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The article presents an examination into the social conditions of the Philippines, particularly in relation to the Muslim minority society of the Mindanao. Details are given discussing the social relations between the Mindanao and the larger Christian Filipino society, centering upon the dichotomies of conflict and peacemaking, as well as the internal gender relations within the Muslim community, centering upon the "invisibility" of Mindanao women. Aspects examined in depth include the unacknowledged role of women within peacemaking activities, the tribal feud system of "rido," and a lack of social justice protection for women.

In national narratives of 'Malayness', a specific language (Malay) and religion (Islam) have become key aspects of an identity that excludes migrants and those of 'questionable' sexualities. Consequently Filipina migrants working in the nightlife industries in East Malaysia have been subjected to disciplinary discourses of ethnicity and sexuality that underpin these national narratives. Attempts to tighten migration laws and curb nightlife activities have resulted in a racialisation of Filipina migrant sexualities. Using ethnographic methods, this article explains the impacts of dominant state and public discourses of migration, ethnicity and gender, which Filipinas encounter in their everyday lives in their destination country. In the process the article also reveals how Filipinas resist these discourses and hence participate in the formation of their subjectivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The five articles in this Special Issue are introduced by contextualising them broadly within feminist poststructuralist, postcolonial and anthropological approaches. After a brief exploration of methodologies that link ethnography with poetics and historical analysis, a general theoretical critique of modern Western forms of agency, especially liberal notions of autonomous rational choice, is offered. Western philosophy and theory, argues the author, have implications well beyond social formations in the West and she outlines their impacts on the agency of women in Asian societies. While cautioning against the pitfalls of both under and overvaluing agency, the author then offers a reconsideration of its analytical utility. Agency needs to address the gaps between everyday reflection and practices and hegemonic discourses or symbolic structures. In this gap, where women who fall outside the parameters of dominant notions of womanhood are considered 'unstable', both resistance and constraint are possible. Dominant discourses certainly have durable effects but their tools and symbols have been reinscribed to produce agency in hybrid forms. Agency is thus thought to arise from within existing societal discourses and symbolic structures rather than in opposition to them. In this process multiple positionings for women, all of which are performative, are created. These reconsiderations of agency are mirrored in the articles which follow. Agency in its modern forms is deemed inadequate by these authors to explain the agency of women in Asia. Rather than proposing a hierarchy of agency in its significant and insignificant forms, the authors in this Issue provide much needed accounts of socially and culturally situated agency, significant in both their breadth and depth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

East Malaysia's vibrant nightlife is a lucrative industry employing many Filipina migrants. The paper addresses the impact on Filipinas of discursive regimes of work, the state and family. These are derived from national discourses of ethnicity, class and nation intertwined with dominant discourses of womanhood in both Malaysia and the Philippines. The paper argues that in transnational space disciplinary regimes are heavily constraining, but resistance and negotiation are possible. The paper follows a feminist poststructuralist approach, which finds that disciplinary forces, rather than being coercive, are subtly inculcated in the migrant subject. Embodiment is never absolute and everyday actions of women initiate instability in the category 'Woman'. This offers the opportunity for agency. Ethnographic methods are used to explore the tensions and constraints of the Filipinas' everyday experience of migration. In the setting of a largely non-Muslim East Malaysia, ethnic identity seems differently constructed than in a predominantly Muslim Peninsula Malaysia. Through friendship and marriage with Malaysians, and integration into local communities, Filipinas are able to resist and negotiate their migrant status. The actions of Filipinas and their local Malaysian partners contest conservative notions of ethnicity, gender, class and nation in both the Philippines and Malaysia. This offers a potential for agency for Filipinas, the possibility for which could also extend to the largely non-Muslim local Malaysians with whom they share their lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Synopsis: From the 1960s Sabah accepted refugees who fled Mindanao after the war escalated against insurgent Muslim groups. From the 1970s, labour migration to Sabah increased exponentially as Filipinos attempted to escape the structural poverty of their country by ameliorating Malaysia''s labour shortage in construction, oil palm and service industries. Various tensions developed in Sabah between migrants, and local communities and the state. Migrant Muslim women in particular experienced violence on a number of different fronts: oppression at the level of citizenship, institutions and culture produced physical, economic and social violence which differentiated their lives from those of both Malaysian citizens and Filipinos in the Philippines. The article addresses, through life narratives, the parameters of such violence and women''s resilience, invoking questions of who ought to defend and protect the rights of migrant Muslim women. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This article explores the case of Flor Contemplacion, a Filipino domestic worker in Singapore who was sentenced to death in 1995 for the supposed murder ora young boy. The totally different versions of the case presented by the media, especially the Singapore and Philippine presses, are explored. Violence against overseas domestic workers has long been acknowledged in sociological research. However, previous media analyses of the Contemplacion case have not addressed such violence. Here, negotiation of gender discourse in media meanings of violence with respect to the Contemplacion case is presented, thereby bringing a different approach to media and cultural analysis of the case, and contributing more generally to the dearth of media analyses of gender and violence. The article endeavors to show how media and nationalist discourses are inextricably interwoven and felt politically in the lives of Contemplacion, the other individuals involved, other overseas domestic contract workers in Singapore and their employers, and media audiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]