An Archipelago of Care: Filipino Migrants and Global Networks by Deirdre McKay

Author:Deirdre McKay [McKay, Deirdre]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, Globalization, Social Science, Anthropology, Cultural & Social, Emigration & Immigration
ISBN: 9780253024831
Google: u0bFjwEACAAJ
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 30008434
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2016-01-15T06:26:05+00:00

Prosthetic Citizenship

Facebook belonging, netizenship, and subversive citizenship intersected, opening up a new space for migrant belonging in the shatter zone: prosthetic citizenship. Migrants could now manipulate their online and public self-presentation through their presence, their actions, and the circulation of particular digital images, appending to themselves the qualities and attributes of a good citizen of both the Philippines and the United Kingdom.13 By acting at all times as if they were, if not citizens already, on a legitimate pathway to UK citizenship, they could even convince themselves of their entitlement to be in the United Kingdom. They used Facebook to publicly archive evidence that they had become good UK citizens in the substantive sense, implying that they were on track to formal citizenship.14

Prosthetic citizenship extended the internalized self-surveillance needed to navigate Kankanaey village life into global, digital, and substantive citizenship spaces. Labanet explained:

Sure, I check in on Facebook when I’m working—like last week when I took the kids to Gambardos, or to see the lions in Trafalgar Square. I post pictures from my employers’ house—just of me, of course. I post pictures when I attend our socials in the [community center]. You see, I know they are looking at my status and pictures to see what I’m doing. If they are really my friends, my family, it’s ok and I can trust them not to report me. But if they are not, I am showing what I do like I have nothing to hide, so maybe they will think I’ve got papers. Only those who are absent are hiding something, that’s what they will think.

Labanet used Facebook to append to herself a kind of belonging she had yet to secure. Because only “the absent” had something to hide, she hid in plain sight. On her Christmas posting, above, she said, “Of course I want everyone to know I will be attending church. I need them to know that I’m doing good things while I’m here. It’s good that they see I am ‘friends’ with our new vicar, that I’m encouraging our kababayans here in London to attend mass, stuff like that. They don’t need to see that I am one of those who . . . Well, I am not one to just enjoy-enjoy [party] when I don’t have work.” When I asked who “them” might refer to, Labanet was not concerned about delimiting “them” as a group. She explained, “I am not hiding anything.” Labanet thus took the affective openness required to accept surveillance and transmuted that orientation into prosthetic citizenship. She “checked in” where she imagined she would be if she held the appropriate work visa. Portraying herself as if she were on a pathway to settlement and to being a full participant in mainstream UK society explained her mosque photos and the pictures with her employers’ children in Trafalgar Square.

With prosthetic citizenship, migrants took Facebook belonging and re-created an alternative citizenship in which gradations of visa status could be equalized through performance. Facebook, combined with church and

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