UP Diliman Extension Program in Pampanga - Gender Office

The UPLB Department of Social Development Services proudly invites you to our ST e-Talks x Human Ecology Seminar Series featuring Samantha Gabrielle Baril, happening on 25 August 2026 (Tuesday) from 4:00–6:00 PM via Zoom.

For more information about the event, please check the poster below.

We look forward to seeing you there!

RESEARCH | As of 2023, the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA, 2024) estimated that there were 2.16 million Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs), with women accounting for the majority. Of the total OFW population, about 37% held elementary occupations, including precarious household service (PSA, 2024).

This qualitative study explores the mental health and overall wellbeing of Filipina migrant domestic workers through the Indigenous Filipino concept of ginhawa (holistic wellbeing). Moving past traditional Western psychological frameworks, the research reveals that global labor migration fundamentally shifts the meaning of ginhawa. Instead of representing a present state of physical, emotional, and spiritual ease, wellbeing is reduced to a financialized concept where workers sacrifice their own current mental health and endure high levels of distress to ensure the economic solvency and basic survival of their families back home. Through in-depth interviews with Filipina domestic workers, the study highlights how compounding identities—being a woman, a migrant, and a domestic worker within discriminatory host-country labor hierarchies—amplify personal precarity and isolation.

Key findings show that holistic ease is redefined strictly as sending remittances, causing workers to intentionally suppress personal distress while navigating the severe emotional toll of transnational mothering. Furthermore, while workers rely on informal coping mechanisms like social media and prayer, formal mental health systems remain largely inaccessible, stigmatized, or absent. The study calls for a transition toward transnational mental health support and policies that protect the holistic health and basic rights of migrant workers beyond a remittance-centric focus.

Author: Archie Lawrence Palima Geneta (Department of Behavioral Sciences, University of the Philippines Manila)

Published in International Perspectives in Psychology

Read more: https://ovpaa.up.edu.ph/research/among-filipina-migrant-domestic-workers-the-concept-of-holistic-ease-has-shifted-from-personal-well-being-to-the-ability-to-provide-for-their-families-back-home/

💬 PANEL SESSION 4C
Gendered care, motherhood, and emotional labor
🗓️ Sep 5 (Day 2) | 🕐 Saturday, 09:30–11:00 | 📍 PH 207

🔗 To view the abstracts and register, please go to damaresearch.org.

📄 Malungkot o masaya?: Unpacking the complex emotions felt by middle-class working mothers in Metro Manila
👤 Ileana U. Cabochan
🏛️ Department of Anthropology, University of the Philippines Diliman

Conversations with six middle-class working mothers in Metro Manila has led me to understand the body as a contested site where gender, power, and labor converge and manifest in a complex mix of emotional, physical, and mental dispositions. In their experience of motherhood, joy and sadness coexist. Using the body as the main site of my inquiry, I ask, what brings pain and sadness to something they also consider to be joyful? The framework of the double burden of women as an embodied experience gives insight into this. As they juggle productive and reproductive labor, they claim to have felt sadness (‘lugmok,’ ‘lungkot’), a lack of self-worth, and exhaustion. These feelings are embodied as they are not contained or isolated from the rest of the person, but manifest on the body as physical pains. In this embodied view, emotional pains compound and intersect with mental and physical pains as mothers negotiate between ideas of a moral mother and personal fulfillment. Noting that these feelings are socially, politically, and economically induced, our conversations ended with discussing how the joy of motherhood could be increased while the pains are decreased.

📄 Pero paano naman ako?: A thematic analysis of emotional labor among self-sacrificing Filipino women in Philippine popular film
👤 Leisel J. Soon
🏛️ College of Media and Communication, University of the Philippines Diliman

“I have to go there for us, for our family’s future,” (Garcia-Sampana, 2013). “I love you all, pero … paano naman ako?” (Garcia-Sampana, 2019) Joy Marie Fabregas from Hello, Love, Goodbye (2019) and Bobbie Salazar from Four Sisters and A Wedding (2013) are just some of the many portrayals of a hardworking woman that dedicates their labor to their family. These portrayals depict the struggles of Filipinas who were forced to invest emotionally and physically for the sake of survival in the country, oftentimes finding work abroad for a better chance of a decent pay (Parreñas, 2001). Despite its normalcy in a Filipino labor landscape, it is rarely examined through the lens of gendered emotion norms. Thus, the question, what emotional scripts of local womanhood and its relation to self-sacrificing practices are reflected in Filipino popular films?

By using Hochschild’s Emotional Labor thesis (1983) and Brody & Hall’s Gendered Emotion (2008) as the psychological and sociological framework, this paper aims to examine the values and rationale emerging from local films that represent the phenomenon of working women and its importance to recognizing gendered emotions in a local setting.

Through Braun & Clarke’s Thematic Analysis (2021), this paper determines the themes found in the film texts—dialogue, scenes, and narrative and cultural structure—and examine existing emotional norms, as well as as well as the gendered burden placed on women expected to hold families together in a conservative and patriarchal society. This paper aims to contribute to the narrative of being matibay in a Filipino household, the presence and absence of recognition afforded to the sibling expected to keep the family intact, and what it costs to be the one who is expected to emotionally and physically bear it.

📄 Walang iskwater sa sariling bayan: Emotional landscapes of relocation, gendered care, and community organizing
👤 Ghemarie C. Labsan
🏛️ University of the Philippines Diliman

This study examines the dominant emotions within a relocation community in San Jose del Monte Heights, East Muzon, Bulacan, in the context of the ongoing mass campaign for the National Housing Authority (NHA) Charter Amendment and Total Condonation. Situated within the broader struggle for housing rights and the right to the city, it explores how emotions are experienced, shared, and mobilized in everyday community life and how these shape participation in community organizing and collective action.

The study draws from feminist theories of emotion, emotional labor, social reproduction, and collective action. It understands emotions not as individual psychological states but as social, relational, and political forces that emerge from lived experiences of displacement, precarity, care, and resistance. Particular attention is given to how emotions circulate within communities and influence organizing processes, participation, and collective commitment.

Using a participatory ethnographic approach informed by Ethnography and Participatory Action Research (PAR), the researcher engaged as an undergraduate fieldwork student and participant in the daily life of the community. Data were generated through participant observation, informal conversations, shared everyday activities, field notes, and weekly reflexive journaling.

Findings reveal that emotions within the relocation site are fluid, layered, and collectively produced. Experiences of fatigue, uncertainty, frustration, anxiety, and grief coexist with solidarity, humor, care, and hope. These emotional dynamics shape both participation in organizing and the community’s capacity to sustain collective struggle. The study further finds that emotional labor is highly gendered and feminized, with women, particularly mothers, playing central roles in caring for others, managing distress, sustaining social bonds, and maintaining collective responsibility within the campaign.

The study contributes to community development and organizing scholarship by foregrounding emotions as central to grassroots political action. It argues that collective emotions are not merely responses to structural conditions but are active forces that enable communities to endure, organize, and pursue social transformation.

[𝐏𝐔𝐁𝐋𝐈𝐂𝐀𝐓𝐈𝐎𝐍 𝐀𝐋𝐄𝐑𝐓] The UP Department of Philosophy congratulates Prof. Ma. Theresa Payongayong on the publication of her co-authored work, “Gender in Philippine education and philosophy: A collective writing project" in Educational Philosophy and Theory, 2026. In this work, Prof. Payongayong contributed a discussion on the discursive and institutional approaches to gender mainstreaming.

ABSTRACT:
This project examines the critical reorientation toward gender in Philippine education and philosophy, situated at the intersection of institutional consolidation and critical inquiry. Drawing on domestic legislative mandates, such as the Magna Carta of Women and Gender and Development (GAD) frameworks, and global benchmarks like Sustainable Development Goal 5, it critically interrogates the paradoxical terrain where high global gender parity rankings coexist with persistent structural inequalities, epistemic marginalization, and symbolic erasure. Moving beyond procedural compliance and tokenistic quantitative metrics, the collection evaluates whether gender mainstreaming achieves substantive epistemic justice or succumbs to administrative domestication. The contributions span diverse domains, including basic and higher education, health care curricula, indigenous and decolonial feminist epistemologies, critical masculinities, and canonical revisions of Filipino philosophy. Finally, the project argues for a reflexive, contextually situated, and globally conversant philosophy of education that moves beyond merely mainstreaming gender to allowing gendered critique to transform the ethical, epistemic, and pedagogical foundations of education and philosophy themselves.

Keywords: Gender Mainstreaming, Philosophy of Education, Gender and Development

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Educational Philosophy and Theory publishes articles on all aspects of educational philosophy, as well as other areas of pure or applied educational research.

See the article here: https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2026.2709645

💚📚

COMING UP: Kababaihan, Tagapanguna: Mga Kontribusyon sa Kasaysayan, Pilosopiya, at Medisina sa Pilipinas

🗓 August 28, 2026 (Friday)
⏰️ 1:00 PM - 4:00 PM
📍 UP Manila Theater

Register here: https://forms.gle/BkztGzHJBcsx997S7

Register now to the 1st Damá Emotion Research Group National Conference, to be held at Palma Hall, UP Diliman on 4-5 September 2026. Participation is free.

💬 PANEL SESSION 1C
Q***r labor, well-being, and collective action
🗓️ Sep 4 (Day 1) | 🕐 Friday, 11:00-12:30 | 📍 TBA

🔗 To view the abstracts and register, please go to damaresearch.org.

📄 (Disk)arte sa kalsada:
Emotional labor and everyday business of LGBT street vendors
👥 Maria Luisa S. Bolacito, Lemar V. Pugoy, Juvy T. Gonzaga, & Rosemarie G. Silva-Torregosa
🏛️ Misamis Oriental Institute of Science and Technology, Inc.

Street vending functions as a vital form of informal micro-entrepreneurship for LGBT individuals who encounter barriers to formal employment. This qualitative study examines (Disk)Arte—the interplay of diskarte (business strategy) and arte (performed emotional expression)—as emotional labor embedded in the everyday business practices of LGBT street vendors in Balingasag, Misamis Oriental. Guided by the sociology of emotions, emotional labor theory, and informal entrepreneurship perspectives, the study employs a phenomenological research design using in-depth semi-structured interviews with fifteen LGBT street vendors.

Thematic analysis reveals that emotions such as kilig (affirmation), kapoy (emotional and physical exhaustion), fear, pride, and resilience are integral to customer relations, public interactions, and livelihood survival. Emotional labor expressed through chikahan, strategic self-presentation, and affective regulation emerges as a key entrepreneurial resource. The study argues that emotions function as both resources and constraints shaping dignity, survival, and continuity in informal business spaces.
The findings highlight how LGBT street vendors in Balingasag, Misamis Oriental navigate structural marginalization through culturally embedded emotional strategies, underscoring the need for context-sensitive local policies and community-driven innovations that support inclusive informal entrepreneurship in the region.

📄 From dysphoria to trans ginhawa:
A proposed framework for understanding gender euphoria among TGNC Filipinos
👤 Epoy Alforque
🏛️ Department of Psychology, University of the Philippines Diliman

Within a predominantly cis-heteronormative world, transgender and gender nonconforming (TGNC) individuals grapple with systemic marginalization—a reality often reinforced by traditional psychological research. Despite the rise of TGNC scholarship over the decades, many studies subscribe to pathological models that hyperfixate on the clinical distress of gender dysphoria. Emerging from within trans communities as a counter-narrative is gender euphoria (GE)—a constellation of positive emotions and experiences that arise from embodying and affirming one’s gender identity. However, GE remains underrepresented in TGNC research and is often overlooked in clinical settings. Moreover, extant GE scholarship remains largely confined to Western, individualistic frameworks—necessitating further exploration within diverse cultural contexts.

This presentation endeavors to elucidate definitions and accounts of GE and its connection to psychological well-being, examine methodological trends and limitations, and explore how indigenous Filipino concepts help enrich TGNC studies. Utilizing a critical and reflexive conceptual review of refereed work, this presentation privileges affirmative, ethical, and competent scholarship to boundary-map local understandings of TGNC emotions and experiences. This work proposes an interim conceptual framework that integrates GE with select indigenous constructs such as ginhawa (holistic well-being), pagkatao (personhood), pagpapakatao (becoming a human person), and pakikipagkapwa-tao (shared inner self), as an attempt to serve as a preliminary guide for future inquiries into the embodiment and affirmation of affects such as gender euphoria, trans ginhawa, and the broader socio-political-cultural movement that is trans joy.

Leveraging Sikolohiyang Pilipino, this framework promotes a holistic model of well-being rooted in collective flourishing, rather than just individual congruence. By reimagining gender euphoria as a contrary viewpoint to damage, deficit, and distress-based models and situating it within the Filipino experience, this work aims to help depathologize TGNC identities, decolonize narratives of gender and well-being, and develop culturally grounded frameworks and approaches for trans-affirmative research and healthcare in the Philippines.

📄 Hope, anger, and belongingness: Emotions as fuel for sustained collective action for qu**rs in youth movements post-2022 elections
👤 Sigmund Fletcher D. Tarrayo
🏛️ Division of Social Sciences, University of the Philippines Tacloban College

Youth political engagement in the Philippines underwent a notable reconfiguration during and following the 2022 national elections, as volunteer-driven networks emerged as instruments of electoral mobilization and sites of collective meaning-making and political identification. In the aftermath of electoral defeat, a subset of networks persisted by transitioning into more durable, mission-oriented sociopolitical organizations. This study investigates the post-2022 elections' continued support of the members of Tindog Kabataan to explore the motivations and lived experiences that drive their continued activism after elections, with particular attention to the roles and experiences of non-binary individuals. Guided by collective instrumental and socio-emotional motivations under the sustained collective action framework, this inquiry examines how youth-led formations sustain political engagement by drawing on the interplay between efficacy beliefs and affective attachments, and how these dynamics enable the transition from candidate-centered volunteerism to enduring, advocacy-oriented sociopolitical organizations. Using a qualitative phenomenological design, the study draws on data collected through in-depth semi-structured interviews and participant observation involving current and former members. Key findings indicate that sustained engagement in Tindog Kabataan is rooted in the interaction between efficacy-driven motivations and affective attachments that bind individuals to collective action. Participants remain involved because they perceive the organization as a viable vehicle for advancing sociopolitical goals and because participation fulfills psychological needs for recognition, validation, and belonging. Moreover, continued engagement of non-binary members is tied to processes of identity affirmation and the mitigation of minority stress since the organization provides a space where marginalized identities are legitimized and expressed. Emotional dynamics operate as key drivers of mobilization, sustaining involvement despite electoral defeat. This study advances the scholarship of socio-emotional infrastructures in movement durability by foregrounding psychological mechanisms. By centering non-binary experiences, the study also enriches gender and politics literature, highlighting how marginalized identities shape and are sustained by inclusive activist spaces.

𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐖𝐀𝐈𝐓 𝐈𝐒 𝐀𝐋𝐌𝐎𝐒𝐓 𝐎𝐕𝐄𝐑! ✨

𝐂𝐞𝐥𝐞𝐛𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐲 𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐩 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐩𝐫𝐢𝐝𝐞 on 𝐀𝐮𝐠𝐮𝐬𝐭 𝟐𝟑, 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟔, 𝐚𝐭 𝟏:𝟎𝟎 𝐏𝐌, and witness history as UP Oblation DanceSport presents its first-ever Ikatlong Uri: Same-Sex DanceSport Competition at the 𝐈𝐁𝐆-𝐊𝐀𝐋 𝐓𝐡𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐫, 𝐔𝐏 𝐃𝐢𝐥𝐢𝐦𝐚𝐧.

𝐀𝐮𝐝𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐤𝐞𝐭𝐬 𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐚𝐯𝐚𝐢𝐥𝐚𝐛𝐥𝐞
𝐑𝐞𝐠𝐮𝐥𝐚𝐫: ₱300
𝐍𝐨𝐧-𝐔𝐏 𝐒𝐭𝐮𝐝𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐬: ₱250
𝐔𝐏 𝐒𝐭𝐮𝐝𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐬: ₱200

Reserve your seat through the link below, or purchase tickets during the DanceSport Workshop on August 22 and on competition day, August 23, 2026.
https://tinyurl.com/IkatlongUri26-Ticket

𝐅𝐨𝐫 𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐤𝐞𝐭 𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐞𝐫𝐯𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐢𝐧𝐪𝐮𝐢𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐬, 𝐦𝐞𝐬𝐬𝐚𝐠𝐞 𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐨𝐟𝐟𝐢𝐜𝐢𝐚𝐥 𝐅𝐚𝐜𝐞𝐛𝐨𝐨𝐤 𝐩𝐚𝐠𝐞.

𝐎𝐧𝐥𝐲 𝟓 𝐃𝐚𝐲𝐬 𝐭𝐨 𝐆𝐨 𝐮𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐥 𝐈𝐤𝐚𝐭𝐥𝐨𝐧𝐠 𝐔𝐫𝐢! 💃🕺
See you on the dance floor!

𝐓𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐢𝐬 𝐩𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐛𝐲:
UP Dancesport Society
Institute for Dementia Care Asia
INDAK – Dance for the Brain

𝐈𝐧 𝐩𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐧𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐡𝐢𝐩 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡:
UP Diliman Gender Office
UP Diliman Office of Student Projects and Activities
Chesterion
Pocari Sweat
Vanguard Pasig Chapter

𝐒𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐞𝐝 𝐛𝐲:
Philippine DanceSport Federation

☔

Rainy days = good reading days. This week: "𝙏𝙤 𝙃𝙚𝙡𝙥 𝙒𝙤𝙢𝙚𝙣-𝙇𝙚𝙙 𝙈𝙎𝙈𝙀𝙨 𝙞𝙨 𝙩𝙤 𝙐𝙣𝙙𝙚𝙧𝙨𝙩𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙏𝙝𝙚𝙢 𝙁𝙞𝙧𝙨𝙩" is a reminder that real support for women entrepreneurs means meeting them where they are, not where the system assumes they should be. Read more here: https://opinion.inquirer.net/193592/to-help-women-led-msmes-is-to-understand-them-first

Stay safe and dry out there! 🌧️📖

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