International Accompaniment and Witnessing State Violence in the Philippines

Abstract: This paper is an examination of a fact‐finding mission by Canadian grassroots organizations to the Philippines in November 2006, focused on investigating the large number of extra‐judicial killings that have occurred since 2001. The mission accompanied KARAPATAN, a Philippines‐based human rights organization, with hopes that their international status would allow KARAPATAN access to militarized regions otherwise inaccessible to them, and that the international attention brought by Canadians would protect them from military violence. The paper tackles the ethics, politics and potentials of such international human rights solidarity, and both explores and unsettles conventional concerns about the power dynamics of international solidarity by considering the complexity of the positionings of the Canadian observers. These positionings both reproduce and disrupt static stable geographies of the global North/South. In Central Luzon, for instance, the politics and ethics of their status as outsiders was a persistent issue. In Southern Tagalog, however, the Canadian observers could not quite keep their distance, found that they were not as firmly located in their Canadian identities as they might have supposed, and not only observed but experienced the theatrics of state violence.     

Geography and the construction of difference

There is growing evidence of ‘horizontal hostilities’ among women: many women are affirming their identities along axes of class, race, sexuality, age and/or relationship to colonialism. Within recent feminist writing, geography—space, place and location—has been used as a vehicle for rethinking a feminist affinity that does not erase or undermine ‘difference’. We review contemporary uses of geographical metaphors and caution against an excessive emphasis on displacement as a metaphor for a critical feminist stance. We argue that geographies of placement must be held in tension with an ideal of displacement. We develop this point through a case study of women and work in contemporary Worcester, Massachusetts. Women in Worcester are very much rooted in place and this is a vehicle for the construction of differences across women. We argue that studies of the construction of feminine identities in particular places counteract the current tendency within feminism to rigidify differences among women and are an important means of rebuilding affinities among women.     

Filipinos settle in the Canadian North: unsettling a gendered frontier

This paper explores how contemporary accounts of Filipino settlement in the Yukon articulate with the imaginative project of a ‘frontier Yukon.’ Since 2007, Whitehorse, Yukon has been as a prominent site of settlement for Filipino newcomers to Canada. This has been supported by the implementation of a new immigration policy–the Yukon Nominee Program (YNP)—inaugurated to address shortages in the territory’s service sector labour market. What happens, we ask, to frontier narratives when they are put into conversation with bodies, peoples, places, and collective experiences that they were never meant to narrate? We discuss how hegemonic notions of race, gender, and frontier masculinity are reworked and unsettled in emerging narratives of Filipino settlement. In working through multiple and contested notions of the frontier, we play on varying meanings of the verb “to settle.” Frontier mythologies seek to settle the disruptive potential of Filipino workers and families as they newly inhabit borderline spaces. At the same time, the hard work of “settling" into a foreign environment is set both within and against the hegemonic facade of frontier mythology. We find that while the examined discourses of arrival in the Yukon reinforce hegemonic accounts of the Yukon’s settlement, and obscure histories of settler colonialism through their celebration of multiculturalism and diversity, they also contain moments of ambiguity that “unmap” hegemonic frontier narratives.