“Happy in my own skin”: Filipina migrants’ embodiment of ageing in New Zealand

Abstract

Ageing Filipina migrants in New Zealand present a valuable opportunity for investigating how intersecting lines of power around ageing and migration produce both oppression and opportunities for resistance and subversion. Ageing bodies present a challenge to neoliberal idealisations of migrants and ageing persons who are required to be productive, responsible, and self-reliant. In this study I explore meaning-making around the ageing migrant Filipina’s body and trace the links between individual level meaning-making and power configurations at the socio-cultural level. I investigate how discourses of the body, revealed in women’s talk, reflect dominant structures of power around gender, age, migrant status, inter alia, and support a series of moral, ideological, and practical positions that have implications for the material body as well as subjectivity. I utilise a methodological framework that brings together feminist psychology, indigenous Filipino psychology and a poststructuralist approach to language. Applying thematic analysis on transcripts of conversations with the 20 participants, I systematically organised and identified discursive themes in the text. The four analytic chapters are organised around four areas that the participants’ stories tended to focus on. The first two are about the two forms of labour bodies are able to provide – productive and reproductive work; and the next two are about two aspects of the physical body – beauty and health. These four form the basis upon which the value of the ageing women and their bodies are measured; they are judged positively based on their ability to continue contributing to society through their engagement in productive work and provision of free care work, their maintenance of a particular standard of appearance that is desirable and that conveys a continued interest in social participation, and good health that prevents them from becoming a public burden. In conclusion I find that ageing Filipina migrants are called on to construct narratives of success in migration through their bodies, that ageing migrants’ bodies are constructed as producers, commodities, and consumers, that neoliberalism is encouraging new forms of ageism and sexism to flourish, and that participants struggle for positive identities through the use of various material and discursive strategies.