Melodrama of Migration
摘要
This chapter focuses on Ricardo Lee’s DH: Domestic Helper, a play that lays bare the feminization of labor from the Philippines. Making sense of how female subjects have become the evident face of the Philippine nation-state’s infamous industry of warm body export, this chapter seeks to comprehend the abnegation that Filipinas undergo abroad and the agency that they creatively employ in their everyday life outside the Philippine nation. More specifically, it delves into how Lee’s play foregrounds the performative (through Brechtian procedures of theatre-making) and the affective aspects (melodrama) of this social phenomenon. It elaborates on how the play highlights domestic workers as at once exploited but resistive laboring subjects who are part of global capitalist flows and structures of feeling. This chapter closes with an inter-subjective analysis of Nora Aunor, the very star and ultimate persuasion of this theatrical production, and shows how the play interconnects her itinerant life story as the country’s one and only Superstar with the melodramatic mode of theatre-making.