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  • Guest Editor’s Introduction
  • Rolando B. Tolentino, Guest Editor (bio)

Vaginal Economy: Cinema and Sexuality in the Post-Marcos, Post-Brocka Philippines

The term vaginal economy was first used by a feminist columnist of a leading newspaper in the Philippines to refer to “how the otherwise legitimate deployment of Filipino women entertainers has deteriorated into their massive trafficking into sex work.”1 In the dominant Philippine—as well as the global—context, the term, however, evokes a much larger scope than sex trafficking, though certainly this subaltern sphere is essentially constitutive of the economy. About half of the 2.45 million people trafficked worldwide, 1.36 million, are from the Asia-Pacific region.2 Vaginal economy refers to the female sex as the primary instrument of national development and is characterized by the massive deployment of overseas contract workers (OCWs; as much as two-thirds are women), the greater sexualization of female domestic labor (sex work and trafficking as an extreme yet common feature; pigeonholed in “3D” jobs that are “domestic, degrading and demeaning”), the [End Page 229] feminization of male labor (also entering domestic work as the main thrust of OCW, and suffering a decline in employment in developed nations), and the double-or triple-feminization of female labor (breadwinning yet absent mother, transnational mothering and care, transnational economy of emotions and devotion; or being woman, foreign, and doing socially reproductive work). In the Philippine case, this is a legacy of the Marcos dictatorship (1965–86), which sought to ease national unemployment and other social problems by the export of Filipino labor, and labor’s further exploitation in the homeland via servicing multinational corporations, using their “nimble fingers and perfect eyesight” to do “dirty, dangerous, and difficult” jobs, mostly in garment and electronic factories inside export-processing zones.

The rise of the vaginal economy in the Philippines is analogous to the rise of neoliberal globalization. What is happening in various national economies—the greater feminization of labor, poverty, and migration, for example—is emblematic of a Philippine phenomenon that is not isolated. The growth of vaginal economies elsewhere, even in first world sites, is related to the kind of substantiation of the vaginal economy in the Philippines. A discussion of the Philippine vaginal economy can illuminate the ways in which other growths are experienced relationally and globally. This anthology focuses on the filmic representations of the vaginal economy, where sexuality becomes integral in its substantiation. By marking the pathing of sexuality in this most recent capitalist subdevelopment, the conditions of the vaginal economy are foregrounded, laying bare the matrix of power of global capital, which in turn, makes possible and impossible the conditions of dialogue and contest for both hegemonic signification and counter-citizenship claims within this economy.

While the vaginal economy is made to substantiate the phenomenon of neoliberalism as experienced in both intersticial and mainstream facets of the nation and its transnational experience, in citizens and their bodies, it is not intended to reify and objectify the “biologistic and normative conception of the Philippine labor diaspora.”3 By historicizing the global era, including its most recent effect—the 2008 global economic crisis—the systemic operations and contradictions of the vaginal economy and neoliberalism are laid bare, making contestations possible. In this sense, the vaginal economy is [End Page 230]


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Jailed overseas contract worker Flor Contemplacion (Helen Gamboa) is interrogated by Singaporean police in Bagong bayani (New Hero, Tikoy Aguiluz, director, 1995). Personal collection of Cesar Hernando

the condition of possibility in neoliberalism to flourish and to be subverted. While the vaginal economy—precisely because of its massive deployment of female labor and feminization of labor—bears the marks of female labor and its material biologism, its discursive analysis presents simultaneous possibilities in which, at least in the Philippine case, biologism is reified, contested, and subverted. In mapping out the hegemonic operations and their subversion, the vaginal economy becomes “increasingly less about the vagina [End Page 231] and more about forms of embodied practices, affect, emotions and feelings that are both political and economic, and cultural, and do not neatly map into gender binaries.”4

What film provides is a kind...

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