Gendering and Racializing the Philippine Migrations: Women in the Global Economy of Care and Marriage Market

Why are Filipina women so numerous in the global economy of care and the marriage market? How do gender and race shape their experience throughout their journey in the care/marriage industry? In a joint presentation, Julien Debonneville and Gwenola Ricordeau share their respective results from fieldwork research conducted in the Philippines and France regarding the migration of “Filipina domestic workers” and Filipina brides. This talk draws on two different research projects based on observation among and in-depth interviews with Filipina migrants, and aims to deconstruct narratives surrounding Filipina women in a postcolonial age.

---

BIOS

Gwenola Ricordeau is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Lille-I (France). Her first research and her PhD thesis have been dedicated to family relationships, gender identities and sexuality in French prisons. Since 2008, she is working on intermarriages, marriage migration, gender and race stereotypes in the Philippines and in France.

Julien Debonneville, University of Geneva, visiting scholar at the Department for Ethnic studies, UC Berkeley.  Sociologist by training, Julien Debonneville is a PhD candidate at the Institute for Gender studies at the University of Geneva and a visiting student researcher in the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. His thesis focuses on the social construction of the “Filipina domestic worker” as a category of otherness by exploring different patterns of migration in the Philippines today. Moreover, he examines how the process of becoming a Filipina domestic worker is framed by diverse power relationships. His main research topics are: gender and migration, care economy and reproductive labor, the coloniality of power, the social construction of otherness, and the intersectionality of power relations in terms of “gender”, class” and “race”.