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This essay interrogates the traditionally gendered Filipino female domestic helper vis-à-vis her "constructed" role in transnational relations and the idea of globalization represented in the 2007-2008 musical The Silent Soprano. Through this musical, the essay explores how globalization and transnational relations are experienced and mediated on the stage of the developing city of Manila, which claims to be a cosmopolitan one. It is posited that the representations of transnational relations and globalization are predicated within methodological nationalism, inscribing a fear of participation in a globalized and cosmopolitan living.
Sir Anril Pineda Tiatco is a PhD candidate in the Theatre Studies Programme of the National University of Singapore. He was a visiting student at the Research Institute for Cosmopolitan Cultures at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom (2012-13). He is also a faculty member at the Department of Speech Communication and Theatre Arts in the University of the Philippines, Diliman. His essays have appeared in Asian Theatre Journal, JATI: Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, the Philippine Humanities Review, and TDR: The Drama Review.
A friend posted a story on my Facebook wall concerning five hundred Filipino maids at Ion Orchard Shopping Mall in Singapore gathered on Sunday, their one day off, to "party" while grooving to live music. Sunday is a time to converge and create a sense of "home" in this busy junction and shopping mall. The Singaporean reactions were fascinating. As one local stated, "I feel that they are downgrading the image of Ion Orchard" (Lim 2011). The story exemplified how popular culture typically represents the maids as voiceless individuals whom Singaporeans only see or hear when they gather together and thereby become a "problem."1 The gathering makes the domestic labor that is an understructure for the economy of the city-state painfully visible and audible. In Hong Kong similar Sunday social gatherings take place in Central Victoria Park, around the Hong Kong Cultural Centre, and at the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank building. Filipino women with university degrees often opt to serve as maids or nannies due to the better pay than is available at home in the Philippines.2
Recent academic works in migration studies have seen foreign domestic workers as important subjects in global transnationalism and cosmopolitanism (Parreñas 2005; Cheah...