Agency in Philippine women's labour migration and provisional diaspora

This paper adopts a transnational, ethnographic vantage point in examining cultural politics, gender, and class relations in the provisional Philippine diaspora constituted through women's labour migration. Emphasis is placed on women's agency and how their experiences are embedded in layers of economic and social support flowing from and to female kin. Cultural capital is acquired from the migration experience, but domestic service migrants remain subject to what Bourdieu calls symbolic violence, both in their places of work and through conventions of Philippine femininity. Diaspora formed by the potentially permanent migration of Philippine women to Canada is fraught with tensions from Philippine familial expectations and, in this sense it remains provisional. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.