Entangling Representations

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Acknowledgements

I want to thank my mother, who has opened her mind, soul and heart to tell these stories about the journeys of her mother and my father's mother. Without her, I would never have known the histories of my grandparents, and I am thankful that she has been willing to share this with me and with the world.

Notes

Rowley (2003: 88) discusses this children's song as a game played in the Eastern Caribbean. I am quoting from it here in order to draw on the way in which it presents ideas of performance, positionality, location and stereotypical misrepresentations.

I am following Grewal's (2006: 29) definitions of biopolitics and biopower. The former acts to regulate legitimacy in states, and the latter functions as technologies of security and control. Biopolitics functions only within geopolitical sites through a constant move to displace violence onto the ‘other’; actors within those states (such as military personnel, individuals, etc.) are key individuals involved in that continuation of violence.

Here, I am tracing the way protection and security logics become institutionalized and embedded in systems of nation and state formation in which national security and borders have become profoundly contradictory for women.

Building on Grewal's (2006: 31) terms here, I argue that sites such as security, knowledge, the public and the private become respatialized and rearticulated into new forms of knowing, seeing and doing.

As Grewal (2006: 30) explains, it is important to understand the ways that bio/ geopolitics work together. For her this intertwining happens through a series of geopolitical acts of regulation that push into the realm of the biopolitical. The State is formed against an ‘other’, but also by various actors within a state through technologies of biopower.

The ‘box’ in this quotation points to the constraints imposed on migrant workers at the local, state and transnational registers. This is a reminder that we need to make the connection between what we see as an unimaginable future and what currently incarcerates us in these boxes, and to construct multiple relations with others in order to help transform our world. This requires a revolutionary praxis where true freedom from necessity exists, as well as forms of knowledge and actions that challenge those who command women's labor for their own benefit and private powers.

Babaylan: a term identifying an indigenous Filipino religious leader who functions as a healer, a seer and a community ‘miracle worker’. It is a person who is fitted to heal the spirit and the body.

When I speak of abolition, I am referring to ways and practices of individually and collectively rethinking systems of international relations. More so, I am referring to the ways that our understandings can be expanded in order to allow us to create alliances aimed at building transnational justice.