Always-On: The Gendered Economies of Filipina Migrant Care Work and Social Media Platforms

Abstract

Though the political economy of Filipina care workers and their lives on the ground might appear to be a world distinct from that of digital platforms, this article explores their continuity: between the multiple demands for Filipina care workers in Taiwan to relentlessly serve the demands of others, and thus to be “always-on,” and the logics of the platforms that they use to stay in touch with loved ones and chill during down time. Based on interviews and online observation, I argue that examining the lives of women OFWs in Taiwan helps us understand how platforms that require their users to be always online remediate the asymmetries of global care work and the longstanding demands for feminized and racialized servitude that have historically been made upon various “others,” including migrants, people of color, and residents of the Global South. Such demands, I further show, cannot be divorced from U.S.-driven developmentalist policies that continue to “modernize” the Asia Pacific into a readily extractable market.