UCLA

Development scholars and practitioners have struggled to implement programs that were inclusive of the needs women in the Global South. As a Global South country lauded for its high levels of gender equality indices, the Philippines offers a generative site to analyze the gendered effects of uneven economic development. While some developing countries like the Philippines report a rising number of women in economic and public life, feminist and Global South scholars have argued that gender mainstreaming and women’s empowerment programs have failed and even harmed marginalized populations, such as urban poor women. This research intervenes in this debate by foregrounding the gendered forms of dispossession in communities that are “made poor” in the pursuit of rapid industrialization. Specifically, this research is compelled by the following questions: First, what are the mechanisms through which market-based development strategies transform Filipino women’s bodies into sites of capitalist accumulation? And second, how do Filipino women conceptualize gender equality based on their own epistemes of development and belonging?

This dissertation examines these questions through how Filipinas analyze market-based projects like microcredit and labor export as attacks on their kabuhayan, a Filipino word that loosely translates to “life-making.” Unlike concepts such as “labor” or “livelihood,” kabuhayan references a complex, dynamic, and relational set of practices that includes everything from creating informal economies where formal means of employment are impossible and building communal relations of support when state-based social welfare programs are nonexistent, to redefining what livable conditions are and collectively imagining a future for themselves and their communities when no such future seems possible. Focusing on kabuhayan highlights the specificities of neoliberal state-capital regimes of extraction. The disruption of vending, community loan groups, and other practices of kabuhayan ensures a steady supply of workers for the country’s labor export programs, which then translate to the high gender equality index levels in the Philippines.

This research uses interdisciplinary methods to examine institutional and discursive strategies deployed by the state to render women subaltern and to assimilate disenfranchised Filipina women into the flows of global capital and labor. By juxtaposing the gender equality indices and economic development strategies with narratives and cultural productions from marginalized Filipina women, my research illuminates how gender equality indices demonstrate not how Filipinas have been empowered by development schemes, but rather how vulnerable women are violently assimilated into the flows of global capital.