Filipina labor migrants in Hong Kong reject stereotypes by embracing their own identity and way of life
03 Jun 2024

The study is mainly concerned with giving an opportunity to Filipina labor migrants in Hong Kong to voice out their resistance to the ways by which they are predominantly characterized and valued only in terms of their worth as foreign domestic workers. Along with their labor status as their identity marker in Hong Kong, they also have to contend with how they are largely perceived based on their gender, class, and ethnicity. This complex way of defining who they are often leads to a marginalizing and dehumanizing treatment. However, as the cases in my study show, these Filipinas resist this confining characterization by insisting on a sense of self and a way of life that transcend their employment category. Social media plays an important role in this endeavor since these platforms offer ways of using language, signs, and images that have the potential to represent them in a different light. Through an analysis of the multimodal ways they use social media, I highlight how they question the limits imposed upon them by dominant ideas of who a Filipino woman is in Hong Kong and practice their agency as human beings who have control over their identity and their lives.
My research highlights the complex process of contending with limiting ontological configurations experienced by labor migrants in the case of Filipina labor migrants in Hong Kong. What the study hopes to achieve is to demonstrate how these Filipinas resist the confinements that their employment status, gender, class, and ethnicity impose upon them via their discursive engagements on social media platforms. While these cases exhibit a sense of representational agency afforded by these new forms of media, particularly as regards their potential to counter dominating characterizations of Filipinas in Hong Kong based on their labor, what the study argues is that online and offline lives are necessarily intertwined. My research contributes to the growing body of knowledge and continuing conversation on critical discourse in new media and labor migration, framed in the intersectional relationships of gender, class, and ethnicity.
Author: Alwin C. Aguirre (Department of Broadcast Communication, College of Mass Communication, UP Diliman)
Read the full paper: https://doi.org/10.1558/genl.22688