Decentring Labour: Looking at the Everyday in the Filipinx Diaspora

Abstract Scholarship on the Filipinx diaspora has tended to be framed through the analytic of labour. Such dominant framings of the Filipinx diaspora tend to set parameters for a diasporic politics that rests on normative citizenship categories. In this paper, I look to the everyday ways Filipinos navigate their lives outside the boundaries of labour. Engaging with interviews conducted on the unceded territories of the Lheidli T'enneh peoples (aka Prince George, British Columbia, Canada), I propose that there are queer ways of disentangling labour configurations by paying attention to the everyday negotiations of Filipinx people. I highlight two ways that Filipinx peoples on Lheidli T'enneh territories show where we might decentre labour as the main way the Filipinx diaspora is theorised. First, I look at the ways in which they turn to the people and places they come from in the Philippines while abroad. Second, I attend to the manner by which Filipinx people approach and appreciate Indigenous sovereignties. I argue that, taken together, their commitments to the people and places they come from and their turning towards Indigenous sovereignties, form starting points that allow for political subjectivities not squarely attached to labour and normative notions of citizenship.