The Visual Acuity of Filipino German Women’s Facebooks

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Facebook, an online social media and networking site, offers services that can tremendously transform contemporary lives and the identity Facebook users project to the public. Its visual capability is so powerful that it can easily supplant a voluble written statement. The visual acuity that is enabled by Facebook technology is a dead-on centre by its eloquence, rendering affordances to some Filipino-German women, the subject of the study. It is this visual capability that is appropriated by them. There are tens of thousands of Filipino women married to German nationals contracted through international marriage social media agencies and sites or informal modes of marriage arrangements. Such transnational marriages have enabled their diaspora, rendering the mobilisation of lives. This notion of mobility through transnational marriage unions is taken a step further by Filipino-German women through their appropriation of Facebook technology, mobilising it to construct narratives of their lives. Using Tim Cresswell’s politics of mobility, John Urry’s metaphors of mobilities, and John Bollmer’s notion of identity and the social media, the paper decodes their Facebook posts to read representations of themselves as cosmopolitan transnationals, both “corporeally and in a virtual sense,” amidst hostile immigration systems that “police” movement and the crossing of borders.