Eicosanoides. Aspectos generales

Publics that have been cultivated using the language of rights are made concrete through their visibility in the material space for representation by claiming their rights to the city. At the same time their struggle for rights in the material space animates the space for representation public. It is the coming together of the discursive and material publics that underpins the migrants’ movements in Hong Kong. The claim to the city, or the right to the city, or more specifically, the right to space for representation is thus important for ‘publics’, for those who want to be seen and heard and to have the opportunity to become part of the plural publics in their own right. Don Mitchell (2003) contends that it is the good that comes from the version of public space as a relatively unmediated interaction, the space’s ‘publicness’

as a good in and of itself and as a collective right to the city that are crucial, especially in the face of threats that come from the exclusion of certain segments of the population (please refer to chapter five for discussions about the interactions between the migrants and the authorities) and the promotion of private, controlled spaces, which are increasingly seen as the solution to perceived social problems.

The publicness of public spaces allows problems that might otherwise be masked to become visible. For instance, the migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong, who are mandated by government policy to live-in with their employers and who find it unaffordable to spend the whole day in cafes and restaurants on their days off would have nowhere else to go to, or simply be (as akin to homeless people in Don Mitchell’s discussion) if they were not on the streets and in the open spaces of Central. Their problems with their employers, if there were any, would be hidden in the private households, for they would not have access to the wider publics in their own community in places like Central on Sundays, where a simple question like asking where to find help can quite readily be answered and they can be directed to service providers like the Mission or grassroots organisations, which hang banners at prominent sites to help migrant domestic workers who might be in trouble. The presence of a physical site like Central offers not only a space for representation, but also a space to be for migrant domestic workers and it is also here that publics cultivated through the language of rights cease to be faceless consumers of information, and become rights-conscious subjectivities.

A place to go and just be, in Don Mitchell’s discussion about homeless people in Berkeley, is essential to the formation of rights-conscious subjectivities. Being heard and seen by the public at large is quite different from acquiring or familiarising oneself with the language of rights. Raising awareness about rights is not one-way street. It is not like in the auditorium of a university setting, where few but the most experienced in the setting speak up; it is a two-way dialogue that is only possible in a conducive environment. The open spaces of Central allow groups of various sizes to gather and talk. Grassroots organisations organise seminars that allow members to participate and ask questions. N, who has been in Hong Kong for fifteen years and recently found a new grassroots organisation, told me:

‘at the seminars they would ask us what are the problems, any suggestions, any ideas, so I always raise my hand to speak, to

speak what’s on my mind, that built up my confidence’

(interview by author, 1 June 2014).

The place to go and be, in a way, is more than taking to the streets – the Sunday gatherings, the lived experiences, and the everyday practices are all constitutive of being who they are and fundamental to becoming ‘publics’.

It is in the public spaces that they can simply be and become what they aspire to be. Through participating in events like One Billion Rising (Figure 3-2), a worldwide campaign against violence against women, N and others in the movement become part of a global community raising issues about violence against women. The campaign did this by organising women to dance en-mass – in an interview with the Guardian,⁷ Ensler says it is claiming back the public spaces for women – as creative resistance.

Images of the campaign appear in media around the globe, including those of the migrant workers in Hong Kong. Through it, they become a global public reaching out to a global public.

7 Source: One Billion Rising: how can public dancing end violence against women? By Homa Khaleeli, 13 Feb 2015, the Guardian,

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/womens-blog/2015/feb/13/one-billion-rising-public-dancing-violence-women-eve-ensler

Figure   3-­‐2:   One   Billion   Rising   dance   at   Chater   Road   on   15   Feb   2015;   Source   of   Photo:    

Courtesy  of  Cocoy  A.  Sabareza  from  Filguys  Organizations  -­‐  Gabriela  Hong  Kong  

It is not possible to discern how and where the ‘publics’ start – did they start in the realm of the discursive spaces cultivated in the language of rights, as Niezen (2010) articulates, or the claim to the rights of the city, as Don Mitchell argues, the physical space of Central in which the Filipino migrants gather? I argue that it is less a concern about where the ‘publics’

start and more about recognition that the ‘publics’ emerge as a result of bringing together the struggle for rights as migrant domestic workers and the struggle for a space for representation as a claim to the right to the city.

In other words, publics cultivated in the discursive space with the language of rights remain intangible and unidentifiable consumers of information.

The publics who gather in an uncontested and sanitised public space of consumerism remain random masses of passive consumers (as in the case of Tiffany Wonderland, discussed in chapter four). Or in the case of traditional groups who gather in Central on Sundays, described by K, who

‘don’t know what to do besides being together’ as collection of private individuals. Being together in a public space does not amount to creating space for representation. It is in the togetherness with a message to deliver, i.e. the conveying of the publics construed in the discursive space with the

language of rights, that puts words to bodies occupying spaces and bodies occupying spaces to words. It is the bringing together of the discursive publics cultivated through the language of rights and the publics in the material space that are constitutive of the transnational migrant workers’

movement in Hong Kong. It is the constructing of publics in the discursive space using the language of rights and by claiming a right to the city and the space for representation that publics come into being.

Don Mitchell (2003) argues that the struggle for rights produces space.

Indeed it does, as in the case of Central for the migrant domestic workers’

movement. Their struggles as migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong makes Central more than a space of global capital; it is also a site of resistance and struggles, although it might be added that the presence of a material space in which Filipino migrant domestic workers gather on Sundays helps to materialise the struggles in the space. Thus, publics cannot be public without having the right to the space for representation (public spaces) and public spaces that are not spaces for representation are not public. They are the two sides of the same coin – one cannot go without the other.

3.6 Conclusion

My notion of the nuanced, multiple and overlapping ‘publics’ contrasts with Habermas’s public sphere, which is more concerned with the bourgeois that assumes ‘universality’ with its representation and perhaps as a result excludes acknowledging the ‘counter-publics’ (Fraser, 1990) who compete to be in the public spheres and bringing issues that might not be deemed as

‘public’ into the public sphere. Using the language of rights deployed in the transnational migrant domestic workers’ movement in Hong Kong, I have demonstrated that even within the seemingly uniform public within a movement, there are multiple publics along the spectrum depending on their acquisition and/or familiarity with the language of rights as well as their inclination and subscription to the multi-scalar of the same discursive representation. I have also demonstrated that instead of the publics that are

knowable only through extrapolation, which are distinctly non-manifest as Niezen (2010) argues in the process of claiming collective human rights, or cultural rights, the publics in the transnational migrant domestic workers’

movements are identifiable and visible, as the nuanced, multiple and overlapping publics occupy the streets of Central on Sundays and public holidays. It is the materiality of their presence in public spaces that make their ‘publics’ concrete. Discursive publics need to be materialised in space to make themselves felt.

From the perspective of rights to the city, which Don Mitchell discusses at length with regard to the rights of homeless people, for marginal people to be seen and heard and alternative movements contesting issues of citizenship and democracy to be made visible the publicness of public spaces is crucial. I wish to emphasise that whilst I do not dispute the rights to the city and the good of the publicness in and of itself, lacking the discursive power regarding what exactly these publics in the spaces are about, the gathering of people in public spaces becomes what K says, and which I repeatedly quote because of how succinctly it captures and perhaps reflects the nature of movements we have seen in the world lately, for example the Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring, and the Umbrella Movement –‘they do not know what to do besides being together’.

Mobilising masses to take to the streets with spur of the moment emotions of outrage and hope (Castells, 2012) is one thing, but cultivating publics and at the same time taking into account the nuanced, multiple and overlapping publics and strategising multiple claims in the language of rights is quite another. Whilst the former might have generated excitement and spectacle, it is in the latter, with its influence on expanding the notion of human rights, that our struggles for our rights might be advanced. It is ultimately due to our aspirations for the kind of the world we want to create that human rights as a regime came into being after World War Two. And it is in the belief that everyone is equally deserving in terms of being protected and accorded human rights that people struggle for their rights, or else, quoting Harvey (2000), ‘what on earth are workers of the world

supposed to unite about unless it is some sense of their fundamental rights as human beings’? Starting with the belief that we are all human beings seems like a small yet big step forward.

In the next two chapters to follow, I will discuss how the transnational migrant workers’ movement in Hong Kong animates the spaces and streets of Central ‘public’: as resistance to the domination of global capital through their protest marches - in chapter four - and with regard to how they negotiate with the representatives and enforcers of abstract spaces with their lived practices in the same area.