Emmanuel David

Purple-Collar Labor: Transgender Workers and Queer Value at Global Call Centers in the Philippines

This article examines new patterns of workplace inequality that emerge as transgender people are incorporated into the global labor market. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 41 transgender call center employees in the Philippines, I develop the concept “purple-collar labor” to describe how transgender workers—specifically trans women—are clustered, dispersed, and segregated in the workplace and how their patterned locations in social organizational structures serve a particular value-producing function. These patterned inclusions, I argue, come with explicit and implicit interactional expectations about how “trans” should be put to work in the expansion and accumulation of global capital. In this way, the study examines the production and extraction of queer value and the folding of trans women’s gendered performances into commercial exchange. Data show how the affective labor of transgender employees is used to help foster productivity, ease workplace tensions, and boost employee morale. This study of transgender employment experiences opens new lines of inquiry for understanding gender inequalities at work, and it builds on scholarship that combines political economy approaches with transgender studies.

Outsourced Heroes and Queer Incorporations Labor Brokerage and the Politics of Inclusion in the Philippine Call Center Industry

This article examines state and corporate discourses that portray outsourced call center workers as bagong bayani, or “new national heroes” of the Philippines. Through a queer reading of state narratives and corporate advertisements that deploy these rhetorical devices, I argue that the new national heroes trope functions ideologically to praise, cultivate, and broker flexible Filipino labor while seeking to quell a host of moral anxieties about gender, sexuality, and globalization. I argue that the naming of outsourced laborers as new national heroes extends the logic of the labor brokerage process that, to date, has been theorized in the context of global migration. The essay charts this shift by looking at the manufacturing of idealized outsourced laborers as well as the neoliberal incorporation of queer and transgender subjects, and others on the margins of the global South, into the logics of capital. At the same time, it examines how call center work has become one site for the articulation of, and struggle over, respectable queer and transgender subjectivities.

The Art of Trans Politics

Emmanuel David on contemporary artist Cassils’s embodied struggle and trans politics.