Datíng as Affect in Filipinx Migration

Abstract

This essay considers “dating” (pronounced as “dah-teeng” and translated from Tagalog into English as a kind of force or impression) as a type of affect that constitutes a potentially generative site to explore the workings and circulation of affect on a global scale. Building on scholarship on the affective dimensions of Filipinx labor migration and, specifically, on care and carework, it poses the question of what it would mean to shift our focus from “return” to “arrival”—in the author’s words, to bend the time and space of the present—as a means to recover what might have been lost during movement or to find pleasure in fantasizing about alternative possibilities.