ABSTRACT
The previous chapter provided a structurationist account of Filipina overseas domestic work. This allowed a conceptualization of FODW agency as both constituted and constitutive of her most immediate structural context, that which I termed the FODW institution. In extending the analysis on FODW agency, this chapter examines constraints to FODW agency, both within and outside of the FODW institution. It does so by drawing from the feminist structuralist perspective on overseas domestic work along with structural constraints caused by underdevelopment in the country or locale of origin (Chapter 3). Indeed, what about those who remain outside of the FODW institution? An explication of Sen and Nussbaum’s notion of the capability approach (CA) in this chapter provides the theoretical ground from which constraints in relation to the FODW institution can be understood, and from which a fuller account of constraints at the structural level to FODW agency becomes possible. In this way, this chapter provides an account of the “structuralist” in the structural-structurationist framework outlined in Chapter 3.
