Fluid Masculinities

That the Philippines is one of the world's largest exporters of human labor is well known thanks to the work of scholars like Catherine Choy, Anna Guevarra, Rhacel Parreñas, Robyn Rodriguez, Neferti Tadiar, and James Tyner. In his fine ethnography Filipino Crosscurrents: Oceanographies of Seafaring, Masculinities, and Globalization, Kale Bantigue Fajardo extends this scholarship by centering the sea and the politics of masculinity in globalization studies. He reminds us that ships transport 90 percent of the world's commodities, that the Philippines contributes the greatest proportion of workers to the global shipping industry, and that Filipino seamen send increasing remittance amounts back to the Philippines. While it has become a (dismaying) "cliché that overseas Filipino/as 'keep the Philippine economy afloat'" (4), Fajardo conversely asks: what keeps these seafarers afloat? According to his elegantly theorized and contextualized account, Filipino workers are enticed into seafaring by neoliberal state and corporate power brokers who promise higher wages, globe-trotting "adventure," and national respect as honorific "bagong bayani" (new heroes/heroines) (chapters 1 and 2). And Filipino seafarers are sustained at sea—kept buoyed in mind, body, and spirit when the ship feels, as one seaman puts it, like a "floating prison" (128)—through beliefs in familial sacrifice and future prosperity and through recreational activities with fellow seamen that produce modes of ethnic support and cross-ethnic solidarities (chapters 3 and 4).

Given the heavy focus in Filipino diaspora studies on women (as domestic workers, sex workers, care workers, nurses, etc.), Fajardo offers a much-needed examination of Filipino masculinities as they are constructed in the highly volatile context of the "feminization" of the Philippine economy vis-à-vis (neo)colonial powers like the United States and Japan. Fajardo critically interrogates attempts by the state, corporations, and manning (recruitment and employment) agencies to recuperate heteropatriarchal masculinities—efforts like the 1998 commemorations of the famed Manila-Acapulco galleon trade (c. 1565-1815) where "Filipinos" were remembered as skilled, fearless sailors, not as raced, classed, and sometimes enslaved laborers.

Challenging the gender normativities that underpin neoliberal state discourses, Fajardo reveals the "gaps, fissures, tensions, and contradictions of Filipino maritime masculinities" by "engag[ing] a more Filipino queer and postcolonial or decolonized ethnographic analysis" (17). Chapters 3 and 4, in which Fajardo effectively mixes "ethnography and autoethnography, cultural criticism, travelogue, and documentary photography," enact this decolonizing queer methodology (38). In "Ethnography in Blue: Navigating Time-Space in the Global Economy," Fajardo provides glimpses of life aboard the Penang Prince as it sails along the northern Pacific rim. Joining a crew of German, Filipino, and Kiribati workers, Fajardo discusses how racial and class hierarchies, acute feelings of homesickness and monotony ("Walang buhay dito"—there is no life here, reports one seaman [126]), and routinized work-times on the ship trouble corporations' recruitment tactics and the state's heroic images of Filipino seafarers. The final chapter, "Transportation: Seamen and Tomboys in Ports and at Sea," continues the work of undermining such dominant tactics and images. Fajardo notes how his own "subject position, embodiment, and identification as tomboy" facilitated the exchange of memories and stories with Filipino seamen regarding their friendships with tomboys (162). Reading the Filipino "tomboy" as akin to trans gendered masculinities in other Southeast Asian locations, Fajardo suggests that the "intimate relationalities" (153) between working-class seamen and tomboys both complicate the presumption that "Filipino tomboys are always lesbians, women, and/or female" (160) and contest state-sanctioned evocations of heteromasculinity by offering "a more expansive, inclusive, and queer understanding of Filipino masculinities/ manhoods/lalaki-ness" (156).

Consistently attentive to the theoretical and political implications of doing and analyzing translocal/diasporic work, Fajardo usefully deploys indigenous/ Filipino frameworks, worldviews, and linguistic practices (particularly the lack of gendered pronouns in Tagalog/Filipino [7]) to account for the varied meanings of "tomboy" and other phenomena as well. For example, he reads the loneliness and lifelessness induced by distance from the Philippines where "life happens" through creation myths in which the islands are needed for "spiritual balance or harmony...