UC Irvine

This dissertation examines the evolving dynamics around care, aging, and retirement amidst sustained labor migration, globalization, and the COVID-19 pandemic in the Philippines and its diaspora. Simply put my dissertation asks, if Filipino are taking care of the world, then who is taking care of Filipinos? I theorize what I call the banality of care or the condition in which those who are racialized and gendered to care find themselves in, as their legibility in the global order is contingent upon their propensity to care while simultaneously dealing with the similar care crisis that they are meant to solve. I center older Filipinos in this dissertation to remove the focus of care from the reproduction of the working body and highlight other forms of living and being with one another that honors life beyond one’s productivity and future contributions to society. In particular, I foreground the experiences of queer figures such as abandoned elderly women and LGBTQ individuals, non-normative figures that do not conform to ideals set forth by the heteronormative family, as they navigate aging without the support from two institutions where care is seen to derive from: the family and the state. Drawing from oral history interviews, participant observation, discourse analysis, close reading, and autoethnography, I examine how care is recast and reimagined by and for older persons through what I call relations of carefulness. I argue that following the ethos of carefulness allows us to articulate a politics where new permutations of life-making, community building, and care are made possible not despite but because of their age as these populations deal with continued neoliberal governance and global racial capitalism.