction because domestic work embodied a double gender and class crisis, ‘between men’s paid labor and women’s unpaid labor and between feudal homestead economy and an industrial wage economy’. As a way of negotiating the crisis, familiar colonial discourses were redeployed: ‘domestic space [and the white female domestic servant] became racialized as the rhetoric of degeneration was drawn upon to discipline and contain the unseemly spectacle of paid women’s work’ (1995: 165). McClintock’s identification of a ‘double crisis’ suggests that the figure of domestic servant – even as a discursive hegemonic event (let alone as a living subject) – was a site of diverse power relations. Wendy Brown (1997) offers one way of thinking about this complexit y; this is to posit the existence of different kinds of powers, different modalities of social subjection. Although these powers of subject formation are not separable in actual people, ‘subjects of gender, class, nationalit y, race, sexualit y, and so forth, are created through different histories, different mechanisms and sites of power, different discursive formations, different regulatory schemes’ (86). Brown is attempting to negotiate a tense, seemingly contradictory line between the understanding that discursive formations do not obey identit y categories (and thus discourses of gender, sexualit y and race can be intertwined in some of the ways suggested by Stoler and Wright, for instance) and a recognition that there are diverse and even unrelated formations of the subject:

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Not simply the content but the modalities of power producing gender, race, or caste are specific to each production – the mode of production and dimensions of state power that produce class, and the discourses and institutions of normative heterosexuality that produce gender, are largely noncomparable forms and st yles of power. (W. Brown 1997: 87) This leads her to call for more complex analyses of ‘subject-producing power’, including ‘careful histories, psychoanalysis, political economy, and cultural, political, and legal discourse analysis’ (94), combined with genealogies of particular modalities of subjection (of the t ype provided by Foucault). This layering of different t ypes of analyses requires a different ‘practice of . . . historiography’ that emphasises ‘contingent developments, formations that may be at odds with or convergent with each other, and trajectories of power that vary in weight for different kinds of subjects’ (94). While the pluralisation of modalities of social subjection would seem to be one answer to Cheah’s complaint about Butler’s singular reading of oppression, Cheah (like Spivak) reminds us of the geographies that need to be written into the historiographies recommended by Brown. Modern power in ‘the West’ has long depended on the exercise of brute domination in other parts of the world, and the t ypes of civil societ y assumed by Butler are not everywhere evident. In Spivak’s (1999) view, it is not only that liberal democracies are not ubiquitous, but that the international humanitarian agencies that originate from within them actively undermine civil societ y in postcolonial contexts. At an intra-national scale, Foucault himself used the metaphor of ‘geographical discontinuity’ (1977: 216) to imagine the relationship between revolutionary class struggle and specific struggles of women, homosexuals and others against particularised power: ‘And these movements are linked to the revolutionary movement of the proletariat to the extent that they fight against the controls and constraints which serve the same system of power’ (216). We might sharpen and extend this rendering of geographical discontinuit y by noting that different modalities of power – some modern and some not so modern – need not operate evenly across space but can be written unevenly into the same space. A sense of the latter is conveyed by concepts such as ‘graduated sovereignt y’, developed by Ong (2000) in relation to contemporary South-east Asian states, or ‘hierarchies of citizenship’ (Stasiulis 1997). These concepts point to the fact that different modalities of even state power co-exist in relation to

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different categories of citizen-subjects residing in the same national space. The state makes different kinds of biopolitical investments in and deploys varying technologies of power in relation to different subject populations. Of increasing concern within many first-world nations is the fact that ‘Third-World-looking migrants’ (Hage 1998: 133) appear to be subjected to different modalities of power than are others, and experience not only reduced citizenship rights, but conditions of more extreme economic exploitation. Chow (1996b) suggests that the ‘discursive ferment’ around ethnicit y in our time invites a comparison to and may supplement the workings of sexualit y as biopower. It is now ethnicit y, as much as sexualit y, that functions ‘to produce, organize and cohere subjectivities in the “multicultural” age’ (206). It is now ethnicit y that is our suppressed truth that must be liberated. ‘This power is evident’, writes Chow, ‘as we think of the frequency with which, in the “multicultural” age, we answer the call and demand to narrate our “ethnic” pasts and lineages’ (209–10). Chow judges this compulsion to narrate ethnicit y to be greatest among those ‘far from what is held to be the cultural “norm”’ (210). One can envision it as a discourse that supports and relays differentiated citizenship. It is also worth considering how the production of ethnicit y supports older systems of alliance and reanimates old gender norms in new ways. It is arguable that confessions of ethnicit y are not just extracted from those who are far from the cultural norm; they now are the cultural norm. Websites for genealogical research are extremely popular, along with those for pornography and financial advice (Nash 2002). The joint popularit y of genealogy and pornography places ethnicit y in suggestively close relation to the ‘secret’ of sex. After all, as Chow notes, ‘ethnicit y, like sexualit y, is ultimately about the management of human reproduction’ (213). Just as Foucault traces the ways that discourses of sexualit y both supplanted and reinforced systems of family alliance (in ways that both unsettled claims about the superiorit y of aristocratic bloodlines and bolstered the virtues of the bourgeois family), discourses of ethnicit y draw us back into the family alliance. Writing about China, Dai Jinhua (2001) describes quick transitions in the constitution of the ideal family – from the nuclear family in the early 1990s, which signified modernit y and economic globalisation, to a re-ethnicised celebration of the extended, three-generation family-household by 1997. Even Pizza Hut has been attuned to the ideological work performed by the extended family: ‘Heaps of fresh ingredients make grandfather feel great; it’s so delicious

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that grandmother feels exhilarated; mother-in-law just can’t wait to taste it, and daughter-in-law can’t stop eating; and you?’ (179). Jinhua notes the importance of such ideological work at a moment of great social transformation in China, in particular, diminished state social welfare commitments. Diminishing social welfare provision is also familiar in Western countries and families (and in particular women) are increasingly expected to take up a wider range of care-giving roles. The model of the threegeneration family-household seems unlikely in the Anglo-American context. Embedding the individual within an extended family narrative, through the process of reclaiming ‘roots’, may be the next best thing, and work to reanimate the family as a caring substitute for the welfare state. The weight of these remarks is that a feminism informed by Foucault’s writing ought not to involve a turning away from ‘the material side of life’ or ‘the economic’, or analyses of a ‘system of power’ or ‘an over-all strategy’. We need to pursue these themes through historical analyses of the multiple, local ‘centres of power-knowledge’ that eventually, ‘through a series of sequences’, enter into and become enveloping systems of power. Sexualit y has been a particularly ‘dense transfer point’ for diverse power relations, with significant gender and class effects, and it has been interwoven in complex ways with discourses of race, both in colonial and Western settings. Pursuing the workings of power through these various discourses and in different modalities, feminists might pay closer attention to the fact – to paraphrase Foucault – that geography indeed lies as the heart of our concerns. Discourses are materialised in the world, and they are spatialised in ways that matter (in) the world.

Notes 1. Given Foucault’s remarks, I find Spivak’s critique of Foucault’s analysis of the eco-

nomic quite uncompromising: ‘However reductionistic an economic analysis might seem, the French intellectuals [Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari] forget at their peril that this entire overdetermined enterprise [of imperialism] was in the interest of a dynamic economic situation requiring that interests, motive (desires), and power (of knowledge) be ruthlessly dislocated. To invoke that dislocation [between power and sexualit y] now as a radical discovery that should make us diagnose the economic . . . as a piece of dated analytic machinery may well be to continue the work of that dislocation and unwittingly to help in securing “a new balance of hegemonic relations”’ (1988: 280). It seems to me that Foucault was not so much diagnosing the economic as a piece of dated analytic machinery as critiquing a reductionist theory of the economic. 2. For example, on 17 June 2003 the Canadian federal government declared its

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3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

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Working Feminism intention to change the definition of marriage to include gays and lesbians (Lunman and Laghi 2003; Mickelburgh 2003). This is a project in which the artist-photographer asked customers at Ikea to pose in the display room that was their ideal domestic space. Butler is exploring the tension between the socialist ideals of Ikea – of delivering good design to a general public – and the way that Ikea encourages customers to temporarily inhabit fantasised environments and lifest yles (i.e., commodit y fetishism). For my purposes, the photographs also display gendered modes of bodily comportment, with women tending to take up much less space and men assuming less contained poses. Rose turns to the theorising of Irigaray (1985) and de Lauretis (1994) to imagine a space ‘in which separateness of identit y does not entail closure, exclusion, and imprisonment, where women can be separate yet still connect’ (254), and argues that this requires ‘theorizing beyond, as well as in, the discursive’ (255). See Cheah and Grosz (1998) for Butler’s own uses of and hesitations about Irigaray’s writing on sexual difference. In this Chow echoes Foucault’s own remarks: ‘Yes, no one wants to talk about that last part [of The History of Sexuality]. Even though the book is short, but I suspect people never got as far as this last chapter. All the same, it is the fundamental part of the book’ (1980a: 222). Joseph argues that new social movements articulated through identifications of gender, race and sexualit y function as supplements to capitalism. Communit y is a space that tempers and compensates for capitalist relations, a space we view as sustaining associations and values that are at odds with capitalism. But ‘[t]he structure [of capitalism] constitutively depends on something outside itself, a surplus, that completes it – providing the coherence, the continuit y, the stabilit y that it can not provide for itself’ (2002: 2). Communit y – including gay or feminist communit y – is such a supplement. This is not meant to be a functionalist reading of communit y insofar as the supplement has its own logic which ‘becomes, or at least may become, dominant or destabilizing, a blockage to the continuit y, a sign of crisis or incompleteness’ (2002: 2). Joseph uses the concept to make the point that there is nothing inherently radical about gay (or racial or feminist) identification and communit y building; these can be deeply conservative of capitalist relations and are certainly bound up with capitalism in diverse ways. As Joseph puts it, ‘[v]arious communities – gay, racial, ethnic/immigrant, religious, and so on – make perfectly good corporate-production rubrics; so Korean markets, lesbian auto repair shops . . . are examples of production and distribution sites that facilitate the flow of capital by organising themselves on the basis of, and thus producing, the communit y with which the business is identified. They become the site and structure through which the communit y enacts its existence’ (1998: 43–4). There is room to dispute this claim. Consider: ‘I don’t think that I could make the gay arena into the fundamental one, and then approach questions of racism or feminism, for example, within the context of the gay movement. I understand myself as a progressive anti-Zionist Jew. I think my Jewish background is more formative than anything else – which is probably why I can’t write about it. My agony and shame over the state of Israel is enormous, and the kind of contributions that I make in that domain have very little with my being queer. They may

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have something to do with being a woman, but they’re more closely related to certain kinds of anti-racist views that I have’ (Butler 1996: 123–4). In other words, Cheah’s claims about the place that Butler stakes for gender identification may be wrong and his complaint that much lies outside of Butler’s analysis is in line with Butler’s own thinking. 8. Butler might respond: ‘Yes, but doesn’t everyone else talk about that? There’s so much out there on that’ (Butler 1996: 112). This is Butler’s response to the question, ‘Shouldn’t you be talking about the constraints on discourse as well as the “the discursive limits of ‘sex’ ”?’ 9. Cheah (1996) finds within Foucault’s theory of power a productive means of overcoming the material/discourse divide, arguing that Foucault’s rendering of power as a shifting substrate of forces implies an undoing of the opposition between the transcendental and immanent, and form and matter (see also Spivak 1993). Similar to Spivak’s argument, Cheah arrives at this by working with the distinction between differences in forces (which he reads as operating at ‘a nonanthropolistic level of generalit y’ (125)) and historical states of power engendered by differences in forces ‘only in the last instance’ (125). 10. One must note that Cheah’s critique itself unhelpfully reinstalls dualisms between the material and discursive, and economic and cultural. Inequalities in food production and consumption, for example, do not operate independently of discursive framings, and Patricia Price (2000) has traced how gendered metaphors of dieting and food consumption are then relayed into the material practices of uneven development within globalisation.

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CH A P TER 3

From Registered Nurse to Registered Nanny

At the first of a series of workshops with Filipina domestic workers, held at the Philippine Women Centre (PWC) in Vancouver in 1995, we went around the room and introduced ourselves. With the exception of some of the workshop facilitators, all of the eighteen participants were domestic workers, admitted to Canada under the Live-in Caregiver programme (LCP). But as we went around that room, there was a surprising (for me) disruption of this uniformit y. We heard from women who were trained and certified as midwives or as registered nurses, about the difficulties of finding work in the Philippines as a secondary-school science teacher, and about the occupational experiences of a trained social worker. We heard about working in a bank in the Philippines and about the experiences of a bookkeeper. As I listened to these diverse personal histories, I puzzled over a colleague’s finding that Filipinas were the most occupationally ghettoised of all women (classified by ethnicit y) in the Vancouver labour market. He found that in 1991 in the Vancouver Census Metropolitan Area (CMA) the return on ‘educational capital’ was less for Filipinas than for Britishorigin women, or even the female labour force as a whole (Hiebert 1999a). Filipinas in the Vancouver CMA were segregated in a narrower range of occupations than any other group of women, clustered in nursing, lowerlevel ‘medical other’ occupations, clerical work, housekeeping and childcare (the latter essentially the same occupation labelled two ways).1 More recent statistics show that although the proportion of Filipinos with a universit y degree exceeds that for the Canadian-born population, average individual incomes for Filipinos are lower (Citizenship and Immigration Canada 2000; McKay and PWC 2002). The LCP requires of participants that they work as a live-in caregiver for two full years before applying for an open visa (at which point they are released from the obligation to do live-in domestic work). However, the experience of coming to Canada as a nanny evidently narrows occupational opportunities long after the

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requirements of the programme have been fulfilled. This is a particular, though extreme, case of a familiar immigrant story: deskilling through immigration, followed by ghettoisation within marginal occupations and low monetary returns on educational investments. It is a story that has been remarkably resistent to change, particularly for women. The good news delivered from the 2001 Canadian census is that, unlike the preceding decade, the wages of men who immigrated to Canada through the 1990s now closely resemble those of Canadian-born men; the bad news is that the average earnings of women who settled in Canada through the 1990s were 24 per cent lower than those of Canadian-born women, even though recent immigrant women are better educated (Statistics Canada 2003). There is an efficient way of rendering this immigrant story; this is that Canada as a societ y exploits third-world women as a low-cost labour force. For Filipinos, the first moment of exploitation provides a cheap supply of childcare that allows middle-class women to pursue their career ambitions outside the home, a scenario that is nicely captured in the noted wage disparity between immigrant and Canadian-born women. A second moment provides a long-term supply of trained nurses and other professionals to supplement and bolster a staggering health-care system. Trained Filipino nurses work in Canadian hospitals, nursing homes and private homes as low-paid, non-accredited health-care workers. If this is indeed the effect, I want to pursue Foucault’s argument that such a grand strategy of capitalist, neo-colonial labour control nonetheless emerges from more diverse local centres of power/knowledge. Filipinas are produced as long-term low-paid caregivers by a mixed set of agents and institutions: the Philippines’ national government, various levels of the Canadian state, Filipino and Canadian nanny agents, Canadian families and other Filipino immigrants. These agents and institutions have different interests and produce Filipinas within different discursive frames. By carefully delineating these various local centres, we get a sense of the interplay between local tactics and overall strategy. While the layering of particularised discursive frames seems to pin Filipinas in place as low-paid caregivers, it also provides some opportunities for resistance. A common complaint against Foucault is that he offers us little to theorise organised resistance. Consider: ‘feminists can learn much from Foucault’s insights about the genealogy of discursive regulation, but next to nothing about how organized resistance might impinge on such all-encompassing regimes of power, other than through the discursively

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disruptive, micro-political strategies favoured by some lesbian theorists’ (Segal 1999: 32–3). Indeed, Foucauldian-inspired analyses of domestic workers, such as those developed by Stoler and McClintock, give little sense of how actual domestic servants engaged the discourses through which the bourgeoisie and middle classes articulated their own class identities and superiorit y. I want to explore such possibilities for engagement by measuring some of the silences (to paraphrase Spivak 1988) and contradictions within discourses.2 I also want to consider moments of rupture between subject positions, as prescribed in different discourses and in different places, which open spaces for agency and opportunities for rewriting the meaning of ‘Filipina’ in Vancouver. My discussion of subject positions is organised by considering paired terms, each defined in relation to the other, reflecting my understanding that identities are relational constructs and that they are defined in relation to what they are not: Live-in Caregiver is defined in opposition to Canadian citizen; and Filipina domestic workers are constructed in relation to European ones, through the terms ‘housekeeper’ and ‘nanny,’ respectively. Within the Filipino communit y, nanny takes on meaning in relation to the term ‘immigrant’. These categories supplement each other and rigidify Filipina domestic workers’ occupational trajectories, such that their entry into the Canadian labour market via the Live-in Caregiver programme narrows their choices thereafter. Complex geographies are woven throughout this trajectory. To understand fully Filipinas’ positionings, one would have to consider conditions within the Philippines that drive them to migrate, as well as discursive framings there. It has been estimated that without labour migration, the rate of unemployment in the Philippines would increase by 40 percent (Castles and Miller 1998). In the Ramos administration, overseas Filipino workers were declared ‘bayani ng bayan’, or heroes of the nation. The Estrada administration declared the year 2000 as ‘The Year of Overseas Filipino Worker in the Recognition of the Determination and Supreme Self-Sacrifice of Overseas Filipino Workers’.3 These declarations are undoubtedly tied to the fact that monetary remittances of overseas workers are the top foreign-exchange earnings in the Philippines. It was estimated in 1994 that labour migrants sent over US$2.6 billion to the Philippines through formal banking systems and, with the addition of money sent through private finance companies, letters and return migrants, the total is closer to US$6 billion annually (Karp 1995, cited in Parreñas 2001b). My analysis is restricted to discursive constructions of

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Filipinas in Vancouver and thus is vulnerable to Spivak’s (1988) criticism of Deleuze, namely that third-world people come into focus for him only as they are installed in the first world. The last discourse considered is one that circulates within the Filipino communit y in Vancouver, and begins to gesture towards important class relations in the Philippines that continue to construct ‘Filipina’ in Vancouver.

Proto-citizen, Not-Yet-Immigrant The live-in caregiver is defined in relation and in opposition to the category of Canadian citizen, and it is the non-citizen status of job occupants that structures the work conditions of live-in caregivers. Table 3.1 indicates the numbers coming to Vancouver from 1981–1996, first through what was called the Foreign Domestic Movement (from 1981–1993) and then through what is now known as the LCP (1992 to the present).4 Over the years a larger proportion of the, mostly, women who have come through these programmes have come from the Philippines; by 1996 fully 87 per cent came from the Philippines.5 In its informational booklet, the federal government explicitly locates occupants of this job as non-Canadians: The Live-in Caregiver Program is a special program whose objective is to bring workers to Canada to do live-in work as caregivers when there are not enough Canadians available to fill the available positions . . . The Live-in Caregiver Program exists only because there is a shortage of Canadians to fill the need for live-in care work. There is no shortage of Canadian workers available for caregiving positions where there is no live-in requirement. (Citizenship and Immigration Canada 1999) A provincial employee who administers the LCP in one Vancouver employment office stated in a telephone interview in May 1994: ‘The reason that we have to bring in from abroad is that the occupation is so poorly paid and no one wants to do it . . . The program is set up for the Canadian employer, to allow them to get on with their lives and get out to work.’ Historically, this difference between live-in caregivers and Canadian citizens was encoded in stark terms by provincial employment regulations, which govern the work conditions of live-in caregivers. Regulations vary by province, but in British Columbia, until March 1995, live-in domestic workers (along with farm workers and other homeworkers) were

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excluded from regulations governing overtime pay and hourly minimum wage. As the West Coast Domestic Workers’ Association (1993: 2) put it in their brief to the Employment Standards Act Review Committee in March 1993: ‘by imposing a daily [as opposed to hourly] minimum wage and excluding domestics from hours of work protection, [provincial regulations], in effect, work with the federal immigration program to provide foreign domestic workers as cheap labor’. This is an unambiguous instance of what Stasiulis (1997) identifies as ‘hierarchies’ of citizenship, in this case, hierarchies of access to minimum hourly wage regulations. Table 3.1 Number of individuals coming to Vancouver through the Foreign Domestic Movement (1982–92) and Live-in Caregiver Programmes (1992–6) Year of Arrival in Canada 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 ** 1994 1995 1996

Philippines (%) 11 29 51 46 50 47 60 59 72 77 74 88 85 92 87

Country of Origin Europe* Other (%) (%) 78 47 32 33 27 31 26 23 11 11 11 7 10 5 9

11 24 17 21 23 22 14 18 17 12 15 5 5 3 4

Total Number 9 129 316 291 152 341 236 323 493 462 421 851 1,387 1,485 1,203

(Source: Landed Immigrant Data Base, Citizenship and Immigration Canada.) * Includes United Kingdom. ** From 1993 onward, numbers entering through Foreign Domestic Movement and Live-in Caregiver Programmes are combined.

Why is it that Canadians so readily accept that some categories of people living within Canada are undeserving of protective labour codes available to other citizens? Why are some categories of people assumed to have minimal subsistence requirements? These are exceedingly important questions to answer because it has become apparent that, even after domestic workers were included within overtime and minimum hourly wage regulations in 1995, many employers continue to evade them (Pratt

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and PWC 1999). I attempt to address these questions by examining three geographic constructs used to negotiate what would seem to be an untenable contradiction between the universal rights of Canadian citizens and unequal treatment of workers in different occupational categories. In the US context, Lowe (1996a) argues that this same contradiction is negotiated foremost through racial categories; I am augmenting her analysis by arguing that this racialisation process in Canada is explicitly intertwined with a number of geographies. First, the promise of potential citizenship works in a potent way to legitimate labour conditions acknowledged by the Canadian government as unacceptable to Canadians. While, strictly speaking, the Live-in Caregiver programme is a work visa (and not an immigration) programme,6 in practice it entitles the occupant to apply for immigrant status after working two full years as a live-in caregiver. There is a widespread understanding that live-in caregivers endure short-term hardship for the opportunit y of applying for landed immigrant status after t wo years. Obviously, the t wo-year trial period as a potential immigrant may effectively dampen workplace militancy. As nanny agent E put it: Filipinos have a very different motivation [from European nannies] . . . they are coming to immigrate, to get citizenship, to bring in their families. They will put up with a lot in order to have a clean record, which makes for a whole other set of problems. But it means that they’re likely to stay on the job. (Interview, May 1994) It is interesting to listen to nanny agents argue against proposed changes to the Employment Standards Act in 1994 because they made direct links between low wages and opportunities to immigrate. Pratt:

I think that the requirement for a 40-hour work week, with overtime on top of that, is in the works. Agent H: Which of course will not work at all. There’s not the money there. It will just cut down on the amount of immigration from the Philippines tremendously, because that [the Livein Caregiver programme] is the foot in the door for so many immigrants . . . You know, things are not good back in the Philippines . . . They would be doomed to a life there. And, you know, I’m a great believer in immigration . . . Open the gates! You know, let them in! And certainly the

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Filipinos . . . make good immigrants. They’re hard working. And they Canadianise extremely well, extremely well. (Interview, June 1994) In another interview, two other agents made the same argument: Agent D: You’re not getting 19 bucks an hour [working as a domestic worker], but the majorit y of Canadians treat you nicely. And you’re getting Canadian citizenship, which is what people are lining up for, dying to come. Agent C: And not costing yourself anything. Like I said before, the West Coast Domestic Association [sic] will argue that [domestic workers are exploited]. And they’re going to do themselves out of a job. Agent D: They’ll wreck it for these women, who come in and 99.9 per cent of them are happy to be here. And they’re not militants. That’s just so sad. Because it’s just that little few that are banging on. (Interview, June 1994) To me, what is of interest in these passages is the way in which benefits to the Canadian state and Canadian households (which allow Canadian men and women ‘to get on with their lives and get out to work’) are translated into a benefit for domestic workers. A discourse of free and fair exchange (immigration for two years of servitude) is commonplace, but it is staged without a careful weighing of the units in exchange; indeed, Agent C cancels out the costs of citizenship to the domestic worker entirely: ‘And not costing yourself anything.’ We need to measure this silence about costs, in part through a more serious analysis of the terms of exchange – that is, whether an opportunit y to immigrate can and should be valued against two years of paid servitude. This discussion must be broadened to consider Canada’s history and responsibilities in relation to global patterns of uneven development. There is a second, fragmented geography that confuses live-in caregivers’ rights as employees – that is, the jurisdictional division in the administration of the programme. The federal government has responsibilit y over the Live-in Caregiver programme, whereas the provincial government regulates employment standards. There is, then, a t ype of discursive rupture in the way that live-in caregivers are defined in relation to the two levels of the government. For the federal government, they are

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Figure 3.1 A graphic representation of the deskilling process. Reprinted from Centre Update, Newsletter of the Philippine Women Centre, Vancouver, Canada (Summer 1998) 8(1). Reprinted with the permission of the artist, Carlo Sayo.

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defined as visa holders; for the provincial governments, they are employees.7 Sometimes the federal and provincial governments’ objectives of producing and maintaining a productive labour force seem at odds. Of particular concern to domestic workers is the federal government’s prohibition against educational training for those registered in the LCP. In their view, the effect of this prohibition is deskilling, as the following conversation among domestic workers attests: Susan: It is stated in the work permit that you cannot go to college, you cannot work for others and you cannot work in other provinces. Cecilia: So, there are plent y of restrictions. Just because you are a contract worker, you don’t have any other choice to improve or develop yourself. It takes two years before you can have an open visa here in Canada. By that time you shall have been deskilled . . . Two years is a long time . . . Susan: After you have not worked for two years in the trade or profession that you have trained for, you begin to doubt if you still have the abilit y to do your previous work. Joergie: Things are not fresh in your mind anymore . . . [The conversation continues and culminates with the following:] Mhay: What you know now is only how to clean and polish the bathroom. Elsie: That’s your skills these days.8 (Focus group discussion, August 1995) Domestic workers perceive that living within the regulations of the LCP makes it difficult to recover a previous occupational identit y (see Figure 3.1).9 Yet it is difficult for them to make a strong case to the federal government because this exceeds the discursive boundaries of the LCP, which positions them as non-citizen visa holders. The governmentally fragmented administration of the LCP makes lobbying for change a complicated process. It also lends an air of confusion about entitlements as employees. Among women attending the focus groups, for example, there was a great deal of uncertaint y about their entitlement to the federal government’s Employment Insurance (EI) programme, despite the fact that they paid into the programme. This confusion about entitlement is of considerable importance because access

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to employment insurance benefits could allow a domestic worker to leave an especially exploitative or abusive employment situation. I quote one conversation at length, in which the Director of the Philippine Women Centre attempts to convince a domestic worker of her entitlement, because it demonstrates the persistence of the latter’s uncertaint y about her rights as an employee while registered within the Live-in Caregiver programme. Cecilia: What about Unemployment Insurance [now relabelled Employment Insurance, or EI]? Susan: I don’t think it is possible. Cecilia: Of course you can go on UI. That is why you are paying the premium so that you can apply for this when you are out of a job temporarily. So while waiting for your documents you may apply because you did contribute to the plan. Susan: Isn’t it so that they often reject your application? Cecilia: Sometimes, but you can always appeal if you think that you are fully entitled to one. For example, take Joergie’s case. Now she is renewing her contract and it takes at least two weeks for her to get papers. In the meantime, she is unemployed and not making any money. And you cannot actually work because it would be illegal. So you can apply for unemployment insurance in the interim. Susan: In two weeks you can receive it? Cecilia: I don’t think so. It might take five weeks before you receive your money. But then, you can already borrow because you know that you will be getting unemployment benefits soon. Joergie: Why does it take so long to process the claims? Cecilia: Well, it’s because of the bureaucracy . . . Susan: But I read that you cannot apply for UI if you terminate your contract. Cecilia: It may be true. But still, they cannot stop you from applying. Susan: But then they will reject you. Cecilia: Even if they reject you, you can appeal. And then you can tell them the reason why you left your work. There is an appeal board at the UI. Susan: But it takes time again. Cecilia: But at least you are getting something if they approve your appeal. I mean, you don’t really lose anything. You have terminated your contract and you are just exercising your right.

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Susan: Right . . . It is your right to apply. Even though you terminated your contract, but you still have to apply. Cecilia: You have the right to apply for that UI because you paid your premium. You should at least try to get something while looking for another employment. Susan: But I read that if you terminate your contract you may not be able to collect or apply for unemployment insurance. Cecilia: But you can still appeal if you are rejected because you terminated your contract with cause. You terminated your contract not because you just wanted to move but, rather, there is something wrong in your employment condition. That is why you can appeal. To collect unemployment for a couple of months at 50 per cent of your current wages, which is already low, is much better than not collecting anything at all. Susan: You might have a point there. Cecilia: Of course. It is an exercise of your right and nobody can stop you from exercising this. Susan: When you file your application, don’t think that it will be rejected. It is plainly an exercise of your right. Cecilia: That’s right. Susan: Just do it then. The worst that can happen is they reject your application. Cecilia: And that is also trying to find out whether or not this is a democratic country. And in doing so, you can learn something about whether there is a different set of rights between you and other Canadians. Susan: I kind of like that. (Focus group discussion, September 1995) The second geography, then, is one of jurisdictional fragmentation, which confuses rights as employees with the status of non-citizen. A third geography is literally written into the Live-in Caregiver programme: registrants must live in their employers’ homes. The requirement that domestic workers live ‘in’ clearly lowers the costs for employers, because they can deduct room and board from the required minimum wage payment.10 It thus brings privatised childcare (which costs the employer approximately $900 a month after this deduction)11 within the reach of middle income families.12 Problems attending live-in requirements have long been recognised by domestic worker advocacy groups.13 Living in an employer’s home dampens wages, tends to stretch the work day, and

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can make domestic workers vulnerable to sexual abuse. It also makes it more difficult for the domestic worker to challenge her employer because her workplace is also her home. The effects of the live-in requirements will be considered in more depth in Chapter 5; here, I note the ways in which discourses of home and family are woven through these material effects. The domestic worker is sometimes constructed as a family member, who is loved and cherished as such. Some have even argued that regulation of domestic work within the framework of employer–employee relations penalises the domestic worker because it degrades her status as a family member. We can see constructions of the nuclear family at work in British Columbia in a legislative debate in 1980, when a member of legislature, Ms Sanford, tabled an amendment to the B.C. Employment Standards Act to ensure overtime wage provisions for live-in domestic workers: Mr Mussallem: The hon. member for Comox [Ms Sanford] has to be admired for her tenacit y. But here we see again the socialist atmosphere against the democratic way of life. Ms Sanford: What! Mr Chairman: Would the member relate this to the amendment. Mr Mussallem: Remember that a domestic has to be accepted into a family. She [Ms Sanford] misses that point. That is the reason a domestic cannot keep time. You are accepted into the family as part of the family, and the principle that you have your time recorded doesn’t work in the family scene. As part of the family, a domestic . . . That’s the point at issue. [Interjection] Mr Mussallem: There can be that. But a domestic does not work that way. A domestic is part of the family, and as part of the family takes part in family life, and that’s the way it should be. (The amendment failed: 26 to 20; Hansard, 22 August 1980, 4173) The West Coast Domestic Workers’ Association quoted Mr Mussallem in their brief to the Employment Standards Act Review Committee in March 1993, countering with the comment that: ‘The West Coast Domestic Workers’ Association strongly disagrees. Live-in domestic workers can keep time and should be paid for the hours worked’ (1993: 4). In arguing

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thus, they were entering a discursive battle, attempting to redefine the domestic worker, not as family member, not as potential immigrant who should be grateful for her temporary lot as a domestic worker, but, quite simply, as an employee. There was much at stake: hours of work and overtime regulations should raise wages and shorten hours of work. But it is also a discursive struggle to redefine the domestic worker, removing her from the highy gendered discursive frame of familialism and re-imagining her within the language of class. By doing so, the politics of class solidarit y can be brought into play.14 Framed in this way, and following Gibson-Graham (1996), we can interpret changes in the Employment Standards Act as a moment of progressive class transformation.

Filipina as Housekeeper There is another grid of identit y formation in which Filipinas are marginalised; they are often unfavourably compared to European women who come to Canada via the same visa programme.15 As Agent E explained it: There are two major populations of nannies available. One is what I would call European, out of European stock – but they would be Australian, New Zealand (although not from Europe, they’re European stock and those populations are trained nannies. They have nanny schools there). And there are the British-trained nanny. And general European from other descriptions. And then there are Asian, mostly Filipino . . . Each has different strengths. They are not the same. And they have different weaknesses – I mean, not as human beings, but as nannies. (Interview, May 1994) This is a fascinating quote because of the efforts that the agent takes to create a dualit y (European/Asian) out of what is obviously an extremely heterogeneous geographical grouping. Within this dualit y, Filipinas are constructed as housekeepers, while European women are called nannies (see Figure 3.2). The ways that these two groups of women are positioned differently within the same occupational category points to the importance of understanding the intertwined cultural and social processes of identit y formation and labour market segmentation. Nanny agents who were interviewed in 1994 were very clear on the distinctions between Filipino and European nannies. Agent F made the distinction simply when she said: ‘And you can get all grades of help. You

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Figure 3.2 Agents classify different types of nannies in the 1993 Vancouver Yellow Pages.

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get from the little Filipino girl that is just a nanny/housekeeper to the British girls that are NNEB [Nursery Nurse Examination Board]’16 (interview, March 1994). Agent G elaborates: Agent G: Depend on what you’re looking for, what you want. My personal view, if you have a baby and you want someone to lick your home clean: Filipino girl. Go for that. Pratt: [Paraphrasing a common stereot ype:] Because they’ll love the baby? Agent G: That’s right. If you have kids 3, 4 years of age and up, and you want interaction, you want them to go to the park, you want them to play arts and crafts, do things, you’re better off with a European. Pratt: Because the traditions are . . . Agent G: Intellectual level, communication level, openness, a lot of things. Your average Filipino girl is a quiet, shy personalit y. She does her job and that’s the most important.17 The house has to be clean, spotless when God’s coming home, sorry, the parents are coming home. Every . . . the kids, they come second. No! I want the kids to come first. The house could be second. (Interview, June 1994) Much was made of the British nannies’ credentials, especially the twoyear nanny ‘degrees’: Agent D: I mean they’re top of the line nannies. Norland nannies are actually better than NNEB. When they come out of Norland [an elite nanny-training school] they have a uniform with a number on it. That’s their official Norland kind of . . . Pratt: But there are jobs for them in England? Agent C: And they’re good jobs for that class of nanny, that educated. So they’re not thrilled to come here. And when they do come, they’re quite particular about what they want to do. (Interview, June 1994) The educational credentials and culture of European nannies stand in marked contrast to representations of Filipinas. Filipinas are represented as uncivilised. Agent H expressed this stereot ype in the following terms:

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Agent H: And by our standards, most of the Filipino children, the adults who are coming over, were not raised how we would raise our children at all. Pratt: That’s an interesting point. Agent H: You know, there’s none of this, you know, ‘Would you please sit and eat!?’ No, they can run all over the house eating something. Also, of course, the Filipino nannies are – maids back home – not permitted to discipline at all. Absolutely not. Pratt: Oh really? Agent H: So the little kids pick up this very quickly. And so it’s a hell of a life . . . They’re kind and caring and loving and that sort of thing. But there is no discipline or structure . . . You know, you don’t line up for the bus. You push aside some little old lady getting on the bus. When you sit at the table, you don’t see that there’s so much food, so you take proportionately. No. You make sure you get yours first. So there’s none of that, you see, which fits in more with a Canadian societ y. And there’s a lot of learning that a lot of Filipino people have to do.18 (Interview, June 1994) This agent was not alone in making this t ype of comment. Loving, patient and gentle with babies, several agents felt that Filipinas were illequipped to instill values in older children. Even toilet training was problematic. Agent E complained that a Filipina nanny will ‘let your children pee in the park. They just take their pants down in the park’19 (interview, May 1994). Many employers absorb the agents’ distinction between European nanny and Asian housekeeper, something that came across clearly in interviews with employers who had employed Filipina and European domestic workers. Consider, for example, the comments of a family who first employed a Filipina nanny. She was replaced when their child turned two, an age when the employers became more concerned about the intellectual stimulation of their child. The Filipina nanny was subjected to a covert test, which involved asking her to read to their child during the day and leaving designated books in a marked position on the table. The nanny failed the test – the books were in the same place at the end of the day – and a Slovakian nanny was hired as her replacement. The employers were clearly fond of the Filipina nanny, in part because she did not intrude. They admired their Slovakian nanny for her skills as an early

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childhood educator, and they spoke in some detail about her other training and skills. They did not, however, like her much, and they were appalled by what they perceived to be her persistent overstepping of social boundaries. I quote from the interview transcript at length because they express these distinctions in such an open way. Bob:

But I think the big difference between the two was that Rosa [Filipina nanny] never took anything for granted, and when we honoured her a privilege, which she thought was a privilege, she would never take advantage of that privilege again unless the honour was there again, whereas . . . unfortunately with Brigid [Slovakian nanny] . . . Wendy: She’s very good as a caregiver. Bob: Wonderful and stimulating, a good teacher and the whole bit, but as soon as we grant her something . . . Say once she asked if she could use Wendy’s skis for the weekend, and we said OK, but after that she used them for the whole season and never asked anymore. Wendy: And she often uses my things. Bob couldn’t see my point at first. I mean I had only skied once since Aidan was born. So I said to him, ‘How would you feel if we hired a gardener and he just used all your golf clubs and stuff ?’ And that soon put things in perspective! Bob: It was funny, when we would have people over with Rosa we would feel Rosa as part of our family. And a lot of times – not so much on the weekends because she was never here – but on the weekdays, if someone was coming over after work or whatever and we were going out for dinner, we would always invite her to eat with us . . . Wendy: But she would always have eaten before we got home. Whereas with Brigid, we feel like we’re practically serving her and she’s talking back and forth [with our guests]. (Interview, July 1995) A little later in the interview, they turned once again to differences between Filipina and Slovakian nannies in terms of intellect and perceptions of entitlement. Bob:

We basically decided in lieu of a Filipino nanny to go with a European nanny, because of the learning skills, the interaction.

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We were finding that Rosa was really good and loving and hugging and doing everything proper for him and feeding him, but the alphabet, the numbers, the colours, those things weren’t happening . . . I think that’s the trade-off. But you’ve gotta remember that they’re educated ladies . . . these women [Slovakian nannies] are intellects, and you’re not going to have six intellects living in a house at the weekend, sleeping on the floor. Whereas with Filipino nannies, they love to roll all over each other all weekend! [He is referring to the common practice among Filipina nannies of sharing rental accommodations during the weekend.] (Interview, July 1995) Another employer, who hired a Quebecois woman after a Filipina domestic worker, complained about the vast amount of food eaten by the Canadian woman, remembering fondly that the Filipina woman ‘survived on toast and air’. These remarks suggest that the two sets of domestic workers are in fact operating with a different set of rights, with the European nannies situating themselves in a less subjugated position. The nanny agents said as much, drawing out the implications for wages: domestic workers from the Philippines initially make minimum wage, while those from Europe and Australia make $100 more a month. Agents themselves play a powerful role in constructing for the prospective employers the idea of Filipina woman as servant/housekeeper. This begins with advice to Filipina women on how they should represent themselves to their prospective employers. Women at the PWC spoke of agents’ recommendations to include two pictures of themselves in their files, one showing them caring for children and another displaying them cleaning (mopping the floor on their hands and knees, washing dishes, or using a vacuum cleaner – the last demonstrates their facilit y for using ‘Western’ technology). Some agents told women not to send a picture that displays them as attractive. Some women were instructed to take off jewelry, wear no make-up, and tie their hair back. An agent in the Philippines cautioned that a picture that displayed a woman as attractive would suggest that ‘maybe she would go to Canada and seduce her employer’. The text that supplements these images of hard-working servants also signals to prospective employers that these women are ripe for exploitation: several domestic workers were told to indicate on their application forms a willingness to work long hours. Further, it is often the case that Filipina live-in caregivers have worked

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previously as domestic workers in Singapore or Hong Kong.20 Both the agents and employers attempt to transfer the highly exploitative conditions for domestic workers from these places to Vancouver.21 They do this by calling upon personal experiences as domestic workers in Singapore or Hong Kong as they ask Filipina domestic workers to work longer hours and at a wider range of non-childcare-related tasks (such as washing the car) than would be required of European women.22 Historical geographies of colonialism and racism continue to define housekeeper and nanny within Vancouver. Filipinas are discursively constructed as housekeepers, with inferior intellects and educations relative to European nannies. Agents encourage Filipina women to represent themselves as exploitable, and they are forced to revisit their personal and collective histories as domestic workers in Hong Kong and Singapore in the Vancouver context.

Husband Stealers Filipino agents in the Philippines are complicit in constructing Filipinas as exploitable labour; hegemonic white Canadians have no monopoly on constructions of Filipina domestic workers as inferior. Domestic workers who participated in the focus groups also told painful stories about a stigmatisation process within the Filipino communit y in Vancouver, one that revolved around a distinction between immigrant and nanny. The Filipino communit y in Vancouver is large; excluding those born in the UK, it was the third largest immigrant communit y in 1996 (Hiebert 1999b). Most Filipino migration to Canada has occurred since the late 1960s after Canadian immigration practices were shifted from explicitly racial criteria to a point system geared to Canada’s employment needs. Through the late 1960s and 1970s many nurses were recruited to Canada (almost one in four nurses admitted to Canada during this period came from the Philippines (Chen 1998)). They were followed in the mid-1970s by large numbers of garment workers, and by family members who could now enter through new family reunification policies. From the mid-1980s nurses were no longer sought and increasing numbers of women were admitted to Canada as live-in domestic workers. Between 1981 and 1984, only 11 per cent of all Filipino immigrants to Canada came through the Foreign Domestic Movement Programme, a proportion that more than doubled to 28 per cent from 1985 to 1989, and then rose sharply between 1990 and 1994 to 46 per cent. The trend continued through 1996 to 1998,

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with proportions of 36 per cent, 27 per cent and 46 per cent of all Filipino immigrants to Canada coming through the LCP annually in these years (McKay and PWC 2002). Even this sketchy history indicates a fascinating characteristic of the Filipino communit y in Canada, which is that a considerable amount of migration to Canada from the Philippines has been initiated by women. In metropolitan Vancouver in 1991, for instance, there were 15,315 employed Filipinas and just 5,525 employed Filipino men (Hiebert 1999a). This is a very different pattern of settlement compared to other Asian immigrants to Canada or to Filipino immigration to the United States, and it is one that holds within it important class distinctions, which are also gendered. The term immigrant is used to refer to individuals who entered Canada through the ‘regular’ immigration system, as opposed to the LCP. Some of these would have entered through the family reunification programme, some through business class programmes, and others through what has been known as the point system. The point system is complex and the criteria for assembling points periodically readjusted by the federal government, depending on labour requirements. But, among other criteria, points were given for having a sponsor (business sponsorship earning more points than family sponsorship) or specialised training in specifically designated occupations (often technical ones). From the mid1980s, nursing skills did not score many points. While, strictly speaking, the LCP is not an immigration programme, in practice it is now the most accessible route for many Filipina woman who wish to initiate immigration to Canada. Once landed immigrant status has been obtained, the former LCP registrant is able to sponsor her family through the family reunification programme. The distinction between immigrant and nanny thus carries both class and gender associations; in the former case the lead family member is more likely to be male, with considerable capital and/or educational resources, in the latter a woman. These class and gender dimensions are laden with sexualised ones: domestic workers who participated in the focus groups saw themselves as being perceived not only as inferior in class terms, but as promiscuous husband stealers. Mhay: ‘Oh, there go the nannies, out on their day off together.’ It’s mostly Filipinos like us who say that. And then there’s that other issue about being, since you’re a nanny, you’re, you know, someone who steals husbands. That’s why wives are angry with us. [Mhay is referring to Filipino men and their wives within

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the Filipino communit y – not to employers.] (Focus group discussion, September 1995) In another focus group conversation (September 1995), Ana says much the same: ‘Like this is how the Filipino people look at the domestic worker. They look at the nanny as just a sex object and a husband stealer.’ Susan substantiates the point: ‘Outside the house, I haven’t encountered whites who say, “Oh, a nanny” just because I’m Filipino. It’s just that the difficult y is with Filipinos like us’ (focus group discussion, September 1995). This stigmatising discourse of sexualit y may be understandable in the context of what Rafael (1997) has identified as an identit y crisis for Filipinos, one that he ties to massive state-encouraged movements of Filipino workers and immigrants over the last thirt y years. He argues that middle-class Filipinos are sometimes embarrassed by being mistaken as domestic workers when they travel outside the Philippines: Embarrassment arises from their inabilit y to keep social lines from blurring (thereby rendering problematic their position as privileged representatives of the nation) and maintaining a distinction between ‘Filipino’ as the name of a sovereign people and ‘Filipino’ as the generic term for designating a subservient class dependent on foreign economies. (Rafael 1997: 276–7) There are, however, contradictions and silences. In Vancouver, the line between immigrant and nanny may be traversed through a repression of memory and family history. Again, Mhay’s remarks are instructive. They follow an incident when she had been insulted by other Filipinos in a public place. Mhay: It was okay with me, because I really am a nanny, but it was my companion who was hurt. [Laughs.] So I asked my friend why he was going into this dark mood, when it was me who was a nanny, not him! [He said,] ‘No, it’s because those people look down on nannies. Where are their roots, anyway?’ I said, ‘Well, from nannies.’ I was also curious [about his reactions] so I said, ‘And what about you? If your girlfriend was a nanny, what will you tell your parents about her? Will you say she’s a nanny?’ ‘Well, yes,’ he said. ‘What if your family looks down on her?’ ‘Well, many people here are like that. If they do that, then

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they’re denying where they came from.’ It turns out that his family was able to come here because his sister was a nanny. So it was funny that he was reacting like that. But it’s really hurting here, that people look down on nannies. (Focus group discussion, September 1995) Mhay’s story suggests that Filipino families in Vancouver cross the line that divides nannies from immigrants (before this encounter she assumed her friend to be a ‘regular’ immigrant and not an immigrant sponsored by a nanny), and that the distinction is maintained in part through some strategic forgetting within some self-identified immigrant families. How the discourse of sexualit y within the Filipino communit y affects occupations and opportunities after a domestic worker attains an open visa is an unanswered question. We know from other contexts that social networks are critical for developing positive occupational aspirations, hearing information about job openings, and receiving help in ‘landing’ a job (Granovetter 1974, 1985; Hanson and Pratt 1995). Stigmatisation of domestic workers within the Filipino communit y is a concern insofar as it potentially excludes them from valuable employment networks. There is an interesting geography to these narratives of stigmatisation. Moments of stigmatisation tend to take place in transit, often quite literally on public transit. The following is t ypical: Inyang: I was on the Sky Train and we planned to recruit a person [we saw] to the Centre [Philippine Women Centre]. We had just said, ‘Oh, you’re probably new here, right?’ After saying yes, she immediately said, ‘Wait, but I’m not a nanny, okay?’ Look at that! So that time, we never talked to her again. It turns out she was brought over by relatives. (Focus group discussion, September 1995) In another conversation, Mhay recounts another transitory incident of stigmatisation: Mhay: I encountered someone once. My driving lessons were over, and we were in the park to eat, because we were hungry. There were many Filipinos in the park, and near the car were some Filipino men and women talking. My companion asked me:

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‘Why are they smiling at you? Do you know them?’ I said, ‘No, and I don’t know why they are smiling.’ They must have heard me, so they said something . . . bad. They said, ‘Oh, those are nannies. And they’re trying to look like something else.’ They were criticising some other women, and perhaps they were including me. So I said, ‘Oh, I don’t know’ but I was feeling uncomfortable. So we left. (Focus group discussion, September 1995)

These narratives may reflect the fact that contact with ‘immigrant’ Filipinos is often transitory, given that domestic workers live in their employers’ homes and work long hours, and that class and other social differences divide the Filipino communit y. This geography of transition nevertheless stabilises the construction of Filipina nanny as inferior and immoral because the insults come as incidental, glancing slights, against which she has (literally) no grounds for retaliation or renegotiation of discursive categories. She must find other grounds and other spaces for re-establishing self-respect.23 Rather than being victims of one grand strategy of labour control, Filipinas are constructed as low-value labour by layer upon layer of discourse that works through various socio-spatial distinctions: insider/outsider; home/workplace; provincial/federal; north/south; immigrant/LCP. One bald statistic – in 2001 immigrant women earned 24 per cent less than Canadian women – is the end product of diverse networks of sedimented discourse. This also offers opportunities. I want to explore those that arise from the fact that employers, agents and state officials imagine Filipinas within multiple, sometimes contradictory frames, and Filipinas get some leverage by moving through various materialised discourses in their daily lives.

Fragmented Landscapes of Hegemonic Discourses Canadians do not say consistent things about Filipinos. These inconsistencies were revealed in the interview with Agent G, who was earlier quoted advising Canadian families to hire a Filipina if they wished their home to be ‘licked clean’. This genuinely shocking statement was followed by a vehement criticism of the federal government’s discrimination against Filipinas, which registers the nanny agent’s knowledge that many Filipinas have a universit y degree.

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Pratt:

It seems really strange that the [six-month training] requirements were worked out country by country. Because I’m sure there’s a real unevenness in terms of what’s required. Agent G: Definitely. What’s six months’ training? You know in Czechoslovakia a girl who’s been a camp leader. Qualified! Why [does] a Filipino girl [have] to be a nurse, if a camp leader can qualify? Because [of] six months’ training. You go there and you [can] make anything you want out of it. Whatever you decide, whatever the Canadian embassy in that country will decide. (Interview, June 1994) But then – just a few minutes later in the same interview – Agent G quickly reverted to the ‘lick the home’ motif. Agent G: See the Europeans that are coming in here, after two years, if they stay and they apply for landed immigrant – they don’t do nanny work. It’s just a jumping board that they use because they have their own plan, their own career, their own training back there. They are not going to stay nannies. Filipinos will. That’s the only thing that they know to do. So not too many of them will go and work in hotels or anything that is really beyond [that kind of work]. There will be McDonald’s and stuff like that. That’s basically it. What they’re trained for. Not trained for anything really higher. Some of them will really have a little bit more plans for their life than being that way, but the majorit y: nannies. That’s what they’re going to do: housekeeping. (Interview, June 1994) This tendency to both know and forget about Filipinas’ educational qualifications is extremely common: Filipinas are simultaneously represented as primitive, untrainable housekeepers, and universit y-educated nurses.24 Nanny agents actively translated university credentials obtained in the Philippines into the equivalent of two years of a Canadian universit y degree.25 Both stereot ypes – untrainabilit y and highly educated – seem to call up a colonial history. As the US Office of Intelligence Research put it in 1952, ‘The widespread and intense Filipino desire for education is one of the more striking heritages of American occupation’ (cited in Dot y 1996: 94). The American influence on the Philippines’ school system

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may be one reason why the nanny agents were able to ‘translate’ educational qualifications from the Philippines to Canada with such ease. Recognising the dynamic of memory and forgetting is a political resource, in two senses. First, retrieving Filipinas’ education from the ambiguit y and vagaries of agents’ memory is one tool for countering claims about Filipinas’ inabilit y to compete as competent agents in the Canadian labour force. We must remind nanny agents and the Canadian federal government, as they portray third-world women coming into Canada through the Live-in Caregiver programme as future welfare dependents,26 that many are in fact well-educated women with a deep sense of familial dut y. A second opportunit y follows from the fact that agents implicitly recognise the instabilit y of their own racial categories. By translating educational credentials in the Philippines to a Canadian equivalent, agents are already reading Filipinas as transnational subjects, and are deconstructing ‘Filipina’ as fixed racial/national category, distinct from Canadian societ y. Dot y (1996) recounts a history of efforts to construct a national Filipino identit y from a diverse set of cultures. Agent H recognises the permeabilit y of national boundaries and the American influence in the construction of the Filipino identit y when he states: ‘You know, from the Philippines, basically they’re halfway English’ (interview, May 1994). Agent H’s statement emerged from his understanding of the historical colonial influence of Americans on the Filipino educational system and the fact that English was the medium of instruction in classrooms until the late 1980s. Insofar as agents implicitly recognise the instabilit y of their own marks of difference, perhaps this offers another avenue for stepping away from what Bhabha (1994) terms an arrested mode of representation.

Boundary Crossings There are also counter-discourses that can be put in tension with hegemonic constructions. Filipinas undoubtedly construct meanings that disrupt and repair their sense of themselves as supplicant-pre-immigrant, inferior nanny and immoral husband stealer. My discussion here is speculative, as focus groups concentrated mostly on roles as domestic workers. A number of domestic workers who took part in the focus groups also regularly attended church. In Singapore, Yeoh and Huang (1998) consider the importance of attending church as a temporary respite from employers’ surveillance. Demonstrating

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how religious discourse can be reworked in other contexts, Lisa Law (1996) has considered how dancers in Cebu in the Philippines draw ideas from Catholicism, and especially themes of mart yrdom, to reclaim self-respect as participants in a stigmatised occupation. Though domestic work is in no sense as stigmatised an occupation, some domestic workers may nonetheless deploy a similar discursive strategy. Given that the majorit y remits large proportions of their incomes to their families in the Philippines, this theme of mart yrdom may intersect with discourses of familial responsibility. A number of those who took part in the focus groups spoke of the pressures to earn wages as a dutiful sister, aunt, daughter or mother, with financial responsibilities in the Philippines. This counter-discourse of responsibilit y and dut y may re-establish or maintain self-esteem and simultaneously empower women to demand higher wages. It does, however, have mixed effects. Mikita (1994), from her survey of 100 Filipina domestic workers in Vancouver in 1992, estimated the mean monthly remittance to be $245 a month (about 33.4 per cent of gross wages). With such a large proportion of wages going towards family remittances, it is extremely difficult for individual women to contemplate and manage educational upgrading, even when released from the restrictions of the LCP. Understanding oneself as a dutiful daughter or sister or mother thus has material effects; in the long run it may lock Filipina women into jobs as domestic workers if the burden of monthly remittances cuts off possibilities for upgrading skills. Another counter-discourse may emerge around the identity of consumer, as an individual with the rights and freedoms to consume. Women at the PWC spoke critically of the many Filipina domestic workers who congregate at the Pacific Center Mall in downtown Vancouver on weekends. One can imagine, however, how conceptions of consumer freedom might supplement and offset the grinding restrictions experienced as domestic workers, especially if status within extended families in the Philippines is wedded to the abilit y to supply and display consumer goods. Consumer consciousness may prepare the ground for resistance if the desire for goods leads domestic workers to challenge employers to comply with new minimum wage and overtime provisions in the Employment Standards Act.27 Domestic workers learn another identit y at the PWC; they learn to see themselves as exploited third-world women and to understand their situations within a socialist feminist theory of imperialism. We have seen a pedagogic process at work in the preceding quotes from focus group

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transcripts, especially when Cecilia Diocsin, then director of the Philippine Women Centre, urged Susan to apply for employment insurance for her immediate material benefit and to ‘learn something about whether there is a different set of rights between you and other Canadians’ (focus group discussion, September 1995). A critical potential emerges from border crossings between sites and discourses, by bringing one discourse into relation with another. The educational process at the PWC, for example, involves not only an exchange of information but a good deal of support and an effort to dislodge the rhetoric of the home as a private, unregulated space, as well as domestic workers’ identification with the needs of their employers. The identit y of exploited third-world woman that domestic workers learn at the Philippine Women Centre is then introduced to Canadian employers within their homes when they are accused of perpetuating such exploitation. In some instances, domestic workers first role play their challenge to their employer with other domestic workers in the safe space of the Centre. As domestic workers attempt to establish their rights as employees rather than family members or supplicant-pre-immigrants, they are forcing employers to reconfigure their relations within the terms of labour relations, away from constructions of family or a t ype of liberal reading of immigration (which would see individuals entering Canada as lucky to be admitted into Canada, with no appreciation, for instance, of complicated webs of political economic relations and dependencies between Canada, the World Bank, and the Philippines). Individuals draw strength from transporting meanings from one context to another, even as they recognise the bitterness of their situations in the translation exercise. At the first workshop, I was introduced to a joke among domestic workers in Vancouver when Lisa said: ‘I was an R.N. in the Philippines and I’m an R.N. in Canada. Only in the Philippines I was a Registered Nurse and in Canada I’m a Registered Nanny’ (focus group discussion, August 1995). Their joke points to links between power, discourse, regulation, labour market segmentation, and one geography (transnational migration within neo-colonial relations) that mediates them. The joke is political and empowering because it is simultaneously an act of remembering and a recognition of present circumstances. As they remember their professional training in the same term that defines their current situation, memories of the former are reactivated within the latter. The challenge of reactivating professional qualifications obtained in

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the Philippines in the Canadian labour market is clearly going to require more than small instances of decisive wordplay, and I come back to these struggles over accreditation in Chapter 5. I have argued that discourses create definitional and social boundaries that contain the horizons of possibilities for individuals and social groups who must live within them. In the case of Filipinas, the discourses of domestic worker seem to constrain them long after they obtain their open visa, given their long-term segregation in the Vancouver labour market. Powerful overlapping of discursive frames of meaning lead to a multiple and polyvalent devaluing of certain categories of people. The word ‘Filipina’ is not only equated with ‘supplicant-pre-immigrant’; the term also connotes ‘just-a-housekeeper’ and ‘husband stealer’. The overlap of discourses is incomplete, however, and fails to totally envelope individuals caught within them; R.N. is also R.N. In the slippage between discourses and through the contradictions within them, as they are taken up and lived by creative individuals and organised social groups, there is room for agency, and for the creative redirection and redefinition of subject positions. I am not suggesting that redefining subjective meanings of particular subject positions is sufficient to end economic marginalisation. I do believe that we have to understand how these cultural practices can be put to work as part of this process of social transformation. I have attempted to demonstrate how government policy, state regulation and the informal negotiations that take place between domestic workers, nanny agents and their employers are all framed within particular discourses that persistently devalue Filipinas. Criticising these discourses is an important element of disrupting these oppressive institutional practices. This is a process of critique that sees itself as resistant to, but fully implicated in, the discourses under scrutiny; there is no privileged point from which to claim truth or a vision of non-oppressive social relations. The PWC, for example, is a source of a powerful and productive criticism of neo-colonialism, racism, and gender and class oppression in Filipino and Canadian societies. It is worth considering, however, Law’s (1996) assessment of the controversies among non-governmental organisations working on HIV/AIDS education in the Philippines, some of which turn around whether their own discursive constructions too readily posit the domestic worker as victim. My point is not that the organisers at the PWC construct discourse that does this, but that their discourse, from a Foucauldian perspective, is no less neutral or ‘true’ than other

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discourses, although it does produce different subject positions and political possibilities. The task for the critic is not one of uncovering the truth of one discourse but of understanding how subjectivity is produced within these multiple discourses, and to evaluate their effects. Foucault challenges us to generate a critical discourse ‘whose power effects are limited as much as possible to the subversion of power’ (Poster 1989: 30). Like others (Fraser 1997; Gibson-Graham 1996; Watts and McCarthy 1997), I attempt to wed discourse analysis with a critique of exploitation, in my case by assessing how the effects of discourse emerge out of and extend exploitative north/south international relations through the sedimentation of Filipina immigrants to Canada within a limited range of low-paid occupations. The exposure, politicisation and disruption of conceptual boundaries can be conceived as an important geographic task. My argument has been that geographies are deeply embedded within these boundary projects, in the construction and control of discursive borders. In this sense, geographers have much to bring to feminist theory. Immigration, colonialism and domestic space are part of the production of borders that define workers as worthy or unworthy, competent or incompetent, skilled or unskilled. These classifications are then intimately tied to the processes through which particular categories of workers are both allocated to and assume particular occupational niches. Subject positions of ‘Filipina’ are often about, and constructed in relation to, specific places: live-in caregiver is defined through the meanings attributed to the ‘home’; imagined geographies of ‘the Philippines’ and ‘Britain’ enter into definitions of skills and evaluations of wage requirements. Careful genealogies of place-meanings thus become part of the project of unravelling particular subject positions and releasing certain social categories from particular labour segments. The case study suggests that geographic strategies of discursive disruption are multiple and complex. When terms from one discourse are used to transform the meanings in another – for example, when a class analysis disrupts the framing of domestic worker as members of the family – we encounter an enabling type of discursive porosity. On the other hand, when the conditions of domestic work in Singapore lead to more exploitative conditions in Vancouver, we encounter the negative effects of discursive and geographic porosit y as poor labour conditions are dragged from one place to another. To point to the particularit y and contingency of geographic effects and political strategy is to do some of the analytical work required by Wendy Brown (1997) in her call for a practice of historiography that produces more complex accounts of subject-producing power.

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One Small Omission When I was presented with the statistical analysis of the numbers of people coming through the Live-in Caregiver programme, the data were broken down by gender. I was surprised by the number of men coming through the programme: in 1996 19.7 per cent of Filipinos coming to Canada through the LCP were male. I chose to ignore this ‘fact’ (and quickly recombined the data). Why I did this might have something to do with the disciplining effects of feminist theory and politics.28 Subsequently, organisers at the Philippine Women Centre have themselves been surprised by the number of Filipino men coming to the Centre as nurses who are registered in the Live-in Caregiver programme. Many of the male nurses are employed in private homes to provide care to an elderly person, and they experience even more exploitative conditions than those I have described for domestic workers caring for children (whose parents do, after all, return at the end of most days). They are often the only able person in the house and are expected to provide care on a 24-hour basis, for an eight-hour wage. To suppress this group – even temporarily – raises questions about disciplining effects of feminism. If to attend to these male nurses is to engage ‘the fundamentally open, if ever discontented and unfinished, business known as the feminisation of culture’ (Chow 1999: 163), where does this lead (or leave) feminism? To pursue this question, let us turn back to theory. In Chapter 4, I assess how a selfreflexive feminism that considers itself as a local centre of powerknowledge and questions the ontological status of it founding subject – the subject defined through sexual difference – can sustain itself as a political project.

Notes i. Filipino men experienced the third highest rate of occupational segregation

compared to all other men in Vancouver and were clustered in some of the same occupations, including clerical, janitorial and factory work (Hiebert 1999b). 2. Mapping discourse is a vast, open-ended task. I rely on interview material collected between 1994 and 1996. In 1994 I interviewed ten agents operating in the Vancouver area, the only ones who would speak with me and, by their own assessment, the ones who handled the largest volume of placements. The ten agents represented nine of the fifteen nanny agencies advertising in the Vancouver Yellow Pages at that time. All but two of the agents were women, who t ypically had employed nannies themselves. In the quotes from nanny agents, I have retained the same alphabetical labelling used in Pratt (1997b). Agents C and D work for the same agency and were

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3. 4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

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Working Feminism interviewed together. All other agents were interviewed on their own. (See Pratt 1997b for more details of the methodology.) In the summer of 1995, I interviewed a randomly selected sample of fift y-two households in the Vancouver metropolitan area who had advertised for nannies in the previous year in one of three local newspapers: the Vancouver Courier (a west-side Vancouver communit y newspaper that is ‘known’ as an important place to advertise for nannies), The Coquitlam News and The Surrey Leader (suburban communit y newspapers). Many were employing a nanny when we came to do the interview. I gratefully acknowledge the research assistance of Trina Bester, who shared the task of doing these interviews. For more details about the methodology, see Pratt (2003). Through the summer and fall of 1995 and spring of 1996, I collaborated with the Philippine Women Centre to conduct a series of focus groups with fourteen domestic workers. We met for six fullday sessions, first to develop themes, two times to break into focus groups of five or six women each in order to discuss the themes, and three more times to code, verify and analyse the personal narratives. Except for the focus groups in which I participated, which took place in English, discussions were carried out in Tagalog and then translated and transcribed. We assumed that the personal nature of some of the accounts could more easily and more comfortably be communicated in the women’s first language. All of the women who participated were already coming to the Centre, and there is no technical way of claiming a t ypicalit y for their experiences. They were, however, connected to women who both did and did not come to the Centre and spoke more generally of their own and their friends’ and relatives’ experiences as domestic workers. For details about the Philippine Women Centre’s activities (which focus substantially but not exclusively on the circumstances of domestic workers), see Pratt in collaboration with the PWC (1998, 1999). All interviews and focus groups were unstructured, taped and transcribed, a necessit y for a study of discourse in which the framing of meaning is the object of inquiry. The Estrada declaration was issued in Proclamation No. 243 on 8 February 2000. Cited in Morales (2000). The data for Table 3.1 are based on the administrative records of the department responsible for immigration in Canada and, as such, are the best data available. Due to problems in the ways that landing forms are filled out and coded, however, they may contain some inaccuracies. Interviews with immigration officials in 1999 indicated that over 90 per cent of applicants for the LCP continue to come from the Philippines (McKay and PWC 2002). The distinction is one that the Canadian Department of Immigration insists upon. One practical effect is that entry through the programme opens the opportunit y to apply for citizenship without implying entitlement to it. There is not, however, a neat dichotomy: the federal government administers and regulates some aspects of the employment relation, notably the Employment Insurance programme, which addresses gaps between employment rather than the employment relation per se. I do not want to be read as implying that the words of domestic workers are somehow more ‘authentic’ or true than those of other speakers. But, as Spivak puts it, ‘Such a testimony . . . constitute[s] the ingredient for producing a countersentence [that is, a counter discourse]’ (1988: 297).

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9. Hiebert’s (1999a) analysis of occupational segregation in Vancouver provides some support for this perception. See also McKay and PWC (2002). 10. At the time of data collection $300 a month could be deducted for room and board. 11. The costs to the employer are further reduced, as childcare expenses are tax

deductable. 12. Given that a one-bedroom apartment rented for roughly $640 a month in 1995 (West End Top Choice 1995: 6), nannies living outside an employer’s home clearly

13.

14.

15. 16. 17.

18.

19.

20. 21.

22.

23.

require a higher wage. In fact, live-out nannies do command a higher wage, about $1,400 a month. The views of the domestic workers who participated in the focus groups are detailed in Pratt in collaboration with the Philippine Women Centre (1998, 1999). Stiell and England (1997) discuss this in the Toronto context. It is thus no surprise that it was a Social Democratic provincial government (with strong links to the labour movement) that instituted the changes to the Employment Standards Act. For a consideration of these distinctions in Toronto, see Arat-Koc (1992); Bakan and Stasiulis (1994, 1995); England and Stiell (1997). See Gregson and Lowe (1994: 159–64) for details about the NNEB programme. The stereot ypes of Filipinas expressed by agents in Vancouver in 1994 are remarkably similar to those deployed by Americans, as colonisers in the Philippines from 1898 to 1946, and as ‘interested neighbours’ after the Philippines attained independence from the United States in 1946. A common stereot ype in the early twentieth century was of the Filipino as passive mimic, incapable of independent thought (Dot y 1996; Rafael 1993). As Dot y observes, although stereot ypes are instantiated in particular contexts, they draw upon globalised representations, and histories of previous stereot ypes are sedimented within contemporary ones. It is disconcerting to put this contemporary commentary beside US Senator Henry Cabot Lodge’s remark in 1900 that: ‘a native [Filipino] family feeds; it does not breakfast or dine, it feeds. A wooden bowl of rice with perhaps a little meat stewed in with it, is put on the floor; the entire family squats around it; the fingers are used to convey the food into the mouth. I have never seen any Filipino eat otherwise’ (quoted in Dot y 1996: 39). This reference to the primitivism of Filipinas is fascinating beside Anderson’s (1995) discussion of early twentieth-century American constructions of Filipinos as polluted and without control over their bodily orifices: ‘Thus a grotesque, defecating Filipino body regularly irrupted into [American] medical reports and scientific papers . . . Especially in times of cholera and t yphoid, physicians overwhelmed with fecal specimens were inclined to reduce the Filipino body – in practice – to little more than a gaping anus and two soiled hands’ (647). See McKay and PWC (2002) for details of this ‘cross country deployment’. See Huang and Yeoh (1994, 1996) and Yeoh and Huang (1995) for descriptions of conditions for domestic workers in Singapore, and Constable (1997) for Hong Kong. Agents commonly complained of European nannies’ unwillingness to do housework, or to cook for the entire family (as opposed to the children only). For details see Pratt (1997b). See Yeoh and Huang (1998) for a range of strategies deployed by domestic workers in Singapore.

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24. The reason for momentarily forgetting about these educational attainments may go

25. 26.

27.

28.

no further than providing a comfortable rationale to Canadian households for what otherwise might be conceived as a highly contradictory situation: low-priced, well-educated labour. But they may also lie at the crossroads of anxieties about sameness and difference and moralities of mothering. In particular, registering a Filipina nanny’s professional training as high-school teacher or registered nurse may generate a series of uncomfortable questions for Canadian agents and families about why a well-trained Filipino woman is staying home with young children and the Canadian mother is not. These questions are uncomfortable, because they call attention not only to north/south relations of inequalit y, but to the intensely fraught terrain of motherhood and the moralit y of working mothers. This was not something that I asked about explicitly in the interviews. It was thus noteworthy that it came up in a number of interviews. At the time of the interviews with nanny agents, there were rumours that the federal government intended to cut back on the number of visas given through the Live-In Caregiver programme. The rumoured rationale was that nannies admitted through the programme are unable to integrate successfully into the Canadian labour force and therefore threaten to overburden the Canadian social welfare system. ‘A leaked report from Immigration Canada, concerning foreign domestic workers, stated that “live-in” domestic workers do not adjust well in Canada’ (Newsletter of the Philippine Women Centre 1994: 2). I should underline the speculative nature of this claim. It has been the experience of the Philippine Women Centre that the desire for consumer goods makes it more difficult to organise women; organisers at the Centre are sceptical about the political potential of consumer consciousness. To be somewhat gentler on myself, Dan Hiebert, who supplied me with the tables, had some reservations about the accuracy of the data and male nurses coming through the LCP had not yet started coming to the Centre. The increase in males coming through the LCP does seem to be very recent. Examining another data set (which ended in 1994 and is national in scope), McKay and PWC (2002: 6) record the following percentage of men within the Live-in Caregiver category: 1980–4: less than 1 per cent; 1985–9: 1.6 per cent; 1990–4: 4.6 per cent.

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CH A P TER 4

Liberalism, Universalisms and Democratic Feminist Politics

Feminists have long been suspicious of the promises of liberalism: individual freedom and equalit y before the law. Joan Scott (1996) argues, however, that modern Western feminism was constituted in relation to the abstract individualism that founds universal inclusion within liberalism. Defined as less than individuals, what women shared was the experience of being excluded from supposedly universal norms, claims and rules of access: ‘Indeed the common experience of being excluded was sometimes mistaken for a shared vision of the meaning of being female’ (14). ‘Would there be feminism’, Scott asks, ‘without the [universalist] discourse of individual rights that represses sexual difference? I think not’ (175). Western feminism continues to operate within the paradoxical spaces produced by the contradictions and inconsistencies inherent to liberal capitalist societies, between the promise of universalism and the particularit y of actual citizenship and the administration of justice. In Scott’s view, it is the embodiment of this paradox that fuels ‘the subversive potential of feminism and the agency of feminists’ (17). But even as feminists have organised to unveil and subvert the particularities of liberalism’s universalisms, they have repeated some of the same tendencies themselves, through the abstraction of generic woman. If the critiques of liberalism leave feminists in an ambiguous and paradoxical relationship with the liberal state, critiques of universalist claims within feminism pose equal if different challenges for political organising, the challenge of organising across the differences that divide women. Poststructural theories are sometimes represented as one unfortunate source of some of these political quandaries. They seem to lead feminism outside the paradoxical space that has produced the subversive energy cited by Scott, through critiques of liberal institutions that are so far reaching as to be debilitating. Segal (1999) acknowledges the important lessons learnt from Foucault, for instance, but argues that his theorising

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not only offers ‘next to nothing’ (32) about organising for social change, but actively discourages institutional analyses of ‘where and how women are best placed to combat the authorit y and privilege men commonly wield over them’ (33). It is not only the absence of concrete institutional analyses that is of concern but also the loss of normative thinking. ‘I want to ask’, writes Benhabib, ‘how in fact the very project of female emancipation would even be thinkable without . . . a regulative principle of agency, autonomy, and self hood’ (1995: 21). In Nussbaum’s (1999) view, there is nothing in Foucault’s and, by extension, Judith Butler’s writing that allows us to judge between good and evil, and between subversive acts that we find congenial and those we abhor. In her assessment, Butler’s theorising is plausible only because she and her readers tacitly ‘agree (sort of) about what the bad things are – discrimination against gays and lesbians, the unequal and hierarchical treatment of women – and . . . why they are bad (they subordinate some people to others, they deny people freedoms that they ought to have)’ (Nussbaum: 42). In the absence of such a like-minded communit y of readers (and these taken for granted universalist, seemingly liberal assumptions) the lack of a normative dimension ‘becomes a severe problem’ (42).1 In this chapter I want to engage with these dilemmas about universalisms, both without and within feminism, and to suggest that, even at their most radical, feminist critics of liberalism rarely leave the space of paradox. The contradictions between universalism and particularit y that they uncover do, however, force new ways of thinking about universal norms and feminist solidarity. Of particular interest to me is the spatialised vocabulary through which both critiques of liberalism and more fully democratic alternatives are enunciated. Many of liberalism’s exclusions operate through boundaries and borders that define who counts as a citizen and which issues warrant public debate and state attention. And when feminists imagine how to actualise some of the failed promises of liberalism – equalit y and justice for all – they equally rely on spatial vocabularies and concrete geographical practices.

Illiberal Geographies The individual is the bedrock of liberal political theory. In theory at least, in liberal societies individuals are granted inalienable rights and achieve self-worth and understanding of ‘the good’ through the exercise of freedom. Politics occur in a morally neutral arena into which individual citizens

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enter voluntarily; the state’s function is to guarantee individual rights and freedoms. There is now a voluminous critical literature that details the exclusions built into and furthered by liberalism’s universalistic claims.2 As Passavant puts it, ‘[t]he liberal rights-bearing subject . . . is not as abstract and disembodied as [some] critics claim’ (2000: 115). At the most basic, in early modern liberal democracies, non-white, non-propertied, non-male subjects were not considered citizens. These exclusions were justified in part through a spatialised vocabulary of boundaries and excess, drawn at the borders of the body and between public and private. The exclusion of particular categories of individuals from civil societ y and public political life has been justified in terms of the unmanageabilit y of certain t ypes of bodies. The female body has been conceived as subject to uncontrollable natural processes and emotions. ‘Feminist scholars are now showing how, from ancient times, political life has been conceptualized in opposition to the mundane world of necessit y, the body, the sexual passions and birth: in short, in opposition to women and the disorder and creativit y they symbolize’ (Pateman 1989: 45). Women’s bodies were not the only ones judged unsuited to the rational business of politics. Passavant (2000) details the racial distinctions written into the foundational texts of liberal thought and American constitutional discourse,3 ones that contrast a civilised (white) communit y ready to receive the benefits of libert y from backward (racialised) ones, which were not. He argues that historically the terms of civilit y and decency have been almost interchangeable and largely judged through ‘outward bodily propriet y’ (121). Liberal theorists have drawn on cultural assumptions about natural laws governing male and female, white and non-white bodies to construct a gendered and racialised political landscape, divided between public and private spheres; Marston (1990) reviews feminist interpretations of the varying origins and rationales for this division. One outcome has been to restrict women’s access to both the political public and the economic private spheres; women are ‘rendered, by nature, guardians of the “household of emotions” a kind of sphere within [the private] sphere’ (456). If these ideas seem antiquated, consider the rationale provided by a British columnist writing for the Mail on Sunday, explaining the small numbers of women in formal British politics in the year 2001: ‘Adversarial politics is a rather male activit y and women [by nature] don’t particularly like doing it’ (A. Freeman 2001: A3).

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It is not only that women themselves are enclaved within the domestic, but that a whole range of issues and relations that are fundamentally important to women’s equalit y and material and psychological well-being have been designated as private and non-political. ‘The family’ and ‘the economy’4 are principal depoliticising sites in liberal, capitalist societies and a major focus of feminist struggle has been to extract issues such as domestic assault and childcare from the domestic realm in order to politicise them (Fraser 1989). In the former case, this is necessary in order for women to even begin to exercise their right not to be assaulted by a resident patriarch, in the latter to denaturalise the gender division of labour and open public debate about social responsibilities towards children. A significant contribution of feminist and queer geographers has been to expand our thinking about the concrete spaces where politics occur, to include sites such as homes and workplaces, which t ypically have been considered as ‘private’,5 and thus apolitical (M. Brown 1997; Marston and Staeheli 1994). Even when such issues and spaces are politicised, however, it is an open question as to whether women and other marginalised groups can achieve justice within liberal capitalist societies. Feminists such as Wendy Brown (1995) have drawn on Marx’s trenchant critique of liberal constitutionalism, which Marx saw as a ruse that grants rights to abstract individuals rather than concrete subjects, while simultaneously enclaving and depoliticising the forms of social and economic power that stratify societ y. The state promises neutralit y, to transcend the particularisms of private interests (both ‘domestic’ and economic ones). However, it is itself legitimated through these claims to resolve inequities: ‘the state achieves a good deal of its power through its “devious” claims to resolve the very inequalities it actually entrenches by depoliticising’ (Brown 1995: 101). Marx nonetheless retained some enthusiasm for the universalist claims of liberalism: being regarded by the state as if free and equal was an advance over previous historical conditions, and ideas of freedom and rights, even if only ideals, engender a desire that Marx believed could be drawn upon to organise for more fundamental social transformation. Some of this optimism is dampened by a Foucauldian reading of biopower, in particular the understanding that subjects not only deploy but are produced by the various discourses through which the state administers their needs (Brown 1995; Ferguson 1993; Fraser 1989; Passavant 2000). Nancy Fraser (1989) has noticed that the state tends to carry forward a separate spheres ideology through the ways that social

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welfare is administered. In particular, women and men tend to be positioned very differently in relation to social programmes. In the United States, she argues, there is a dual system of welfare provision that is tied together by core assumptions about the gender division of labour. What she identifies as the masculine system (which includes programmes such as employment insurance) is tied to participation in waged labour, is focused on the individual, is less demeaning, and involves less surveillance and control. Recipients are positioned as rights bearers, as deserving, and as consumers who have the right to determine how they allocate the cash that they receive. The feminine system is designed to compensate for family failure, focused on the household, and financed out of tax revenues rather than structured as a contributory plan. Subjects are positioned as dependants and clients (rather than as consumers) and are closely surveilled. Benefits are low (with the effect of maintaining dependency), and there is frequently a therapeutic component to service provision. These systems produce different subject positions: active, entitled individuals in one; needy, dependent, passive, psychologised ones in the other.6 Rights might seem preferable to dependency but the culture of individual rights itself induces technologies of self that reproduce and patrol gender boundaries and proprieties, in ways that can be racialised as well. Passavant (2000) makes this point by examining recent efforts by US constitutional legal scholars to restrict the t ypes of speech protected by the law. One leading constitutional law scholar, Cass Sunstein, has argued that current law is too inclusive and ‘protects much speech that ought not to be protected. It safeguards speech that has little or no connection with democratic aspirations’ (quoted in Passavant 2000: 123). Sunstein locates American sovereignt y in ‘We the People’, a system of ‘government by discussion’ whereby outcomes are achieved through broad public deliberation. But Passavant unearths a controversial genealogy for the concept of ‘government by discussion’. When first formulated, it was explicitly founded in the patriarchal family and a heterosexual economy of desire. It was contrasted to the oratory of ‘savages’. ‘Government by discussion uses race to think social difference, sexual deviance to signify racial alterit y, and sexual normalit y to represent the possibilit y of free speech’ (Passavant 2000: 124). And while one could argue that these historical underpinnings need not resonate in contemporary uses of the concept, Passavant detects them in Sunstein’s recent writings on free speech, in which ‘Sunstein argues that “government should . . . be allowed to maintain a civilized society” by “guard[ing] against the degradation produced

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by . . . obscenit y”’ (126; original emphasis). Sunstein would allow rights to free speech, Passavant argues, only to those who practise norms of heterosexual, conjugal patriarchy.7 It is the use that public institutions make of privacy – the symbolic traffic between the public and private – that leads Lauren Berlant to coin the term ‘infantile citizenship’. In the popular imagination, privacy is a safe, controllable, potentially unconflicted space: ‘a world built for you’ (Berlant 2000: 6). The problem from Berlant’s perspective is that this intimate space not only enclaves some aspects of life as non-political, but it now structures how Americans imagine the nation and themselves as citizens. She detects a fundamental shift in the last twent y years in the way in which the public sphere is imagined and practised, a shift that reconfigures the relations between public and private. In the past, she argues, domestic space was conceived in liberal thinking as the place where people developed a sense of themselves as unique; the self became a citizen only when it became abstracted from these particularities in the public sphere of liberal capitalist culture. The process of abstraction is no longer even considered an ideal and ‘conservative ideology has convinced a citizenship that the core context of politics should be the sphere of private life’ (Berlant 1997: 8). This is a very different circumstance than the idea of a pluralistic public sphere advocated by some feminist theorists. Nancy Fraser (1997), for example, has argued that we must re-imagine the public sphere, not as a space in which citizens operate with an abstracted, generalised set of interests, but as a sphere in which multiple publics (which articulate different private and social interests, needs and identities) meet. Particularistic interests cannot be hived off into the private sphere, she argues, because this strategy t ypically serves dominant interests. It is through public discussion of particularistic, interested positions that we can decide what common good as opposed to private interest is. In striking contrast to this ideal of a pluralistic and productively conflictual public sphere, what Berlant detects in actual fact is an almost total collapse of the public into the intimate: ‘the family sphere [is] considered the moral, ethical, and political horizon of national and political interest’ (1997: 262). This national imaginary is rooted in traditional notions of family, home and communit y in which a non-conflictual, homogeneous space is the ideal, citizenship is ‘downsized’ to an act of voluntarism, and social justice is replaced by a privatised ethic of responsibilit y, charit y and identification with suffering. One face of this is the erosion of the welfare state, and the redirection of state funding into a ‘shadow state’ of charitable

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and non-profit agencies. Though public funds continue to flow through such organisations, they exist beyond the transparent public accountabilit y demanded of state institutions (Wolch 1990). Another has been an intensification of state regulation of the family and sexualit y, given that such practices are conceived as a critical site for the formation of civic ethics. Yet another effect is that a conflictual public sphere of the t ype imagined by Nancy Fraser has no place within this imagined nation: ‘embodied activism performed in civic spaces has been designated as demonized, deranged, unclean (a)social activity’ (1997: 179). This is infantile citizenship because it manifests as passive patriotism and the suspension of critical judgement. This form of citizenship is something ‘smaller than agency: [it is] patriotic inclination, default social membership, or the simple possession of a normal [and normalised] national character’ (1997: 27). This intermingling of intimacy and citizenship has the effect, in Berlant’s view, of impoverishing both and has led to an intensified regulation of heteronormativit y. Reworking the public/private divide by invoking a national fantasy of homogeneous, intimate space is one geographical strategy for reinventing universalit y and managing a radically pluralistic societ y; another is to cast a collective geographical imagination in another direction, towards the borders of the nation. Honig (1998) locates the effect of contemporary discourse about immigration in the United States as that of revalidating the supposed universalit y of America’s liberal democratic principles. It is a discourse that ‘returns a regime to itself’ (2). Honig understands the discourse of foreigners to act as a supplement to the nation, as ‘an agent of re-enchantment that might rescue the regime from corruption and return it to its first principles’ (1). In Honig’s view, the immigrant performs an important symbolic function and solves a legitimisation problem that plagues liberal democracies. The problem is that, although liberal democracies draw their legitimacy from their consent base, native-born citizens do not explicitly consent to the nation. ‘With a hope, a prayer, and an oath’ (3), the immigrant fills this consent gap and solidifies the foundation of voluntarist consent. This process of reasserting the universalit y of democratic constitutionalism nevertheless continues to throw up gender differences and reassert heteronormativit y among residents within the nation. Honig notes, for instance, how depictions of immigrants function to renormalise traditional heterosexual norms. The myth of the good immigrant often celebrates his or her patriarchal familial bonds – indeed the extended family, and the entrepreneurial activit y associated

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with it, is one characteristic that makes them good (Tang 2000).8 Thobani (2000) has argued that, in the case of Canada, this is somewhat of a selffulfilling prophecy because Canadian immigration policy is structured so as to strengthen patriarchal authorit y within immigrant households by casting immigrant women in a literal state of dependency on male household heads. Honig (1998) also cites the foreign bride trade in countries such as the United States and Canada as a symptom and vehicle for the reassertion of traditional masculine and feminine roles. Once again, then, the effort to ‘re-enchant’, to re-establish the universalit y of liberalism generates particularities, and reactivates – even intensifies – gender differences, heteronormativit y and women’s oppression.

Javier and I I need to pause. I need to pause because some of what I have just written deviates from my own experience. As I write about the difficulties that women have had in achieving full citizenship rights and of the production of women’s dependency by the state, my mind wanders to my own excessive sense of privilege as a citizen. My ‘attitude’ at the nation’s border has become a stock family joke, ever since my sister’s partner, Javier, and I crossed the US–Canada border together. Let me tell the story. We were two professionals driving from Vancouver to Seattle to do some work; I was to give a colloquium at the Universit y of Washington, Javier to check on the construction of a house he had redesigned. I was the first to be questioned and as the border official pressed for more details about the nature of my talk, I answered with more and more edge in my voice. Perhaps the feeling that he was trivialising my intellectual authorit y as a woman provoked me. In any case, I recall a kind of pleasure in pushing against this embodiment of masculinised authorit y, a moment of daring him, goading him to abuse his authorit y. And I could do this because I felt perfectly, possibly absurdly, secure in my rights as a citizen of both Canada and the United States. Our encounter was so intense that the border official forgot to question Javier at all, either about his citizenship or business in the United States. I remember that Javier and I exploded across the border, at first tensely silent and then laughing, obsessively rehearsing, again and again, my interrogation. But if I had been exhilarated by the erotics of defiance, Javier had experienced something different. As a citizen of Canada who immigrated from Chile as a teenager, he imagined that my defiance would lead us into the backrooms

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of the building that houses the American state at the border, where we would be detained for an unspecified amount of time, during which every orifice of our bodies would be examined to exact maximum humiliation. Reflecting on why he had not been questioned by the border official, Javier quipped, ‘He probably thought I was your chauffeur.’

Feminism in Fragments My exaggerated sense of securit y in my citizenship rights no doubt speaks to my class standing, although Javier arguably has led a more class-privileged existence. Crossing the border, he re-imagines himself as working class and fantasises about being effectively raped by the nation. The imagined porous body is a feminised one, its penetration a violation of norms of hetero-masculinit y. Our paired transgressive fantasies – mine of being the disembodied, autonomous, rights-bearing liberal subject, and Javier’s feelings of vulnerabilit y – raise questions about the subject of feminism and universalising claims about gender difference and women’s oppression. I am suggesting that in some circumstances male bodies can be more profoundly feminised than female ones, and that other social relations such as class standing and processes of racialisation affect how gender is read and experienced. Criticisms of universalisms within feminism are now numerous and familiar.9 Claims about generic woman can be a t ype of power move on the part of white, middle-class, heterosexual feminists if they have the effect of overgeneralising and normalising specific white, middle-class, heterosexual experiences. Carole Pateman has argued that ‘the dichotomy between the private and the public is central to almost two centuries of feminist writing and political struggle; it is, ultimately, what the feminist movement is about’ (1989: 118). But some of that feminist narrative about ‘the’ private and ‘the’ public may have a very different meaning to varying groups of women and men. White, middle-class women’s critiques of the cult of domesticit y and idealisations of motherhood, for example, have to be read against the fragile hold that some groups of women have on their rights to mother their own children.10 To cite an example in which I am implicated, a number of feminist geographers demonstrated that in the United States married women with young children, taken as a statistical aggregate, tend to find paid employment very close to home (within about ten minutes). We have argued that this narrows their field of opportunities, and exacerbates the tendency for women to work in low-paid, dead-end

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jobs (Hanson and Pratt 1995). One can see this as a variant of the separate spheres argument insofar as it emphases the decisive pull that the domestic continues to exert on women’s lives, even when they are employed outside the home. But when feminist geographers absorbed the criticisms made by non-white feminist theorists and thought to consider the experiences of differently racialised women, they found that many African-American women with dependants have very long commutes to paid employment (McLaffert y and Preston 1992, 1997). Given the relentless racial segregation of American housing markets (Young 1997), the racialisation of educational opportunit y and labour markets, and the suburbanisation of many low-skilled jobs, many African-American women simply do not have the opportunit y to find employment close to home and they suffer long commutes and hence long hours away from home. The meaning of a longer commute clearly differs if it is made by choice or of necessit y, by a professional with a nanny caring for her children at home, or a workingclass woman taking the subway to the only job that she can find (England 1993). Alternatively, different geographies, other than spatial constraint, may haunt the lives of lesbian women. In one of the first articles to address sexualit y and space, Valentine (1993) chronicled the discomfort and/or veiled existences lived by many British lesbian women in heterosexual workplaces. Many feminist geographers’ descriptive narratives of the world thus had been racialised and sexualised in unacknowledged ways and they did not describe the lives or relevant geographies of many non-white, non-heterosexual women. This leaves us with a partial understanding of the spatial practices that sustain ‘the other side of universalit y’ (Razack 2000a: 7), practices that exceed the vocabulary of public and private. In her effort to ‘move beyond law’s insistence on abstract individuals without histories’, Sherene Razack suggests that we begin by ‘tracing the constitution of spaces’ and ‘mapping . . . the hierarchical social relations they create and sustain’ (7). We can unmask the particularities of liberal universalism, she argues, by ‘unmapping’11 the naturalised spaces that are constructed within legal (and other) representations as beyond liberal universal justice. Razack’s focus is on racialised spaces, which are often conceived as degenerate12 spaces where violence is naturally occurring and can thus occur with relative impunit y. Assessing the trial of two white, middle-class, 19-year-old male universit y students for the murder of an Aboriginal woman, Pamela George, in Regina, Saskatchewan, in 1995, Razack argues that their conviction for manslaughter (rather than murder) resulted from a series of

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spatialised assumptions: Pamela George existed in a racialised space of prostitution ‘where violence is innate’, while the men were conceived as ‘far removed from spaces of violence’ (2000b: 126). ‘She was of the space where murders happen; they were not’ (126). Describing a similar phenomenon at another scale, Isabel Garcia (2002) refers to the US–Mexican border as a ‘deconstitutionalized zone’, where constitutional guarantees to equal protection before the law do not apply.13 These arguments are important because they urge feminist scholars to uncover a more varied set of spatial practices through which social relations of domination are produced and reproduced by means of (and not in spite of) a language of universal justice. Razack’s analysis of the effects of dominant groups crossing into racialised, degenerate spaces also raises longstanding concerns about feminists’ own border crossings. Razack notes the traditional function of white men ‘slumming’ in the degenerate urban spaces of prostitution: ‘[m]oving from respectable space to degenerate space and back again is an adventure that serves to confirm that they are indeed white men in control who can survive a dangerous encounter with the racial Other and who have an unquestioned right to go anywhere and do anything’ (2000b: 95).14 This right to go anywhere and do anything is a feature of the canonical figure of modernit y – the urban flâneur – and it is one that feminists have interrogated (Wolff 1993). The critique has been extended, however, to the activities of white feminists themselves, and especially their right to perform as flâneuse in their representations of other women. One concern is that these representations reinforce the superiorit y of white, Western women as more civilised, more liberated than the less privileged women whom they represent as powerless victims of patriarchy (and racism) (Mohant y 1991b). To argue that white feminists have normalised their own experiences through the category of generic woman is to raise the question of power among women. To assert that women who are differently positioned by other social relations, such as race and class, experience exclusion from universal justice through some common but many different spatial practices is to open the question of what unifies feminist organising. To suggest that white Western feminists subjugate other women through their interpretive practices (not to mention daily lives) raises questions about the possibilities of alliances across differences. To assert that racialised men can be more profoundly feminised than a middle-class white woman is to unmoor feminism from its ontological foundations – a specifically sexed body.

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These are arguments, assertions and suggestions that have preoccupied feminists since the 1980s. Fraser (1997) identifies them as ‘a cultural turn’ in feminist discussion; it is this turn that has led some to reassert universal principles to offset tendencies towards fragmentation.15 However, Iris Young, among others, has urged a reassessment of the political effects of the politics of difference. She argues that the term, identit y politics, so often used to denigrate the politics of difference, is misleading, and that political theorists would be better served by disengaging their analyses of social groups from the logic of identit y. This is because social groups do not have identities; individuals construct identities in terms of socialgroup positioning. She also rejects the dualit y that Nancy Fraser (1997) has constructed between different kinds of political claims: ones for redistributive justice and others for cultural recognition, and the way that Fraser then deploys this dualit y in relation to certain t ypes of political groups. Fraser has criticised groups organised around identit y for being too concentrated on injustices of cultural valuation and not attentive enough to questions of redistributive justice. But Young argues that the political demands of groups based in identification, such as gay, lesbian, transgendered, ethnic or race-based ones, usually go beyond recognition of identit y to demands for redistributive justice.16 Rather than persisting with old dualities of unit y or difference, we require new ways of thinking about universals and the politics of difference in relation to feminist solidarit y. As it turns out, some of these new ways of thinking work through space, both metaphorical and concrete geographies.

Geographies of Democracy I want to consider how two geographies operate within recent efforts to rethink universalism and feminist solidarit y. These are geographies of empt y space and webbed connection across political affinities. Universalism as an empt y space is a metaphor that has been developed by Ernesto Laclau in the context of theorising radical democracy; it has also been taken up and reworked by Judith Butler, in conversation with Laclau and Z˘iz˘ek (Butler et al. 2000). From Laclau’s perspective, the failure of liberal democracies to deliver on their promises of universal freedom and justice ought not to lead us to reject universalit y. Pure particularism, in which particular groups define and defend their own principles and rights, is ‘a self defeating enterprise’ (1996: 26). In a world of pure particularism, we would be without principles for deciding between legitimate

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and illegitimate rights claims. Particularism is also a self-defeating strategy for members of non-dominant groups because they cannot assert a differential identit y without distinguishing themselves from a context, thus reinscribing their marginalit y within a dominant communit y. In practice, identification-based groups are rarely totally separate because they assert their difference through norms and principles that transcend their difference, often through the language of rights. In other words, they rely on shared universal norms to assert their particularit y. This paradox is captured in the demand for women’s human rights, which involves simultaneously claiming and refusing sexual difference. In Scott’s view, this is a paradox that is ‘the constitutive condition of feminism as a political movement throughout its long history’ (Scott 1996: 7). Lara (1998) argues that feminist and US black civil rights movements have been particularly successful in shifting public opinion over the last century and expanding the ‘public sphere’, precisely because they have persuasively called up both the particularit y of their experiences and the norms of universalit y – especially universal principles of freedom and human rights. These universal terms are resources that can be redeployed by those who are not authorised to use them, to simultaneously expose the limits of current practices of universalit y and demand inclusion within them. The notion of universalit y that Laclau has in mind is not, however, a fixed set of universal principles or a regulative ideal that transcends particulars. Universalit y is not a process through which difference can be finally overcome, or individuals come to recognise a shared essence. It is an ongoing, conflictual process, through which antagonistic struggles articulate common social objectives and strategies. His argument is by turns historical, theoretical and normative. Universalism is a historically situated discourse, originating in religious doctrine ( ‘all men are equal before God’), ‘brought down into this world’ (Laclau 1996: 121) in Enlightenment thought, and more fully generalised through ‘the democratic revolution’. It is a vocabulary – a language game – that democracy requires in order to bring different groups into political interaction. Laclau derives the limits of the language game from theories of identit y and signification. He argues that universalit y is a symbol, an empt y signifier that signifies the ‘pure cancellation of all difference’. He understands any identit y to be necessarily constituted through its difference from other identities. Identities therefore are never complete in and of themselves. Universality is a symbol of the ‘absent fullness’ that identity cannot be. The universal thus cannot have an identit y or concrete content of its

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own. Universalit y is never fully achieved, nor is it ‘a preexisting something (essence or form) to which individuals accede but, rather, the fragile, shifting, and always incomplete achievement of political action; it is not the container of a presence but the placeholder of an absence, not the substantive content but an empt y place’ (Zerilli 1998: 15). Concrete struggles become linked, not because their objectives are the same, but because they are equivalent in their confrontation of repressive power. Laclau argues that the content of the universal is ‘borrowed’ from some group constituted within this ‘equivalential space’ (1996: 42). (This is what he means when he argues that the universal is ‘parasitic’ on the particular.) At the same time, once a group or particular struggle becomes the ‘surface of inscription’ (45) through which all liberation struggle is expressed, it loses some of its concrete particularit y. ‘What does determine that one of them rather than another incarnates, at particular periods of times, this universal function?’ (42). As Zerilli puts it: ‘this is the crucial political question to ask about empt y signifiers’ (1998: 14). Why are not all claims to the universal equally valid, and why do some groups’ claims to represent the universal carry more weight than those of others? Laclau’s answer is simply: ‘the unevenness of the social’ (43), by which he means the existing relations of power. And although this structural unevenness means that some groups are more likely than others to assume the function of the universal, the contest is by no means predetermined. If it were, as Zerilli notes, ‘there would be no such thing as politics’ (1998: 15). The universal as an empt y signifier allows a way of re-imagining the category woman as a universalising term that does not presuppose an essential identit y. ‘Woman’ can be thought of as an identification that is articulated and comes into being through political agency (Mouffe 1992). Whether feminism as a social movement is successful in articulating other liberation struggles within the category ‘woman’ is something that is decided through political struggle and not only or finally through philosophical debate. To the extent that it is successful in fulfilling this function of representing the universal, we would expect the feminist movement to be increasingly emptied of its singular focus on woman, and possibly rethought around a broader critique of the production of social difference and the multiple exclusions enacted by dominant groups and institutions. It is arguable that this is what has happened within and to feminism over the last twent y-five years or so. It is not only that it has become a

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powerful movement that has articulated liberatory struggles in and through the category, woman (which has become increasingly emptied of a singular meaning). Mary Dietz has argued that feminism has a pivotal role to play in the USA because it has become a living repository of democratic norms and values. She argues that democratic practices have ‘nearly ceased to be part of the politics of the United States’, where a more narrowly individualistic liberal capitalist citizenship is now practised (1987: 16). In contrast, second-wave feminism has a history of putting democratic principles into practice. Dietz is thus claiming for feminism the function of modelling democratic values. Democracy is a term through which feminism can articulate with other struggles and it is possible that, because of its historical claims to democratic practice, feminism can assume the function of the universal. Alternatively, or additionally, YuvalDavis (1997) argues that the category of citizenship now has the capacit y to mobilise and integrate separate struggles against exclusion from citizenship rights. It is a category through which various feminist groups can build solidarit y among themselves and with other excluded groups. Feminists who have been drawn to theorising radical democracy are also asking, however, whether there are ways of thinking beyond Laclau toward a more expansive political field in which democratic struggle is ‘not primarily one of persuasive synecdoche, whereby the particular comes to stand, compellingly, for the whole’ (Butler 2000b: 166). Can we imagine a political field in which the tension is maintained between competing universal claims made by different social movements? Can we establish a democratic commitment to translate across competing universalist claims without absorbing the terms of one completely within those which (for the time being) occupy this universal function? I understand Laclau and Butler to be arguing that the best chance of achieving this is to nurture democratic practices that allow groups to compete with each other peacefully. In their view, conceiving universalit y as an empt y place is the precondition of such practices. Any existing formulation of the universal is necessarily exclusionary but paradoxically holds within it the means to be challenged by those who are excluded by it. Groups compete to define what counts as universal, a competition that requires in democratic societies the difficult labour of translation across competing claims. Butler uses a somewhat different spatial vocabulary to capture this, preferring to imagine universalit y as a non-place, as a ‘fundamentally temporal modalit y’ that can never be allowed to settle in one place (2000a: 39). ‘It will be the labor of transaction and translation which belongs to no single site,

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but is the movement between languages, and has its final destination in this movement itself’ (2000b: 179). Butler is nonetheless concerned that existing relations of domination are frequently reinscribed when challenges are made to existing universal norms. She cites current debates about same-sex legal alliances and marriages, and argues that although entrance into the institution of marriage can be seen to extend and universalise certain rights and entitlements (for example, entitlements to a partner’s health and pension plan), it also has the effect of deepening state regulation of sexualit y, re-normalising ‘the family’, and widening the gap between legitimate, state-sanctioned and illegitimate sexualities. In her view, abolishing the institution of marriage as a precondition for certain legal entitlements has more radically democratic effects. The problem is not only that the act of universalising often has the effect of absorbing particular social movements within existing relations of domination; the translation practices that Butler envisions must take into account that some people inhabit a social space from which it is difficult to speak, or be heard. To be able to speak and be heard as a social movement already implies being constituted within the field of the political. She urges the necessit y of standing on the line between the speakable and unspeakable, in order to make use of power and discourse in ways that ‘do not renaturalize the political vernacular of the state and its status as the primary instrument of legitimating effects’ (Butler 2000b: 178). This suggests – at the very least – the necessit y for multiple publics within the public sphere (Fraser 1997) and the understanding that the state and its liberal institutions are just one site of democratic politics (Marston and Staeheli 1994; Pulido 1994). Butler means to suggest more than this and does this through the activist slogan, ‘Put your body on the line’. By evoking the ‘somatic domain of the political claim’ (2000b: 177–8), she is acknowledging the difficult y of speaking outside existing normative discourse, while simultaneously trying to conjure in language a limit of where the norms of legitimation might break down in order to create an opening for other versions of universalit y. Mobilit y, empt y space and the body that offers its own finalit y – death – to expose the violence – epistemic and otherwise – that founds state activit y and cultural norms; this is a potent mix of spatial metaphors and materialities. Some feminists have worried about a feminist politics that is motivated by a concept of universalit y that is pure negativit y. Its worth as an ideal rests in its unattainabilit y. Its unattainabilit y is what keeps the borders of

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the social open, so that a societ y is persistently forced to confront the questions: ‘Who are we?’ ‘What is a right, and who and what has them?’ But what then is the glue of feminist politics? If the category of woman is seen as a political achievement, itself a t ype of empt y signifier, that has productively forced questions about the limits of universalit y over the last century or so, what is it that motivates that politics (Young 1997)? Placed against this concern, it is fascinating that Butler introduces the materialit y of the body, not fully absorbed in discourse, as a goad, a site of provocation that can be used to create openings from which questions about universalit y can emerge. She also suggests that paying close attention to the disjuncture between lived experiences and state practices and ideologies offers some important ground for proliferating freedoms. The discourse of the family, which Berlant and others argue increasingly defines the dominant interpretation of citizenship in the United States, actually has ‘limited descriptive reach’ (Butler 2000b: 177), if one considers the growing number of non- or quasi-state-sanctioned common-law marriages, and alternative non-heterosexual kinship forms. In the province of Quebec in Canada in 2001, 30 per cent of couples lived in common-law alliances, and in 2000, one out of every 100 common-law couples in the USA were same-sex ones (Cash 2003: F7). The newspaper article that presented these statistics was entitled, ‘[t]he altered state’, testimony to Butler’s point that ‘the social basis for the state turns out to be more complicated and less unitary than the discourse of the family permits’ (Butler 2000b: 177). I want to suggest that theorising universalit y, even the category of woman, as a t ype of empt y space is not at odds with the t ype of materialist, non-identit y-based, affinit y theorised for feminism by Iris Young (1997). Indeed, because Young says more about the positive conditions for feminist coalition building, and does so through a rich geographical vocabulary, her writing is a useful complement to that of Butler. To theorise feminist alliances, Young draws upon Sartre’s notion of serialit y, which is distinct from a group. If a group is a mutually acknowledging collective with a shared purpose, a series is a less coherently organised, unselfconscious collective, organised by ‘practico-inert’ realit y. Sartre17 explained seriality through the example of a group of people waiting for the bus. These people are brought together by their relation to a material object, a bus, and shared conventions of public transportation. They are united only by their desire to ride on that route. They do not share an identit y. There is a latent potential to organise as a group. If the bus does

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not come, some may organise to call a taxi. If there is a public transportation strike, some may organise to protest this.18 Or, as is the case in cities such as Vancouver and Los Angeles, public transportation ridership can be articulated with and become a promising site of class and antiracist politics.19 Young reads gender as a series that has no specific set of attributes that are sufficient condition for membership. Contemplating the difficult y of determining the relevant attributes to define bus rider membership, Young asks: ‘Who belongs to the series of bus riders? Only those riding today? Those regularly riding? Occasionally? Those who may ride buses and know the social practices of bus riding?’ (1997: 26). Serialit y designates a set of structured constraints and relations to practico-inert objects that condition action and meaning; rather than an identit y or a category with fixed boundaries, it is a lived process. ‘Women are the individuals who are positioned as feminine by these activities’ (Young 1997: 28; original emphasis). The body is a primary practico-inert object to which actions are oriented to produce feminine individuals within the norms of heterosexualit y. But it is not the only one. Indeed one of the appeals of the concept of practico-inert as developed by Young is the extent to which she theorises the ways that social practices become naturalised in objects and the built environment: ‘offices, workstations, locker rooms, uniforms, and instruments of a particular activity presuppose a certain sex’ (29) and enforce heteronormativit y and a gendered division of labour.20 When women group together to change or eliminate the conditions that serialise them as women, these are usually feminist groupings. But series are always partial, never a totalit y, and there are many feminisms, depending on what else brings the group together, on how they are situated in relation to other serialities such as race, class, religion or neighbourhood. Or neighbourhoods. It is through the concrete details of our lives that we develop affinities, and the milieux in which we live are powerfully concrete. Young has used this idea to extend obligations of justice beyond processes of identification. What is the moral basis for extending justice and access to universal norms and claims across social differences, to people with whom we do not identify? It is, quite simply, ‘that people live together. They are together in a locale or region, whether they like it or not’ (Young 2000: 222). Whenever interdependencies generate benefits and burdens that are contingent on existing spatial and institutional relationships, people within that set of interdependent institutional relationships ‘stand in relations of justice’ (242). Young envisions building

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global solidarities in this way, because obligations of justice extend as far beyond the borders of a region or nation as existing social and economic connections. I return to the theme of building solidarities across global difference in Chapter 7.

Theoretical Risks and Contextuality Young (2000) insists that webbed networks of moral obligation are not dependent on feelings of identification but must rest on more ‘objective’ criteria such as institutionalised connections – economic, political and social. In a comparable move, Berlant (2000: 48) questions the centrality of ‘the subject’ who ‘so powerfully animates so much feminist, anti-racist and queer work’ because she believes that this focus on identit y reproduces the dream of privacy – dwelling in a safe, non-conflictual space – within these oppositional theories themselves. These two theorists are taking the risk of reactivating some categorical distinctions (in the case of Young, objective/subjective) that have not been ‘friends’ of feminists because they have been deployed historically to exclude and marginalise women. Equally important, they take the risk of reactivating some of the spaces of liberal theory that have been so problematic for women, in particular, the public/private divide. At stake is a public sphere in which the kinds of conflict and translation practices imagined within radical democratic theory can thrive. The notion of universalit y envisioned by Laclau and Butler are truly and not metaphorically empt y without such a conflictual public sphere. But like the concept of universalit y, this public sphere is imagined as a paradoxical space in which particularistic, specific interests are articulated. It is crucial to recognise that particularistic interests are not private interests. This is because they are the consequence of relations of power and the fact that different groups are structured through relations of power. Possibly riskier still, some feminists and queer theorists are trying to re-imagine privacy itself through the categories of transitional space (another geographical metaphor) and intimacy. Debra Morris (2000) reframes privacy, not as a space of exclusion based on individual rights to autonomy, but as a transitional space constituted by our willingness to suspend judgement, as a space of play, secrecy and taboo. Feminists’ conventional refusal to consider such a space, because of concerns about how it has functioned historically to shield oppressive relations,21 is tempered somewhat by the defence of home and privacy by African-American

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feminists (hooks 1990; P. Williams 1991) and by critiques of state regulation of intimacy, particularly non-heterosexual varieties (Bell 1995). These discussions highlight the limitations of abstracted categorical theorising, and the force of another geographical term, that of context. Commenting on the paradox that feminists deploy discourses of both universalit y (equalit y) and particularit y (sexual difference), Butler (2000a: 33) notes that this way of framing the issue underplays the mobilit y of categories. The very same term, ‘sexual difference’, can denote the particular in one context and the universal in another. Whether privacy is a resource to veil or unveil power relations depends on context. We need to worry, however, about the ways that contextual geographies work in relation to each other to create the conditions for ‘double positions’ taken in the name of universal norms (Harvey 2000a). An example would be supporting sexual harassment legislation in a country such as the United States or Canada, and accepting the rights of US or Canadian firms to operate outside of these norms in other contexts (for example, maquiladoras). Often these doubled positions emerge because there are competing universalisms at stake (women’s equalit y versus economic liberalism), but, as Harvey notes, the contradictions of competing universalisms can be eased or the uneven application of universal principles can go undetected if these contradictions or inconsistencies happen in different places. ‘Failure to specify or investigate . . . geographic conditions makes such double positions entirely feasible all in the name of universal ethics’ (Harvey 2000a: 546). So it is that President George Bush Senior could toast Ferdinand Marcos while visiting Manila: ‘We love your adherence to democratic principles’ (cited in Francia 2001: 141). The radical undecidability of universal principles, the effects of context, and the need to study how geographies work relationally, all lead us back to the empirical.

Notes 1. See also Allen (1998); Webster (2000); Weir (1996). 2. For important feminist contributions see Dietz (1987); Marston (1990); Pateman (1989). 3. In particular, he examines J. S. Mill’s introduction to ‘On Libert y’ and US Supreme Court rulings from the 1930s onwards. 4. See T. Mitchell (1998) for a discussion of the historical construction of ‘the econo-

my’ as a coherent object apart from the domestic. 5. The terminology is confusing because different meanings of private are called up

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6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

91

and blurred, especially privacy as personal autonomy and private as the absence of state intervention. Hence both the home and the economy can be conceived as private. Patricia Williams argues that non-dominant groups must also present themselves as dependants in order to successfully represent themselves within the law: ‘A quick review of almost any contracts text will show that most successful defenses feature women, particularly if they are old and widowed; illiterates; blacks and other minorities; the abjectly poor; and the old and infirm. A white male student of mine once remarked that he couldn’t imagine “reconfiguring his manhood” to live up to the “publicly craven defencelessness” of defenses like duress and undue influence. I learned that the best way to give voice to those whose voice has been suppressed was to argue that they had no voice’ (1991: 155–6). Indeed, support for patriarchial authorit y appears to be on the rise in the United States. An increasing number of Americans agree with the statement, ‘The father of the family must be the master in his own house’: 42 per cent in 1992, 44 per cent in 1996 and 48 per cent in 2000. The comparable percentages in Canada for 1992 and 1996 were: 26 per cent and 20 per cent (Adams 2001). Tang (2000) argues that even second- and third-generation Asian-Americans are narrated through geographies of immigration that stress ruralit y, and tightly knit patriarchal extended families, while African-Americans are imagined within another geography, that of the ghettoised underclass. Similar experiences of high fertilit y rates and chronic unemployment are then interpreted through this lens of mobilit y and stasis, in the case of Asian-Americans as a temporary aberration, for African-Americans as evidence of an enduring and self-reproducing underclass. See for example, Moraga and Anzaldua (1981); Hull et al. (1982); Zinn and Dill (1996). For general overviews of some of these criticisms, see Segal (1999); Young (1997). See Minnie Bruce Pratt (1984) for a powerful autobiographical account of losing custody of her young sons after she made a decision to leave her husband for a lesbian relationship. Iris Young (1997) describes her own mother’s difficulties retaining custody of her children when she failed to conform to middle-class norms of motherhood. Significantly, she fled from the suburbs to the cit y as a means of managing this crisis. See also Boyd (1997) for legal challenges in Canada faced by lesbian mothers, and mothers with mental-health histories. Razack is drawing on Richard Phillips’ terminology: ‘to unmap literally is to denaturalise geography, hence to undermine world views that rest upon it’ (Phillips 1997: 147). In using the term ‘degenerate’, Razack is calling up Foucault’s notion of the ‘internal enemies’ of the bourgeois male: women, racial others, the mentally ill, and ‘perverts’ – all those who threaten to weaken the vigorous bourgeois body and state. Alison Mountz (2003) examines a similar t ype of space at Canadian international airports, which immigration officers refer to as ‘the long tunnel’. This metaphorical tunnel is a time-space, which refugee claimants pass through – all on Canadian soil – between getting off the plane and being processed as claimants (at which point they are entitled to basic rights guaranteed by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms). The proliferation of such spaces, only accentuated after 11 September 2001, is worthy of some alarm.

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14. This echoes hooks’ influential discussion of the politics of cosmopolitan consump-

15.

16.

17.

18.

19. 20. 21.

tion of ‘the other’, of white practices of ‘eating the other’, whether it be through touristic sexual adventures or eating in ‘authentic’ ethnic restaurants (see Chapter 6). Others on the left, such as David Harvey (1996), argue that class politics continues to offer a unifying political framework beyond the partialit y of gender and racial difference. But as Iris Young (2000) has argued, it is ironic that critics on the left make such an argument, given that those speaking for the working class are critical of the fact that capitalist interests are t ypically represented as universal ones. Young interprets feminist and anti-racist claims as extensions of, and not antagonistic to, this line of argument. Lara (1998) makes a similar argument. Fraser argues that a feminism of ‘equalit y’ and a feminism of ‘difference’ are based on different versions of justice and different approaches to achieving equalit y. She has criticised the latter for being too concentrated on injustices of cultural valuation and not attentive enough to questions of redistributive justice. In Lara’s view, ‘demands for recognition and fair distribution are always intertwined’ (151) and the problem identified by Fraser is ‘less real than conceptual’, involving a false separation of recognition and redistribution (153). Sartre (1991) develops this idea about serialit y in the Critique of Dialectical Reason as a way of theorising class relations, and a distinction between class standing and class consciousness. It is perhaps not surprising that the first protester to camp on the front lawn of Vancouver Cit y Hall during the months-long Vancouver transit strike in 2001 was a 59-year-old woman, who also founded Walkers and Riders Revolt (WARR). Women, older people and those in povert y were commonly identified as those most adversely affected by the strike. For information on Vancouver’s Bus Riders’ Union, see http://bru.resist.ca/ Mike Davis (2000: 147) describes some of the successes of the Los Angeles Bus Riders Union. There is a vast literature on the gendering of the build environment and excellent points of entry are Domosh and Seager (2001) and Weisman (1992). Morris’ theorisation of privacy as transitional space was roundly criticised on these grounds. See Boling (2000) and Elshtain (2000).

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CH A P TER 5

Working at the Borders of Liberalism

When the United Nations’ Rapporteur on Human Rights for Migrants, Gabriel Rodriquez, met at the Kalayaan Centre in Vancouver in September 2000, she was told of the ‘grave human rights violations’ perpetuated by the Canadian Government’s Department of Citizenship and Immigration against domestic workers ‘as women, as workers, as youth, as migrant Filipinos and as a highly marginalized and vulnerable group’ (Philippine Women Centre 2000a). Speaking at a conference on Anti-Racist Teaching and Learning just eight months later, Cecilia Diocsin of the Kalayaan Centre criticised the Registered Nurses’ Association of British Columbia (RNABC) for using their commitment to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms as an excuse for not formulating an explicit anti-racism policy. The same advocacy group, then, moves in and out of the discourse of rights, and both calls up and dresses down institutions that speak through the language of rights. This is the paradox of rights. It is a language that works rhetorically through its universalistic claims: ‘[to characterise] a specific goal as a human right elevates it above the rank and file of competing social goals, gives it a degree of immunit y from challenge and generally endows it with an aura of timelessness, absoluteness and universal validit y’ (Alston 1988: 3). And yet particular world views are written into formulations of rights, access to rights is by no means universal, and the effectiveness of rights claims for marginal groups are situational. Cheah (1997: 261) names rights as ‘violent gifts’ that offer ‘the only way for the disenfranchised to mobilise’. No wonder domestic-worker advocacy groups approach rights strategically and ambivalently. The appeal to human rights and the criticism of the effectiveness of citizenship rights for racialised groups in Canada are from one perspective fully compatible because appeals to human rights are t ypically made when the state fails to protect citizenship rights of particular categories of individuals. It is for this reason that Hannah Arendt (1951) judged human rights to be the worst possible rights to have to rely upon; they are the de facto rights of persons who have lost government protection.1

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That the Kalayaan Centre made such an appeal is still surprising because, relative to most other countries, migrant domestic workers in Canada have more rights, as well as the opportunit y to obtain citizenship. This is in line with Canada’s rating for many years as number one on the United Nations’ Human Development Index.2 As Stasiulis and Bakan (1997a: 120) note: ‘[c]itizenship rights in Canada may therefore appropriately be considered among the “best” that liberal democratic capitalism can offer in the current period’. But the ‘best place in the world to live’, it turns out, ‘is hardly the best for all’ (Bakan and Stasiulis 1997: 121), and Canada’s treatment of domestic workers appears so positive only because conditions elsewhere are so abominable. ‘Since the international consensus condones various degrees of oppression of migrant female [domestic] workers . . . any departure from this pattern that accords foreign domestic workers some rights, including those commonly enjoyed by most other categories of workers or immigrants, take on a progressive appearance’ (Stasiulis and Bakan 2002: 243; original emphasis). Situated in the best of a bad lot, domestic workers’ struggles for and through rights in Canada ‘suggest the boundaries of such experiences in contemporary capitalism in general’ (Stasiulis and Bakan 1997a: 120), a kind of limit that exists at the contradiction between globalised power relations and universal norms of freedom and equalit y. Migrant domestic workers are often framed within the past, as indentured servants or ‘modern day slaves’.3 In Macklin’s assessment, ‘the role of the foreign domestic worker is not merely anomalous; it is an anachronism’ (1992: 749). It is an anachronism that seems at odds and out of step with the basic tenets of modern liberal democracy. Domestic workers – including those in Canada – have lost their economic rights to stay within their own country, most commonly the Philippines, insofar as their migration is forced by economic need. They have lost their rights to family unit y when they are forced to leave their husbands and children in the Philippines, one instance of the racialisation of heterosexual privilege.4 The Live-in Caregiver programme ties domestic workers to a job and residential location; they thus lose basic rights to economic and social development, and mobilit y. Their employment rights are hollow. Basic rights to privacy and bodily integrit y – the foundations of the liberal subject – are precarious.5 This reached its most intimate limit when the kidney of a Toronto Filipina domestic worker was transplanted into her 76-year-old employer’s body (Priest 2002: A1).6 And yet if migrant domestic workers are often conceived within the

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past of a feudal or slave economy, the urgency of contemporary rights violations emerges from the understanding that they not only describe present circumstances but foretell a future of increasingly differentiated citizenship rights within the borders of nation-states.7 Because of restrictions that have been placed on the Live-in Caregiver programme since 1992,8 overall numbers coming into Canada through this programme have declined.9 Stasiulis and Bakan (2002) argue that there has been a corresponding increase in the numbers of undocumented domestic workers within Canada, whose rights and circumstances are even more precarious than those already described. The rights to acquire rights10 can be seen as a political struggle that is only intensifying. This is a political struggle that is fought through imaginative, legalistic and concrete geographies. Certain boundaries naturalise unequal access to rights. A major question is whether it is sufficient to work away at these boundaries, or whether rights discourse is itself a flawed and limited resource that throws the responsibilit y for social inequalit y on to individuals and deepens the regulatory reach of the state; such hesitations about rights as a political tool themselves can be understood through the vocabulary of boundaries, in terms of geographies of containment. However, I want to argue that a geographical imagination also offers certain openings for working within rights discourse so as to hold liberalism to its promises of freedom, equalit y and justice for all. If the language of rights is now ‘the discourse of choice’, indeed ‘often the only discourse’ through which disadvantaged groups can articulate demands (Cossman 1991: 340), these openings warrant serious attention.

Borders and Unequal Access to Rights Michael Walzer (1984: 315) has defined liberalism as ‘a certain way of drawing the map of the social and political world’. Reconstructing their world against feudalism, liberals practised an ‘art of separation. They drew lines, marked off different realms, and created the sociopolitical map with which we are still familiar’ (Walzer 1984: 315).11 These lines radiate from the body outwards, and they map the spaces of rights. I want to consider how three boundaries map domestic workers’ rights, indeed their very right to rights: these are borders (1) at the limit of the body, (2) between private and public, and (3) of the nation-state. One of the most persistent criticisms of the Live-in Caregiver programme is that domestic workers must live in their employers’ homes for the two

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years required before eligible to apply for an open visa. Much follows from the live-in requirement.12 I want to begin by considering chronic violations of privacy and how they figure into perceptions of Filipina bodies. Although the federal government stipulates that employers must provide the domestic worker with a separate room that she can lock, there are many instances in which employers fail to provide this and/or feel no compunction about using the domestic worker’s room in her absence.13 Two examples, taken from the series of focus groups with domestic workers at the Philippine Women Centre (PWC) in 1995–6,14 provide a sense of the chronic violations of privacy. In the first, Susan describes how her employers grossly misunderstood the contractual arrangement between themselves and Susan, and simply used her room to accommodate guests in her absence: Susan:

Then when I’m on my holidays, and they had visitors, they let the visitors use and sleep in my room. One time when I was ready to return on Sunday evening, they asked me to just return in the morning because their friend is still around and staying in my room.

In a second conversation, Crist y and Joergie describe their understanding of their rights over their rooms. Cristy:

Joergie:

Don’t we have the right, when we go out, to lock our doors? Why should employers enter our rooms when they have given us those rooms to stay in, if not so that they can check things inside? Because I’m sure that when they go inside the room they check inside, right? My employer says that that’s because it’s part of her house, and so she has the right to check what’s in there, what you do in your room, whatever things you are hiding there.

Lack of rights goes beyond the privacy of a room; in focus groups at the Philippine Women Centre, domestic workers spoke of a profound loss of bodily integrit y. They live in fear of being accused of theft and feel relatively defenceless around this charge. The following exchange in a focus group conveys a sense of this: Endrolyn: I don’t touch their jewelry, even in Singapore. I am very

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conscious. I use a towel or gloves [when cleaning jewelry]. Because some employers, they just set you up. Marlyn: When I quit my employer I knew she would do that. Because she was so mad at me. So I said that I want someone to go with me [when I pack my belongings] and check everything I get. I said, ‘You have to see everything that I am packing.’ Because if I don’t [do this] she might just put something in and will charge me later on. Endrolyn: That happened in Singapore. The nanny worked for so many years and she spent her money to buy jewelry. And she had lots of jewelry. So her employer was jealous. I guess because she was only a nanny and had lots of jewelry. You know what she did? [The employer] got her jewelry and transferred it to the nanny’s bag. [The nanny] was leaving to go to the Philippines the following day, and [the employer] called the police and said that her nanny is stealing her jewelry. Then what the nanny did was say, ‘Okay you trace whose finger prints are there.’ That’s why I am always aware of that [and wears gloves to ensure that her fingerprints are not on her employer’s jewelry] . . . Even the attaché case, I don’t touch. I use a stick. You know why? They will take advantage. Because I’ve heard of this before. It is worth reflecting on Endrolyn’s concerns about her loss of control over the traces of her body, about a t ype of leakiness across the borders of the body; they can be read as both symptom and source of her insecurit y about rights. Rights confer and protect bodily integrit y. It is this understanding that founds Patricia Williams’ defence of rights. The ‘black desire’ for rights in the United States is fuelled, she argues, ‘by knowledge of, and generations of existing in, a world without any meaningful boundaries – and “without boundary” for blacks has meant not untrammeled vistas of possibilit y but the crushing weight of total – bodily and spiritual – intrusion’ (1991: 164; original emphasis). The relationship between entitlement to rights and bodily integrit y is recursive. Arguing from the perspective of Lacanian theory, Drucilla Cornell (1995) emphasises that individuation is by no means pre-given or assured. Rather, it is a fragile achievement that is necessarily dependent on constitutive relations with others. The legal system, she argues, functions as a t ype of symbolic Other that not only recognises but ‘constitutes’ and

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‘confirms’ who is to be valued and who counts as a person. For this reason, she believes that it is imperative that the law figures women as subjects of rights; it is a form of cultural symbolisation of bodily integrit y that in turn constitutes identit y. Berlant (1991) also explores how the law (and the space of the nation) mediates experiences of bodily and psychic integrit y: birthright ‘affects profoundly the citizen’s subjective experience of her/his political rights, but also of civil life, private life, the life of the body itself’ (20). It is through citizenship, she argues, that the citizen ‘reaches another plane of existence, a whole, unassailable body, whose translation into totalit y mimics the nation’s permeable yet impervious spaces’ (24). It is perhaps no coincidence that Fanon (1967: 109) represents the colonial subject as an ‘amputation’ to himself. Bodily integrit y has psychic and political consequences that feed back into understandings of which subjects are entitled to rights. Richard Dyer considers the controlled, bounded body to be one of the defining characteristics of white, heterosexual masculinit y, and locates fears about loss of control of other bodies, particularly ‘those bodies whose exploitation is so fundamental to capitalist economy’, ‘at the heart of whiteness’ (1988: 63). As discussed in Chapter 4, historically, physical closure has been a defining characteristic of ‘civilised’ individuals and a source of their entitlement to individual rights; black bodies and women’s bodies often have been read as lacking this characteristic of physical closure and consequently undeserving of individual rights15 (Comaroff 1995; Passavant 2000). When Endrolyn represents her body as leaking traces of her identit y across her employers’ propert y, she is expressing her vulnerabilit y as a non-citizen, as a woman, as a woman of colour, whose rights are uncertain. However, such a bodily representation itself negates entitlements to rights, and Endrolyn unwittingly reproduces herself as other than the self-contained, autonomous body deserving of liberal rights. When employers move in and out of domestic workers’ rooms without the occupants’ consent, they both instantiate the insecurit y of domestic workers’ rights, and reproduce hegemonic understandings of domestic workers as women with no firm boundaries of their own from which to claim individual rights. Drawing gloves over her hands, using a stick to push her employer’s briefcase, these are remarkable attempts by Endrolyn to remake her body within the terms of liberalism, and to control both the boundaries of her body and her vulnerabilit y to employer abuse. If it is arguable that the boundaries of Filipina domestic workers’ bodies are conceived as too fluid, too uncontrolled16 to fully lay claim to

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rights, there are fixed boundaries that also make it difficult for migrant domestic workers to gain access to rights. The public and private divide is one such boundary that reverberates through domestic workers’ lives. Although Staeheli (1996) has argued persuasively that the private sphere is not synonymous with private or domestic space, in practice it often is. And if space itself is often consigned to the realm of the pre-political, these spatialised categories of private and public can themselves appear to be natural and pre-given. It certainly has been argued that the fact that paid domestic work takes place in the home has played an important role in hampering claims to employment equit y.17 Until 1995 in British Columbia, for example, domestic workers were not covered by basic regulations for minimum hourly wages or overtime provisions. They were regulated by a daily wage, with no stipulation of the number of hours they could be asked to work in a day. Discourses of the family and domesticit y were deployed to justify this circumstance (see Chapter 3). Even when claims of domestic workers were recognised in British Columbia in 1995 and important changes were made to the Employment Standards Act (domestic workers are now covered by minimum wage and overtime provisions),18 it has been an entirely different matter to implement these formal regulations.19 There is ambiguit y about the border between work and leisure time; many employers are still loathe to conceive of themselves as employers (and domestic workers as employees); and the Canadian state has been slow to enforce existing regulations. Living in an employer’s house can blur the line between paid, ‘real’ employment, the employee’s own work of social reproduction, and social gifts of time and labour. It is sometimes unclear, for instance, as to whether a domestic worker is an employee or ‘a family member’ when it comes to cleaning up after dinner, and whether work beyond eight hours is done by choice or coercion. It is interesting to listen to one set of employers explain why their Filipina nanny works 12–13 hours a day for 8 hours’ worth of minimum wage.20 Gary:

No, but then again, Rosa, on the other hand, I don’t know whether she likes to work or she feels compelled to work. I’m always telling her, like, ‘Go home. Go home’ [to her basement suite]. And she’s, like, ‘Oh, no, no, I just want to do this.’ And I’m, like, ‘No, you’ve done enough. Go home!’ But she’d rather, I don’t know, do it. I guess. I don’t know.

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Susan: Because they’re a fairly, sort of, very private people. And they’re very hard working. So when Gary was [on a trip], and she said ‘I enjoy it. I want to help you while you’re by yourself.’ But now, I mean, she really likes [my son], and it works out well. Gary: That’s a plus! Susan: It’s a big plus. But the other night, Gary’s father was here, and his uncle, for dinner. And she cooked dinner and cleaned up afterwards. And so she’s extremely good to us. This short passage displays many of the ingredients that lead to persisting violations of labour codes: Rosa’s labour in the evening is interpreted as a gift ( ‘she’s extremely good to us’); Rosa’s affection for their son is seen as compensation in itself; Rosa’s self-exploitation is interpreted as a cultural trait (‘they’re very hard working’). But Gary remains somewhat troubled by Rosa’s long hours of work. (He wonders whether she likes to work or feels compelled to do so and repeatedly states: ‘I don’t know.’) Gary and Susan are not ‘bad’ people, but this is really beside the point. As Christina Davidson, advisor to the West Coast Domestic Workers’ Association, observes: It’s not that all employers are mean, nast y, dirt y, evil people in comparison with lovely domestic workers. The point is, the way the system is set up, it’s very easy to abuse domestic workers because they are in a powerless position. (Quoted in Macklin 1992: 729) Or as Macklin succinctly puts it: ‘That many (perhaps most) employers choose not to mistreat their domestic worker does not negate the availabilit y of the option’ (1992: 729). And the options are extensive, given the privacy of the home. One common strategy is to subcontract a domestic worker to another employer. I interviewed one set of employers who had whittled the cost of a live-in domestic worker (who not only cared for their child but cleaned their house and prepared meals) to $500 a month. They did this by ‘sharing’ the domestic worker with another set of parents who paid them $700 a month in order to bring their child to their home. This violates the terms of the domestic worker’s contract – which the employer has also signed – and places her in a position of extreme vulnerabilit y. In fact, it is this circumstance that led to the much-publicised deportation of Leticia Cables from Canada in spring 2000 (Mahoney 2000).21 Perhaps the most unusual

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aspect of Leticia Cables’ case was that the multiple employers came to the attention of the state when she was deported. Much of this activit y does not come into public view.22 This is because, generally, the home is conceived as a private space within liberal ideology, in which the employer has considerable discretion and protection from state intrusion. That the employers’ flagrant disregard for the employment contract benefited them but only increased their nanny’s workload and vulnerabilit y to deportation is symptomatic of the contractual arrangement between Canadian employers and domestic workers. Macklin notes the paradox: domestic workers contract to assume the status of servant, ‘at which point the contractual model (with its assumption of juridical equalit y) ceases to inform the internal operation of the relationship’ (1992: 749). The status of the employment contract for employers is ambiguous. The information supplied by the federal government indicates that ‘Citizenship and Immigration Canada is not part y to, nor does it bear responsibilit y for, the enforcement of this contract.’23 This is a statement that Stasiulis and Bakan (2002: 250) interpret as giving employees ‘implicit permission to violate contract provisions’. They judge it significant that, although contract transgressions by employers have come before Human Rights Commissions in Canada, they have rarely been the subject of court cases.24 In general, their assessment is that Canadian courts have been sympathetic to upholding domestic workers’ procedural rights on an individual basis to counter unjust deportation decisions, but unwilling to review the pernicious systemic problems inherent to the Live-in Caregiver programme: the temporary visa status of migrant domestic workers, and the live-in requirement. And yet the abolition of both is ‘a key precondition to the realization and vindication of all other rights . . . [including] statutory rights under employment standards, labour and workers’ compensation legislation and contractual rights under the employer/employee agreement’ (Macklin 1992: 739–40; see Figure 5.1). There is a second fixed border that the courts may be reluctant to cross and which certainly affects domestic workers’ rights in Canada; this is the national border. After reviewing recent legal cases involving domestic workers, Stasiulis and Bakan (2002: 274) are of the opinion that there is a ‘high level of judicial discomfort’ about bringing immigration law and its administration under the scrutiny of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The Canadian state has the sovereign power to assert control over its territorial borders and immigration law has a reputation ‘as a sort

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Figure 5.1 A research participant steps into the public sphere. Reprinted with permission of The Georgia Straight. Photograph by Lorne Bridgman.

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of wasteland’ (quoted in Stasiulis and Bakan 2002: 273) in which judges are reluctant to apply legal principles that operate in other areas of the law.25 Admitted on a temporary worker visa, foreign domestic workers remain citizens of the sending country. And yet, sending countries have been notoriously ineffectual in defending the citizenship rights of domestic workers abroad.26 Being inside and outside both sending and labourreceiving nations, domestic workers’ rights to claim rights are precarious at best. Nonetheless, Honig (1998) reminds us that, contrary to a type of liberal meliorism that creeps into popular narrative, the history of suffrage and rights in liberal democracies is not one of continual expansion, and the United States in fact has a long history of ‘alien suffrage’ which Honig would like to recover and mobilise. In the Canadian case, a more specific history of domestic workers’ rights can and has been told; Daenzer (1993) traces a gradual diminishment of rights to citizenship over the last century as the source of domestic workers moved from Western Europe to Southern and Eastern Europe, to the Caribbean, and then to Asia. As Balibar (1995) puts it, the right to rights should be seen as the right to politics, and this can include new (or old) political arenas and forms of citizenship. Thinking geographically about these political arenas opens further possibilities. Pincetl (1994) has argued the case for granting voting (political) rights at local and country levels of government to undocumented Latino immigrants in Los Angeles, on the grounds that they already practise and thus demonstrate the responsibilit y of citizenship within these local communities. In her view, rights of citizenship should, in this case, follow from evidence of the daily practice of citizenship responsibilities.

Rights, Containment and Governmentality But is rights discourse a route to politics? I want to consider two interrelated hesitations around rights as political strategy: that rights contain politics by sustaining the illusion of individual freedom and personal responsibilit y for social difference; and that rights regionalise identit y-ininjury in ways that extend the administrative and management reach of the state. When Sherene Razack (1998) lists which ideas allow her feminist students to deny the existence of racial oppression among women, rights thinking is at the top of it. The idea of rights rests on an autonomous

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individual who is free to pursue her or his interests without inflicting harm on others. Competing interests receive equal consideration. Despite the improbabilit y of this scenario in actual practice, the effect of attributing this sovereign self hood can be to turn back on the individual (and members of a marginalised group) all responsibilit y for social failure. Rights discourse veils the historical and existing social conditions that produce social difference, constraints and opportunities, and throws the responsibilit y for outcomes on to individuals.27 It is for this reason that Wendy Brown (1995: 122) names rights as ‘one of the cruelest social objects of desire’. Razack recognises that this critique simplifies liberalism and she acknowledges attempts by liberal thinkers such as Kymlicka to accommodate collective rights within liberalism. Kymlicka (1994) recognises two rationales for special rights for specific groups: historical (for example, treaty rights) and as a means to equality (to compensate for unequal circumstances). When groups are constrained by factors not of their own choosing, they are entitled to special rights to correct this situation. Razack is pessimistic about how this process will work in practice and is suspicious that existing power relations will dictate interpretations of choice and constraint. She cites Kymlicka’s distinction between the national rights of Aboriginal peoples and French-Canadians to self-determination in Canada, and the multicultural rights of immigrant groups. Having chosen to immigrate to Canada, Kymlicka argues that these groups have relinquished some of their rights to cultural protection, although which rights they have relinquished and what they retain is open to discussion. Such a distinction is both telling and problematic because the question of choice and historical accountabilit y is murkier than Kymlicka suggests. Do Filipina domestic workers freely choose to immigrate? And how does Canada’s role in uneven globalised relations of economic development enter into assessments of historical accountabilit y? Surely historical arguments cannot end at the nation’s borders. But what is their geographical reach? Razack’s view is that it is too costly to acknowledge all of these relations, in part because domestic workers support the freedom of middleclass, mostly white men and women to participate in waged labour. The cost would involve extending citizenship rights to migrant domestic workers, recognising their existing professional qualifications so as to release them from the necessit y of live-in domestic work, and/or instituting a national system of affordable, accessible, publicly subsidised childcare. The costs are such, in Razack’s view, that it is more likely that migrant

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domestic workers will be seen as undeserving of special rights: ‘the major stumbling block to collective rights is not simply the failure of collective rights advocates to present their case within liberalism but the way in which the discussion is already regulated to obscure relations of domination’ (1998: 33). Despite Razack’s pessimism, she acknowledges the necessit y of working within a rights framework and urges vivid descriptions of the realities of oppressed groups in order to bring relations of domination and subordination into visibilit y. What is the effect of claiming special rights? One view is that the regionalisation of identit y-in-injury through rights claims has the effect of producing more docile, more disciplined, more dependent subjects. If the subject of rights is ‘birthed from the womb of the state’ (McClure 1995: 153), when the state grants rights to groups, the effect can be to further naturalise group identit y rather than unveil the social relations that constitute it. When individuals press claims as members of a subordinated group, they are accepting and redeploying an – often stigmatised – identit y to gain rights. They allow themselves to step forward and be counted and administered by the state in particular ways. Rights, in other words, function as a modalit y of biopower. It is probably no coincidence, for example, that at the moment when same-sex benefits are being recognised by the Canadian state, the federal government introduced a question about sexuality on the national census.28 Concerns about state interference in private life have been countered by citing the necessit y of this t ype of counting ‘because of human rights laws’ (Tibbetts 2003: A4). But rights are not simply a tool for individuals and groups to use instrumentally; they are themselves constitutive of these groups and individuals. They encourage identities to congeal around particular social characteristics. When Filipino domestic workers claim rights as ‘a highly marginalized and vulnerable group’ (Philippine Women Centre 2000a), they are solidifying an ethnic identit y and claiming rights in the name of their disadvantage. This has at least two effects that are worth pondering. First, it brings Filipina domestic workers more fully under the regulatory gaze of the state. The Philippine Women Centre (PWC), for example, argues that domestic workers are deskilled through the Live-in Caregiver programme and has presented statistics produced by my colleague, Dan Hiebert, that show that Filipinas are the most occupationally segregated of all female workers in Vancouver (see Chapter 3). That is, Filipinas work in the narrowest range of occupations. This is an interesting move, because the state is persistently curious about the economic fate of immigrants. In

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1995, the Department of Immigration joined forces with the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council to fund four Centres of Excellence to explore exactly this kind of question. In 1998 a Legislative Review of the federal government’s immigration policy recommended that the Live-in Caregiver programme be discontinued, precisely because of some of the effects delineated by advocacy groups. It is the assessment of some of the Review’s critics that this will have the effect of disengaging migrant domestic labour from the promise of Canadian citizenship (Hyndman 1999; Philippine Women Centre 1998). Critics speculate that migrant labour will still be admitted to Canada on visitors’ visas to provide live-in domestic work but that this will no longer provide a route to Canadian citizenship, as it currently does. If increased state regulation is one concern that follows from the solidification of Filipina identit y as marginalised, another is that potential alliances may be missed. This has emerged as an issue in recent campaigns to struggle for recognition of Filipina nurses’ professional credentials. The Philippine Women Centre has been slow in accessing provincial government funding from the Ministry of Multiculturalism and Immigration to study and organise around this issue because they are unwilling to co-ordinate other ethnicised groups under the rubric of multiculturalism. The PWC’s position is that Filipinas comprise the majorit y of foreigntrained nurses in Vancouver who seek accreditation and that they must be allowed to analyse and organise within their communit y in ways that engage the specificities of their historical and material circumstances. They are, in effect, levelling a decisive critique at liberal multiculturalism: this is that liberal multiculturalism abstracts racialised groups from their specific material histories to create a pluralistic string of equivalencies across all ethnic groups. But the other side of this refusal to be regulated by the state could be a t ype of ethnic separatism.

Openings And yet rights claims seem not to have this effect of separation on the Philippine Women Centre. Members refuse one imposition of multiculturalism even as they actively seek out and participate in multi-racial alliances with other advocacy groups. They deploy the language of rights without absorbing the depoliticising individualism that it is claimed to produce. I want to pursue their labile use of rights discourse through four spatial arguments. These are the following: we inhabit multiple spaces

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and multiple discourses; human rights is itself a fragmented discourse because it has emerged from and is redeployed within specific geographical contexts; geographical scale can be exploited and, finally (to draw upon the resources of Chapter 4), universal rights are an ‘empt y space’ that can be used to reveal exclusions and acquire concrete rights. Developing her critique of rights from those of Marx and Foucault, Brown (1995) notes a tension in Foucault’s writing: at the same time as he ‘conjures’ a political field ‘with relatively little open space and none of the tricks of self overcoming, of forward motion, contained in Marxist historiography’ (111), he makes no claims to spatial comprehensiveness and represents space as a domain of multiple and contestable discourses. We might push the latter insight more fully than does Brown to consider what a multiplicit y of spaces can mean for the politics of rights. One could argue that the Philippine Women Centre has both absorbed and strategically redeployed an understanding that rights constitute and solidify identit y. In recent years it has moved away from lobbying for changes to the Live-in Caregiver programme to an outright condemnation of it. In its press release on 27 September 2000 the Philippine Women Centre (2000a) stated that: ‘the communit y stands clear that even with this visit from the UN Special Rapporteur they will continue their struggle to scrap the LCP’. One might translate the PWC position into the following terms: the programme produces marginalised subjects, and individual rights have been and will continue to be insufficient to remedy the injuries constitutive of Filipina domestic workers. One irony is that the PWC aspires to scrap the LCP through the legal technology of citizenship rights, namely the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. It is over a decade since Macklin (1992) laid out what such a ‘frontal assault’ (740) on the LCP through section 15 of the Charter could look like. She judged it beyond the jurisdiction of the courts to remedy the most ‘egregious’ aspects of the programme and thought the most likely outcome of a successful Charter challenge would be to strike the programme down in its entiret y. If this had the effect of leaving domestic workers with only the option of entering Canada on visitor visas, Macklin felt that such a legal strategy would have ‘disastrous consequences for domestic workers’ (742).29 That a number of domestic worker advocacy groups30 no longer judge these consequences to be disastrous is an index of how fully they understand the limitations of rights in repairing the injuries that constitute domestic workers. But refusing the identit y of domestic worker that is offered by the

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Canadian state need not end the immigration of Filipina women to Canada, and the PWC is presently seeking to alter the definitional terms by which Filipinas enter Canada. It is a requirement of the existing Livein Caregiver programme that entrants have at least two years of postsecondary education. In fact, many who enter the programme have universit y degrees, often in Nursing.31 The Philippine Women Centre is now organising for recognition of these degrees by professional nursing organisations in British Columbia so that Filipina women can enter Canada as regular immigrants rather than domestic workers (see Figure 5.2). This is part of a broader feminist strategy to lobby for women’s admission to Canada under conditions other than dependency. This campaign has operated in part through a discourse of rights: for example, through demands for protection from the sex discrimination implicit in the existing evaluation of skills in the point system used to regulate admission of ‘regular’ immigrants (Macklin 1992). This multiplication of identities is institutionally explicit. Since I began working with the Philippine Women Centre in 1995, it has created a number of new organisations, all housed within the Kalayaan Centre (for example, Filipino Nurses’ Support Group, SIKLAB (Filipino migrant workers’ organisation) and Filipino-Canadian Youth Alliance). Many of the same individuals work within a number, even all, of the organisations. But the groups house – indeed implicitly insist upon – different identities, and the proliferation of political spaces available to Filipinas in Vancouver. It is this very multiplication of spaces, the lived experience of a multiplicit y of spaces, which seems missing from critiques of rights, such as the one so ably advanced by Wendy Brown.32 Brown criticises Patricia Williams’ defence of rights as a valid social aspiration for African-Americans, arguing that rights produce a ‘buffered and enclosed space of liberal personhood’, which distracts from the ‘generative sources’ of the ‘desire for withdrawal’, and can ‘intensify the isolation of struggle’ (120). And yet (outside of the abstractions of theory) we do not live within a single discourse, and the multiplicit y of spaces in which we live likely modifies some of the depoliticising effects attributed to rights discourse. Indeed, this multiplicity inhabits rights discourse itself. Like any discourse, rights discourse is polyvalent, but the point goes beyond this. There is a way in which abstract theorisations of rights are inevitably misleading because the meaning of rights is historically and geographically contingent and contextual. It is such an understanding that allows McClure (1995) to ‘take liberties’ (and find some theoretical space for resistance)

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Figure 5.2 The Filipino Nurses’ Support Group protests the Live-in Caregiver Programme. Photograph courtesy of Leah Diana.

within Foucault’s triangle of sovereignt y, discipline and governmentalit y. She identifies three distinctive kinds of rights: positive rights (such as citizenship rights to political participation), negative ones (such as rights to protection of personal securit y, against discrimination, violence or

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unwanted interference) and entitlement rights (or claims to public access to specific goods). These rights, she argues, produce different subject positions, and relations to legal and political institutions (the autonomous subject of modernit y, the protected subject and the dependent subject, respectively). She argues that these rights developed very differently in different places. In the English context, negative libert y rights preceded positive rights, and the language and existence of rights preceded the modern state. The language of rights was authorised as a language of political dissent against the state from the Renaissance onwards. She detects in the archival evidence ‘something in excess of Foucault’s subjected sovereignt y’ (181). Opposition to, as well as complicit y with, different t ypes of state power were voiced in terms of, and through the play and tension between, different t ypes of rights. It is in the proliferation of political spaces engendered by the multiple languages of rights that McClure glimpses the potential for resistance. A multiplicit y of rights talk can be traced through other historical geographies. Assessing the development of universal rights norms at an international scale, Cossman (1991) argues that there are three generations of human rights, which correspond to three different political visions (and are embedded in three different historical geographies): civil and political rights associated with Western liberal democracies; social and economic rights associated with Eastern European socialist states; and development rights initiated by developing, postcolonial countries. The division of the International Bill of Rights into two Covenants, one that deals with political and civil rights and the other with social and economic rights, reflects the difficult y of merging liberal and socialist conceptions of rights. Alston (1988) has remarked that ‘[p]erhaps the most important . . . characteristic of international human rights law is its philosophical complexit y’ (quoted in Cossman 1991: 344). In some senses these philosophies have not been successfully merged at an international level; the United States has never accepted the validit y of social and economic rights, choosing to view them as expressing aspirations rather than enforceable standards, and Canada and Australia stand as the only Western countries to sign the Declaration on the Right to Development. Cossman’s concern is that the end of the Cold War has brought Eastern European countries more fully in line with the individualism of the United States, and that this will have the effect of deepening divisions between north and south. Significantly, she detected that economic and social rights were being increasing downplayed in Eastern Europe, relative to civil and political

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ones, and wondered whether some civil and political rights ‘will be more equal than others’ (345). The ‘assault on women’s rights’ (346) in Eastern European countries, she took as ominous. As one border recedes, other geopolitical and social boundaries strengthen.33 And yet the jumble of philosophies remains within international rights norms; we might see it as offering some valuable political space for democratic contestation.34 The mention of international human-rights norms raises a third geographical concept; this is the concept of scale. Appeals to the United Nations and other sets of transnational networks have the potential, Jenson and Papillon (2000) argue, to challenge the existing Canadian citizenship regime, and to redefine both individual and collective rights within Canada.35 I began this chapter with an appeal by the Philippine Women Centre to the United Nations’ Rapporteur to remedy human-rights violations perpetuated by the Canadian government. In another context, the Philippine Women Centre (2000b) has called upon human-rights discourse, specifically for a campaign to lobby the Canadian government to ratify the United Nations’ Convention for the Protection of the Rights of all Migrant Workers and their Families, opened for signatures as long ago as December 1990.36 Stasiulis (1997) is pessimistic about the efficacy of such international human-rights provisions and principles in general, and of the Convention for the protection of the rights of migrant workers in particular. The Convention has now acquired the necessary twent y ratifications and came into force on 1 July 2003, but to date it has not been signed by a single G7 or major industrialised state (Brouwer 2003). Canadian officials’ rationale for not signing the Convention is that the definition of ‘migrant worker’ is not relevant to Canada, and nonCanadians working in Canada are already protected by a range of employment standards regulations. As Stasiulis and Bakan (2002: 276) put it: ‘[t]his reasoning reinforces the invisibilit y of paid domestic labour and the plight of domestic workers’. Nevertheless, there are two arguments for maintaining some cautious optimism about the local impact of international human-rights norms, both of which are inherently geographical. First, there is evidence of Canadian courts taking into account international treaties that have been ratified by Canada, even when these principles have not been directly incorporated into Canadian law. Although there is no express reference to Canada’s international human-rights treaties in the Charter, or other federal and provincial statutes, the concept of ‘implicit incorporation’ has been both theorised (Bayefsky 1992) and practised. One instance of

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practice is Baker v Canada,37 a case that involved Mavis Baker, a Jamaican woman who worked for eleven years as a domestic worker after overstaying her visitor’s visa, during which time she had four children. Much of the legal argument against the decision to deport her, as the case advanced through the Federal Court of Appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada, turned on the relevance of the Convention on the Rights of the Child to Canadian domestic law. All seven Supreme Court judges were unanimous in granting Ms Baker’s appeal. In reaching this decision, the majorit y held that international legal instruments constitute an important part of the context within which the phrase ‘compassionate or humanitarian considerations’ is used in Canada’s Immigration Act and Regulations. The Court found that ‘the values reflected in international law may help inform the contextual approach to statutory interpretation and judicial review’ (quoted in Aiken and Scott 2000: 239). This is a judgement that is said to embrace a ‘cosmopolitan conception of the law’.38 A second argument for cautious optimism about the local impacts of international human-rights norms turns on the way that Canada as a nation imagines itself. Razack (1998) is rightly critical of Canada’s selfportrait of national innocence, one that is framed especially in relation to the United States. This is evidenced, for instance, in claims such as: ‘Canada’s experience of active multiculturalism within its borders and its promotion of reconciliation and active, engaged peacekeeping abroad makes it distinctive among rich nations. This is becoming its trademark’ (Lloyd 2002: A13). This self-representation has only been heightened since refusing to join the ‘coalition of the willing’ in the US-led war against Iraq in 2003 in the absence of United Nations’ support.39 Razack notes the rhetorical and political importance to the project of Canadian nation-building of casting Canada as saviour to the third world and international peacekeeper, and reads this as a national fantasy that is one instance of, quoting Spivak, the ‘long term toxic effects’ of imperialism. ‘It is through such images that . . . when people of the Third World come knocking on our [Canadian] doors, we are able to view them as supplicants asking to be relieved of the disorder of their world and to be admitted to the rational calm of ours’ (Razack 1998: 91). I think that it is also worth considering that the effects are more plural and that this national imaginary can function as a resource as well as an alibi. In Canada, much nation-building in recent years has been achieved through the discourse of human rights (Blomley and Pratt 2001). Pierre

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Trudeau, who played the leading role in advancing the concept and implementation of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, saw constitutional reform as a vehicle for nation-building. Many observers saw the Charter as a vehicle for restraining the Quebec sovereignt y movement, but publicly Prime Minister Trudeau framed it thus: We must now establish the basic principles, the basic values and beliefs which hold us together as Canadians, so that beyond our regional loyalties there is a way of life and a system of values which make us proud of the country that has given us such freedom and such immeasurable joy. (Quoted on Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Radio 1995) And if attempts have been made to unify the Canadian nation from within through a human-rights discourse, the nation, as Razack notes, regularly defines itself against others in these terms. Canada’s place for many years as number one on the Human Development Index is widely publicised within Canada, as is the fact that a Canadian, John Humphrey, was a key architect of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, along with Canada’s distinguished record as a United Nations’ peacekeeper (Forsythe 1997; see also Gee 2002; Lloyd 2002). Given the rhetorical importance of human rights to Canadian self-definition, the discourse carries considerable moral authorit y in Canada. It is a moral authorit y that needs to be played as well as critiqued. Aside from activating international legal instruments and norms, there are other ways of thinking about scale and the elasticit y of borders, of being both inside and outside of the national border. A concrete example of the political potential of the paradox of being both inside and outside national space is provided in Lowe’s (2001) description of the empirical research that she and Laura Pulido have done with Mexican maquiladora workers on sexual harassment in the workplace. With the knowledge that no Latin-American country has a national law that defines sexual harassment as a human-rights violation, the data from the workers’ survey may be used in a struggle to test whether international law will extend relevant US civil-rights legislation to subjects working in US plants outside of the United States. It is the ambiguit y of the US firms’ position: both inside and outside the USA that opens this opportunit y for feminist organising to extend ‘universal’ rights for women from one context to the other. Another fascinating example of this use of paradoxical space involves

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the recent conviction of a French citizen for sexually violating an elevenyear-old girl in Thailand while on holiday as a sex tourist. A 1998 law authorises French courts to try ‘sexual aggression committed abroad’ even when the deed is not considered a crime in the country in which it is committed. As Llosa (2001) notes, if this principle could be extended to other countries from which sex tourists originate, this could have a significant impact on the sexual exploitation of children in developing countries.40 As an extension of this line of thinking in relation to domestic workers, could Canadian civil servants working outside Canada who hire domestic workers be obliged to comply with employment standards specified in Canada, say in Ontario? One further geographical strategy is worth thinking about in relation to rights. In theorising democracy, a number of theorists conceive of democracy and universal principles as an empt y space (see Chapter 4, also Lefort 1988). The hallmark of democracy is the disappearance of certaint y about the foundations of social life. Old sources of authorit y were dismantled. There is nothing outside society to found social unity. ‘The people’ become the place from which power derives but ‘the people’ have no fixed, essential, positive identit y. The right to contest who are ‘the people’ is the starting point of a properly democratic politics. Using the metaphor of empt y space, we might think of rights discourse not only as an effective means of repairing injury, but as an important mechanism for a persistent critique and public discussion of who constitutes ‘the people’ and upon which exclusions this is built. This is an idea that Wendy Brown (1995) gestures towards when she argues that rights work best as a (fictional) egalitarian imaginary. In part this is because this use of rights does not found an identit y but can be used as a means of critiquing the practices of liberal nation-states (see also Lisa Lowe 2001). I think that we can see citizenship rights being deployed in this way at one of the focus groups held at the Philippine Women Centre in 1995. At one point in the discussion, the director of the PWC urged a domestic worker to apply for Employment Insurance. She argued that ‘[the process of applying] is also trying to find out whether or not this is a democratic country. And in doing so, you can learn something about whether there is a different set of rights between you and other Canadians’ (for the extended quote, see Chapter 3). This is a small example of an activist deploying rights discourse to politicise, to build awareness of the exclusions, the unevenness, of citizenship rights in Canada. It is an organising tool that simultaneously

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marks a possible exclusion from formal rights and the moral authorit y of being in the right. Universal rights as a kind of empt y space that we measure inequalities against may be as significant as rights as mechanisms for achieving them.

Closing In conclusion, this chapter has been an effort to work at the borders of liberalism to think about the effects of deploying rights discourse, and the ways that domestic workers do and might work with the tools offered by liberalism. Such a discussion is necessarily thoroughly embedded in geography. Because rights claims are so often about claims to access, protection, defence against incursion, it is a congenial discourse for a group of workers whose claims to a place and privacy are so fragile. As an organising imaginary of the nation, it offers an effective means of critiquing the exclusions of Canadian societ y. At the same time, some of the geographies written into liberalism make it very difficult to make rights claims in some spaces: the autonomous liberal citizen subject has often been conceived against unbounded, irrational female, racialised, or primitivised bodies; and the home is a very difficult space in which to claim rights because it is so self-evidently private. Between nations, both insiders and outsiders, domestic workers have no firm ground from which to claim rights. Rights claims are also risky politics, because they have the potential of solidifying identities around identities of injury, and proliferating identit ybased politics. In some situations, it may be a more effective strategy to abandon attempts to repair injury through rights and refuse the conditions that produce that injury; some domestic-worker advocacy groups in Canada have come to this position in relation to the Live-in Caregiver programme. This point of refusal has generated organising around another identit y and another immigration strategy: immigration of professional nurses as regular immigrants rather than by means of a stigmatising and specialised (non-)immigration programme. Other geographical tactics are possible: jumping from the national to international scale is one example. Strategy, tactics, refusal – all of these terms suggest the need for a very close and careful consideration of rights discourse. To question the utilit y and effects of rights is not to condemn them. In Wendy Brown’s words ‘it is to refuse them any predetermined place in an emancipatory politics

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and to insist instead upon the importance of incessantly querying that place’ (1995: 121). I think that we need to take place more seriously than does Brown and more fully consider the geographies that structure it.

Notes 1. I thank Jennifer Hyndman for this point. 2. Canada was ranked number one on the index for seven years running, but slipped to third place (behind Norway and Australia) in 2001, because of a drop in the lifeexpectancy indicator (Knox 2001a). The Human Development Index includes mea-

3. 4.

5.

6.

7. 8.

9.

sures of life expectancy, adult literacy rates, school enrolment and GDP per capita. It does not include an explicit score on civil human rights, in part because of the negative reaction to its inclusion in the index in 1991 (Hsiung 1993). In the United Nations’ general definition of human development, however, guaranteed human rights are identified as a necessary feature of human development (Stasiulis and Bakan 1997a: 120). For example, the documentary film on domestic workers in Canada by Boti (1997) is entitled Modern Heroes, Modern Slaves. Surveys of Filipina domestic workers routinely document the large proportion of married women with children among migrant domestic workers, and the importance of sending remittances to relatives in the Philippines as a major motivation for migration (for example, Mikita 1994; Stasiulis and Bakan 1997a). Rhacel Parreñas (2002) has been studying this transnational mothering through lengthy interviews with children and extended families in the Philippines. See West Coast Domestic Workers’ Association (2001) for a careful delineation of rights violations, analysed through existing human rights legislation, both the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and United Nations’ instruments to which Canada is a signatory, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) and the Convention on the Rights of the Child. The operation was performed in the United States, after being refused by four Canadian hospitals on ethical grounds. The media reporter raised the prickly question: ‘Can an employee freely give her kidney to her employer upon whom she depends for her livelihood?’ (Priest 2002: A1). The operation came to light when the employer sought to exercise his citizenship rights by claiming reimbursement from the Ontario Health Insurance Plan for out-of-country care. This is an argument that has been developed by Hage (1998), Lowe (1996a), Ong (2000), Stasiulis (1997), among others. In April 1992 the Foreign Domestic Movement Programme was replaced by the Live-in Caregiver Programme (see Stasiulis and Bakan (2002) for a detailed discussion of these changes). One change, raising the educational requirement from an equivalent of Canadian grade 10 to an equivalent of Canadian grade 12, was interpreted by some as a deliberate attempt to restrict the entry of women of colour from developing countries into Canada via the LCP. This generalisation requires some qualification because the patterns differ by geographical location. As Table 3.1 shows, the number of people admitted through the

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10.

11.

12.

13.

14. 15.

16.

17.

18.

117

Foreign Domestic Movement and Live-in Caregiver programmes has actually increased in Vancouver since 1992, from 421 in 1992 to 1,203 in 1996. The situation is different in Toronto, where numbers decreased from a high of 3,377 in 1993 to 1,710 in 1996 (Pratt in collaboration with the Philippine Women Centre 1999). Concerns about a growing informal sector of domestic workers are thus probably greater in Toronto than Vancouver. The phrase, the rights to have rights, is Hannah Arendt’s (1951: 296). She was concerned about the growing number of individuals who were living outside of the context of citizenship rights. She understood the right to have rights to mean to be living within a framework in which one is judged by one’s actions and opinions. She argued that the loss of polit y was effectively to be cast from humanit y, to lose the right to humanit y, to live within a context where one’s actions and opinions were meaningless. This chapter grew out of and draws upon another, written with Nicholas Blomley (Blomley and Pratt 2001). I thank Nick both for some specific phrasing, the insights that have come through working with him, and for comments on this chapter. Domestic worker advocacy groups argue that injustices in terms of basic rights to housing continue even after a domestic worker has attained an open visa and is no longer required to live in an employer’s home. A recent target of their criticism has been access to social and non-profit housing. This is because applications to this t ype of housing will not be considered until landed immigrant status is attained, inevitably years after the domestic worker first enters Canada (Kalayaan Resource and Training Centre 2000). Advocacy groups frame this as a violation of citizenship rights. A recent survey of 104 domestic workers in British Columbia found that about half reported no locks on their doors. Indeed, 16 per cent did not even have a separate bedroom (Mikita 1997). Methodological details are provided in Chapter 3. Comaroff (1995) argues that in the South African colonial context this legitimated two interdependent systems of rights: individual and tribal rights, for white Europeans and black, tribalised South Africans respectively. To more fully substantiate this argument, recall from Chapter 3 nanny agents’ remarks about Filipinas’ embodied primitivism, which ranged from tolerating public urination to greedy and unruly dining etiquette. In relation to African-American women, it has been argued that myths of uncontrolled sexual voraciousness make it difficult for African-American women to claim their rights to a workplace free of sexual harassment. In Lisa Lowe’s (2001) terminology it is ‘epistemologically uncertain’ whether an African-American woman can claim sexual harassment because of stereot ypes about her sexualit y and body. There is an abundant and excellent literature on this: for example, Aitken 1987; Bakan and Stasiulis 1997; England and Stiell 1997; Macklin 1992; Schecter 1998; Stasiulis and Bakan 1997a, 1997b, 2002. Labour legislation varies by province. Only Ontario and British Columbia presently guarantee minimum wages, overtime and most employee benefits within existing provincial employment standards. Manitoba, Quebec, Newfoundland and Prince Edward Island have lower minimum wages for domestic workers and/or longer

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19.

20.

21. 22.

23.

24.

25.

26.

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work weeks. Alberta, Saskatchewan, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and the Northwest Territories continue to exempt domestic workers from minimum wage, hours of work and overtime provisions (Stasiulis and Bakan 2002). In this sense, the situation in British Columbia and Ontario present the ‘best case’ scenarios for domestic worker rights. In a recent survey of 104 domestic workers in British Columbia, it was found that 82 per cent of respondents did not receive their proper wages. The average work week was 51.4 hours, and the average shortfall in legally required wages was approximately $600 a month. Given that the average monthly pay was $1,278, including overtime and before deductions for room and board, this shortfall amounts to about one-third of the wages to which the domestic worker was entitled (Mikita 1997). I draw from one of fift y in-depth qualitative interviews that were done with employers in the summer of 1995. We contacted employers who had advertised for a nanny during the past year in one of three local newspapers. One, The Courier, is distributed free of charge to households living in the more affluent west side of Vancouver. Another is delivered to the outer suburbs of Coquitlam, Port Coquitlam and Port Moody, and a third is circulated to Surrey households. I drew a random sample of advertisements placed between June 1994 and July 1995. A small sample of employers who advertised in The Courier lived in East Vancouver. An astonishing 90 per cent of those we contacted agreed to an interview; this is a striking measure of how eager they were to talk about their experiences. The interviews were unstructured and in-depth, t ypically lasting for over an hour. I thank Trina Bester for doing about half of the interviews; the rest I did myself. Leticia Cables was re-admitted to Canada in July 2000. The practice of subcontracting was recognised as very common among domestic workers who participated in focus groups and is discussed more fully in Pratt in collaboration with the Philippine Women Centre (1999). Stasiulis and Bakan (2002) review one legal case that involves subcontracting. This statement appears at the bottom of the ‘Sample Contract’ provided by Immigration Canada in the booklet, ‘The Live-in Caregiver Program: Information for employers and live-in caregivers from abroad’, Minister of Supply and Services Canada, 1992. Reported in Stasiulis and Bakan (2002). Stasiulis and Bakan (2002) also judge it significant that in the one exceptional case in which a nanny was awarded $250,000 for virtual enslavement within a British Columbian home, the employers were exceptionally abusive, exceptionally wealthy, and foreign-born Asians. In their view, this combination of factors may ‘limit the beneficial aspects of this legal victory for other domestic workers’. Macklin (1992) also makes this point: ‘[i]mmigration is one of the least controllable aspects of government activit y’ (745) because there is considerable bureaucratic discretion, those subject to it are politically powerless, and public support is limited. See Stasiulis and Bakan (1997b: 40–3) for a survey of sending countries’ protection of the rights of their citizens working overseas as domestic workers. The Philippines government has the most extensive system of bureaucracy to regulate the labour conditions and lives of overseas contract workers. Nevertheless, its inadequacies are well documented (Presidential Fact-finding and the Policy Advisory Commission 1995, cited in Stasiulis and Bakan 1997b).

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27. Jennifer Hyndman (2000) analyses the way that liberal sovereign subjecthood can

28.

29.

30.

31.

32.

33.

34.

35.

be returned to individuals as social failure in relation to workplace affirmative action and employment equit y programmes. ‘New sexism and its corollary, “new racism”, are effects of affirmative action initiatives targeted, literally, at women and other groups. The new sexism speaks from the view that women were given the chance to prove themselves vis-à-vis such equit y initiatives, and yet they have still not succeeded in increasing their representation. If women and minorit y groups don’t meet the mark when given the “extra” chance, the blame falls on them. These arguably new kinds of prejudice stem from good intentions of liberal equit y policies which aim to include underrepresented groups, but often end up in a quagmire of statistical distributions and bureaucracy’ (51, n. 5). See also Yount (1993). In the 2001 census Canadians were asked for the first time to identify whether they are part of a same-sex couple. See Hannah (2001) for a discussion of the US census and notions of statistical citizenship. In this, Macklin anticipates a rift that Stasiulis and Bakan (2002) detect between advocacy groups and legally inclined feminist groups, the latter being more likely to support reforms to the LCP, namely admission as landed immigrants and removal of the live-in requirement. Other domestic worker advocacy groups that have taken this stance in recent years include: Association des Aides Familiale du Québec (AFFQ), the National Action Committee for the Status of Women, and INTERCEDE. See Stasiulis and Bakan (2002) for details. It is difficult to use publicly available government statistics to attach specific numbers to such a claim. The Filipino Nurses’ Support Group at the Kalayaan Centre in Vancouver was at the time of research (in 2001) in contact with about 250 trained Filipino nurses in the Vancouver area. Brown’s critique is widely cited and influential. For example, Debra Morris (2000) calls Brown’s critique ‘formidable’ (341) and considers it to be ‘the most challenging with respect to any contemporary reclamation of privacy’ (342). Writing later in the 1990s, Cheah (1997) rearticulates the generational argument within a new geopolitical context. He distinguishes ‘three voices of existing human rights practical discourse’: the first voice is the position of constitutional democratic governments in the hegemonic north or west; the second is the position of Asian governments that claim rights to development above all others; the third is the position of human rights NGOs (non-governmental organisations) in the south (which articulate most forcefully social and economic rights). In an effort to keep this contestation democratic, Cheah (1997) judges it imperative that we understand that each ‘voice’ within human rights discourse emerges from a particular set of interests, none is more universal or ‘pure’ than the other, and that all are contaminated or complicit with global capital. Jenson and Papillon (2000) are particularly interested in how the Cree in Quebec have turned to transnational networks to confront their ‘limited political opportunity structure’ at home. They term this ‘weak transnational collective action’ because it involves the strategic use of transnational networks and alliances to achieve the recognition of rights within Canada: the struggle is local/national and the main opponents remain the federal and provincial governments. Canadian governments have thus found themselves being challenged by international environmental and

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human rights groups. In the summer of 2000 alone, Canadian governments were accused by two separate representations to the United Nations of ‘violating native rights’ (Thanh Ha 2000), and committing ‘economic genocide’, that is, governmental neglect causing the collapse of the local economy (Branswell 2000). The former representation was made by a coalition of Canadian native leaders to the UN Working Group on Indigenous Populations, the latter by L’Action des patriotes gaspésien(ne)s, which presented accusations of ‘economic genocide’ by the Canadian federal and provincial governments to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights (UNCHR). It is the view of Jenson and Papillon that such appeals have the potential to strengthen conceptions of multiple nationhood within Canada, and possibly alter territorial borders within the nation (those of Quebec). 36. This convention supports rights for all migrants, documented and undocumented, to family reunification, consular or diplomatic protection, information about working conditions, political rights and equalit y with nationals in educational, social and health services. It does, however, affirm the broad exclusionary powers of sovereign states (see Stasiulis and Bakan 2002). 37. This case is discussed in detail by Aitken and Scott (2000) and specifically in relation to the Live-in Caregiver programme by Stasiulis and Bakan (2002). 38. This is the opinion of Craig Scott (1999) who was counsel for the Charter Committee on Povert y Issues in the Baker case. Quoted in Aiken and Scott (2000: 239). 39. The self-image may be as much fiction as fact: ‘the peacekeeping forces wearing Canadian flags are now less numerous than those from Bangladesh or Nepal. Foreign aid contributions from Canada now rank 19th of the 22 industrial nations’ (Saunders 2003). 40. Another important example involves convicting crimes against humanit y in a country in which they did not occur. The Belgium courts charged four Rwandans with genocide in June 2001. The trial was the first in which a jury of citizens in one country judged defendants in war crimes committed in another. Regarding this conviction, the advocacy director of Human Rights Watch was quoted as saying ‘The idea that justice has no border has received a big boost’ (New York Times 2001). At the same time, it is important to register the difficulties of putting these principles into practice. In 1997 the Canadian Criminal Code was also amended to allow Canadians who engage in sex with children abroad to be brought to trial in Canada. The law requires the consent of the country where the alleged offence occurred. In one attempt to implement the law in 2000, consent from the Costa Rican government was not forthcoming. As of December 2001, no prosecutions had been made (Knox 2001b; Leidl 2002).

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CH A P TER 6

Gleaning the Home

Agnes Varda’s recent documentary film, The Gleaners and I (2000), is a study of the everyday art of gleaning in contemporary France. The film is staged as a series of excursions away from and back into Varda’s home. Early on, she visits potato fields where gleaners – some unemployed and minimally housed in nearby trailers – take from the huge piles of oversized, under-sized or just wrongly-sized potatoes left to rot. Varda herself is drawn into the activit y when she finds heart-shaped potatoes (see Figure 6.1). Film-maker turned gleaner, she bundles these heart-potatoes and takes them home, continuing to record their image as they wrinkle and age. At home, Varda uses her camera to study the white roots of her dyed black hair and the wrinkled skin of her aging hands; the potatoes begin to resemble the latter through the course of the film. The film is at once a decisive critique of private propert y and of waste produced in the face of need, and a meditation on existence at the margins of the market, on our capacit y to inhabit unlikely places, on the meaningfulness of objects, on aging – in short, it is a meditation on the home. The home is a place that Varda ventures from, and to which she returns to settle in the objects that she has gleaned. These objects both mark her life’s journey and aid her in her attempts to evade time. One of her most prized finds is a mantle clock (see Figure 6.2), rendered more and not less valuable because it is missing its hands. Gleaning involves taking what is discarded and re-envisioning its worth. By retrieving discarded objects and placing them in relation to each other, new associations and meanings are released. Ironically, the home is a concept badly in need of such a treatment. Many feminists have been deeply suspicious of the home as a site of unpaid domestic work and patriarchal control (Hanson and Pratt 1995; Gregson and Lowe 1995; Luxton 1990); indeed I have argued in the preceding chapter that it is the privacy of the home that enclaves it as a space beyond liberal justice. The home has been considered a dangerous metaphor for feminism because it expresses and invites a desire for safet y, comfort and identification, rather than for challenging, sometimes destabilising criticism.1 Other

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Figure 6.1 Heart-shaped potatoes in The Gleaners and I. Photograph courtesy of Zeitgeist Films.

feminists have made efforts to retrieve it, arguing that this rejection of home is too narrowly conceived because it depends on particular white, middle-class experiences.2 But beyond adding nuance to feminist scholarship, there is a broader, more pressing reason for re-envisioning the home. Timothy Brennan (1997) detects a tendency for postcolonial studies, and cultural studies more generally, to gyrate between an abstracted globalised cosmopolitanism on the one hand, and identit y on the other. ‘An emphasis on the world’, he writes ‘is accompanied by an emphasis on identit y and the subject by calling [identit y and the subject] forth as alleviating counterpoints.’ Brennan is suspicious that the academic fascination with ‘the subject’ in ‘the world’ complements and legitimates the globalising practices of capitalism (and American imperialism). In Arif Dirlik’s terminology, the effect is to universalise the ‘global dreams’ of capitalism so that we cannot

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Figure 6.2 A clock without hands in The Gleaners and I. Photograph courtesy of Zeitgeist Films.

imagine anything beyond an inevitable globalisation of capitalism, and the penetration of the market into every space and moment of our existence. Dirlik (1996) urges a return to history in an effort to both record and stimulate other dreams, other ways of imagining and laying claim to the world. At least in history, he argues, we can see concrete evidence of other dreams. We can remember social experiments that now seem quite audacious: experiments like mass public housing, middle-class communities of kitchenless houses (Hayden 1981), plans for an entire domestic revolution (Spain 2001). Dirlik’s argument about the necessit y for historical scholarship for imagining the future is important, but I want to pursue another strategy: this is to reclaim the spaces between the subject and the world.3 We can do this by re-envisioning such thoroughly criticised spaces as ‘the nation’, ‘the region’,4 ‘the cit y’, indeed, ‘the home’. A focus on domestic workers’ lives forces this act of reclamation.

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Hannah Arendt (1951: 298), writing about the vast increase in stateless peoples through the first half of the twentieth century and pessimistic about the capacit y for international human rights to operate outside of national frameworks, argued that a loss of home had the profound effect of expulsion from full humanit y, precisely because a home is a precondition to the right to have rights. Finding a home within Vancouver is a crucial political act for domestic workers, and it is one that holds the potential to transform Vancouver as a home. I position myself as a gleaner, treating theories as technologies that produce empirical objects which can be re-used in other contexts. I want to consider two objects that have been produced to describe being at home in a globalised world: postnational traveller and the multicultural cit y. These conceptions of dwelling are clumped and more or less dismissed by Brennan under the label of ‘cosmopolitanism’.5 I want to tread rather more carefully through the debates that these terms have generated. I do this in the spirit and with the methodology of a gleaner, with an eye to what we might take from each in our effort to re-imagine the home within globalisation. Gleaning is an everyday concrete practice, and I draw upon empirical work with domestic workers, as well as focus groups with Chinese-Canadian and Filipino-Canadian youth who are re-envisioning Vancouver as a home in important ways. In this, I am not only reversing the pattern of interleaving empirical and theoretical chapters, but also playing up (and with) the impurit y of each. It should be clear that the empirical objects are generated by theoretical concerns, but, so too, the theory, grown tattered through criticism, is re-circulated and takes on different value in relation to different empirical objects.

Dwelling in Travel The image of traveller or nomad has provided one means of re-imaging belonging within globalisation. It would be wrong to suggest that this trope of travel has been used in one way only. I am particularly interested in its normative use as a metaphor for a progressive way of dwelling in the world, released from nationalist and other attachments. Appadurai (1997), for instance, has encouraged us to rethink the possibilities offered to us by the large-scale migrations of our time; this is an opportunit y to think beyond the nation-state – and both the global violence and internal racism it sometimes engenders6 – and to imagine complex, non-territorial postnational forms of allegiance. He imagines new homes, new objects of

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desire, beyond the territorial nation-state. These new objects include fluid, diasporic identities/communities. Because my hesitations around this vision find concrete expression through my work with Filipina domestic workers in Vancouver, I ask Jessica Hagedorn, a Filipino-American writer, to stand in as spokesperson for this imagined deterritorialised home. In Jessica Hagedorn’s novel, Dogeaters (1990), one of the main characters, a woman called Rio, states that she is at home ‘only in airports’. In an interview, Hagedorn has been asked to reflect on how Rio’s observation relates to herself as ‘an Asian American writer’. Hagedorn elaborates: This thing about being at home only in airports is a question I bring up a lot [in my work] . . . The feeling of home and the definition of it do not mean necessarily my apartment in New York Cit y. Home is in my head and includes forever that [childhood] house in Santa Mesa [a neighbourhood in Manila]. It also includes the different homes in which we lived in San Francisco as I was growing up . . . I have a sense that [now] I’m almost happiest, in a cosmic way, in an airport, in between flights. The sense of a million worlds meeting in an airport. Miami, for example, – that airport to me is amazing . . . It is a hub, where you’re hearing all kinds of languages on the intercom and people are coming and going. There’s a lot of crazy energy spoken in different tongues; it’s this great babble. I love it. It fuels me. I’m neither here nor there. (2000: 28–9; original emphasis) Later in the interview she notes that ‘there’s a tight-knit communit y of [immigrant] Filipino artists in Manhattan. We share the same ties to the motherland. We embrace a dual identit y. When we say home, you’re never sure if we mean America or the Philippines’ (31). That the home should be such a mobile concept for Hagedorn and that the airport should figure so prominently in her work is perhaps not so surprising. The Philippines has one of the most dispersed of citizenry, leading Filomeno Aquilar (2002) to title his book on Filipinas in global migration with the question, At Home in the World? 7 But I am interested in how different are the airport stories told at the Philippine Women Centre in Vancouver. In a play written in spring 2000 by a FilipinoCanadian youth group at the Kalayaan Centre, the second scene is staged in the airport in Manila.8 It is here that the main character, Rosa, who has recently graduated as a nurse (summa cum laude) in the Philippines

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but is unable to find employment there, tearfully says goodbye to her family before taking up what she believes to be a promising nursing job in Canada. Rather than being homelike, the airport is a place of impending loss. In the scene that follows, we find that Rosa has been tricked by the labour recruiter, and she is working as a live-in domestic worker in a white, middle-class Canadian home. If the airport in Manila provides a last moment of familial securit y in the play, the stories told by domestic workers in focus groups at the Centre render the airport in transit as a site of deprivation and fear. I quote one domestic worker’s description of her arrival at the Vancouver airport in 1994: When I came to Canada, I waited for the agent in the airport for two hours. ‘Whom are you looking for?’ [people at the airport] would ask. I really felt like crying because I don’t know anybody here in Vancouver. I waited for two hours [for the agent], then at their house they brought me corn for dinner: steamed corn and a glass of milk. For ten hours I went hungry in Seoul [while making the connection to Vancouver]. How could I tell them that? This domestic worker and Hagedorn are clearly travelling in different circumstances. Hagedorn has a stable home, an apartment in New York Cit y no less, and the airport that fuels her imagination is located close to home, in the United States. In other words, Hagedorn has all of the material comforts of home and, ironically, it is these that enable her to dwell-in-travel. I am simply restating an early and now extensive critique of the travel trope: that is, that the abilit y to find a home in travel is dependent upon being well situated, particularly in terms of gender, race and class (hooks 1990; Kaplan 1987; Massey 1992; Mitchell 1997b; Pratt 1997a; Visweswaran 1994). The point is not just that we must be more specific about who can experience dwelling-in-travel, but that the capacit y to do so is often highly dependent upon the misery of those for whom travel is loss. In a general sense, one must note that the possibilit y of a middle-class woman dwelling-in-travel is often dependent on the presence and labour of women such as Rosa and the domestic worker I have quoted. A persistent focus of this book is on the mostly Filipina women who perform just such labour for middle-class families in Canada. They are allowed into Canada to perform one service: to take care of dependent Canadians, young and old, at wages and under conditions that no Canadian will tolerate. They

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must live in their employer’s home. These terms are structurally determined by the needs of their employers for cheap child- and elder-care. By definition, then, it is almost impossible for these migrants to make a home in Vancouver. I want to give just a few examples to convey a sense of how cramped this space of home-making is. By law, employers are required to provide separate rooms with lock and key. In practice, many employers think nothing of entering domestic workers’ rooms or housing their guests in them in their absence (see Chapter 5). I know of domestic workers who have been told that they cannot bring friends to their house or that they cannot bring male friends to the house. The latter poses a serious problem because it makes it difficult to comply with codes of heterosexual respectabilit y. A respectable woman is picked up from home, not some public place. The stories that domestic workers tell about food are particularly poignant, given the importance of food preparation and consumption for home-making. I’ll retell just two, told in a focus-group context: Susan:

Mhay:

Susan:

I would be hesitant to cook when my employers are around. I would feel embarrassed . . . In the morning, I can hardly eat their food even if I want to because they are still around. I would be able to taste it only after they have left the house. Once, I really wanted to cook my own food, which they do not eat. I opened the windows so they could not smell it in the house. Then I ate in the living room so that I could see them coming. Once I saw them, I would go to the kitchen and fix everything so that they would not find out that I cooked my own dinner or food. It’s quite tough. One time, after they had gone, I started eating, when all of a sudden they returned. So I had to throw into the garbage can the food that I was eating. I felt bad about it, especially that I did not have a chance to eat one of my favourite foods.

Director of the Philippine Women Centre: You did not keep it in the refrigerator? Susan: I was not sure that they would not open the fridge. (Focus group discussion, September 1995)

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Figure 6.3 Representing loss through air travel, programme cover of Breaking Ground.

What is striking about these stories is that the concern about food preparation and consumption has nothing to do with incurring the costs of food, when this is meant to be included in the fees they pay their employers for room and board. Susan and Mhay are anticipating their employers’ literal

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Figure 6.4 Writing the Filipino community onto the Vancouver landscape.

distaste for their culture. There is no space in the home for the smells of their culture. Given the material, structural difficult y of home-making in Canada, the provisional title of the play written and presented by the Ugnayan ng Kabataang Pilipino sa Canada/Filipino-Canadian Youth Alliance (UKPC/FCYA) is instructive. They titled their play ‘Breaking Ground: Towards an Empowered Filipino Communit y’; this is a title that lays claim to place (see Figure 6.3). The ticket stub from their performance in May 2001 (see Figure 6.4) literally stamps their claim on top of an emptied Vancouver landscape. In Brennan’s view, the need and capacit y to lay claim to place is precisely what the trope of dwelling-in-travel ignores. ‘The problem’, Brennan writes, ‘is not what the argument does so much as what it finds unnecessary or unappealing to do: [that is] hold out a sophisticated theoretical space for a defensive nationalism that relies, inevitably, on a grounded sense of sociocultural belonging to a polit y’ (1997: 17). In Brennan’s view, the dwelling-in-travel metaphor is quite simply a supplement to American imperialism because it makes a virtue of a statelessness that is unlikely for Americans at home but possibly congenial to Americans when it happens elsewhere. In other words, it performs an act of American imperialist home-making that would surprise many cultural theorists. This criticism is particularly apt and problematic in relation to Filipinos’ global homelessness, given the long history of US imperialist home-making in the Philippines.

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But it is not only imperialism that is at stake. That so many criticisms of postnational diaspora and the deterritorialised cosmopolitan come from feminists is telling. Although Kondo (1997) stresses what is valuable and contestory about efforts by theorists such as Appadurai9 to disrupt conventional identit y categories and the stabilit y and inevitabilit y of the nation-state, she argues that they presume ‘a diasporic, always already masculine subject’ (175). A focus on the public, the transnational and the cosmopolitan has placed into shadow the local and the domestic.10 Kondo develops this argument through a close reading of Appadurai’s oft-cited essay, ‘Patriotism and its futures’. She argues that, although Appadurai reveals and criticises the masculinism intrinsic to nationalism, he introduces another masculinism in his rendering of postnational patriotism. Kondo is particularly alert to his discussion of racial identification and argues that Appadurai’s desire for multiplicit y and hybridit y leads him to read racial classification and identification in purely negative terms. She understands him to yearn for a mobile process of identification. In her view, this is a new version of the unmarked body. She understands Appadurai to be attempting to transcend specificit y, which has the effect of reproducing the master subject, now as the diasporic master subject. Rather than aiming to transcend territorial and even racial identification, Kondo wonders if it might be more effective to attend to ‘the power relations constructing particular sites – including the postnational’ and to processes of ‘reterritorialisation’ along with ‘deterritorialisation’. ‘The production of localit y, communit y, and home, can provide a provisional safe place for those “on the margins”, whose “homelessness” is not chosen’ (178). Appadurai may instantiate masculinism in another way as well. Visweswaran (1994) has noted his tendency to proliferate empirical vignettes without attending to the particularit y of each, lending an all-seeing, unsituated sense to his observations. But, as Kondo notes, positions that critically unsettle some taken-for-granted norms are also likely reinscribe other conventions. In Appadurai’s case, her view is that, even as he unsettles race essentialism and nationalism, he reinscribes existing gender and class relations. And so do all of our accounts – no matter how critical – reinscribe some existing social relations, in ways that we are unlikely to see because of our social locations. This is the significance of situated knowledge (Haraway 1988), and the limits of all theorising. The postnational nomad thus comes off as, at best, a contradictory ideal that is complicit with nation-states such as Canada that exploit

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third-world labour to their own advantage. It professes non-territorialit y from the safet y of home. Theorists as travellers repeat the unlocatabilit y criticised as masculinist knowledge (Rose 1997). What emerges out of criticisms of the ideal is a renewed recognition of the particularit y of experiences of home-making and the situatedness of theory, and an appreciation that venturing from a home is different than being homeless.

Multicultural City as Home One space that many social and cultural theorists can envision as home is the multicultural cit y, as a place where difference is not only tolerated but celebrated, and where the energy that fuels Hagedorn produces new identities, new ideas, new ways of living. ‘[I]t is to the cit y that migrants, the minorities, the diasporic come to change the history of the nation . . . it is the city which provides the space in which emergent identifications and new social movements of the people are played out’ (Bhabha 1990: 319–20). Sue Golding could not make the case more strongly: [S]ocial ‘progress’ . . . has . . . implicitly relied on the importance of the urban or urban-ness, i.e. the anomie yet multiple, heterogeneit y of the cit y (or perhaps, rather cities) . . . the urban itself, and the kinds of cityscapes to which it points, is a fundamental requisite for radical pluralism. (1993: 207; original emphasis) 11 Doreen Massey (1997: 222) describes the creative potential of the ‘spatial disruptions’ that occur when different ‘[h]istories jumble in the street’ to produce unexpected identities and ways of living. The density and heterogeneit y of many cities makes them vibrant, if not unique, sites for such disruptions: ‘[t]he cit y (and especially the ‘postmodern’ cit y) is no more than (though that is quite a lot) an advanced case of what is true of “space” in general’ (223). This vision too has proven to be illusory in practice. I want to review some of the criticisms that have been made of it and then express some hesitations around these critiques. In an act of gleaning, I draw upon the unlikely figure of middle-class transnational subject – the figure that I have just trashed – to assist me in opening up a moment of closure in this critique of multiculturalism. In the manner of damaged clocks with no hands, rotting heart-shaped potatoes, roots that haven’t seen a hairdresser in months, I claim little for the generalised figure of middle-class

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transnational nomad in and of itself. It is what its specific, empirical manifestations allow me to see in relation to the multicultural cit y that I appreciate. Critics argue that interaction in the multicultural cit y is often little beyond touristic consumption. Eating in a great variet y of ethnic restaurants is emblematic of this activit y. Ghassan Hage (1997) labels this cosmo-multiculturalism and argues that eating cross-culturally is an activit y that is largely about invidious class distinction between elite and non-elite whites, and has little to do with multicultural exchange. Cosmopolitan elites take their eating practices as a sign of their sophistication and non-racism. However, tropes of colonial conquest abound, for example, in the search for the authentic meal in a restaurant frequented only by natives. bell hooks’ (1992) analysis of ‘courageous consumption’ parallels that of Hage, although she places her emphasis on race rather than class distinction. hooks argues that the impulse behind touristic cosmopolitanism is self-transformation on the part of whites. The exotic ‘Other’ is a source of life-sustaining alternatives to a drab, exhausted white culture. But this excursion into otherness is embarked upon with the understanding that one’s familiar world will remain perfectly intact. The goal is self-transformation and not transformation of one’s world. Travel through the spaces of the multicultural cit y thus acts not so much to disrupt, but to reaffirm hegemonic social relations. The point then is that cosmo-multiculturalism does little, and is expected to do little, to change existing social relations in the so-called multicultural cit y. The rhetoric of multiculturalism is a kind of alibi for liberal ideology; it allows the pretension of egalitarianism across differently racialised groups without addressing the fundamental material inequalities that persist between them. Hage does allow that migrant home-building in intercultural interaction occurs in migrant neighbourhoods; he simply sees this as an entirely different t ype of multiculturalism with its own geography – well away from cosmo-multiculturalism and largely invisible to elite groups. Without wanting to caricature the positions of Hage and hooks (whose critiques of commodified multiculturalism are important and persuasive), I want to hesitate over the segregated geography of multiculturalism that they present and the boundaries they draw between white and non-white cultural practices. This is because they seem to reinscribe a distinction between inauthentic and authentic cultural practices, and simplify the social geographies within the multicultural cit y and to spaces beyond. Further, Hage and hooks seem to conceive of cosmopolitan middle classes

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and elites as white. Doing so renders invisible both the history of settlement in many cities and the cultural complexit y of the existing middle classes, and thus foreshortens some of (although certainly not all) the possibilities for a critical multiculturalism in the space of the cit y. As a way of opening this closure, I want to reintroduce the figure of a young Asian middle-class woman who is on the move transnationally, but to do so empirically, by considering testimony from focus groups with Canadian-born, middle-class Chinese-Canadian and Filipino-Canadian youth in Vancouver. The two transnational ‘figures’ that I describe are negotiating their transnationalism differently, and, in the process, offer two different possibilities for working towards a vibrant critical multiculturalism. The image of the Chinese-Canadian is a compelling one at this moment in Vancouver’s history. A sense of occasion is expressed in the bilingual Chinese-Canadian student newspaper that was first published on my universit y campus (The Universit y of British Columbia) in the autumn of 2000. Its lead title: Asian-in-fluency (see Figure 6.5). In a column entitled ‘Maple Syrup on the Mosaic’, written in this newspaper by a secondgeneration Chinese-Canadian woman, she ventured that ‘This generation of Chinese Canadians will be the strongest one yet’ (Ho 2000: 3). Asianin-fluency communicates both influence and change. This sense of eventfulness was expressed by participants in a focus group assembled by my research collaborator, David Ley, in 1997.12 All of the participants in this focus group were Chinese-Canadian in their early twenties and they shared the experience of coming into a Chinese identit y in their teens. A comment by one young man was t ypical: I think I had a similar experience except that I went to Shaughnessy Elementary School and again, it was predominantly Caucasian. I was fortunate enough that I didn’t experience any racism or discrimination whatsoever. All of my friends were white and I thought of myself as white, except when I got home I was Chinese. [Group laughter.] You don’t notice it until you look in the mirror that you are different. During my Elementary and High School, I could say that I almost about never spoke Chinese other than inside of my home, and I could almost say that I didn’t have any Chinese friends. But I notice that besides myself, I see a lot of Chinese people as they reach adulthood or when they are going through universit y, there’s a big change in their life. They start to look for their roots. [Group agreement.] That

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happened to me. Even [during] first year [at] universit y I spoke all English. But now if you look at my friends, most of my friends are Chinese now. A lot of times I speak Chinese now. It’s just . . . I don’t know how it evolved that way. But a lot of friends are now Chinese, and I speak Chinese with them. (Focus group discussion, December 1997) The youths described a process of racial identification that was fragmented and sometimes difficult, which quite literally demanded different bodily performances. One young woman described how she inhabited her body and gender differently as she moved from English to Chinese. When I speak Chinese, I feel very formal. I feel like I should be sitting with my back straight. [Group laughter.] It seems that when I speak Chinese, I’m trying to fit the stereotype of what I am supposed to be in Chinese culture. I am a girl. I am female. So I try to fit the identit y of female when I speak Chinese. My voice when I speak English isn’t extremely high pitched. It’s quite low. But when I speak Chinese my voice goes up. It just shoots up. I swear. [Group laughter.] I feel like this little girl. I totally feel it. When I am speaking Chinese, I try to fit into this stereot ype of what, maybe not the culture, but what I have been taught that I’m supposed to be as a Chinese female, as a Chinese woman, as a Chinese young woman. (Focus group discussion, December 1997) There is a compelling social geography to these performances, and different ones are extracted in different spaces of the cit y. That the young man quoted above performed himself as white as an elementary student in Shaughnessy in the early 1980s is not entirely surprising. Shaughnessy at this time was largely a white communit y, which had been designed within the English landscape tastes of large lawns and English Tudor houses. There was an intense struggle through the 1980s into the early 1990s to preserve this landscape of ‘Anglophilia’, precisely from the incursion of what was identified as an Asian landscape taste (Ley 1995). In 1997, focus-group participants still described a self-conscious and tense negotiation of the cit y to control the ever-present possibilit y of misperforming cultural, classed and gendered identities, by performing the wrong identit y in the wrong place. In one young woman’s words, to speak Chinese in a racially-mixed downtown mall was to invite the

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Figure 6.5 Asian-in-fluency. Cover design by Denise Fong and Emily Kajioka. Reprinted courtesy of Perspectives.

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Figure 6.6 A mall landscape in Richmond that exacts Chinese language. Photograph by Amelia Butler.

criticism of being an affluent, recent immigrant from Hong Kong: ‘I don’t want people to say, “Oh, there goes another” . . . whatever.’ But to speak English in Chinatown or suburban Richmond (where the majorit y population is now Chinese-Canadian: see Figure 6.6) was ‘to get that same kind of negative thing coming to me. ‘“Oh look at her. She’s got yellow skin, but she can’t speak in Chinese like a good Chinese girl”’. Vancouver is not a stable home, and hybridit y does not adequately describe this woman’s experiences, which are more situated and divided. The landscape that conditions these racialised performances is still remarkably segregated. As one indication, residential segregation of those who identified as Chinese in the Canadian census remained high and relatively constant from 1971–1996: the index of residential segregation was 54.5 in 1971 and still 49 in 1991 and 47.7 in 1996, and among the highest of any ethnic group (Hiebert 1999b). And although this suggests the kind of simplified social geography described by Hage, even the few comments that I have quoted indicate a more complex mapping of class and racialised identities.

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Certainly a binary social geography of inauthentic cosmo-multiculturalism and authentic migrant neighbourhoods is too simplistic to map the complex cartographies of the speaker’s cultural identifications and the spatialised scripting of her performances. Why did these youths come to identify themselves as Chinese in their teen years? One factor is undoubtedly their age. Teen years are often a time of intense introspection about identit y, and dating often sets in motion a process of more clearly delineating patterns of racial categorisation and exclusion.13 The historical moment in Vancouver is also important because these youths were identifying themselves as Chinese at a time of large-scale and controversial immigration to Vancouver from Hong Kong and Taiwan, as many with the necessary capital to enter Canada through the business categories of immigration programmes secured Canadian citizenship and a safe haven for their investments in preparation for the 1997 repatriation of Hong Kong. Look more closely at the cover page of Asian-in-fluency and you will see Pikachu14 approaching over the horizon (see Figure 6.7).15 To give a sense of the numerical impact of this immigration, there was a 13 per cent increase in Vancouver’s population between 1991 and 1996 (in the years immediately preceding the focus group); 90 per cent of this resulted from immigration, and roughly 80 per cent of immigration came from Asia (Hiebert 1999b). One young woman expressed the effects of this coincidence of biography and demography in the following terms: [T]he benefits [from the recent immigration] were that there was a heightened awareness of my own sense of my community. I think of that entire growth of population, and the biggest thing that I got out of it was that I identified myself as being Chinese, as a Chinese-Canadian. I no longer felt this hatred of being Chinese. I seriously hated being Chinese. I would look at the television and quite honestly say: ‘Man. I wish I were white.’ Really. Quite seriously. ‘I wish I was white.’ And I think maybe after the media cooled down a bit about immigration into BC [British Columbia], I think that’s when I started thinking that this isn’t all that bad. Now I know [the language of] Chinese. Now there are different outlets to go to and stuff like that. So I no longer felt alone, more than anything else. (Focus group discussion, December 1997) Focus-group participants had a complex and contradictory relationship to this transnationalism. On the one hand, with the increased migration

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of Chinese people to Vancouver, they ‘no longer felt alone’, and they were well aware of transnational economic opportunities available to them because of their cultural capital, in particular, Chinese-language skills. One young man estimated that his knowledge of Chinese language and culture translated into $3,000 to $5,000 annually at his job as a trader and discounter at a bank in Vancouver, and two of the participants had worked for short times in Taiwan or Hong Kong. Participants reported an increased interest in current events and cultural activities in Hong Kong and Taiwan. At the same time, they actively defined themselves against their image of affluent Hong Kong transnationals. One young woman spoke of the deep resentment that some Chinese-Canadians feel towards newer immigrants from Hong Kong and Taiwan. She tells that her grandmother resents the new immigrants so much. There’s a lot of hatred because she had to work so hard and because my family came over to build the railroad. It was that far back. She remembers not being able to vote, and this and that. A lot of the new immigrant kids, well at least when I went to high school, they didn’t know that that was ever an issue. My aunt was the first Chinese nurse to graduate from UBC [Universit y of British Columbia]. I really appreciate all the work that the generation before me had to go through. My uncles each have engineering degrees from UBC but they’re tailors because they couldn’t get a job. So I really appreciate that. But I don’t think it’s [taught] in our school system for the new immigrants to learn and appreciate the immigrants before them. There is resentment. Quite substantial. (Focus group discussion, December 1997) This is a fascinating statement that points in one direction for building towards critical multiculturalism. This woman is not finding a home within a generalised Chinese identity; she is claiming a geographically and historically specific identit y as a Chinese-Canadian woman whose family history dates to the late nineteenth century, quite literally to the moment of British Columbia’s inclusion in the Canadian nation. Even as she is identifying herself as Chinese, she is articulating a partial disidentification with new immigrant kids, a partial disidentification that challenges an easy, pluralist model of multiculturalism. She is emphasising that her family has laboured for generations in Vancouver, and articulates a compressed history of labour exploitation and institutional racism in British Columbia. It is a history that writes her family into the founding of the

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Figure 6.7 Pikachu on the horizon, a detail of Perspectives. Cover design by Denise Fong and Emily Kajioka. Reprinted courtesy Perspectives.

nation through the construction of the railroad. By suggesting that immigrant kids should be taught this in school, she is asking for an official re-narration of the nation, one in which home is told as an unsettled place of conflict, and Chinese settlement has a long history in that home. Ironically, then, while the transnational flow of capital and persons from Hong Kong and Taiwan both expanded horizons and conditioned a sense of comfort and communit y in Vancouver, the critical multiculturalism that this young woman articulates insists on her family’s centralit y to Vancouver’s history, their rootedness and their depth of connection to this place. She stakes her claim to belonging not within a migrant community, but at the very symbolic heart of the nation: the railroad, and within an institution of higher learning: UBC. She identifies her uncles and aunt as professionals, as mistreated but rightful members of Vancouver’s established middle classes. This is one strand of critical multiculturalism which Hage and hooks draw our attention away from when they simplify elite culture and the social geography of the cit y. Filipino youth with whom I have worked experience transnationalism

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very differently, in ways that open other avenues for rethinking multiculturalism.16 In many statements they elaborated precisely the critiques of cosmopolitanism developed by Hage and hooks. Both women and men were acutely aware of being sexualised, and they lampooned, for instance, the rise of ‘the sexy Asian male’: ‘The King and I, man . . . It’s the trendy thing . . . Before it was trendy to have a gay friend, especially if you were living in the West End [an inner cit y, ‘cosmopolitan’, gay-identified neighbourhood]. Now, it’s the multicultural’ (Carlo, focus group discussion, August 2001). They spoke of the exoticisation of their eating practices and their own active invention of their cultural alterit y and authenticit y: There’s this big guy at work. He’s lived in Vancouver all of his life . . . [Finding that Maricel doesn’t use a knife,] he said, ‘Are you serious?’ I said, ‘Yeah, actually I don’t really know how to eat with a knife’ . . . He said, ‘I want to see this.’ So, he’s watching me eat my meat and rice with spoon and fork. He goes, ‘Incredible! I just don’t get it.’ And then I have to explain this thing about knives and make up a story about how it’s in our culture how we are forbidden to have knives. (Maricel, focus group discussion, April 2001) Like the Chinese-Canadian youth with whom we spoke, Filipino-Canadian youth described a process of coming to identify strongly in their teen years as Filipino rather than as Canadian or even Filipino-Canadian. But rather than transnational migration to Vancouver facilitating this identification, as it seems to have done with the Chinese-Canadian youth, they saw their transnationalism as a response to this imposed identification. In particular, they understood their transnationalism as a response to the ways that white Canadians persistently insist upon their perpetually immigrant status. Teachers treat grade schoolchildren born in Canada as small ambassadors of ‘their’ nation, assumed to be the Philippines. As May tells it: I remember growing up, [when I was] in elementary school. This is when Aquino went through People Power. Or when the people ousted Marcos and Aquino came into power. It was big international news. I remember sitting at my desk and my teacher asking me about it. I was eight years old then. I don’t really care. Why would she expect that I would have an opinion about it? Even in universit y, one of my TAs [Teaching Assistants] told me that I understood and spoke English

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really well. You, [Canadians assume], are the authorit y on people of colour issues. (Focus group discussion, August 2001) A common experience is to have their Canadian birthright explicitly denied by white Canadians. The following is representative of a conversation that came up again and again, in at least five of the focus groups. Monica: ‘Where are you from?’ ‘Vancouver, Winnipeg, okay.’ Like you know, it’s still not the answer they are looking for . . . I got into almost an argument with one of my clients [in Vancouver]. This was like a few years back. She was born in Grace Hospital in Winnipeg . . . I go, ‘Oh, I was also born in that hospital.’ And she goes, ‘Oh, you mean the name, not Winnipeg.’ And I go, ‘Yeah, I was born in Winnipeg’s Grace Hospital.’ She just assumed that I meant the hospital, like I was born in Grace Hospital Philippines or something. ‘No, you know, in that hospital in Winnipeg.’ We almost had an argument about it. (Focus group discussion, March 2001) This assumption was naturalised in an amusing but telling way when Vicki was doing her practicum as a student teacher: ‘the school I am in is predominantly caucasian or white . . . We were talking about rocks. And where they come from and stuff. And all of a sudden, the hand goes up. “Well, where do you come from?”’ (focus group discussion, April 2001). Identification as Filipino is not only a choice; it also emerges out of a process of being continuously read as a recently arrived outsider.17 In May’s words: ‘[we identify as Filipino] because we are forced to in our daily experience . . . It was to defend ourselves . . . emotionally and mentally. [We were] arming ourselves to go to school’ (focus group discussion, August 2001). Identification is more than a matter of labelling themselves as Filipino. Most of the youth have searched for meaning and belonging in the Philippines itself. Wolf writes about the ‘emotional transnationalism’ of second-generation Filipino-American youth in San Diego. While parents maintain relationships that directly link the United States and the Philippines, she argues, their children maintain the links ‘at the level of emotion, ideologies, and conflicting cultural codes’ (Wolf 2002: 350). The youths who participated in our focus groups certainly held these sentiments: ‘When I think of the Philippines or see the flag or see a Filipino

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sticker on their car, it brings this joy. I know it’s a bit sappy’ (focus group discussion, August 2001). But they also made actual trips to the Philippines, which they describe as a journey to a space of belonging. Anthony, a 24year-old born at Vancouver General Hospital, described his year studying at a college in the Philippines as ‘the happiest time of my life’. Junior, a 21-year-old born and raised in Montreal, says simply: ‘I loved the Philippines’ (focus group discussion, April 2001). Several spoke of the comfort of being among all Filipinos, and the pleasure of eating with fork and spoon without comment, or of ordering Balut or Taho without being asked, ‘What the hell is that?’ Developing connections to the Philippines has allowed these youths to understand their parents’ and their own lives in different terms, filtered through the theme of forced migration. They now ask their parents questions that they have never asked before: where exactly are you from in the Philippines? What were your jobs in the Philippines? And what they have learned is: the father they know as a school maintenance worker was also a mechanical engineer, a Zamboni driver was a teacher, or a securit y guard was a civil engineer. They thus get a concrete measure of their parents’ deskilling.18 Recovering their parents’ lives in the Philippines thus can be one way of seeing their immigrant parents and themselves in a new light. ‘Forced migration’ is a powerful articulating concept which knits together youth whose parents have come to Canada in very different circumstances. It binds the lives of universit y graduates who were born in Canada and whose mothers immigrated in the 1970s as nurses, to recently arrived children of domestic workers. As well as this shared history, youths at the UKPC/FCYA19 turn to the Philippines to claim a concrete history of struggle. May expresses this way of understanding the Philippines: It is a sentiment for the people. It is not a sentiment for the [nation]state. It could be for the family who brought you here. Or for your grandmother, who raised [you]. When we look back at our history, we try to look back at the people’s history. When we learn about that, there is really a strong connection to the Filipino people that we never learn about in Canada. They hardly learn about that in their textbooks in the Philippines. So many years of being colonized and living in povert y. What we really appreciate when we go back is how people really struggle . . . Collectively, you can really see how people resisted their oppression . . . Especially for people who grew up not feeling

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proud about being Filipino. We found something to be proud of and it is incredible. Your self-identification also changes . . . I don’t think it is a romantic sentiment. We also know there are struggles within the Philippines. (Focus group discussion, August 2001) Uncovering this specific, material history of a real, not just imaginary, place becomes an important means of establishing self-worth and – more than this – has altered the geographical terrain and modes of political activism. Members of the UKPC/FCYA now see their activities in Canada as part of the struggle in the Philippines. Crossing national boundaries has brought their organising against racism in Canada into a larger history of resistance. This alters the geographical reach of the activities of the UKPC/FCYA to include struggles within the Philippines, for example, an extended Oust Estrada campaign (that is, to remove President Estrada from public office). Feeling the impact of their parents’ forced migration from the Philippines on their daily lives, they understand the political and economic relations within the Philippines to be part of not only their history, but their daily existence. Every year the Alliance now sends youths to the Philippines to learn from organisations there. This youth organisation in Vancouver is not alone in doing this; representations to the Philippines from youth groups from North America have increased substantially in recent years so as to attract the interest and curiosit y of organisations in the Philippines.20 How does this reconfigure multiculturalism within Canada? In contrast to the Philippines as repository of sentiment and a political space in which to draw strength and learn specific oppositional tactics, Canada was t ypically represented as a liberal state from which to claim rights. As Carlo put it: When you are saying you are Canadian, it is like a defense mechanism. [In reaction to] when people think you can’t speak English, or whatever. ‘Where are you from?’ ‘Well, I’m Canadian. I know as much about it as you do, of this country or whatever. I am just as smart as you are.’ It is just someone assuming things about you and you want to prove them wrong. (Focus group discussion, August 2001) Charlene continues: That is how I use the fact I was born here . . . I let them know I have

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just as much of a right to be here . . . I was born here and I use that to assert myself as an individual here . . . for our communit y, we use that because you brought us here because you want our labour. Give us what we deserve. When I see Canadian people who are waving the Canadian flag, I feel detached on a certain level regarding patriotism. (Focus group discussion, August 2001) An important irony to note in relation to Charlene’s and Carlo’s disavowal of attachment to Canada – but entirely in keeping with their reading of the liberal state – is that they exercise the duties of citizenship vigorously through their activities at the UKPC/FCYA, likely more fully than the majorit y of Canadians. But the mappings that they practise every day, of folding the history of the Philippines into their daily lives in Canada, insisting on the continuities and connections (and not just the discontinuities and ruptures) between Canada and the Philippines, also exceed this liberal reading of the state as a guarantor of rights. This has some implications for re-imagining multiculturalism. Carlo and Charlene articulate an understanding that access to rights in Canada is unequal (Razack 1998), and the UKPC/FCYA echoes a larger critique that multiculturalism reinforces cultural hegemony of white Canadians if ethnic groups are simply ‘tolerated’ in relation to the cultural norm (Hage 1998), and the specific histories of particular groups are effectively elided within a pluralist society. The consequence of the latter is that multiculturalism can level as much as protect difference. The political and cultural activities of Filipino-Canadian youths suggest a different, mediating, geographical imagination in relation to multiculturalism – one that works between the nation and global capitalism. This entails tracing the specific histories of connection between Canada and other nations. This geography of connectivit y poses multiculturalism as a process of articulation rather than pluralism, and ruptures the national boundedness of the multicultural project in Canada. To be fully multicultural, Canadians must appreciate the specificit y of connections and the complexit y of identifications and attachments held by many Canadian citizens. This offers a way of re-imagining Canada, and not just Filipino youths. It is not just the peculiarit y of these Filipino children of immigrants to find themselves in and between nations; it is the situation of the Canadian nation to be so. I am suggesting that Chinese-Canadian and Filipino-Canadian middleclass youth experience transnationalism differently, and offer different

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models for rethinking multiculturalism: rereading Canadian history in the case of Chinese-Canadian youth, tracing lateral connections and histories of displacement across space in the case of Filipino-Canadian youth. This is not a generalised celebration of what transnationalism enables (in the case of established Chinese-Canadians in Vancouver I have argued that they have a contradictory relationship to transnationalism), but a set of more specific arguments about what transnational subjects can bring to understandings of multiculturalism. These are not entirely positive or joyful models of effervescent urbanity; they are models of a rather dissatisfied, insistent and contested multiculturalism. By bringing transnational subjects to multiculturalism I want both to suggest that multiculturalism must be thought of in the same frame as transnationalism, and to recognise the partialit y of and limits to any theoretical lens, such that theorising might be thought of as a continuous process of opening the limits of one conceptual frame through the technologies of another. When Varda returns home from a trip to Japan she finds a large stain on her ceiling where water has leaked through. Rather than repairing the damage, she learns to love her stain – or at least to live with it – by reimagining it through the lens of fine art: she revisions it as a work by the Spanish artist Tapies. Re-imaging through the decay of smoothed-over, neatly plastered, white space need not take away from belonging; it can be a creative act of rebuilding. The question is, can these re-imaginings go beyond playful translations within the terms set by Europe? Can the multicultural stain be imagined in terms quite other than a Tapies?

Notes 1. Martin and Mohant y (1986) were early in making this argument. Berlant (1994)

then extended it to the universit y: ‘the universit y as a “home” for intellectual work and intellectuals in the US has been a debilitating condition for thinking about what kinds of challenges to norms of knowledge critical thinkers might generate’ (129). 2. African-American feminists (for example, bell hooks 1990) have argued that, rather than a site of oppression, the home has been a refuge from racism, and a site that sustains oppositional thinking. Recognising the ways that middle-class suburban ideals of home police and punish non-conforming white families, Young (1997) nonetheless formulates four normative values of home that she believes should be available to everyone: rights to safet y, individuation, privacy and the preservation of individual and collective memories through ‘rituals of remembrance’ enacted in the home. Meaghan Morris (1996) deploys Deleuzian theory to

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3. 4. 5.

6. 7. 8.

9. 10.

11. 12.

13.

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Working Feminism imagine the home not as a static container, but as a constructed place of comfort from which one ventures into the world. For a fuller discussion of the above, see Pratt (1999b). These themes are explored in Harvey (2000b). On the issue of re-imagining the region, see Gibson (2001). Brennan himself is more interested in the issue of defensive nationalism. There is a substantial critical feminist literature on nationalism, in part because so often nationalism is both masculinist and carried out in defence of women (and motherland) (Mayer 2000). This has left Meaghan Morris to observe that feminists often have had very little to say about concrete efforts to reconstruct the nation. Specifically, she discusses feminist contributions to ongoing debates about republicanism in Australia. Feminists t ypically do not ‘aspire to be a “virtuous propert yowning warrior-citizen” on classic civic republicanism lines’ (Morris 1998: 197); leaving the question, what do women want? Feminists have lots to say about identities of race, ethnicit y, gender and sexualit y, but relatively less to say about ‘identities, interests, and allegiances . . . a nationwide movement can mobilize’ (200–1). She looks to the mobilisation of Aboriginal groups around land rights, and their savvy movement between transnational alliances and national reform, for re-imagining the Australian nation as ‘an open framework of analysis’ and one site through which a critical (and not just pluralist) multiculturalism might be achieved. This repeats Morris’ (1996) refusal to envision the home only as a static, closed container. The production of hierarchised racial difference within the nation and as part of the nation-building process is a theme to which I attend in the next chapter. See also Parreñas (2001a, 2001b). The play has been performed a number of times, including performances at the Kalayaan Centre in May 2000, in August 2000 in Winnipeg for the FilipinoCanadian National Consultative Forum, at the Asian Connections conference at the Universit y of British Columbia in November 2000, during Asian Heritage Month in May 2001 and at the National Forum for Filipino Nurses in December 2001. For more details about the play and the youth group, see Pratt in collaboration with the Ugnayan ng Kabataang Pilipino sa Canada/ Filipino-Canadian Youth Alliance (2003). Kondo also sets her sights on Gilroy (1993). Kondo includes on her list, the out-of-the way, in recognition of the tendency for the urban cosmopolitan to consume the attention of critical theorists. This is a tendency that is repeated in this chapter, but explored in the next. See also Holston (1995). The focus group with Chinese-Canadian-born youth was conducted as part of the first phase of a five-neighbourhood study of immigrant settlement in Vancouver. The sample of seven participants was assembled through social networks, and was part of a study of one area in Vancouver, the affluent west side. David Ley was the principal investigator for this case-study area. The transcript is thus a t ype of ‘found object’, and I thank David Ley for making it available in this way. For details of the larger project, see Hiebert et al. (1998). Frances Winddance Twine (1996) has shown that pubert y is a key moment for racialisation among middle-class youth in the United States. Heterosexual dating seems to compel a patrolling of the border between black and white.

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14. Pikachu is the most popular Pokemon, a character in a Game Boy game which orig-

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

inated in Japan in February 1996. Pokemon is now a much wider cultural phenomenon, estimated to generate between 25–50 million retail dollars annually, and has been wildly popular among primary children throughout the world. Katharyne Mitchell (1997b) explores in detail the complexities of ethnic identification, multiculturalism and global capitalism among Chinese immigrant entrepeneurs in Vancouver. The focus groups with Filipino-Canadian youth were conducted as a separate project, a collaboration with the Ugnayan ng Kabataang Pilipino sa Canada/FilipinoCanadian Youth Alliance. We conducted ten focus groups from spring to fall 2001. The focus groups varied in size, from four to six people. There was some overlap in participation (some individuals participated more than once). A total of twent y-six youths from 14 to 28 years of age participated. The youths assembled the focus groups through their social networks, and thus no claims can be made about the representativeness of the sample. For fuller development of this analysis, see Pratt in collaboration with UKPC/FCYA (2003). Espiritu (1994) also notes the primary significance of experiences of racism for second-generation Filipino-American youths’ identification as Filipino. In the Canadian context, Elaine Chang (1994), writing about her experiences growing up as a Korean-Canadian, makes an explicit and eloquent argument that her capacit y to construct her identit y always has been conditioned by how she was read. The persistent construction of Asians as outsiders within the nation has been conceived as part of the process through which the culturally dominant create the nation as home – in other words, as part of a home-making project of white Canadians (Anderson 1991). These examples are drawn directly from the focus groups. The sample of secondgeneration youths is too small to draw meaningful generalisations but there are some suggestive patterns. All of the mothers – who came in the 1970s and early 1980s – had paid employment and had experienced relatively little downward occupational mobilit y, principally because six of the twelve could practise their profession of nursing when they immigrated to Canada. As noted in Chapters 3 and 5, the situation has changed and many professional nurses from the Philippines now enter Canada through the Live-in Caregiver programme. The process of deskilling is thus now a greater problem. The situation was a little different for their fathers, half of whom experienced downward occupational mobilit y (of the t ype already described) or retired after immigrating to Canada. In 1993 the Montreal Coalition of Filipino Students (MCFS) was organised. In that same year, the Canadian Youth Network for Asian Pacific Solidarit y (CYNAPS) and the British Columbia Committee for Human Rights in the Philippines sponsored a national speaking tour featuring a member from the League of Filipino Students (LFS), a student organisation based in the Philippines. During the tour, this representative of LFS met with MCFS and other politically conscious Filipino youth organisations across Canada. In the summer of 1994, Filipino youths from Winnipeg, Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver met in St-Hilair, Quebec, for a national consultation, where they passed a resolution to begin local youth organisations in their respective cities. One woman attending from Vancouver was involved with the Philippine Women Centre (PWC), and she and several

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other young women involved with the PWC already felt that they needed a separate group to address their distinctive issues. With the help of the PWC, they organised the UKPC/FCYA in the summer of 1995. The first issues that they dealt with were those of identit y (for example, ‘Who are we? Are we Filipino or Canadian?’), racism and their own unfamiliarit y with Filipino history. In 1996 UKPC/FCYA organised a province-wide consultation (entitled ‘As We Begin to Understand Our Roots’), attended by fort y to fift y youths, during which they began to explore the history of the Philippines, and their families’ histories of migration. 20. This comment about the increased numbers of representatives of North-American Filipino organisations visiting the Philippines was made by the National ViceChair of ANAKBAYAN, which is the national comprehensive youth organisation in the Philippines, when visiting Canada in July 2001 to attend the first national conference of Filipino-Canadian youths, held in Toronto. Roughly ninet y youths attended from across Canada.

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In May 2002, I attended a lecture sponsored by Ugnayan ng Kabataang Pilipino sa Canada/Filipino-Canadian Youth Alliance as part of Vancouver’s Asian Heritage Month. Ninotchka Rosca, a New York-based author, once jailed in the Philippines for her opposition to the Marcos regime, was speaking to the title: ‘Trafficking is Femicide: Filipino women and war, past and present’. She argued strenuously against positioning prostitutes as ‘sex workers’, and located the origins of this analysis in the Netherlands (‘the West’). In her view, both the intention and effect of this interpretation of prostitution as waged labour is to increase the supply of thirdworld women working as prostitutes, in the first world and for first-world men throughout the world. She predicted that the discourse of ‘sex worker’ will prepare the way for legalising prostitution. Prostitution will then become an acceptable employment category for immigration, thus creating a steady supply in the first world of third-world women working as prostitutes. She thus recast a discourse that many Western feminists have seen as empowering as imperialist in effect, and deeply exploitative of third-world women. In the question period that followed, a young Chinese-Canadian woman, representing an organisation endeavouring to provide AIDS education to prostitutes in Vancouver, asked for suggestions about how her organisation might contact Filipina prostitutes in Vancouver, because they had experienced difficulty making contact with this group. Ninotchka Rosca answered that what was needed was to better fund Filipino grassroots organisations, because a distressed or sick Filipina woman wants to be helped by a member of her own communit y, rather than a white person. In casual conversation after the event, a member of the Philippine Women Centre (PWC) said that the Chinese-Canadian woman who had asked the question had visited the PWC that week to discuss this issue with them. She said that the PWC shares Rosca’s position that prostitution is so deeply exploitative that it is not usefully conceptualised as paid labour, but that the organisation involved in AIDS education was not yet

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clear on its position on prostitution. She attributed the clarit y of the PWC position to the fact that they view Filipinas, first and foremost, as third-world women. This was a rich encounter in which a Chinese-Canadian woman was momentarily (at least implicitly) cast as white, and geographies of ‘the West’ – first and third world – were made to co-exist and jostle in the same urban space. Different analyses and strategies for addressing prostitution were put into close conversation, and it is by no means clear that consensus will or even can be reached. What are we witnessing here? Are we witnessing the pernicious effects of identit y politics that divide and weaken feminist unit y, leading Susan Moller Okin (1999) to conclude that multiculturalism is, after all, ‘bad for women’? Or, to revisit the argument developed in the last chapter, could it be that the middle-class ChineseCanadians activated to re-mobilise the multicultural cit y in fact have very little to say to Filipina migrants? Or perhaps we are witnessing something more subtle, so that casting the Chinese-Canadian woman as white and Filipinas in Canada as third-world women is both right and wrong, but certainly productive. I want to call upon debates that have preoccupied feminists through the 1990s, debates about the tight co-production of nation, racial differences, sexuality, gender identity and capitalist profitabilit y, to move towards the latter position and to reconsider the possibilities for re-imagining multiculturalism and what Doreen Massey has called ‘a progressive sense of place’.

Diagnosing Difference within Liberalism It is now commonplace to acknowledge that differences among women are significant, and feminist identification and practice must emerge through a process of building coalitions across differently situated women. Although this is an easy statement in the abstract, it has proven more difficult in practice to determine which claims to difference are morally and politically relevant and how to communicate across them. Susan Moller Okin asks, ‘what should be done when the claims of minorit y cultures or religions clash with the norm of gender equalit y that is at least formally endorsed by liberal states (however much they continue to violate it in their practices)?’ (1999: 9). After reviewing practices such as polygamy, clitoridectomy, wife-murder, marriage by capture, she concludes that, in such cases, gender equit y must trump cultural relativism, and that women in patriarchal minorit y cultures

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might be much better off if the culture into which they were born were either to become extinct (so that its members would become better integrated into the less sexist surrounding culture) or, preferably, to be encouraged to alter itself so as to reinforce the equalit y of women – at least to the degree to which this value is upheld in the majorit y culture. (22–3; original emphasis) Some of the critics of Okin’s position have argued that it betrays the way that liberal feminism continues to work within a universalising paradigm that is complicit with Western imperialism. Western liberalism functions as [A]t once the measure and mentor of minorit y cultures – Western liberalism, warts and all, as a salvage operation, if not salvation itself. With a zealousness not unlike the colonial civilizing mission, the ‘liberal’ agenda is articulated without a shadow of self-doubt, except perhaps an acknowledgement of its contingent failings in the practice of everyday life. (Bhabha 1999: 83) Okin’s critics argued that immigrant cultural practices cannot be understood apart from the immigrant experience. Dominant and minorit y cultures are co-produced and the ‘pain and rage produced by intercultural engagements’ can itself strengthen patriarchal traditions within minorit y cultures (Sassen 1999: 77). Beyond this, some practices of migrant minorit y cultures can only be understood within a fuller analysis of colonial and postcolonial relations, outside the metropole. Narayan (2000) details the ways in which sati in India was in part a colonial production; Pollitt (1999) notes that clitoridectomy in Kenya was revived by anti-colonial nationalists. Thus when a country such as Canada admits refugee standing to women on the basis of the persecution of clitoridectomy, it is not surprising that what some regard as a triumph of gender equalit y has been interpreted by others (Obiora 2002) as another instance of the Western civilising mission. To portray non-Western women as victims of cultures with which the first world is not historically intertwined produces ‘the simulacrum of liberating the masses from “their subordinate place”’ (Spivak 2000: 354), which only reinforces the centralit y of the West. Spivak (1993, 1996) is particularly critical in relation to Western feminists working directly and indirectly for international non-governmental organisations (NGOs) within what is now referred to as an ‘international civil

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societ y’. This is because she understands their deployment of liberal human rights and an individuating gender training discourse to be so lethal in its effects. She argues that it has the effect in postcolonial societies of ‘shrinking the possibilities’ of creating an ‘operative civil societ y’ with adequate welfare structures: ‘Like the Bolshevik experiment, imperial and nationalist feminisms have also prepared the way for the abstract itinerary of the calculus of capital’ (1996: 250). Critics argue that liberal positions such as Okin’s will continue to promote this imperialist agenda, and fail in their attempts to adjudicate cross-cultural disputes because they lack the theoretical resources to do otherwise. The moral force of liberalism is its universalism: ‘our common humanit y, our natural equal worth and dignit y, and our equal entitlement to make reasoned moral choices’ (Quillen 2001: 97). These bedrock assumptions make difference a problem: ‘What deserves respect here is not difference, though assuredly incidental difference is tolerated, but rather sameness’ (98). Beyond the moral discomfort with difference, the bedrock of liberal theory – the rational individual – offers little for understanding either the complex psychological processes that lead us to produce and tenaciously hold on to differences, or the wider discursive, political and economic processes that structure them. I want to pursue attempts to elaborate both of these, and suggest that a fuller theory of the psychological production of cultural difference rests on an appreciation of these structuring forces.

Abjection and Desire Attempting to theorise the psychological complexit y of cross-cultural exchange, Quillen (2001) turns to Rey Chow’s (1996a) analysis of the role of fantasy in the formation of the self and other. Chow develops this through a careful reading of David Cronenberg’s film, M. Butterfly, and explores in particular cross-cultural exchange that operates through the circulation of orientalist stereot ypes. The film is not empirical ‘evidence’ for her argument but a means of thinking concretely with a set of theoretical ideas, and one way of exploring ‘the limits of human and subjects as agents of their fates’ (Chow 2001: 135; original emphasis). Like Quillen, I want to follow Chow’s analysis in some detail because Chow is outlining what is now a fairly common psychoanalytical reading but she does this with great subtlet y, precisely because she insists on the particularit y of these psychological processes within a wider but specific geopolitical context.

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In brief, M. Butterfly is a story of a love affair between the pett y bureaucrat Gallimard, working in the French Consulate in Beijing in 1964, and a Chinese opera singer, Song Liling, which begins after Gallimard sees her performing the role of Madame Butterfly in a performance of Puccini’s opera, Madama Butterfly. Gallimard’s desire for Song is sustained through the fantasy of the stereot ypical beautiful self-sacrificing oriental woman. Chow understands his desire to possess Song as displacing, or ‘abjecting’, an unspeakable desire to be Butterfly. Possessing Song enables him to establish his own internal coherence, autonomy and stabilit y. ‘Having Butterfly through possessing Song, he can be, with increasing self-assurance, the vice-consul his government asks him to be’ (Quillen 2001: 132). The film thus portrays a process now familiar within feminist criticism, that of securing autonomy, coherence and identit y by displacing what cannot be assimilated within one’s self on to another in a reductionist way, and then nurturing the self through the possession of that other. Desire is sustained for two reasons. The process of abjection and purification is never complete because it is the process of excising the abject that sustains purit y and the boundary between self and other. Further, the possession of the other is unachievable, in part because it is based on processes of misrecognising the stereot ype in an actual person.1 The persistence of desire because of – and not despite – the gap between what is seen and what is imagined makes this process resistant to ‘a quick decoding according to anti-orientalist didactic’ (Quillen 2001: 109). Consider the scene of the lovers’ first encounter: Song:

It’s one of your favorite fantasies, isn’t it? – the submissive Oriental woman and the cruel white man. Gallimard: Well, I didn’t quite mean . . . Song: Consider it this way: what would you say if a blonde homecoming queen fell in love with a short Japanese businessman? He treats her cruelly, then goes home for three years, during which time she prays to his picture and turns down marriage from a young Kennedy. Then, when she learns he has remarried, she kills herself. Now, I believe you would consider this girl a deranged idiot, correct? But because it’s an Oriental who kills herself for a Westerner – ah! – you find it beautiful. (Quoted in Chow 1996a: 67) Song’s observations merely ‘fuel Gallimard’s imagination of the “oriental

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woman” rather than cure it’ (Chow 1996a: 67). The insertion of this explicit critique of orientalism in the lovers’ first dialogue makes it clear that the film, rather than ‘simply endorsing such a[n anti-orientalist] didactic’, posits orientalism as a psychic, interpersonal structure that builds precisely on fantasy and stereot ype, so predictable ‘that their behavior cannot be altered simply by an exposure of the conditions that enable it’. Like Pavlov’s dog, ‘these creatures would salivate and come alive for real even if the stimulus had nothing “real” behind it’ (67). Rather than standing as a generalised statement about the dynamic of orientalising desire, Chow’s close reading of a particular film indicates that such desire emerges within an intersubjective context that is specific in time and place. Song, for example, feeds Gallimard the stereot ype; it is not the invention of the Western white man alone. Also, as it turns out, Song is a man in disguise – a spy for the Chinese Communist Part y no less – and eroticised orientalism is sustained (though not reducible) by both imperialist and nationalist symbolics. What possible use might feminists make of this elaborated psychology of the co-production of identit y and difference through the circulation of desire and possession? Quillen detects within it the tools for theorising an ‘other-than-liberal’ humanism. Understanding this psychic process might allow us ‘to acknowledge, to tolerate and to theorize’ (2001: 112) both the ambivalences that reside within us, and our dependence on others for identit y formation. For Quillen, the ‘real tragedy’ of Gallimard is that he reduces Song to Butterfly. He thus misses the opportunit y for a more complex and dynamic set of identifications and connections with Song, while simultaneously denying Song his full humanit y. While the tragedy of this reduction is undoubtedly true, Chow (2001) notes that a model for a renewed humanism is an unlikely lesson to extract from her analysis because she is arguing that our psychic processes are structured through available discourses within relations of power, and desire is stimulated by persistent misrecognition.2 Gallimand achieves his identit y through the available resources of orientalism – instantiated in the performance of Madama Butterfly. In this sense, his subjecthood does not exist in advance of, or apart from, orientalism. Further, Song’s revelation of the oriental stereot ype and its distance from realit y merely fuels Gallimard’s desire. Rather than offering a means to alter our psychic structures of desire and identit y formation, her analysis suggests the need to pay close attention to available discourses. There is, moreover, something very limited to an analysis that refers

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the production of difference back to psychic distress over ambivalence within the self, without placing these practices within wider sets of power relations.

Nation and the Production of Difference In an effort to place the production of differences among women within such a wider context, I want to attend to the considerable body of literature that traces a peculiar geography to the production of racial difference, namely the ways that gender, racialisation and the nation-state are intertwined. In the Canadian context, Kay Anderson (1991) traces a history of the decisive role played by racial classification in the production of national belonging. She details how the national ‘we’, a collective sense of national belonging, was constructed among a disparate population of white settlers in early British Columbia through the production of the racial category, Chinese. Key to Anderson’s argument, this racial categorisation was spatially produced by legally defining Chinese as disenfranchised alien residents (that is, as outsiders within), and through the strict spatial segregation of Chinese residents within Chinatown. The systematic stigmatisation of the place of Chinatown, conceived and practised upon by dominant white societ y as a place of filth and immoralit y, was integral and not incidental to the definition of Chinese as a race apart. This was part of a process of nation-building, and not simply an outcome of an inability on the part of individuals to tolerate difference and ambiguit y, in themselves or others. Anderson notes that many witnesses who provided evidence at the Royal Commission on Chinese immigration in 1885 ‘singled out politicians as chief among the instigators of an anti-Chinese movement in British Columbia. Chief Justice Begbie, for example, remarked that he could not recollect anything that could be called agitation against the Chinese until Confederation’ (Anderson 1991: 46). Chronicling a comparable history in the United States, Lowe (1996a) argues that the first phase of excluding Asians within the American nation, which she dates from 1850 to the Second World War, reflects the fact that the needs of capital and the nation-state can be contradictory in racially differentiated societies. While capital profited from labour cheapened through racialisation, the nation-state required a unified culture to participate in the public sphere. Legal (and spatial) exclusion – the production of outsiders within – ‘sublated’ these contradictions (13).

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In both countries, this process of nation-building – both economic and political – through racialisation was thoroughly gendered and sexualised. The segregation and containment of Chinese alien residents was often performed in the name of protecting white women, and gendered immigration policy that allowed Chinese men (but not women and families) to enter Canada and the United States as labourers was in part legitimised by attributing to Chinese women excessive fertilit y and/or sexual promiscuit y and associated transmission of disease (Anderson 1996). National productions of racial difference are not historically invariant and state discourse in many nations has changed from earlier periods of selective but explicit racial exclusion to one of multicultural inclusion. As noted in Chapter 6, discourses of multiculturalism have been seen as new moments in managing and producing hierarchies of difference. But the dynamics behind multiculturalism are themselves complex and historically variable, scripted within the changing context of a globalised capitalist economy.3 Katharyne Mitchell (1993), for example, documents a fascinating reorientation of federal expenditures on multicultural programmes in Canada in the mid-1980s. Not only did federal expenditures on these programmes almost double through the latter half of the 1980s, but they shifted away from the maintenance of cultural heritage and language (primarily focused on French-Canadians) to ‘race relations’. Mitchell locates the federal government’s more explicit commitment to multiculturalism during these years to an economic imperative to strengthen national competitiveness in a global economy. The Conservative Prime Minister publicly recognised the economic benefits of multiculturalism and the role that immigrants can play in brokering trading opportunities and opening export markets. Within Canada, the discourse of multiculturalism was used to break down local resistance to international investment and massive real-estate development, much of which originated from Hong Kong and Taiwan, insofar as resistance could be (and was) dismissed as racist. Given the close relation between state discourses of multiculturalism and economic globalisation, it is thus not surprising that class position conditions ‘immigrant reception’. Aihwa Ong (1996: 751) argues, for example, that ‘differential governmentalities’ are brought to bear on different Asian migrants to the United States, depending on their class locations. Cambodian refugees have been not only positioned, but constructed as black, welfare-dependent Asians, in contrast to the ‘model-minorit y’ image of Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese immigrants.4 This began in refugee camps outside of the United States, where Cambodians were taught

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English tailored to low-skilled jobs, and ‘socialized to expect limited occupational options . . . as well as a flexible attitude toward frequent changes of jobs which would help them to adapt to cycles of employment and unemployment’ (742). It continued when they arrived in the United States, where Cambodian families were actively produced as patriarchal and learned (and were in fact trained by social workers) to manipulate the welfare system in ways that were both gendered and gender altering.5 In contrast, she argues that affluent Hong Kong entrepreneurial immigrants are disciplined by stereot ypes of being ‘economic animals’ who build ‘monster houses’.6 Countering such stereotypes, they engage in ‘whitening’ cultural practices, including donating large sums of money for the construction of buildings in ‘prestigious “white” public space’ (750). One of the gender impacts of this whitening process is the masculinisation of Chinese men. In effect, neither set of immigrants escapes the discipline of gendered racial classification, staged in relation to white culture. In Ong’s words, ‘[t]his dynamic of racial othering emerges in a range of mechanisms that variously subject nonwhite immigrants to whitening or blackening processes that indicate the degree of their closeness to or distance from ideal white standards’ (751). These mechanisms operate in and through space, whether it be in and through refugee camps and public hous-ing projects, or ‘monster houses’ and highly visible public buildings. Mitchell’s observation that national productions of multiculturalism are conditioned by global economic relations already rescales the analysis of multiculturalism – from national to global.7 This is an important theoretical move because one important criticism of Western feminist scholarship, especially within cultural studies, is that these analyses are often narrowly focused on the production of difference within the nation, which has the effect of emphasising the centrality of the West in producing immigrant identities. No one has made this argument more vigorously than Gayatri Spivak and I want to follow her reading of one novel, Lucy, to trace her argument about the profound implications that follow from re-imaging multiculturalism within postcolonialism and beyond the nationstate. As it turns out, Lucy is a story of a young woman from Antigua who comes to the United States to work as a nanny.

Histories Collide Considering the reception of Jamaica Kincaid’s novel, Lucy, within feminist criticism, Spivak is critical of the ‘preferred reading’, which is to elaborate the race-gender-class ‘predicament’ of the recent migrant.

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Playing within this ‘structured ideological field’ encourages analyses that ‘remain narcissistic, question-begging’ (2000: 335), and return readers to themselves and their own ‘predicament’. Certainly the novel, in which Lucy narrates her first year in the United States, is a persistent critique of the privilege and arrogance of rich white employers and their friends, a privilege that reaches beyond the borders of the United States: They had names like Peters, Smith, Jones, and Richards – names that were easy on the tongue, names that made the world spin. They had somehow all been to the islands – by that, they meant the place where I was from – and had fun there. (Kincaid 1990: 64–5) But to reduce the novel to a series of binaries – black/white; poor/rich; periphery/core; woman/man – is, in Spivak’s view, to miss both its subtlet y and the imaginative possibilities it offers. Lucy is an upwardly mobile economic migrant who comes with a history. Her history as hybridised colonial subject makes her resistant to multicultural assimilation or any easy connection with a diaspora. Her upward mobilit y denies her a position of unmediated resistance in the United States. Lucy embodies a complex site of layers of identifications and dis-identifications, produced through a series of displacements. Lucy’s inabilit y to establish connection in the United States begins long before her migration, and there is no single source for it: it grows from her inabilit y to inhabit comfortably colonial hybridit y, from patriarchal practices of her country of origin, from the end of her great love affair with her mother at age ten, when her mother gives birth to her second child and first son. When Lucy establishes a connection with her employer, Mariah, it is ‘half-rejected because the mother must be half-mourned’ (Spivak 2000: 348); ‘The times that I loved Mariah it was because she reminded me of my mother. The times that I did not love Mariah it was because she reminded me of my mother’ (Kincaid 1990: 58). For Lucy, migration was a way of severing a connection, ‘as a solution – rather than the source – of a problem’ (Spivak 2000: 344). Spivak notes that we receive ‘the shock of that displacement’ (344) on the first pages of the novel: Oh, I had imagined that with my one swift act – leaving home and coming to this new place – I could leave behind me, as if it were an old garment never to be worn again, my sad thoughts, my sad feelings, and my discontent with life in general as it presented itself to me. (Kincaid 1990: 6–7)

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Lucy must bear the responsibilit y for the fact that she has migrated to leave behind her troubled social relations. Spivak asks us to be attentive to this responsibilit y, arguing that ‘new transnational radicals, focusing on the migrant as an effectively historyless object of intellectual and political activism’ (2000: 354), merely strengthen the metropolis when they read only the destabilised cultural hybridit y of the metropolis and miss the economic processes at work, the ways that ‘the migrant is inserted [and actively inserts herself] into the circuit of hegemony’ (354). There are three points that I wish to draw from this recognition that migrants come with a history. First, a cit y of migrants with histories is one that is alive with multiple temporalities, multiple geographies, even multiple attitudes and practices of liberalism. Bhabha (1999: 83) notes that many postcolonial immigrants bring with them rich histories with a more fully ‘agonistic’ liberalism. Feminists from Asia and the ‘Middle East’ have had to struggle for many years in colonial and postcolonial contexts both with indigenous patriarchies and the contradictions inherent to the liberal tradition. They bring with them ‘ambivalent and “unsatisfied” histories of the liberal persuasion’ (84) that can usefully disrupt pluralist multiculturalism.8 Second, migrants with histories potentially experience more acutely a critical distance from dominant ideologies of inclusion. Theories of identit y since the 1980s have stressed that subjects are hailed by multiple discourses, and that movement between discourses offers some potential for agency insofar as one discourse can provide the ground for disrupting another (Smith 1988). But Spivak brings a far richer understanding of this theorising in relation to female, colonised, postcolonial, migrant, ethnicised subjects. Lisa Lowe (1996a) also writes in compelling ways about such subjects, who are ‘episodically and incompletely formed within linguistically and historically [and geographically] differentiated circumstances’ (135). She argues that such subjects live a series of distinctive alterities, such that each instance of subject formation is ‘uneven and unfinished . . . leaving a variet y of residues that remain uncontained by and antagonistic to the state apparatuses of domination and assimilation’ (135). What subject might emerge, for example, from a girlhood education in French Catholicism in Korea in the 1930s? This is something that Lowe contemplates through Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s text, Dictée (1982). In this context, Lowe argues, religion was articulated with colonialism and language training in French: ‘each demands different repetitions of the subject, and each is inextricably implicated in the form of fidelit y demanded by the others’ (148). Placed starkly against Althusser’s (1969) claim that

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Christian religion is a paradigmatic example of an ideological apparatus that transforms the individual into a faithful subject, Lowe introduces a complicating series of alterities: as female, as colonial other, as racially and linguistically other, identification for such a Korean girl cannot be complete or entirely faithful. Further, these ‘nonidentities . . . cannot be reduced in a single dictated formation of the subject’ (148). Departure and distance through migration are yet further moments and mechanisms of exceeding faithful or full identification.9 Lisa Law (1997) considers what this t ype of episodic formation of subjects within sedimented but differential histories and geographies might mean for concrete organising among Filipina dancers.10 Her analysis is based in Cebu Cit y, Philippines, a further reminder of the obvious but (so Spivak argues) often forgotten fact that hybrid subjects and spaces exist outside first-world multicultural cities.11 Law writes against standard analyses of sex tourism which construct ‘a-go-go’ bars as singular sites of oppression that work through simple binaries of rich Western man/poor Filipina; powerful/powerless; oppressor/victim. She analyses the bar as a space in which different discourses jostle and collide, and some times just pass by each other, and argues that identities are less fixed and power relations more diffuse than is t ypically recognised. Some Western men, for example, understand their encounters with these dancers through a Western feminist lens of economic inequalit y, an interpretation that problematises their own masculine sexual identit y insofar as they are forced to recognise that their sexual appeal is mediated by their economic power. Dancers embody sedimentations of colonial histories. Reflecting the influence of Spanish colonialism (from the sixteenth century to 1896), they have been schooled in and call upon a discourse of Catholicism, of mart yrdom, suffering and shame, in ways that disrupt simple moralising about their job as ‘a-go-go’ dancers. As US colonial subjects (1902–46), they have been educated in English and into Western beaut y regimes. Breast enlargements are read by the dancers themselves both as the embodiment of a personal history of working around American military bases, and thus evidence of both American imperialism and a stable identit y as prostitute, and as a form of agency over their bodies and an effort to ‘become modern’. Rather than judging the dancers simply as participants in their own oppression, Law thinks that it is more productive to understand the complexit y of power relations, the discursive constructions and subject positions that speak to and are spoken by the

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dancers, and their efforts to refuse stereot ypes that position them within coherent identities as ‘prostitutes’ and ‘victims’. And if this seems like a politically immobilising theoretical gesture, consider that one discourse that barely makes it through the door of the bar, and to which dancers turn a deaf ear, is AIDS education from NGOs about condom use. If such NGOs have any hopes of speaking to and with dancers, Law believes that they have to not only understand the complexit y of dancers’ subject positions, but begin a more subtle process of translation in relation to them. Law is attempting to find a political space beyond conventional representations of sex tourism, and understands her analysis to be a means of imagining ‘more ambivalent deployments of power’ that allow for ‘collaboration and contestation’ (109). Her analysis suggests that a conversation across representations of women as ‘sex workers’ or ‘victims of Western imperialism’ with women who embody them – the scenario with which the chapter began – can only begin if the incompleteness of their identifications and the ‘residuals that remain uncontained by them’ are acknowledged and explored. To return to Lucy to address the third point that it raises, Lucy’s predicament of partial disconnection and emotional withdrawal also opens opportunities for a different kind of connection, through social responsibilit y rather than individualistic love (or identit y). Or rather, Lucy chooses the ‘right/responsibilit y of loving, denied to the subject that wishes to choose agency from victimage’ (Spivak 1999: x). Robbins (2003: 22) likens this to a ‘cooler, less satisfying brand of love, still compromised by hierarchy and injustice, that is historically embedded in the welfare state’. This is a structure of responsibilit y that carries with it rights to reparation. Spivak is using Kincaid’s novel as a means to articulate and imagine a different relationship between rights and social responsibilit y within a deconstructive ethics of complicit y: ‘dirt y hands that can never be cleaned’ (Robbins 2003: 19). She describes a coming into self hood – not against or apart from – but enmeshed in these networks of social connection. This is not an empirical case study, and it would be wrong to imagine Lucy’s economic migrancy and her betrayal of her mother as a generalised empirical description. Filipino domestic workers who call home daily to mother their children in the Philippines and send home large portions of their salaries as remittances would deeply resent this portrayal of their migrancy. Non-generalisable as a description, Spivak nonetheless offers a structure of responsibilit y – decidedly outside identit y politics – that is

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good to think with. Is it possible, for example, for Canadian employers of domestic workers to be brought into this chain of complicities and an ethic of social responsibility so as to find common cause with domestic workers? I want to pursue this theme of linkages by switching geographical metaphor – from that of displacement and severing connection, to topography and mapping alliances.

The Labour of Translation Cindi Katz (2001) has assessed some of the limitations of feminism’s theoretical resources for imagining connections among differently situated women. In particular, she criticises an overreliance on theories of identit y abstracted from the specificit y of material histories and geographies. The concept of situated knowledge (Haraway 1988) has been a powerful analytical tool for insisting that all knowledge is socially located, but too often in feminist theory that location is a subject position, ‘a space of zero dimensions . . . from which materiality is largely evacuated’ (Katz 2001: 1230). Katz offers as its complement the concrete abstraction of counter-topography. Topography is ‘the accurate and detailed delineation and description of any localit y’ (Oxford English Dictionary, 1971; quoted by Katz 2001: 1214). Katz imagines this delineation as a patient process of mapping contour lines; it is by drawing layers and layers of contour lines that three-dimensionalit y is produced. If Katz’s first concern is to reinvigorate the material within feminist theory by insisting on the necessit y of studying the sedimentation of the varied processes of globalising capitalism in particular places, she is also alert to the metaphorical provocations that attend her concept. ‘Contour lines are lines of constant elevation, connecting places at precisely the same altitude to reveal a terrain’s three-dimensional shape’ (2001: 1229). She imagines each contour line as a particular process, say deskilling of women’s labour. Our analytical task is to trace these lines across places to show how places are connected by the same processes, even as they are always situated within the specifics of their fully three-dimensional space.12 She hopes that her material metaphor can inspire a different kind of politics that is not homogenising, but is one ‘in which crossing space and “jumping scale” are obligatory rather than overlooked’ (1231). Katz is using the metaphor of topography loosely to invite us to draw connections that respect the specificit y of place and the materialit y of existence. Such translation exercises are not generalisable, and I offer a

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few examples that draw contour lines in different ways. One example involves tracing contour lines across places through historical narrative. Consider Lowe’s description of the interpretation placed on the Los Angeles uprising in April 1992 in the Korean-American documentary film, Sa-I-Gu. The title, which means 4.29 or April 29, embeds the Los Angeles uprising firmly within Korean national history because it follows after the manner of naming other events in Korean history – 3.1 (sam-il) for March 1, 1919, when massive protests against Japanese colonial rule began in Korea; 6.25 (yook-i-o) or June 25, 1950, when the Korean War began; and 4.19 (sa-il-ku), or April 19, 1960, when the first student movement in the world to overthrow a government began in South Korea. The ironic similarit y between 4.19 and 4.29 does not escape most Korean Americans. (Kim 1993: 216) Lowe argues that this allusion to Korean history through the naming of the film is ‘not a direct transference of Korean nationalism but a discontinuous rearticulation of it that includes the crucial consideration of the racialization of Korean immigrants in the United States as workers of color’ (1996b: 423). This subtle mapping of continuities and discontinuities, which involves a partial folding of one geography into another, is an act of translation and articulation that embeds a critique of the conjunction of global capitalism, racism and patriarchy in the United States in a longer history of colonial and nation-state oppression. We might imagine the film Sa-I-Gu as tracing a contour line that maps state oppression, racism and struggle for democratic inclusion in two places at different times. It involves a literal act of translation that does not reduce one struggle to another. This is because contour lines drawn at different elevations in relation to other issues would connect South Korea in different ways to different places. Anti-colonial and democratic struggle in South Korea is not reducible or fully translatable to the struggle for political and economic inclusion of Korean-Americans because they articulate with other processes in each place. These connections need not be merely nominalistic. To return to the scenario that opens this chapter, when Filipino activists locate Filipina migrants as third-world women, they are activating an interpretive framework that allows them to wed a critique of American imperialism and global capitalism to a critique of liberal individualism and the discursive production of prostitutes as free individuals with propert y to sell in a fair

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wage contract. They are also insisting on the concrete interdependence between the policies and practices of the IMF and World Bank, and the production of a supply of Filipina prostitutes within Canada and other Western countries. In a comparable way, Filipino-Canadian youth discussed in Chapter 6, through their concrete, personal histories of their parents’ forced migrations, are tracing a contour line between their antiracist struggles in Canada and organising against both American imperialism and state authoritarianism in the Philippines. These lines are also vectors along which bodies and ideas move. The Canada-based youth group both supports Philippines-based struggles from their location in Canada, and brings back to Canada organising techniques that they have learnt in the Philippines. The play that they performed through 2000 and 2001, for instance, represented experiences of forced migration and the difficulties of settling in Vancouver through revolutionary theatre techniques learnt in the Philippines (see Figure 7.1). Contour lines can be drawn through particular institutions. Rachel Silvey (2002) describes a process of drawing lines through the company of Nike, so as to connect groups that might not otherwise see their common interests. She traces a line that connects women Nike factory workers in Indonesia with student activists in the United States protesting Nike’s production of their own universit y’s logo-bearing products (e.g. sports clothing with universit y identification). Nike threatened to cancel a multi-million dollar contract with the athletic department at her universit y if it signed the code of conduct demanded by student activists. Aligned with student activists, and asked by universit y administrators to sit on a committee to determine policy on this code of conduct, Silvey felt the weight of Nike’s overbearing stand on this issue. She recognises that the lived situations of factory workers in Indonesia, her situation as a pressured facult y member and the position of student activists on her universit y campus are not comparable and that the effects of global neoliberal trends are very different in the two places. But she insists that groups in both places share the experience of being pressured, disciplined and silenced by Nike, and this recognition provides the grounds to build alliances across contexts. She describes efforts to make other connections – in particular, to the low wages of (largely immigrant women) universit y service workers who also bear the impact of the corporatisation of the universit y. Like Katz, Silvey argues that examining one’s standpoint or position

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Figure 7.1 The Filipino-Canadian Youth Alliance perform experiences of forced migration in Breaking Ground. Photograph courtesy of FCYA.

and acknowledging complicities (in her case, worrying about the fate of her job) are neither sufficient in themselves nor necessarily divisive and politically immobilising, but can provide the grounds for making links and developing alliances across difference and multiple forms and sites of oppression. Tracing material connections – both interdependencies between places and common experiences within places – establishes a firmer ground for attentiveness across differences than does a more individualised ethical commitment to transcending ‘difference-making mechanisms’ of identification. Maps are notorious instruments of power/knowledge, which can effectively solidify existing relations of power. Katz is calling for counter-topographies that disrupt hegemonic, naturalised understandings of the order of things. To appreciate her argument we must return the ‘homey verbiness’ to mapping contour lines by seeing it as a process of making connections visible, through layers and layers of tracings that emanate from different locations, including geographical locations. We

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must be attentive to who draws the lines and how. Silvey notes, for example, efforts to reframe students’ interpretation of their actions away from ‘saving third-world women from Nike’ to an interpretation that makes connections to racialised and gendered oppressions and to living wage campaigns within the United States. Katz’s schema of countertopographies returns us to Marion Young’s attempts to ground feminist solidarit y, not in shared identification (‘fellow feeling’), but in obligations of justice derived from concrete social and economic connections across the globe (as discussed in Chapter 4). Young argues that where connections exist, institutions stand in relations of justice. Counter-topographies map the contours of these connections and can be seen as efforts to push relations of justice far beyond the nation-state. Katz insists on reading connections and commonalities both against dominant readings of globalisation and against the specificity of places; this echoes a commitment to a process of translation across cultural differences that does not simply redescribe within the terms of the dominant discourse, but respects the labour of translation across incommensurate frames (Schutte 2000). Faced with Susan Okin’s (1999) rough dismissal of cultural relativism, several commentators countered with the need for ‘genuine dialogue’ (al-Hibri 1999), and a co-operative exploration of differences (Parekh 1999). Such a conversation would have to be open-ended and attentive to the context. For example, Eric Fassin (2001) has argued that defending or opposing same-sex marriages and family rights for samesex couples had different meanings in France and the United States at different moments through the 1990s, and could be judged to be radical or conservative depending on the enframing political discourse. Returning to the conversation between Ninotchka Rosca and the young Chinese-Canadian AIDS activist with which this chapter began, this would suggest that there is no predetermined destination for their conversation, and it is not clear in advance how a liberal rights-based discourse (prostitute as worker with rights) can accommodate the victimof-third-world imperialism discourse of Rosca (or vice versa). The effects of each interpretative framing of prostitution, in Vancouver at this moment, would have to be assessed. This is another spatialit y that augments the one that Katz envisions because, instead of tracing contour lines across places, it is the collision of disparate interpretations in a single place that is at issue. This is precisely the predicament invited by critical multiculturalism (Kobayashi 1993).

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Labouring over Translation In her analysis of M. Butterfly, Chow locates an opening for change beyond the endless production of the white man’s Others, in particular the orientalising of the East, in the suicide of Gallimard (the white man) and Song’s flight from Europe back to China: [T]he death of the white man signals the dawn of a fundamentally different way of coming to terms with the East. The film closes with [Song] flying back [from Europe] to China. This ‘oriental woman’ who existed as the white man’s symptom – what will happen to her now that the white man is dead? That is the ultimate question with which we are left. (1996a: 87) In Chapter 6 I tried to locate an opening in another geographical scenario, one in which Song does not fly back to China but declares herself to be present at the founding of the Canadian nation – a simple refusal to be outside the nation. This scenario is held in close tension with another figure who refuses superficial inclusion and insists on the productivit y – the democratic productivit y – of a history outside the nation. With shared but different histories of racial exclusion, it is a conversation across an insistent inclusion and an insistent history outside the nation that might produce both alliances between the young Chinese-Canadian activist and Rosca, and the potential for something new to emerge out of them. But in real life the white man is not dead, and the gist of Chow’s remarks to Quillen is that fantasy persists, such creatures continue to ‘salivate and come alive for real even if the stimulus has nothing “real” behind it’ (1996a: 67; original emphasis). I think that Meaghan Morris’ remark about ‘the widespread tendency in feminism to know in advance that any event is just more of the same old story, more of the same patriarchy, the same racism, the same form of class exploitation’ (1998: 199; original emphasis) bears repeating. In particular, Morris argues that there is much to learn from Aboriginal political tactics in Australia through the 1980s and 1990s, their practices of cultural pedagogy, ‘theatre of politics’ and ‘actual dialogue’. It is too knowing, too cynical, to presume in advance that whiteness and the production of difference will inevitably go on in the same old ways. Morris’ list of tactics involves creative modes of storytelling. Genuine dialogue across differences takes time and creativit y. We might think of

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modes of telling that insist that we take the time, and allow access to differences through the mode of telling over time. We might think of readers who take the time to recognise this. To return to Spivak’s reading of Lucy, she argues that the preferred ‘migrant-as-victim’ reading ‘in black and white’ is a fast, superficial one, which engages only the story or subject matter but not the rhetorical form of the text. In Spivak’s view ‘what mainly happens in this novel is . . . parataxis’ (2000: 337); that is, placing sentences side by side without conjunction.13 Spivak takes, as one example, two sentences from the first page of the book: [A] famous building, an important street, a park, a bridge that when built was thought to be a spectacle. In a daydream I used to have, all these places were points of happiness to me . . . for I would imagine myself entering and leaving them, and just that – entering and leaving over and over again – would see me through a bad feeling I did not have a name for. (Kincaid 1990: 3) This is a rhetorical representation of a ‘paratactic affective structure’, of ‘a withdrawal from affective connectives’ (Spivak 2000: 339). It is through attending to the specificit y of language that Spivak believes we might gain imaginative access to the experience of ‘quite-other’ (336). Spivak thus insists on the literariness of fictional writing, on literature being more than a story, an account. It is the peculiarit y of language that gives imaginative access to the ‘quite-other’. Chow (2001) makes a similar point in her reaction to Quillen’s use of her analysis of M. Butterfly. Chow reminds Quillen that she is analysing a fictional representation and she is, in particular, fascinated by how David Cronenberg uses the mythical construct of Oriental Woman as a means of exploring the ‘limits of humans as subjects and agents’ (135; original emphasis). ‘But, rather than being simply stated as an idea, this point is gradually revealed through the film’s structure, its fictional way of probing fantasy’ (136). Both Chow and Spivak are stressing not only the distinctiveness of fictional representations, but a certain temporal and spatial relationship between reader/viewer and text that allows a mode of imagining differences, both parataxis and fantasies of difference and identit y. I want to question Spivak’s and Chow’s insistence on the distinctiveness of fictional representation and ask whether there are ways for ‘social scientific’ representations to be more attentive to modes of storytelling that can better enable genuine dialogue across difference. At our first

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workshop with domestic workers at the Philippine Women Centre in 1995, the first items that domestic workers put on the agenda for discussion were their experiences in the Philippines: what they did there before coming to Canada, their frustrations with nepotism in the labour market in the Philippines ( ‘it’s not what you know, but who you know’), elaborate processes of moving through various institutional structures in the Philippines, the medical test, taxes and levies that they endured to come. It seemed that they most wanted to talk about their lives in the Philippines, and I wanted to hear about their lives in Canada. I have only begun to understand that their stories about life in the Philippines are stories about life in Canada; this chapter has been an effort to tell why this is so. It was not only the content of their stories that I was deaf to, but also the mode of storytelling. I want to turn now to imagine how I might hear not only the plot line but the rhetorical framing – the peculiarit y of the language itself – of their stories.

Notes 1. In this example, the misrecognition is complex because Song is actually a man and

a spy for the Chinese government. 2. Commenting on Quillen’s analysis, Chow is sceptical that her own analysis can

3. 4.

5.

6.

7.

be taken as a foundation for a humanist feminist ethics: ‘I am not sure that it is convincing to see the film in terms of humanism, however broadened, difference aware, or culturally sensitive. There is something profoundly antihumanist in the revelation that human “consciousness” is always a matter of misrecognition . . . human consciousness is not something that will improve through an increased attention to social injustice because fantasy somehow always intervenes’ (2001: 136). So too, Kondo (1997: 157) argues that internationalisation of the economy was ‘of a piece’ with neo-nationalism in Japan in the 1980s. Thus Ong argues that Cambodians are inevitably referred to as refugees while Vietnamese refugees are referred to as immigrants – the label and stigma of refugee status does not ‘stick’ to Vietnamese migrants. Ong is critical of what she sees as overly zealous feminist social workers who ‘empower’ immigrant women through a rights discourse in ways that build on stereot ypes of Cambodian men. She also argues that attempts to extract maximum resources from the welfare system are, at least in part, responsible for high rates of pregnancy among Cambodian teenage women and are leading to fundamental changes to family composition. ‘Monster house’ is a derogatory term used in North America to describe a st yle of modern architecture associated with wealthy Hong Kong Chinese immigrants (see Ley 1995). Radhika Mongia (1999) makes the point that nationalism is always constructed

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within globalisation historically, arguing that the ‘so-called nation-state’ only came into existence in the age of empire (543). Specifically, it was the ‘long process of end of empires that generates the nation-state as contained entit y’ (544). A nation such as Canada was caught between commitments to juridical liberalism and the universalisms it entails, and a history within the British Empire. This dilemma could be stated no more clearly than it was by Wilfred Laurier, former Prime Minister, speaking in 1914 as a member of the Opposition part y: ‘The people of Canada want to have a white country, and certain of our fellow subjects who are not of the white race want to come to Canada and be admitted to all the rights of Canadian citizenship . . . These men have been taught by a certain school of politics [that is to say, liberalism] that they are the equals of British subjects’ (quoted by Mongia 1999: 550). The dilemma was most acute in relation to other British subjects, notably British subjects from India. Mongia traces a decade of struggle between 1906 and 1915 which culminated in state monopoly over migration, achieved through the technology of the passport. ‘The passport is thus a document that has effectively naturalized the rule of colonial difference in what one might call the “rule of postcolonial difference”, where the marker of difference is not “race”, but the “universal” category of “nationalit y”’ (Mongia 1999: 555). Nationalit y was an acceptable marker of difference because it had the appearance of being reciprocal and thus non-discriminatory. Importantly, it was not just a desire for racial homogeneit y within Canada that enabled this to occur. The government of India repeatedly refused to adopt the passport system for fears that it would fuel anti-colonial and nationalist sentiment in India. Through the ensuing process of negotiation, the very meaning of the nation changed, from ‘a state designation made on juridical grounds’ to a ‘more full-fledged, robust, and familiar notion of nationalit y as a narrative of origin and authenticit y . . . whereby people are tethered to the geographical space of the nation’ (546–7). As Mongia notes, this point ‘is simple, but deceptively so’ (543). With no Treat y engagements with China and no shared history of empire, overt racial discrimination against Chinese settlers to Canada was more acceptable (Mongia 1999). With respect to Aboriginal peoples, the land was cleared, imaginatively through conceptions such as ‘terra nullus’, and by means of thoroughly repressive regimes of domination that culminated, in the case of British Columbia, in a system of unworkably small, mostly rural reserves and systematic plans for cultural eradication through assimilation (Harris 2002). 8. The histories and interpretive structures that migrants bring are not necessarily progressive; this is Spivak’s point about the need to pay careful attention to how migrants are inserted within the circuit of hegemony. Mitchell (2001) develops this argument in relation to affluent Chinese immigrant parents in the suburb of Richmond, Vancouver, who reject the fundamental principle of individualism that underlies the federalist multicultural model and have entered into a conversation with Canadian parents about the goals and ideals of their children’s education. Chinese immigrant parents have been strong supporters of ‘traditional’ schools in Richmond, arguing that these schools teach an ethical code that will better equip their children for a competitive global societ y. They see this as more important than a focus on creativit y, and the child’s rights to individualit y. Chinese immigrant parents thus frame the needs of their children in terms of global rather than

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10.

11. 12. 13.

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national citizenship. Assessing the progressive potential of these parents’ actions, Mitchell asks: ‘Rather than through the “generous” inclusion of outside groups into a hegemonic nation-state project, how can the project itself be reformulated from the “bottom up”? How can multiculturalism be given teeth through a reconstitution of the project “from below”? How can national responsibilities articulate with global ones and vice versa?’ (71) Mitchell is, however, well aware that the political demands of the Richmond Chinese-Canadian parents are not necessarily progressive because they have the potential to ‘leapfrog from [the nation-state] directly into the netherworld of global capitalism’ (71). Following Pecheux’s reworking of Althusser, Muñoz distinguishes between identification, when a ‘good subject’ identifies with discursive forms, and counteridentification, whereby the ‘bad subject’ resists identification with dominant discourse. The danger of counter-identification is that it potentially validates dominant ideology ‘through controlled symmetry’ (Munoz 1999: 11). Disidentification is neither pure assimilation nor pure opposition, but rather works on, through, and against dominant ideology. Lisa Lowe helpfully articulates disidentification in terms of displacement, including spatial displacement. She is particularly attentive to disidentifications from the national citizen subject, ‘constituted through lateral movements across distances and disjunctions’ (1996a: 220). Migration and contradictions between liberal ideology and material patterns of inequalit y would be examples of lateral movement and disjunction, respectively. Law is drawing on Bhabha’s notion of third space. Geographers have been keen to interpret Bhabha’s third space spatially. Though certainly productive, I’m not sure that this is Bhabha’s notion of third space, which is more a temporal reading of the unfixit y of language. The third space of enunciation refers to the split between a stable system of reference and the specific condition of enunciation. All cultural statements are constructed in this contradictory and ambivalent space (Bhabha 1994: 36–7). Spivak (2000: 353) quotes Stuart Hall: ‘The notion that only the multi-cultural cities of the First World are diaspora-ised is a fantasy.’ This notion of counter-topography bears some relation to Mohant y’s (1997) geographically grounded, comparative methodology. In her analysis of Dictée, Lowe notes Cha’s distinctive and unconventional use of the conjunction ‘because’. In this case, the unorthodox use of the conjunction registers the failure of temporal narrative and this acts to ‘assault causalit y as a trope of official history’ (1996a: 111).

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CH A P TER 8

Song Flies Home

We need to perform our texts. We need to perform in our texts. (Dening 1996: 116)

When Trevor Barnes, Dan Hiebert and I applied for funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council in 1990, we outlined a smooth research trajectory for the proposed case study of domestic workers: first, I would interview twenty nanny agencies, then sixty nannies, and then twent y employers. The actual research process was a much livelier, halting one, embedded in the politics of doing feminist research in the 1990s. I want to examine that process, in an effort to understand how old habits of thinking haunt the best-intentioned, seemingly progressive research strategies. In Shotter’s (1998) view, we have yet – still – to put much of our theoretical talk into our research practices. Our talk may be that of poststructuralists, and/or postcolonialists, but our practice continues to be that of colonising humanists; it is the self-induced invisibilit y of our disciplinary procedures that allows this. My objective for this selfreflection is to make some of the boundaries of social science conventions visible, in order to clear spaces for more varied research practices. I am particularly interested in examining my reluctance to allow expression of stereot yping and ridicule, what might be interpreted as evidence of the emotional distance within which Spivak (2000) has located possibilities of connection through generalised social responsibilit y rather than identification. As such, this chapter also functions both as a t ype of cautionary tale about the challenges of connection, and an investigation of another way of storytelling beyond the endless recycling of orientalist representations. This is a way of pursuing – though not answering – the question that Chow poses about the ending of M. Butterfly, when Song flies back to China: ‘what will happen to [the orientalised woman] now that the white man is dead?’ As Chow notes, ‘That is the ultimate question with which we are left’ (1996a: 87). Certainly there have been decades of self-reflexive debate in many disciplines. Feminists have been keenly aware that bringing marginalised

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groups into visibilit y is insufficient to change hegemonic relations; as Phelan (1993: 10) wryly notes, if representational visibilit y ‘equals power, then almost-naked young white women should be running Western culture’. This recognition has prompted prolonged debate through the 1980s and 1990s about how to bring marginalised women into visibilit y, the impossibilit y of representation outside of dominant ways of thinking and viewing (de Lauretis 1987; Spivak 1988), the politics of white middleclass heterosexual women representing others (Alcoff 1992; England 1994), and the inevitable circulation and negotiation of power ‘even’ in feminist research practice (Stacey 1988). And yet Chow’s question remains. This particular research project was conceived amidst these concerns. In the domestic-worker case study, they led first to procrastination: I was slow in engaging domestic workers themselves. The politics of interviewing nanny agents and middle-class Canadian employers seemed far less complex than studying the lives of domestic workers, the majorit y of whom come to Vancouver, as ‘third-world women’, from the Philippines. Eventually in 1995, just before the research grant expired, I initiated a collaborative research project with the Philippine Women Centre. The director of the Centre had spent some time as a communit y scholar at the Centre for Research in Women and Gender Studies at my universit y. Having met her there, I approached her in her own space to discuss the possibilit y of collaboration. Eventually, we engaged domestic workers, already coming to the Centre, in a project of narrating their experiences as women living in Vancouver as domestic workers (see Figure 8.1). Our desire was to enable them to tell their stories in their own terms, with an intimacy, complexit y and force that would have an impact on those who read them, by dispelling stereot ypes and offering views into domestic workers’ experiences. Ong (1995: 354) has phrased this desire in more theoretical terms as one of helping ‘marginal groups intervene in global narratives by putting into circulation alternative circuits of discursive power’. It was the first such project for both me and the Philippine Women Centre. Ong (1995) engages with current ‘ethnographic anxieties’ about such collaborations, especially the concern that it is the first-world academic who more often benefits from them (in terms of her own career). I agree with Ong’s pragmatic assessment that ‘the most critical point is not that we [academics] reap material and social benefits from their [marginalised women’s] stories but that we help to disseminate their views and that we do so without betraying their political interests as narrators of their own lives’ (354). My hope was that collaboration with the Philippine

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Figure 8.1 Narrating experiences during the 1995 focus groups at the Philippine Women Centre. Photograph courtesy of the Philippine Women Centre.

Women Centre would help me to listen carefully and minimise the potential for such betrayal. Subsequently, women at the Centre have used our research experience to independently generate funds for and carry out further communit y-based research projects.1 This kind of transfer of skills (and legitimacy), from professional to communit y researchers, seems to me to be one of the best possible outcomes of such a collaborative project. At the same time, I want to resist a certain cachet that a universit y researcher can exploit from such collaboration. As will become apparent, the collaboration remained troubled by power dynamics. From another perspective, I distrust the virtue that accrues to academics who cross boundaries between the academy and other worlds. Without trivialising a long-standing feminist commitment to this t ype of border crossing, I agree with Threadgold (2000) that we must problematise a rhetoric that valorises these crossings too readily; they dangerously mimic and supplement the language of the corporate universit y (which also denigrates the ‘pure’ humanities and highly values ‘relevant’ or applied research). I choose to problematise the easy virtue of academic-as-collaborator, first by

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Figure 8.2 A house in East Vancouver. Photograph by Amelia Butler.

calling attention to the negotiated qualit y of my relationship with the Philippine Women Centre. But enough of academic talk. It’s time for a performance (that you’ll recognise as such).

A Fissured Landscape I found my way to the Philippine Women Centre by walking to the back of a small, grey stucco house on a residential street in East Vancouver. The pile of yellow terry-cloth slippers at the entrance indicated an expectation: that shoes are shed on entry. Sifting through the pile, I selected the largest pair. The one-inch gap between the end of the slipper and my heel imprints a recognition of difference. I have come for our second workshop with Filipina domestic workers. We had settled upon our methodologies together in an earlier meeting in this same space. When workers at the Centre suggested collage, sculpture and role playing as methodologies for storytelling I was cautiously interested, although I didn’t have a clue what I could do with these research products, paid for by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. I hoped that some more conventional oral histories would be told.

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Figure 8.3 Research in the basement of the Philippine Women Centre. Photograph courtesy of the Philippine Women Centre.

The first workshop was long, lasting from 10 in the morning until about 8.30 at night. We broke into three groups. For the most part, I didn’t know what was going on because most of the conversation was in Tagalog, a language I do not understand. The group that I joined moved in and out of English, as a courtesy to me. It was exhausting and I disappointed myself with momentary (and irrational) feelings of resentment for being excluded and isolated. I was relieved to see no evidence of collage or sculpture. We finished the day by joining in an informal circle. The director initiated a performance in which we each took turns moving into the centre of the room to dance. I remember laughter, and exaggerated, self-mocking, jokingly lascivious displays from the others, against which I posed my constrained, embarrassed, extremely brief performance. I felt exhilarated as I rode home on my bicycle, through the cool dark Vancouver streets. My body was competent and in motion, and I was moving away from the hours of sitting in a small basement (see Figure 8.3). As I pedalled away from the Centre, I entertained fantasies of moving back into that cultural space

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Figure 8.4 Pedalling through the employers’ landscape in Shaughnessy. Photograph by Amelia Butler.

and making new connections. I charted a path on back streets that took me quietly, stealthily, from a working-class, South-Asian neighbourhood, through Shaughnessy, traditional home of Vancouver’s elite. In the dark, in Shaughnessy, I could see into the displays of brightly-lit homes (see Figures 8.4 and 8.5); I simultaneously carried the stories of domestic workers in my head: their laughter about, anger towards and resistances to the inhabitants of these houses. But I wondered: who am I in all of this, especially as I registered the comfort, the release of bodily tension, as I moved past Shaughnessy into the familiarity of my middle-class neighbourhood and the ease of my home. In this narrative, I control the conditions of my own and others’ visibilit y, and choose to present myself as an uncertain, divided, sometimes pett y researcher. I question my competence and connection with those with whom I am collaborating, insofar as both emerge only as I actively pedal away from the messiness of social engagement, and I begin to recompose the cit y through a mélange of my vision and the remembered voices of domestic workers. My authority and sense of comfortable connection

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Figure 8.5 Shaughnessy at night. Photograph by Amelia Butler.

comes with distance, thus casting suspicion on me as a cartographer of connectivit y. I express fantasies of identification with my collaborators. I portray the accidental, uncontrolled side of research, which may produce (at considerable expense to national funding agencies) information that I have no idea of how to analyse. This narrative is an attempt to respond to and work with Rose’s (1997) criticism of feminist geographers’ attempts at self-reflexivit y. In Rose’s view, feminist geographers have embraced the ideals of self-reflexivit y without adequately problematising their ability to be self-reflexive. Working from within a psychoanalytic frame, Rose questions our capacit y to lay ourselves bare, but she also questions the motives that might lie behind some exercises in self-reflexivity, suggesting that they can represent another,

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more sophisticated, attempt to render the world transparent and coherent, yet another power move using a realist representational device. She reads the same metaphor of distanced appraisal that runs through masculinist geography, in what she terms ‘transparent reflexivit y’, a t ype of reflexivit y in which self-location serves the purpose of stabilising interpretation and removing bias in order to uncover the truth. We might see this as an instance of Shotter’s argument that theory and practice need not run in the same direction. We might wonder at its implications for the politics of counter-topographies because Rose’s critique suggests that reflexivit y is yet another tool used by Western feminists to maintain their privilege as expert cartographers. In trying to think her way past this return of the universalising, detached gaze, Rose reminds us of the aim of Haraway’s (1988) notion of situated knowledge, which is to excite scholars to produce partial knowledges, knowledges that are not overgeneralised. Partial knowledges leave opportunities to learn from other perspectives and ways of knowing, to engage in translation exercises across non-reducible knowledges. Iris Young (1997) builds this idea of partial knowledges into her model for inclusive democracy, which begins from the premise that all participants in public life have biases and blind spots, and are fundamentally ignorant in significant ways. In trying to describe the necessary process of imperfect, incomplete translation, Rose urges another spatial vocabulary – of gaps and fissures – to replace the metaphors of distance and detachment. And rather than being detached, stable and in control, the researcher herself is seen as reconstituted through the research process, within a fragmented space of fragile and fluid networks of connections and gaps. Reflexive accounts, then, are not ones in which the researcher is firmly located; they are accounts in which absences, fallibilities and moments that require translation are brought into visibilit y. Let’s return to a moment that resists assimilation.

A Rogue Performance And then the research ‘products’, laboriously transcribed and translated from Tagalog into English, arrived. Subsequently, I have made uneven use of these transcripts: the role-playing transcripts lie abandoned in my filing cabinet. This is a striking dismissal of a data-collection strategy initiated by women at the Centre. Perhaps now is the moment to unveil (fragments of) the role-playing transcripts.

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One more thing. Why don’t they [the Canadian government] treat people equally? Pet: [Assuming the voice of the Canadian government/employer] Why? Are you human? Ana: What do you think of us? Bing: As people of colour, it is only our colour that is different. If we talk about brains, we are equal. Pet: You have different tastes, smells, culture, and we had to teach you to speak English. Ana: Who told you that you teach us English? Pet: We teach you how to read and how to use a fork and spoon. Ana: If it is really true that you teach us, right now we are teaching your kids. Pet: We don’t have time anymore to teach our kids. Ana: That is the point. You are lazy. Marlyn: Some of your people [Canadians] are just depending on UI [Unemployment Insurance]. Ana: We are covered by the Employment Standards Act [ESA], but the employers aren’t following it. Bing: The employers are aware. Marlyn: You really have to push so that the law will be implemented. Pet: Why do you need the ESA? Marlyn: So that the employers will follow our demands. Ana: Why? What do you like, that we will work 24 hours a day? You are only paying us for 8 hours. Pet: Be thankful that you have a job. Ana: You’re not paying us right! Pet: You even have a place to stay [she is referring to the live-in requirement of which domestic workers are critical]. Marlyn: We are entitled to have it because we are paying $300 for our room and board. Bing: If it was not for us, you would not be able to go to work. Endrolyn: If there is no employer, you wouldn’t be here. Ana: Who assures you that we can’t come here? Bing: How can you work if you don’t have a nanny? Endrolyn: There is a daycare centre. Ana: You will end up paying more. Pet: You work so slow, that is why we need to extend your hours.

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My neglect of these role-playing transcripts now puzzles me; it signals both my continuing authorit y within this research collaboration and a boundary between what I do and do not count as empirical evidence. ‘Everyday practices dictate what narratives can be understood, what kind of story cannot be understood or credited’ (Smith and Watson 1996: 12). The role-playing exercises, suggested by my research collaborators, who were more familiar with the genre, inadvertently offer an opportunit y for examining not only my privilege but everyday practices of social science that are precisely so conventional as to be taken for granted.2 When I first received the role-playing transcripts, I saw them, not as narrating the women’s experiences, but as crude expressions of stereot ypes. This now seems like an odd reaction, particularly because I was then writing about nanny agents’ stereot yping of domestic workers (Pratt 1997b). As one way of understanding this reaction, I find it helpful to read the role-playing transcripts against another narrative, told the same day, which I have come back to again and again, and have felt compelled almost to overuse in my academic writing about Filipina domestic workers. This is a monologue from Mhay: Most of the Filipinos here, especially those who become immigrants, they ask: ‘Have you been here a long time?’ I say, ‘Yes’, and then they ask, ‘What is your work?’ I say, answering in an evasive manner, that I work in Tsawwassen [a place]. [Laughs.] Because that has an effect on . . . It’s not that I’m thinking of being a nanny as being very low. No. But I can’t accept that, the difference in the tone of speech, the way they ask you . . . So that if you said you were a nanny, you know . . . So I form my answer in another way to the question, ‘What is your job?’ I don’t say I am a nanny. I say I work in Delta, in Tsawwassen. I live in. Because most of us, especially we Filipinos, we go into small groups. One group will say, ‘Oh, there go the nannies, out on their day off together.’ It’s mostly Filipinos like us who say that. And then there’s that other issue about being, since you’re a nanny, you’re, you know, someone who steals husbands. That’s why wives are angry with us. I don’t get entangled with that issue, because I don’t steal husbands. That’s a dangerous situation. I’m not ashamed of myself, and think very low of myself because I’m a nanny, since I’m not doing anything wrong. I cook, clean, take care of children. I’m not just a nanny. I’m also a nanay [Tagalog for mother].

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I have found it easy to absorb Mhay’s narrative into my academic writing and credit it with the status of empirical evidence. This is for a number of reasons. Mhay is speaking directly and earnestly about her experiences. This is a realist narrative and her reliabilit y as a cautious observer is enhanced by her careful attention to tone of voice ( ‘the difference in the tone of speech’) and her self-consciousness about twisting the meaning of the question, ‘What is your job?’, to evade stigmatisation. This helps to establish Mhay’s testimony as reliable and empirically correct. Further, Mhay is sufficiently detached to assess her strategic opportunities, and detaches herself from stigmatising activities (for example, ‘I don’t get entangled’); she is, in other words, an enviable ‘Cartesian’ observer. The Galilean habit of thought that Descartes drew into prominence was detachment. For people interpreting themselves and things with detachment, the best view of anything would then be the spectator’s distanced view. Detachment enables us, first of all, to obtain a wider view, by extracting ourselves from the immediate pressures of the moment, and to see what is before us in terms of its relationships to other matters . . . Detachment also enables us to extract ourselves from the passions of the moment so that we can be objective – that is, think and speak out of the composed mood. (Spinosa et al. 1997: 6) Spinosa et al. argue that in everyday life, for example in evaluating the veracit y of a newscaster’s report, detached accounts are the ones we believe. Mhay’s narrative also conveys a familiar unified subject, the subject of humanism. Her narrative works through a contrast between a stable, self-possessed identity and the shameful ones that she fights against. There is some controversy about autobiography as a genre, whether its narrative structure imposes this subject position: ‘autobiography is a narrative form through which the West sustains its romance with individualism and promotes a universal representative subject’ (Smith and Watson 1996: 7). Caren Kaplan (1992) has argued that third-world women’s experiences are thus not adequately represented through autobiography. Ong (1995) nonetheless argues against making autobiography into an ‘outlaw genre’ and Smith and Watson (1996: 17) allow that ‘there are no inherently liberatory or repressive [narrative] practices, for any practice is co-optable and is capable of becoming a source of resistance’. Whatever the potentials or limitations of the genre, in Mhay’s narrative we experience a subject in

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conflict with an unjust outer world, and not a subject divided on to itself. Mhay is not written by discourse; she is actively crafting an identit y in resistance to what she perceives as misrepresentations of herself. Although Mhay is no passive victim in her account, she is certainly a victim of unfair treatment; it is an uncomfortable realisation that this may be another reason why her narrative is attractive. There is now a strong criticism of the victim status demanded of colonised women by Western, white scholars (hooks 1990; Mohant y 1991b). hooks locates herself against the position of marginality imposed by oppressive structures and by oppressors who say ‘tell me your story. Only do not speak in a voice of resistance. Only speak from that space in the margin that is a sign of deprivation, a wound, an unfulfilled longing. Only speak your pain’ (152). But as Mhay resists her victimisation, I am drawn to her narrative in other conventional ways. I identify with her, and in particular, with her clever instances of resistance through word play. Through a series of translations, Mhay reinterprets herself within dualities that are familiar, if repugnant. She literally translates herself from whore to mother. As a feminist reader, I am entertained and impressed by her use of patriarchal (and postcolonial) dualities in such a subtle and subversive way. This identification needs, however, to be problematised in light of claims that ethnography implicitly fetishises subjects of ethnographic inquiry by transforming them from the unknown ‘(and potentially anxiet y-producing “other”) into the “known” (the reassuringly familiar)’ (Phelan 1993: 94). The worry is that ethnography engenders a false sense of competence in the reader, who feels that she or he has come to understand other cultures. The reasons that I am drawn to Mhay’s narrative are, then, complex and contradictory, and some (that is, her deployment of the humanist subject, the effectiveness of the realism of her account, the weight that I give to her detachment, my ready identification) would seem to be at odds with my ostensibly poststructuralist, postcolonial theoretical and political perspectives. For some of the reasons that Mhay’s monologue is so successful as evidence, the role playing transcripts fail. The role-playing is performative and playful; not empirically correct. Pet is pretending to be a person or agency that she is not and eventually Endrolyn joins her, moving from her identit y as domestic worker to speak the voice of Canadian authorit y. This is, then, not an accurate reportage of personal experience. It might be seen to operate with the conventions of melodrama insofar as the

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statements are simultaneously excessive and one-dimensional. The shift from testimony to drama is certainly decisive. Jennings (1995: 9) writes about our ‘fear of drama’, its association with unbridled emotion unleashed from the intellect, loss of control, darkness and anti-social forces. In Dening’s (1996) words, Playfulness is a scandal. True believers live in – and the powerful would like to live in – an ex opere operato world where all signs effect what they signify in the signifying, and everybody is sincere. So mimesis that somehow clones the world is acceptable. It changes nothing. Being playful in the slightest way suggests that things might be otherwise. (113; original emphasis) And there is something more scandalous than ‘mere’ play at work here; it turns out that these Filipina women know all about white Canadians’ stereot ypes of Filipinas, and their justifications for Filipinas’ long hours and low wages, and they are arguing against them, as well as throwing out a few insulting stereot ypes of their own. It is possible that I first rejected this transcript precisely because it is truly disruptive of hegemonic patterns of thought. And this disruption comes from Filipino domestic workers, not from a critical, detached, Canadian theorist, fully in charge. In any given discursive event there will be a normative arrangement in which some participants are designated speakers and others are designated hearers. In many speaking situations some participants are accorded the authoritative status of interpreters and others are constructed as ‘naïve transmitters of raw experience’. (Alcoff and GrayRosendale 1996: 202) Throughout the collaborative research project, but most explicitly in the role-playing groups, the normative arrangements of both social science research and white Canadian societ y were profoundly disrupted; the designated transmitters of raw experience were simply out of (my) control. I find it important to work away at the puzzle of my reactions, to try to account for my resistance to this activit y. It allows me to better understand how thoroughly my actions – my research practice – as a ‘critical’ feminist geographer continue to be written by norms that I question and work against. This collaborative project was conceived in an effort to

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disrupt conventional ways of studying others and yet conventional representational practices persist, in this case, through the unselfconscious culling of documentary evidence. This really should come as no surprise; there is now a vast critical literature on the myriad ways that our representations of others betray our identities and interests: ‘one looks and one is seen’ (Phelan 1993: 16). But that this happened in a collaborative research venture is very troubling indeed.

Role Playing and Getting Some Distance To return to the rationale for reflexivit y: it is to specify the partialit y of a particular account, both to take responsibilit y for it and to open space for other ways of knowing. Understanding some of the relations of power that undergird the seeming facticit y of Mhay’s testimony creates room for thinking beyond the truth or falsit y of the role-playing exercise, to consider how it works as a representation of Filipinas’ experiences as domestic workers in Vancouver. I am not suggesting that role playing is the most novel or appropriate research strategy with which to represent domestic workers. Quite simply, it is the innovation that lies at hand and, again acting as gleaner, I use it to probe Chow’s question about representational strategies that exceed orientalism. Theorists working at the border of theatre and social theory often remind us of the et ymological roots of ‘theatre’: ‘the word theatre derives from the Greek theatron which literally means a place for seeing. However, it is also linked to the word theoria meaning spectacle . . . spectacle also meant “to speculate and to theorise”’ (Jennings 1995: 9; original emphasis). And it has been long recognised that play and performance in everyday life are moments for creating identities and exploring or speculating about social norms (Sutton-Smith 1997). Kondo (1995: 63, also 2000) assesses performance, and in particular theatre, as a place where women of colour ‘can be “bad girls”, to invoke Donna Summer, not “sad girls” . . . daring to be outspoken and outrageous, uniting to fight the sources of our common oppression’; it is a ‘site for new cultural possibilities’. It is particularly interesting to me how often these ‘bad girl’ performances involve a strategic engagement with stereot ypes. Chasnoff (1996) describes workshops that she co-ordinated as part of a short-term alternative high-school programme for pregnant teens in Evanston, Illinois, which eventually led to the production of Looking at Teen Motherhood: The Fantastic Moms Video. The video is structured in two parts: the first

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introduces stereot ypes of ‘mother’ and ‘teen’ to demonstrate how the two terms ‘refuse to pair’ (120). In the second half, the ‘Fantastic Moms’ attempt to represent themselves against these stereot ypes, in particular to convey the complexit y and individualit y of their circumstances. ‘By publicly narrating and interpreting these personal and hitherto “private” matters in the context of the stereot ype, the Fantastic Moms politicized without essentializing themselves, and rendered their tale eminently tellable’ (129). In her play (Dis)graceful(l) Conduct Dorinne Kondo creates Janice Ito, a young assistant professor working at Ivy Universit y who manages her daily life of racial and sexual harassment through fantasies of inhabiting a stereot ype of phallic Black Amazon, specifically, Grace Jones. The stereot ypes are themselves staged, and in the last scene, the Grace Jones and Madame Butterfly stereot ypes both enact and disrupt their t ypification: Ito:

OK. OK. I know I sound like a broken record. But I just need someone to look up to. To inspire me, to give me strength.

[Butterfly begins to stir.] Grace Jones: Butterfly: Ito: Butterfly: Ito: Grace Jones: Ito: Grace Jones: Butterfly: Grace Jones: Butterfly: Grace Jones: Ito: Grace Jones: Butterfly:

But why me? Yeah, why her? Oh, my. What’s she got that I don’t have? Why can’t I, an ASIAN woman, be your inspiration? I hate to say this, but . . . Go ahead, girl. You’re such a wimp. And a ho. [To Grace:] And you’re so strong. And so powerful. But you see. You’re doing it. Playing into it. Creating the mold. Dressing the mannequin. Yes, but . . . I didn’t think . . . Precisely. You didn’t think.

[The two women imitate each other.]

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Grace Jones: Neither of us could exist without the other. Butterfly – lotus blossom, the ultrafeminine, the flip side of . . . Butterfly: The phallic Black Amazon. Ito: Oh, my God . . . (Kondo 1995: 61–2) Though she recognises that working through stereot yped representations is a ‘risky business’ that may reinscribe stereot ypes, Kondo’s goal is to build cross-racial alliances through a strategic redeployment of them. The term, stereot ype, was first coined to refer to cognitive processes in 1922 by a journalist named Lippmann (Chow 1997). Apparently Lippmann was ambivalent in his judgement of stereot ypes, but social psychologists who have subsequently used the term have been less nuanced in their interpretation. They have used the term pejoratively, to refer to ‘incorrect generalizations that are rigid, oversimplified, and biased’ (Chow 1997: 27), which result from prejudice, ethnocentrism or an inabilit y to fully process information. Stereot ypes are now conceived as ‘images that injure’ (Chow 1997: 28). Indeed I may have resisted the role-playing transcripts because I had cast the domestic workers, in my own staging of melodrama, as heroines of my story; if stereot yping is bad, this was not an activit y that could be easily scripted.3 Hage (2000) interprets migration and migrants through the framework of the gift: the gift of citizenship. The rituals of citizenship demand that the gift be given and received graciously. Problems arise when the experience of forced migration – the experience of many domestic workers – produces subjects who are less than gracious, who are in fact angry about their circumstances of forced migration. If stereot yping Canadians is less than gracious, my reticence about revealing it may be bound up with a commitment to present Filipinas to Canadian societ y as good, deserving immigrants, as migrants without histories who wish to start life afresh in Canada. Ironically, this is an act of stereot yping that radically simplifies the circumstances and emotional lives of Filipina immigrants, and asks very little of Canadians in the way of reparation or re-imagining their nation as a multicultural one. There are, however, other ways of interpreting stereot ypes. Chasnoff (1996) reads the redeployment of stereot ypes by minorit y groups as an example of what Mary Louise Pratt (1992) has termed, auto-ethnography: ‘instances in which colonized subjects undertake to represent themselves in ways that engage with the colonizers’ own terms’ (110). Articulating Canadian stereot ypes of Filipina domestic workers – their primitivism and

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accented English – creates an opportunit y to respond to their employers, one that is unavailable in their employers’ homes. Chow (1997) theorises this politicised – and indeed performative – reading of stereot ypes in relation to the work of Hong Kong cartoonist Larry Feign. She attempts to move away from an empiricist, cognitive reading of stereot ypes to consider not whether stereot ypes are true or false, but how they function as representational devices. Stereot ypes are dangerous, in Chow’s view, not because they are misrepresentations or formulaic, but because of their ‘capacit y for creativit y and originalit y . . . [They] have demonstrated themselves to be effective, realistic political weapons capable of generating belief, commitment, and action’ (34–5). In her opinion, the violence attributed to stereot ypes is not intrinsic to the stereot ype; it is an effect ‘of those in power who must, in order to stamp out competition and preserve their own monopoly, forbid others the privilege of stereot yping’ (37; original emphasis). Feign – as do the women at the Philippine Women Centre – wrests back this privilege, and, in a ‘fearless and deliberate play with boundaries’, produces cartoons that are ‘a lethal confounding of cliché and creativit y, petrification and expressivit y, death and life’ (37). Most subversively, he produces laughter, ‘that healthiest of anarchist explosives’ (38).4 Domestic workers at the Philippine Women Centre not only resist stereotypes of themselves; they are characterising Canadians as lazy, unjust and unlawful. It seems to me extremely important that Canadians be exposed to this simplified, stereotypical representation. By assaulting Canadian viewers/spectators/readers with stereot yped images that they may not want to see or hear, the Filipina domestic workers are insisting on points of disidentification and on the radical difference of their experiences, because of both their history in the Philippines and their treatment in Canada as migrant workers. It would be a pit y if we too quickly assimilated this assault into a comfortable reading of these images as stereot ypes-as-resistance, without considering what the stereot ypes demand from white Canadians. We might think of this as a moment that resists translation, one that articulates a deep anger, a sense of injustice and emotional disconnection on the part of Filipina domestic workers. In criticising Sandra Bernhard’s film, Without You I’m Nothing, bell hooks has argued that Bernhard’s playful imitations of black women operate in an artistic space that only she as a white woman can inhabit . . . Indeed, it is difficult to imagine any setting other than an all black space where black women could use comedy to critique and ridicule

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white womanhood in the way Bernhard mocks black womanhood. (hooks 1992: 39) Similarly, Kondo (2000) describes debates that took place in the production of Bordertown, a play written by a Los Angeles-based Chicano-Latino male trio called Culture Clash; the white director objected to the writers’ stereot yping of two white ‘Cit y fathers’. Kondo interprets this objection as a familiar move on the part of the dominant, who t ypically demand a complexit y for themselves that they deny to those they dominate. In these terms, Culture Clash defend their strategy of ‘fighting superficialit y with superficialit y’ (Kondo 2000: 93). In the role-playing exercise we have been invited to listen to a performance where white Canadians are talked against and for which white Canadians are not the intended audience. This communicates the message that there are different communities of speakers and audiences in Canadian societ y, and it works to displace the normativit y of white culture. It is an instance where Filipino domestic workers are mapping topographies of discontinuit y, surely a first step before dialogue across differences are imaginable. Further, the role-playing exercise provokes me to think harder about academic writing, about academic modes of address. Despite discussions of experimental ethnography and representation, realism is still the conventional social scientific empirical narrative genre. And yet there is a substantial body of criticism that claims that realism performs . . . the work of ideology, not only in its representation of the world of consistent subjects who are the origin of meaning, knowledge and action, but also in offering the reader, as a position from which the text is most readily intelligible, the position of subject as the origin both of understanding and of action in accordance with that understanding. (Belsey 1980: 67) The genre thus represents the subject of the text as a unified humanist subject and simultaneously produces the reader in a position of mastery. It also has been argued that personal testimonies invite identification that focuses the viewer/reader’s attention on the personal and psychological rather than the social and structural. These forms of data encourage, in other words, a humanist mode of telling history (Rabinowitz 1994; Renov 1984). There are, however, other ways of addressing an audience/reader.

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Dolan (1993: 437; original emphasis) asks of theatre: ‘How can audiences be trained to “listen in”, to retool our expectations of how and what we hear in the theatre?’ We can ask the same question more broadly. How might we construct texts and performances that challenge the reader more thoroughly, that render the reader divided, more aware, more challenged by points of disconnection, and the prospect of only partial translation across experiences? In short, how might we better prepare readers for dialogues across fissures and gaps? This is a pressing question for a study of domestic workers; as Phelan (1993: 158) notes: ‘the “belong to me aspect” of the documentary tradition – and the narrative of mastery integral to it – is far too close to the “belong to me aspect” of slavery, domestic work, and the history of sexual labor’. Various artistic media provide examples of addressing the reader in more challenging ways. Recall from Chapter 7, Spivak’s and Chow’s insistence on the imaginative possibilities available within creative writing and film. As a further example, Lowe (1996a) details how Jessica Hagedorn works away at the official history of the Philippines in her novel, Dogeater, by interweaving official history and gossip, so as to dissolve a firm boundary between legitimate and illegitimate representations. Within the social scientific tradition, we also find examples of writing that refuse capture and insist on the capacit y of non-white women to control the terms of their disclosure; Kamela Visweswaran’s essay ‘Betrayal’ is one such example (1994). Visweswaran writes a series of ethnographic encounters with older female informants in India as a three-act play. This format accentuates the fabricated nature of both her own and her informants’ accounts, and she is explicit that they all stage their performances so as to keep key information and identities off stage. As readers, we are simply left with the frustration of knowing that we cannot know a series of carefully orchestrated secrets. Sommer (1994) calls such texts ‘resistant texts’. They keep the reader at arm’s length – ‘a spatial relation that suggests contiguit y, not overlap’ (1994: 539). These texts, she argues, encourage us to imagine a politics of coalition among differently positioned subjects, but do not enable an easy identification that collapses the specificit y of different material histories. This is an argument for different modes of address, and not a prescription for the correct representational strategy. Kondo (1996, 1997), for example, weighs the criticism of realism in relation to contemporary Asian-American theatre, some of which is written in a realist narrative mode, and argues that an evaluation of the political effects of realism

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must be contextualised within specific historical and cultural power relations. One must consider the speaker’s position, the intended audience, the stakes, the larger discursive fields. For marginalised groups, realist writing can be a way of writing an identit y into existence. We can, for example, see Mhay’s testimony as an important political intervention; she is narrating the specificit y and complexit y of her existence. Our identification with her story and her authenticit y as a character in that story, rather than being politically regressive, can be interpreted as an important political act, which resonates with Rort y’s (1989) contention that human solidarit y can be achieved ‘not by inquiry but by imagination’ (Dening 1996: 205) (and, we might add, partial identification). We must search, then, for ways of writing, for our own representational strategies that challenge the hegemony of dominant ways of seeing and allow for the fractured landscape of identification and disidentification, one in which I have located critical as opposed to commodified or pluralist multiculturalism. Dwelling in Rose’s landscape of gaps, crevices and fissures leads us to consider personal testimony and role playing through stereotypes as research performances that operate differently. I have argued that they operate on the audience differently, the former inviting identification, the latter refusing or deferring it. We might also consider Dening’s (1996: 117) distinction between indicative and subjunctive performances. The indicative mood tells us ‘what is’; the subjunctive expresses the ‘as if it were’: ‘the enigma of the theatre, indeed of living, is that the one does not exist without the other . . . we make poles of them at the risk of fantasizing’. As researchers we tend to privilege the indicative mood. But if different methodologies are technologies for seeing differently – of actually seeing differently, my worry is that our existing technologies support the indicative mood, so much so that we see the world only as it is, more fully through existing power relations than we might have thought, and are thus blinded to how it might be otherwise: a world, for example, where smart-talking Filipinas trash their employers. This is a world where migrants have histories and such representations challenge us to speak across the burden of these histories towards a shared vision of social responsibilit y.

Research in the Present Tense Erickson (1995: 47) writes about the ‘double lives’ of plays: they are both

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‘potential grounds for performative action’ and written artifacts that are read for their thematic content. The radical potential of performance is located precisely in its transitory nature: it cannot be accurately recorded or repeated. It disappears. It seems to violate a (re)productive economy (Phelan 1993; but see Joseph 1998 for a critique of this view). Kondo (1995: 63) argues that the theatre presently offers more opportunities for ‘exploration, outrageousness, and flights of fantasy’ than do more popular media such as television, which are more cautiously censored. Theatre versus other popular media: this is not the issue here, but rather my concern is to engage in a debate about the particularit y of geographies and technologies for creating and circulating alternative interpretations. Performance theorists suggest that there is something about the transitory nature of performance – literally unrecordable – that opens opportunities for new ways of being and new modes of thought. Compared to the double life afforded to plays, I am struck by the singularit y with which many of us engage our research,5 principally as textual products constructed within a narrow ranges of genres. In this we enact the universit y as a domain for the production, reproduction and conservation of textual knowledges – an extraordinarily restrictive understanding of what we do as researchers in realit y. Our actual research performances, the now of research, go largely un(re)marked, even though they clearly exceed the written trace. My intent is not to romanticise performance. The force of Butler’s theory of performativit y is that most performances are reiterations of a norm. But if a failure within performance studies is the tendency to exaggerate the liminalit y of performance (McKenzie 1998), a complementary limit within the social sciences is a failure to explore the liminal possibilities of our own performances. And if the performative aspect of our research lies unexamined, there is no opportunit y to consider alternative research performances in order to weigh the extent to which they reiterate or subvert current norms. In hindsight, we staged several performances in the small basement inhabited by the Philippine Women Centre. We created a small theatre of experimentation in which domestic workers could be outrageous and pursue their own flights of fantasy, in ways that are also instructive about the conditions of domestic workers in Vancouver. However, the current state of thinking about research practice – as a means towards a realist text – is such that I have had to write myself towards this recognition. That this recognition came through writing should dissolve any fixed boundary between performance and text, and underlines one argument

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that runs through this text; this is that theoretical contemplation and research practice are interdependent. I want to suggest that the entanglements are deeper and more profound than many discussions of these matters suggest. It is not simply that theory informs empirical study and vice versa. There are critical and productive moments of rupture between academic theory and research practice. Different, contradictory epistemological framings can run side by side, and we sometimes enact both simultaneously in contradictory ways. Some research performances open opportunities for rethinking both theory and epistemology – the role playing that I consider here is just one example. Despite the current fascination with the performative (Nash 2000), there is a danger of missing the specificit y of different performative spaces, and the potentials afforded in each. We might envision the space of research as a much more varied space. We can conceive of it not only as the space of authentic testimony – as a t ype of confessional so ably assessed by Foucault (1978), but as a riotous theatre for transgressing norms or inviting representations of paratactic, affective structures that refuse quick translation or easy assimilation. We might think of it as a space in which we take our role as improvisational directors both more lightly and more seriously, to create spaces from which to speak and perform the unspeakable. The written traces, for example this text, are but one outcome of a process that far exceeds them. At the same time, the writing of this text has allowed me to appreciate how fully my collaboration with the Philippine Women Centre has transformed my research and theoretical practice.

Notes 1. The projects have dealt with housing needs assessment, violence against Filipino

2.

3. 4. 5.

migrant/immigrant women, experiences of professional nurses trapped in domestic work and the global trafficking of women. For information, contact [email protected]. When I presented a version of this paper to colleagues from History and Anthropology they seemed perplexed by my initial inabilit y to read the roleplaying transcripts as data; whether this signals a disciplinary boundary or my own idiosyncrasies, I cannot gauge. I might have been more wary of casting Filipinas in this role; they already bear the burden of being scripted as national heroines (Rafael 1997). Not everyone laughed. Larry Feign, pre-eminent cartoonist for the South China Morning Post was fired in 1995, for ‘politically motivated’ reasons (Chow 1997). This is not to say that research performances are entirely ignored. See, for

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example, ‘Innovative Conference Links Researchers, Activists and Performers’, Newsletter of the International Geographical Union Commission on Gender, May 1999, no. 22, p. 1. Available from Southwest Institute for Research on Women, Communication 108, P.O. Box 210025, The Universit y of Arizona, Tucson AZ 85721-0025 USA.

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Index Abjection, 18, 153 Accreditation, professional, 64–5, 106 Agency see Human agency AIDS education, 65, 149, 161, 166 Alien suffrage, 103 Alliances, multi-racial, 106, 187 Anderson, Kay, 155 Appadurai, Arjun, 124, 130 Arendt, Hannah, 93, 117n, 124 Autoethnography, 187 Benhabib, Seyla, 72 Berlant, Lauren, 76–7, 87, 89, 98, 145n Bhabha, Homi, 4, 131, 151, 159 Biopower, 13–16, 26–7, 30, 33–5, 74, 105 Bodily ego, 18 comportment and gender norms, 23–4

Body and discourse, 5, 8, 16–18, 21, 28, 30, 134

and performativit y, 16–18, 21, 23, 134

and political transformation, 86–7 as practico-inert object, 88 integrit y of, 18, 97–8 of citizen-subject, 73 produced as low-valued, 28 Brennan, Timothy, 122, 129, 146n Brown, Wendy, 32–3, 66, 74, 104, 107, 108, 114, 115–16

Butler, Judith, 19–30, 72, 82–7, 90, 192 critiques of, 19–30 Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, 93, 101, 107 Cheah, Pheng, 24, 29–30, 33, 37n, 93, 119n

Childcare, national systems of, 104 Chinatown, 155 Chinese-Canadians, 133–9, 149, 155, 156

Chow, Rey, 2, 3, 26, 34, 152–5, 167–8, 187, 188

Citizenship as means of articulating separate struggles, 85 differentiated, 33–4, 42, 71, 95 infantile, 76–7 potential, 41 rights see Rights, citizenship Class formation, 15, 50, 88 Colonial discourse, 30–2, 151, 160 hybridit y, 158–61 Colonialism, 56, 158 United States in Philippines see Philippines Contour lines and feminist connectivit y, 162–6 Cornell, Drucilla, 97–8 Corporate universit y, 164–5, 174 Cosmopolitanism, 13, 122, 132, 140 Counter-discourse, 62 Counter-topography see Contour lines and feminist connectivit y Cultural relativism, 150–1, 166 Democracy, 77, 82–9, 114, 179 Deskilling, 39, 46, 105, 142 Dictée, 159–60 Dietz, Mary, 85 Dirlik, Arif, 122–3 Disidentification, 138, 171n, 188, 191 Domestic servant see Nanny Domestic worker see Nanny Domesticit y, discourses of, 49, 99 Dyer, Richard, 98 Empire, 9 Empire, 6, 9, 30 Employment regulations, 41–52, 99–100, 117–18n

Empt y space, 82–7, 107, 114

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Index England, Kim, 80 Ethnicit y as biopower, 34

Human agency, 18–21, 71, 72 Humanism, the subject of, 154, 182–3,

Feminism and coalition building, 71, 87–9 articulation across liberatory struggles, 84–5, 162–9 as repository of democratic norms,

Hybridit y, 6, 130, 158–9, 160

189

85

differences within, 79–81, 149–55, 173

Western, 12, 71, 81, 173, 179 Filipino-American fiction, 2, 125, 190 Filipino-Canadian Youth Alliance, 108,

Identit y-in-injury, 105, 183 Identit y politics, 82, 105–6, 122 Immigration and restoration of liberal-democratic principles, 77–8 of Filipinos to Canada, 56–7, 108, 140–1

Imperialism, 13, 129, 160 Individualism, 25–6, 71, 72, 103–4, 106

125–6, 128–9, 140–8, 164–5

Filipino migrants, 4, 56–7, 108–9, 125–6, 147n

Joseph, Miranda, 36n Justice, 70, 82, 88, 166

as transnational subjects, 4, 62, 125–9, 139–45

children of, 139–44, 147n identifications, 8, 139–44, 147n identit y crisis, 58 resisting multicultural pluralism, 8,

Kalayaan Centre, 93, 108, 125 Katz, Cindi, 162–6 Kondo, Dorrine, 130, 185, 186–7, 190–1, 192

Kymlicka, Will, 104

106, 140, 143–5

Filipino Nurses Support Group, 108, 119n

Forced migration, 5, 142, 187 Foucault, Michel, 12–16, 21–2, 26–7, 30–1, 33, 34, 39–40, 66, 107

Fraser, Nancy, 74–5, 76, 77, 82, 86 Gibson-Graham, J.-K., 10–11, 50 Global neocolonialism, 30 Globalisation, 9, 10–11, 122–3, 156, 166

Gregson, Nicky, 24, 69n, 121 Hage, Ghassan, 132, 136, 144, 187 Hagedorn, Jessica, 125, 190 Hanson, Susan, 80 Haraway, Donna, 130, 179 Hermaphroditism, 16–17 Heteronormativit y, 16–19 and citizenship, 75, 77, 86 and immigrants, 77–8 and workplaces, 80 Hiebert, Dan, 38, 105 Home, 49, 66, 89–90, 99–101, 121–45 Honig, Bonnie, 77, 103 hooks, bell, 132, 145n, 183, 188–9

Labour market segmentation, 28, 38–9, 50

Laclau, Ernesto, 82–5 Law, Lisa, 63, 65, 160–1 Liberalism, 72–8, 95, 103–4, 150–2 agonistic, 159 and exclusion, 73–8, 80–1, 95–103, 150–2

and humanism, 152, 154 feminist, 71, 150–2 feminist critiques of, 71, 150–2 Live-in requirement, 48–50, 95–101 Lowe, Lisa, 20, 43, 113, 155, 159–60, 163, 190

Lucy, 157–9, 161–2, 168 M. Butterfly, 152–5, 167–8, 172 McClintock, Anne, 32 McClure, Kristie, 105, 108–10 Macklin, Audrey, 94, 100–1, 107 McLaffert y, Sara, 80 McNamee, Sara, 24 Maquiladora workers, 27–9, 90, 113 Marston, Sallie, 73 Mart yrdom, discourses of, 63 Marxism, 15, 27, 74, 107

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Index

Masculinism, 130, 131 Masculinit y, 75, 79, 98 and social programmes, 75 Massey, Doreen, 10n, 131 Melodrama, 1–3, 183 Misrecognition, 153, 169n Mitchell, Katharyne, 156–7, 170–1n Mongia, Radhika, 169–70n Morris, Meaghan, 9, 145–6n, 167 Multiculturalism, 5, 8, 9, 10, 34, 106, 112, 160

and cit y life, 131–45 and economic globalisation, 5–6, 34–5, 156

and liberal feminism, 150 critical, 138, 144–5, 159, 166, 191 critiques of, 131–2 liberal, 106, 132, 143–4 state, 156, 170n Nanny agents, 43–4, 50–3, 55–6 and discourses of bourgeois femininit y, 3, 30–2 Caribbean, 157–9 European, 32, 50–5 Filipino, 1–10, 38–67, 93–119, 125–9, 172–85, 187–9

National imaginaries, 76, 77–8, 112 Nationalism and feminism, 146n and gender, 130, 155–7 and human rights discourse, 112–13, 152

and the production of racial difference, 155–7, 169–70n Canadian, 112–13, 139 defensive, 129, 146n Korean, 163 Numbers of individuals coming to Vancouver (table), 42 Nurses, foreign-trained, 106, 125, 142, 147n

Nussbaum, Martha, 12–13, 32, 72 Occupational segregation, 38–9, 105; see also Labour market segregation Okin, Susan Moller, 150–1, 166 Ong, Aihwa, 33, 156–7, 173 Orientalism see Stereot ypes, orientalist

Paradoxical space, 71 Parataxis, 168 Participatory action research, 7, 173–4 Passavant, Paul, 73, 75–6 Pateman, Carole, 73, 79 Performance, 175, 179, 183–4, 185–7, 188–90, 191–3

Performativit y, 17–20, 22, 192, 193 Philippines and transnationalism, 141–4 diaspora, 125 labour export policy, 40 migration to Canada, 56–7, 108, 140–1

protection of overseas contract workers, 103, 118n remittances to, 40, 63, 161 U.S. colonialism in, 6, 160 Pincetl, Stephanie, 103 Postcolonial immigrants, 157–9 Postcolonialism, 122, 151–2, 157 Postnationalism, 124–5, 130 feminist critiques of, 130 Primitivism, 52–3, 75, 117 Privacy, 76, 89, 96–9, 100–1 Private sphere, 73–7, 79 Prostitution, 80–1, 149, 160–1, 163 Psychoanalysis, 14, 18, 21, 27, 33, 97–8, 152–4, 178

Public/private divide, 73–7, 79–80, 89, 96–9

Public sphere, 73–7, 83, 86, 89, 155 Quillen, Carol, 152–4, 167 Racial identification, 130, 134, 137, 140–1, 147n

Racialisation, 73, 75, 79, 80, 155–7 Racism, 31, 56, 138, 147n Razack, Sherene, 80–1, 103, 104–5, 112, 144

Realism, 183, 189, 190–1 Reflexivit y, 178–9, 185 Registered Nurses’ Association of British Columbia, 93 Remittances to the Philippines, 40, 63, 161

Resistance, 15, 20–2 Filipina, 62–4, 93–4, 98, 105, 106–9, 111, 114, 183, 188

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Index Resistant texts, 190 Rights, 46–8, 55, 71, 72, 74–6, 87, 93–120 and Canadian self-definition, 113 and gender difference, 73, 75, 78 and heteronormativit y, 75–6, 86 and social responsibilit y, 161 Citizenship, 93, 98, 103, 107, 110 Collective, 104–5 Depoliticising effects of, 74, 103–6, 108, 119n

Development, 110 Economic, 94, 110–11 Effects in postcolonial contexts, 151–2

Entitlement, 110 Human, 72, 93, 107, 110–14, 124 Negative, 109–10 Positive, 109–10 Special group, 104–5 Rose, Gillian, 24–6, 36, 131, 178–9, 191

Social constructionism, limitations of, 16–17

Spaces beyond justice, 80–1, 99, 121 degenerate, 80–1 empt y, 82–7, 107, 114 heterosexed, 80 racialised, 80–1 third, 171n transitional, 89 Spatial aptitudes, gendered, 23–4 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravort y, 14–15, 30, 33, 35n, 40, 68n, 151–2, 157–9, 161–2, 168, 172 Staeheli, Lynn, 99 Stasiulis, Daiva, 42, 94, 95, 101, 103, 111 Stereot ypes, 181, 187–9 Filipinos’ of Filipina nannies, 56–60

Filipinas’ of white Canadians, 180–1, 184, 187, 188, 189

Sa-I-Gu, 163 Same sex benefits, 105 marriages, 86–7, 119n, 166 San Juan, E., Jr., 6 Scale and activating human rights norms, 111–12, 113–14

and rescaling analyses of multiculturalism, 157 and transnational networks,

of Asian Americans, 20, 156–7, 186–7

of dominant groups by minorit y cultures, 188–9 orientalist, 152–5, 167–8, 172, 186–7 white Canadians’ of European nannies, 52–4 white Canadians’ of Filipinos, 52–5, 60–1, 69n, 140–1, 187

Stoler, Ann Laura, 3–4, 30–2

119–20n, 162

lives lived at a variet y of, 6, 7 Scott, Joan, 71, 83 Segal, Lynne, 27, 71–2 Separate spheres ideology see Public/private divide Serialit y, 87–8 Sex tourism, 114, 160–1 Sexualisation, 56–8, 140 Sexualit y children’s, 21–2, 23 discourses of, 13–22, 23, 26–7 state regulation of, 13–19, 86 Shadow state, 76–7 Shaughnessy, 134, 177–8 Silvey, Rachel, 164–5 Situated knowledges, 130, 162, 165, 179 Skills, construction of, 50–6, 60–2 Slavery, 94–5

The History of Sexuality, 13–16, 26 Topography, and feminist alliances see Contour lines and feminist connectivit y Touristic consumption, 132 Translation, 9, 85, 162–9, 179 Transnationalism, 9, 10, 119n, 133–45 Transnational feminism, 88–9, 162–6 Travel metaphor, 124–31 Undocumented domestic workers, 95 United Nations Convention for the Protection of the Rights of all Migrant Workers and their Families, 111 Human Development Index, 94, 113 Rapporteur on Human Rights for Migrants, 93, 107, 111

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218 Universal justice, 74, 80–1, 88 norms, 71, 72, 80–4, 90 Valentine, Gill, 24, 80 Varda, Agnes, 121, 122–3 Victimisation see Identit y-in-injury Visweswaran, Kamala, 126, 130, 190 Wex, Marianne, 23 Whiteness, 98, 157

Index Williams, Patricia, 97, 108 Wolch, Jennifer, 77 Work visas, temporary, 43, 101, 106, 107

Wright, Melissa, 27–8 Yeoh, Brenda, 62 Young, Iris Marion, 23, 80, 87–9, 166, 179 Zerilli, Linda, 84