The resilience critique

Not a denial that Filipino resilience exists. An argument about what the praise is doing. Three strands, and they are separable.

The first is distributional: if vulnerability tracks political and economic marginalisation, then resilience frequently describes people absorbing a cost that a functioning state would have prevented. The second is about who specifically absorbs it, with norms of female altruism harnessed at household and community level while women and girls carry the longer harms of displacement. The third is about speech: after a disaster, a public story built on compassion can quietly place anger and demands for accountability outside what a survivor is allowed to say.

Source: Greg Bankoff (2003), Cultures of Disaster, for the link between vulnerability and marginalisation. Maria Tanyag (2018), “Resilience, Female Altruism, and Bodily Autonomy: Disaster-Induced Displacement in Post-Haiyan Philippines,” Signs, paid, record at https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8e0c8a6272c4dff486553f25f4b053b897d6b03a . Nicole Curato (2016), “Politics of Anxiety, Politics of Hope,” Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs, 35(3), open access at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/186810341603500305 , from more than two hundred interviews and two years of fieldwork in Tacloban, on the post-Haiyan discourse of compassion doing ethical boundary work against a discourse of contestation. The phrase “resilience porn” circulates in Philippine commentary and was not found as a defined term in a peer-reviewed source, so this course does not attribute it to scholarship.

First used in: 2.6 · What is actually strong here