'Sending dollars shows feeling' - Emotions and economies in Filipino migration

Abstract

This paper analyses the conceptualization of gender, relationships, and emotions that underpin 'care chains' approaches to Filipino labour migration. In a case study of long-distance intimacy and economic transfers in an extended Filipino family, I show how contextualizing migration within local understandings of emotion fractures expectations created by care chains accounts. This case instead reveals agency, diversity, and new forms of global subjectivity emerging through long-distance emotional connections within the translocal field shaped by labour mobility.