Balikbayan Boxes and the Performance of Intimacy by Filipino Migrant Women in Hong Kong

Abstract

This article explores how the sending of goods by Filipino migrant women in Hong Kong to their families in the Philippines is a gendered process that “maps” these migrant women back into the emotional economy of the household. I argue that the practice is a performance of intimacy, a way for migrant women to bridge the Hong Kong and Philippine segments of their diasporic and fragmented lives, which enables them to sustain coherent narratives of the self. The kind of intimacy being performed, however, is unconventional and “diasporic” as it is defined by both engagement with and estrangement from the domestic spaces of home.