| Migration is a means of survival not only for individuals and families, but also for the fragile economy and political legitimacy of the Philippines. To cope with unemployment and foreign debt the Philippines rely on the labor migration of Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs). As both male and female migrants continue to fill different labor niches in the global economy, the Philippine state and civil society groups decry the social costs and cultural changes of migration. Casting stark light into how the affective terrain of family life is structured by the greater political economy of human labor and uneven development, this dissertation is an ethnography about the children of OFWs as they struggle to make sense of households bereft of one, sometimes both parents.;This ethnography draws from three months of preliminary fieldwork conducted in 2004 and fifteen months of dissertation fieldwork conducted between 2006 and 2007 to examine how children conceptualize their role in the gendered contradiction between the state-sanctioned image of the nuclear family as the basic unit of the nation on the one hand, and the prevalence of single-parent, extended family households on the other, in which fathers often resist the feminization, mothers negotiate the masculinization, and other kin relatives, in the absence of both parents, accept the responsibility of their role as primary caregivers. As children actively navigate from various imaginations and spaces an increasingly complex process of becoming and belonging in a household and community where norms about kinship, categories of identity, and systems of reciprocal obligations and behavioral expectations are susceptible to continuous transformations and adaptations, this ethnography details the kinds of affective investments made in the context of migration. Through their affective labor within the intimate space of domestic life, this ethnography explores the ways in which children and their various caregivers serve to support and destabilize conventional notions of childhood, family, and kinship. |
