Migrant labour and the politics of scale: gendering the Philippine state

The purpose of this paper is to situate the study of international labour migration, and especially the policies of labour export, within a gendered geopolitical framework. In so doing I open avenues of inquiry into the complexities of political ideologies that guide state apparatuses. Specifically, I examine how the Philippine state negotiates and operates within contradictory capitalist spaces through discourses of scale. Spatial scales are politically and socially constructed to legitimise power relations and to justify particular policies and programmes. In its support of capital accumulation, the Philippine state tends to adopt a discourse of globalisation; when confronted with charges of migrant exploitation, the Philippine state couples a discourse of the global with a discourse of the body. This corporeal discourse attempts to deflect attention and criticism away from the state, thereby maintaining its political hegemony.