Searching to Death for "Home": A Filipina Immigrant Bride's Subaltern Rewriting

How can we feminist intellectuals enter into the lives of the subaltern? This essay is written to explain the sudden pang of pain and the strong sense of relatedness that I experienced when I happened to read a brief nongovernmental organization (NGO) report about a Filipina immigrant bride's death in South Korea. Instead of retrieving additional facts of her life, I interrogate my privileged position in connection with her. My initial vague sense of relatedness to the Filipina turns out double-edged. I have to admit that despite our common experience of patriarchal oppression, I am a beneficiary of the Filipina's plight in the globalized neocolonial system. However, I argue that there exists the possibility of another mode of "belonging" between the woman and me. Seeking to reinscribe the woman's subaltern rewriting of the hegemonic discourse on the third-world woman, I suggest that the woman and I share the same historical agency of searching for alternative forms of home and nonhegemonic relations across the boundaries of race, class, sexuality, and nationality. The resistive mode of belonging has further crucial significances beyond the pale of this essay since it urges transformation of our ego-bound subjectivities and re-definition of our mode of being.