The Gender Lunch Talks are a series of networking events held by the MvBZ aiming to make gender research within Freie Universität Berlin more visible. At each event, projects and recent publications are presented and discussed. There will be five events in Winter Term 2017/18.

The talks will be given either in German or English.

Input on 08.02.2018

Dr. Roderick Galam (Institut für Sozial- und Kulturanthropologie)

Young Filipino men, servitude and the moral economy of becoming a seafarer and attaining adulthood

To get a job as a seafarer in the global maritime industry, thousands of male Filipino youths work for free as ‘utility men’ for manning agencies that supply seafarers to ship operators around the world. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and approached from a moral economy perspective, this presentation examines how manning agencies and utility men differentially rationalise this exploitative work (utility manning).

Manning agencies use it as a technology of servitude that, through physical and verbal abuse and other techniques, enforces docility to prepare utility men for the harsher conditions on-board a ship. In contrast, utility men use it as a technology of imagination, gleaning from it a capacity to shape their future. Faced with little social possibilities in the Philippines, they deploy servitude as a strategy for attaining economic mobility and masculine adulthood.