by Dada Docot
To state it succinctly, this paper is about the creation and negotiation of power among kin. In this essay, I... more
To state it succinctly, this paper is about the creation and negotiation of power among kin. In this essay, I introduce the three matriarchs in my immediate family, located in three different “sites” of home. These three matriarchs have replaced the patriarch of the family, my grandfather, who built up his career from being a street peddler during his youth, to a successful bamboo basket exporter and furniture maker from the early 1970s until the 1990s. The patriarch, Tatay (father), was based all throughout his life in our hometown, until his death in 1992. Nanay (mother), the grandmother, was briefly a matriarch until she passed away in 2006. Since then, the new matriarchs, three daughters out of his twelve children, have had varying degrees of hold over the members of the clan living in three locations, namely: barangay (district or village) San Nicolas, located in the agricultural town of Nabua in the Bicol Region of southeastern Luzon Island, Philippines; a house on P. Tuazon Blvd., in the commercial district of Cubao, Quezon City, Metro Manila, and; in the Greater Los Angeles Area, California. I argue in this paper that the maintenance of these “homes,” and the assignment of gendered roles for each site was, and continues to be, necessary for the maintenance and propagation of kin unity and kin success. Likewise, I argue that in the case of my family's migration, the assignment of gendered status, such as “surrogate motherhood,” and others that I will later explicate on, should be understood according to traditional kinship patterns, and must thus be seen as a markedly localized practice of kinship. As I will show in this paper, a look into the complex practices of kinship and gender provides an insight into the contemporary dynamics of Filipino migration.
In looking at the work of kinship in rural-urban-overseas migration, I create a framework that follows feminist literature on kinship, such as those by Jane Collier and Sylvia Yanagisako (1987), which call for the exploration of gender and kinship as a “unified form or analysis.” I likewise consider kinship as being fluid and constantly changing, following Janet Carsten's arguments in the book After Kinship. In this paper, I reflect on several questions: Why do women assume or accept these gendered roles as matriarchs, as caretakers, or plainly as “powerless” members of the clan? By taking on these highly gendered roles, do women family members become complicit to the reproduction of gender inequality, or do they only perform roles according to the traditional worldviews of the Filipino family? What motivates the activation of these kinship and gendered practices?
To answer the above questions, I merge critical "peminist" work (used as reference to the Filipino school of feminism; in the Filipino language, the alien letter/sound f is often replaced with the more natural p, such as in Pilipino/Pilipinas) with Pierre Bourdieu's theory of practice, particularly his concepts of doxa and habitus. Feminist critique of Bourdieu's work, such as the writings of Beverly Skeggs and Julie McLeod, has called for more sensitivity in looking at how material, emotional and intimate aspects of the everyday overlap and interact with social fields that transform gendered practices. Skeggs' and McLeod's suggestions are particularly useful when looking at the contemporary work of specific family values and practices. In this paper, I argue that there is more to the “hard work” (Aguilar 2009) in the maintenance of Filipino homes. I argue that it in locating “hard work,” it will be useful to look at Fredrik Barth's (1966) concepts of transcationalism and reciprocity, using in addition lenses from indigenous Philippine scholarship.
Finally, I find it necessary to return to an analysis of the “shadows of colonialism” that haunt contemporary Filipino life, as a way of understanding my own family's increasing idealization of the “home” in the United States – that “fragrant” place, where the sweet-scented “stateside” goods in the balikbayan boxes come from. As Melinda de Jesus (2005) writes, the first step towards peminist empowerment and decolonization is the recognition of the “imperial trauma.” Following native feminist writers (de Jesus 2005; Narayan 1993; Okely 1996; Ryang; 2005), I use an autobiographical style of writing, and hopefully this does not appear to the readers of this text as a classic case of navel-gazing, but as part of a feminist project in which one engages the self as a methodology for theorizing the intersections of the political and the personal experience (de Jesus 2005).
![](http://photos.academia.edu/1144051/402603/491870/tiny_andrea.vastano.jpg?1327267917 "<strong>Andrea Vastano</strong><br/>University of Naples "L'Orientale""){kind=small}
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