Activating Frontier Livelihoods: Women And The Transnational Secondhand Clothing Trade Between Hong Kong And The Philippines

This paper explores the work of Filipina entrepreneurs in Baguio City who have developed a branch of the global trade in secondhand clothing between Hong Kong and the Philippines.Building on kinship networks of women working in Hong Kong, these entrepreneurs navigate formal government and informal economic and cultural channels to operationalize a transnational trade that straddles legal-illegal practice in both locales. I argue here that these women emerge as transnational market players whose actions unsettle essentialist categories of economy, work, value and legality. Through their cross-border work, they connect parts of societies not previously linked, or connect these in different ways, capturing contested markets and fashioning new spaces of consumption. At the same time, state and cultural constraints on their newfound economic flexibility, mean that traders continue to depend on community networks in both the Philippines and Hong Kong rather than being able to consistently use formal infrastructure options and more visible avenues of action to facilitate their businesses. Because the status of the used clothing trade remains under legal debate, Filipina's entrepreneurial work in this sphere thus helps us situate local initiatives within wider negotiations of agency and understand the extent to which personalized actions on the edge can transform political and global forces.