Masculinity from Below: Filipino tomboys in South Korea and Hong Kong and the Construction of Transmasculinity

• In Event: Trans and Nonbinary Lives

Abstract

This paper offers a comparative ethnography of Filipino tomboy migrants in manufacturing work in South Korea and domestic work in Hong Kong. The Filipino term “tomboy” refers to a broad range of Filipino queer subjects who are “male- or masculine-identified females or transgendered subjects on the female-to-male (FTM) spectrum of embodiments, practices, and identities in the Philippines and Diaspora” (Fajardo 405).

In Korea, Filipino tomboys claim their masculinity through their natural competency in factory work and their status as socially respectable, high-earning workers. They assert that they are as good as or better than the male-bodied workers because they have innate aptitude to excel in physically demanding, machine-operating factory work. They value their work, considered by the Filipino migrant community as “men’s work” or “real work” (unlike domestic or entertainment work that are not viewed as such), and take great pride as a select few who make the highest wage as migrants in Asia.

Filipino tomboys in Hong Kong, on the other hand, establish themselves as desirable, masculine subjects through the discourse of love. They highlight their unique capacity to give “pure love” to Filipino women, whose relationship with local heterosexual men is viewed as transactional by both the Hong Kong society as well as the migrant community. They assert themselves as better men who are capable of offering romantic love--qualities of “true” masculinity that they argue are lacking in the available local male masculinities.

My paper contributes to scholarship on global masculinity and sexuality and migration by demonstrating how migration creates opportunities for migrants to construct themselves as gender non-normative and queer subjects—an aspect hitherto overlooked in feminist migration studies. Introducing the concept of “masculinity from below,” I examine marginalized forms of masculinity that arise within feminized transnational labor flows.

Author

• DONGYOUNG KIM, Boston University