Prostitution, women's movements and the victim narrative in the Philippines

SynopsisThis article is about how women's organizations constructed “the Filipino woman” as part of the feminist project of addressing prostitution as a women's issue in the Philippines from 1985 to 2006. Despite the radical positions of women's activism, the eternal binary of the woman as victim/agent, martyr/advocate or martyr/activist haunted the discourses about Filipino womanhood. Feminist engagement with these binary categories was fraught, ambivalent and contradictory. In unpacking the grand narrative on women, victimization was raised as the reason for the low status of the ‘second sex’ and therefore the call to reject victim status was important. Thus, women's organizations used oral testimonies and the theatre as advocacy to transform ‘survivors’ into activists. And yet, feminists deployed the victim narrative in the campaign to pass the Anti-Trafficking Act. Material from three women's organizations will be used to provide empirical evidence for the arguments made above.