ARI Working Paper Series

Focusing on a key group of global labor migrants – Filipino merchant seafarers – this paper demonstrates how a migration analysis can address a central debate in masculinity studies. Specifically, the paper addresses the concept of “hegemonic masculinity” and its critics by analyzing relations between competing, dominant masculinities in transnational and non-western contexts (Connell 2005, Whitehead 2002). I argue that Filipino seafarers, despite their subordinate positions onboard and in the global labor market, nevertheless are able to deliver the Filipino “package deal” of adult masculinity through migrant work.  But based on their precarious labor and anchored by their providership, these men go further, attempting to “re-masculinize” heroism and construct themselves as “masculine exemplars.” Through their work and migration, they exercise a kind of  “hegemonic masculine privilege,” attempting to transgress or appropriate certain gender practices and combine, rather than choose between, competing masculinities.  Nevertheless, this heroic masculinity can also be quite fragile, because it is based on an occupation that remains unstable and insecure, separates individuals from their families and communities, and contains contradictory elements. The seafarers’ fragile gender projects, performed in migration, highlight both the separations and necessary connections between work and providership, and the productive and socially re-productive spheres. The paper draws on a combination of semi-structured interviews and extensive ethnographic field research with Filipino seafarers on-board three merchant ships and with family and community members in a migrant-sending provincial town in the Southern Philippines.