Pressed into Starched Whites: Nursing (Dis)ability in Filipino/American History

What is the good life? This question addresses the culture of nursing in the Philippines, the country’s surplus supply of nurses, and the unidirectional migration patterns of Filipino nurses to the Global North. The current discourse around the hyperabled Filipino nurse valorizes this ethnic professional group as living embodiments of care. This racialization has proven challenging to critique due to its endorsement by those within and outside this identity and also nursing’s apolitical view of care. These issues mask the structural inequalities that wear down Filipino nurses, who remain targets of dehumanizing practices such as labor exploitation and human trafficking. The critical lens of ability and disability can delineate Filipino nurses’ interpellation with the capacity for nursing and political belonging. While nursing has served as a normative conduit for flourishing under capitalist-liberal orders, how has the search for the good life worn out Filipino nurses’ bodyminds?
This study explores the transnational history of Filipino nurses between the Philippines and the United States across the twentieth century. It examines the ablement (the process of becoming human) and disablement (the process of dehumanizing) of these nurses to understand how their capacity for professionalism remains interlocked with limited access to human flourishing. I thereby argue that Filipino nurses’ capacities have remained suspended in becoming human under racial capitalism despite their normative career path. Their weariness foregrounds the ableist imaginary that is intent on reproducing their precarious lives, whether in the Philippines or abroad. Still, they practiced life-making that was illegible to capitalist exploitation, which became a way to resist, survive, and reimagine the good life amidst the inescapability of hegemonic forces. Filipino nurses managed to reconfigure a life filled with uncertainty into one of adventure and beauty.