Politicizing Homemaking: Towards Feminist Recognition of Subaltern Filipino Women's Everyday Resistances

Abstract

This study offers necessary interventions to render visible urban subaltern women's everyday politics as primary home carers within regimes of neoliberal dispossessions. Drawing from social reproduction theory, and cognizant of the home as a site of exploitation and resistance of women, I contribute to feminist conversations by re-embedding notions of care work within subaltern politics to politically mark anti-neoliberal enactments of subaltern women homemaking using two case studies in the Philippines. Incapable of care commodification and outsourcing, subaltern women reframe the home from a neoliberal reproduction space as a political site, redistribute care and production work, provide activist education, and perform conflict resolution to family members. In supporting their partners' public-political work, subaltern women's everyday homemaking acts against the reproduction of the disciplined and docile labor and patriarchal family norms. This intervention is a discursive counterpoint to constructions of women's emancipation as chiefly the disarticulation from the private sphere to ensure fuller economic participation that renders invisible subaltern women's anti-neoliberal political contributions.
The paper draws from participant-observations and storytelling sessions among women activists leading the defense of their slum community, and among male activist-leaders and female homemaking companions of a predominantly male social organization resisting dispossessions in the public jeepney sector in Metro Manila.