Manning the World
摘要
This chapter examines Vicvic Ello, Vincent de Jesus, and Liza Magtoto’s Katas ng Saudi, a play that features four Filipino construction workers at the height of oil-fueled construction industries in the Persian Gulf. It accounts for that socioeconomic moment when a massive tide of Filipino men (husbands and fathers mostly) comprised the initial phase of the so-called third wave of migration from the Philippines in the 1970s and 1980s. What happens to male subjects when the patriarchal virility that they believe to possess as human agency, or as an access to a labor circulation generative of profit, is shaken off from its reified supremacies and lapses into inutility within migratory or diasporic conditions? This chapter explains the connection of masculinity, nation, and migration particularly through the negotiated manhood of migrant workers who are regarded as breadwinners, guardians, and pillars of the homeland, on the one hand, but who are simultaneously perceived as racialized, stratified, and sexualized workers of the world, on the other hand.