This article uses a feminist lens to examine Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte and former United States President Donald Trump’s responses to COVID-19. It argues that both populist leaders mobilised masculinity as a resource in statecraft. Both initially responded to the pandemic with dismissiveness and denialism. For the rest of his term, Trump diminished the harms of COVID and emphasised ‘protecting the economy’. Duterte, however, eventually embraced the fear of COVID, imposed a strict lockdown, and secured emergency powers. This article first (...) analyses differences in the masculinities the two politicians performed. It then explores how this performance of masculinity contributed to structuring public discourses in relation to the pandemic and situates it in neoliberal governance more broadly. For example, the performance of invincibility constructed others’ vulnerability and illness as an individual weakness rather than socially and relationally produced. Trump’s co-optation of the language of freedom encouraged protests against health measures and positioned medical experts as the ‘real threat’. In contrast, Duterte’s securitised approach made it difficult for citizens to protest repressive laws enacted by his government. Duterte’s ‘war on COVID’ was marked by his demand for obedience and discipline, thereby constituting anyone who questioned the harmful effects of a police-led lockdown as a threat to national security. Finally, the article reflects on the ways China’s growing role in global politics affects notions and practices of populist masculinities. Both leaders flexed diplomatic masculinity differently in relation to China: Duterte touted his personal closeness to China as a path to securing resources for the Philippines, while Trump’s vilification of China constructed COVID as a ‘foreign enemy’ as opposed to a crisis he was responsible for. Ultimately, these masculine responses undermined dissent and centred muscularity, either in the form of individual resilience or securitisation and policing, as the solution to the pandemic. (shrink)

The Philippines is a global leader in deploying microcredit to address poverty. These programmes are usually directed at women. Research on these programmes focuses on traditional economic indicators such as loan repayment rates but neglects impacts on women’s agency and well-being, or their position in the household and relationships with their partners and children. It is taken for granted that access to microcredit leads to enhanced gender freedoms. In line with the growing body of work in feminist scholarship that critiques (...) the instrumentalist logic of microfinance institutions in relation to women, this research foregrounds stories from interviews with female borrowers in Zamboanga City in Southern Philippines to provide grounded illustrations of how microcredit is reshaping relationships between women and their families, women and poverty and women and the state. Borrowers used loans to meet their family’s needs even at the cost of harassment from creditors, indebtedness, increased workloads and conflict with partners. These narratives challenge the dominant neoliberal discourse of female empowerment through access to credit by exposing how microcredit is part of a complex set of regulations around ‘good motherhood’ and consumption, where women’s moral worth is based on their willingness and ability to lift their families out of poverty. (shrink)