UC Santa Cruz

Since 1974, the Philippine government has sought to uplift the nation’s economy by institutionalizing an economic and immigration policy that capitalizes on the remittances of 10.2 million overseas Filipino workers of which 59.6% are women. To continue profiting from Filipino laborers, the Philippine government produces gendered representations of Filipinos as ideal laboring bodies that are circulated internationally to potential employers. My project illuminates the ways female contemporary artists respond to the production and circulation of these state representations. I argue that contemporary Filipina artists living in the diaspora – including Martha Atienza, Xyza Bacani, Lizza May David, Imelda Cajipe Endaya, and Jenifer Wofford – employ what I call “counter-production,” an artistic practice that represents the fragmented and gendered experiences of labor displacement, critiques official nationalisms, and reconstructs worker subjectivities. By portraying laborers in non-capitalizable, non-laboring moments – such as instances of respite, boredom, and leisure – contemporary female artists counter representations of workers that secure the primacy of the Philippine nation-state to control Filipino laborers. Studies on the globalization of Filipino labor have relied on ethnographic or sociological methods of analysis. “Counter-Productivity as Resistance” expands the fields of Filipino art history, diaspora studies, and Filipino labor studies by being the first to use visual culture methods and diaspora studies approaches to explore contemporary art by women made after Martial Law, a period in which labor migration flourished in the Philippines. I seek to offer a new angle of vision by showing how artists depict the day-to-day minutiae of living in the diaspora through creative and representational modes of expression such as illustration, film, installation, painting, and photography. Artistic representations of the mundane are often overlooked by scholars of Filipino labor migration, yet such representations counter national narratives on overseas Filipino workers and forge new possibilities of living within global capitalism.