Roderick Galam

The Promise of the Nation examines the construction of the nation in contemporary Ilokano literature in the intersections of gender, history, and nationalism by tracking Ilokano literature’s political, material, and socio-cultural connections and examining its intervention in Philippine socio-political discourse, history, and historiography. It attends to and addresses the limitations, contradictions, and potential constituting Ilokano writers’ efforts to (re)make a Filipino nation, efforts made in the context of Spanish and American imperialism, neocolonialism, martial law, militarization, urban squatting, patriarchy, migrant work, and the marginalization of ethic peoples. Finally, the book argues that the writers’ project of realizing what Caroline Hau has evocatively called the nation’s “promise of community” may be more powerfully imagined and grasped were nationalism transformed by feminism; indeed if we dream this nation, see and seek its promise and possibility with a feminist-communitarian imagination.

Discussions of a culture of migration in the Philippines present it to mean a predisposition to migrate and focus on the migrants. Through the prism of the experiences of seamen's wives in an Ilocos town, experiences narrated through interviews, this article aims to cut a conceptual space in which to examine the relationship between left-behind women and the culture of migration. Examining the women's persistent references to settlement migration to Hawaii against which their husband's labor migration as seafarers is compared, this article provides a discussion of a culture of migration among Ilocanos that has been vitally shaped by the socio-economic possibilities brought about by Ilocano migration to Hawaii beginning in the early 20th century. Consequently, it offers historical and cultural specificity to scholarly discussions of the Philippines' culture of migration, which remains pitched at the national level.

Most theories of nation and state have excluded gender as an analytic category. This article will demonstrate how the nation and the state are gendered. It will examine how nation and gender are shaped by capitalist and patriarchal structures, two powerful ideologies that impact the state. Analyzing an Iluko novel which constructs in the context of urban squatting the nation as a social space, the article will detail how it is impacted by the state, by class and gender, and how people and identities as well as the social and political spaces they inhabit are classed and gendered. It will locate these classed and gendered identities and spaces in the class struggle for the nation as well as in the conflict that exists between the nation and state. The article therefore will illustrate how nation, state, class, and gender are inextricably bound up.

Nationalism has proven to be male-biased and this is evident in its tendency to image the nation as woman/mother in language, It has conveniently placed women where it is almost completely nowhere to be read, dismembered from the national body and denied agency and meaningful participation, When written of, women are assigned to the concepts of nation and mother as is the case of "Inang Bayan," In this nation, the citizen is male and the state masculine, Consequently, the experience of a nation in the context of colonialism and imperialism is semanticized as rape which further reinforces the gendering of the nation as woman, Through poetry, Hermilinda Ungbaoan-Bulong creates spaces for women in the narrative that is nationalism, In [i]"Madre Abre"[/i] and [i]"Baro a Kaputotan,"[/i] Ungbaoan-Bulong's feminized territory represents ethnicity belonging to a wider community or territory, She encourages women to remember their own strength, their own cap...

This article provides a preliminary account of how the lives of UK-based Filipinos have been affected by the Covid-19 pandemic using care and solidarity as lenses to make sense of their experiences. By undertaking an intersectional analysis, it demonstrates how Filipinos' experiences have been significantly shaped by the fact of their being migrants, which folds racism into their experiences. Alongside race/ethnicity and citizenship/ migration status, their relationship with or location in the labor market has also shaped the impact of the pandemic on their lives. It concludes with a reflection on the duty of states to care for migrants.

ABSTRACT This article examines how young Filipino men looking to work in international seafaring deploy servitude as a means of attaining education-to-work transition. It focuses on those applying to work for free as ‘utility men’ (gofer or flunkey) in Manila’s manning and crewing agencies that supply seafarers to ship operators around the world in exchange for the promise of boarding a ship. Based on participant observation and life history interviews, the article accounts for how they transform their servitude into diskarte – strategy by which they navigate the limited employment opportunities in the Philippines – by constructing their ‘utility manning’ as an informal and negotiated pathway to employment. The young Filipino men’s seeking and enduring servitude, geared towards gleaning better social possibilities, becomes a profoundly rational act of investing in and securing their future.

To get a job as a seafarer in the global maritime industry, thousands of male Filipino youths work for free as ‘utility men’ for manning agencies that supply seafarers to ship operators around the world. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and approached from a moral economy perspective, this article examines how manning agencies and utility men differentially rationalize this exploitative work (utility manning). Manning agencies use it as a technology of servitude that, through physical and verbal abuse and other techniques, enforces docility to prepare utility men for the harsher conditions on-board a ship. In contrast, utility men use it as a technology of imagination, gleaning from it a capacity to shape their future. Faced with few social possibilities in the Philippines, they deploy servitude as a strategy for attaining economic mobility and male adulthood.

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Page 1. NAVIGATING LIVES: The Spatiotemporality of the Gender Identity, Agency and Subjectivity of Filipino Seamen's Wives Roderick G Galam A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of ... Signed: Roderick Galam (candidate) Date: 07 December 2011 ...

Research on mother-and daughter-in-law relationships has primarily focused on the conflict between the two. This article highlights the empowering potential of daughters-in-law of this problematic relationship by examining the struggle of Filipino seafarers' wives to exercise agency and achieve autonomy in the context of living with their mothers-in-law. Drawing on in-depth semi-structured interviews, it analyses the women's project for autonomy within kinship, that is, an autonomy deeply embedded in intersubjective relations through the conceptualisation of kinship as 'cultures of relatedness', which explicitly attends to the negative aspects of kinship. Three dimensions of their experiences are discussed: breaking their silence/talking back; becoming their husband's designated recipient of their remittances; and having their own house. Their experiences demonstrate the importance of retaining normativity in the conceptualisation of kinship as relatedness. key words autonomy • mother-/daughter-in-law relationship • kinship • relatedness • affinity • house • voice • male emigration • Ilocos, Philippines

This article reflects on the epistemological, methodological, and ethical issues related to undertaking a cross-gender research (male researcher with female participants) in one's own community. It also examines issues of analysis and representation germane to taking a gendered perspective in this study of the lives and experiences of left-behind women. The article frames the discussion of these issues within four interrelated sites or levels of reflexivity: theoretical reflexivity, gender and fieldwork relations, positionality and the insider/outsider dynamic, and representation. The conclusion reflects on the ethical obligation a researcher conducting a study in one's own community bears and the consequences of this ethical burden on representation.

Discussions of a culture of migration in the Philippines present it to mean a predisposition to migrate and focus on the migrants. Through the prism of the experiences of seamen's wives in an Ilocos town, experiences narrated through interviews, this article aims to cut a conceptual space in which to examine the relationship between left-behind women and the culture of migration. Examining the women's persistent references to settlement migration to Hawaii against which their husband's labor migration as seafarers is compared, this article provides a discussion of a culture of migration among Ilocanos that has been vitally shaped by the socioeconomic possibilities brought about by Ilocano migration to Hawaii beginning in the early 20th century. Consequently, it offers historical and cultural specificity to scholarly discussions of the Philippines' culture of migration, which remains pitched at the national level.

Seamen’s wives know absence very well. Their lives are striated by it. Based on interviews with seamen’s wives conducted in Ilocos Norte, this article investigates the communicative practices obtaining amid absence and separation, and the wives’ activities that bring their husbands home and bring “home” to their husbands. It examines how new communication technologies, particularly the cellphone, have engendered new ways of becoming present and intimate. For seamen’s families, cellphone-mediated intimacy creates a space of imagined communion, which becomes the locus of the reproduction of family and affective ties and is itself the result of these emotional and material activities.

Like many Ilokano writers, poet-fictionist Herman Garcia Tabin has never made his position on the Marcos dictatorship known. His works, which were written in the early 1980s and bound with the conditions produced by the regime, do not explicitly denounce Marcos’s regime. However, they may be read as critiquing the social reality engendered by the dictatorship. Through a rhythmanalysis that implicates the constitutive role of the state and capital, this article examines depictions of life experiences of Metro Manila’s impoverished people in Tabin’s works. Tracing and following Tabin’s moves and movements provide clues to that which he has not publicly
avowed or disavowed.

Like many Ilokano writers, poet-fictionist Herman Garcia Tabin has never made his position on the Marcos dictatorship known. His works, which were written in the early 1980s and bound with the conditions produced by the regime, do not explicitly denounce Marcos’s regime. However, they may be read as critiquing the social reality engendered by the dictatorship. Through a rhythmanalysis that implicates the constitutive role of the state and capital, this article examines depictions of life experiences of Metro Manila’s impoverished people in Tabin’s works. Tracing and following Tabin’s moves and movements provide clues to that which he has not publicly
avowed or disavowed.

Like many Ilokano writers, poet-fictionist Herman Garcia Tabin has never made his position on the Marcos dictatorship known. His works, which were written in the early 1980s and bound with the conditions produced by the regime, do not explicitly denounce Marcos’s regime. However, they may be read as critiquing the social reality engendered by the dictatorship. Through a rhythmanalysis that implicates the constitutive role of the state and capital, this article examines depictions of life experiences of Metro Manila’s impoverished people in Tabin’s works. Tracing and following Tabin’s moves and movements provide clues to that which he has not publicly
avowed or disavowed.

This article inquires into the social memory of Ferdinand Marcos and of his dictatorship in the literature written in the language of his home region, the Ilocos, in the period since his downfall in the 1986 People Power Revolution. The novels Saksi ti Kaunggan (1986-1987) by Juan S. P. Hidalgo Jr. and Dagiti Bin-i ti Kimat (1995) by Clesencio B. Rambaud are used as indicators of changing narrative social memories of Marcos in Ilokano literature. Hidalgo's novel exemplifies the Ilokano writers' 'loyalist' memory of Marcos, whereas Rambaud's novel indexes attempts to reassess Marcos and the legacies of his dictatorship. This article seeks to contribute to the literature on the social memory of Marcos's military regime; looks into the braiding of literature, memory, and the nation; and examines the constitution of memory in gender.