Defending the Land: Filipina Activists amidst Authoritarian Rule in the Philippines

Types and Modalities of Gendered Violence

Gendered violence, in both discursive and structural forms, permeates and harms various facets of women activists’ lives and advocacy. This violence follows them along the spatial and temporal contours of public and private life, emerging gradually, dissipating and sometimes returning with devastating force that affects women activists and their families. Discursive violence includes historical events, ideas and beliefs that give rise to and legitimize socio-cultural stereotypes and expressions of gendered violence (Neumann, 2004). It involves deploying representations that perform and enable harm through naming, framing and enactment (Hall, 1985), for example, through publicly red-tagging women activists as communist terrorists. Such acts of signification subject something (a woman's body, caring roles, etc.) to political rhetoric that can reinforce gendered racialization, sexism and prejudice, reproducing gendered representations with significant emotional, biophysical and material consequences. As Roces (2010, 2012) describes, Filipina activists are subject to discursive violence that (re)constructs them as industrious, dutiful, caring, domestic women (Parreñas, 2015; Resurreción, 1999) who re-emerge as either ‘victims’ or ‘survivors’ rather than women with political agency and powerful legacies. This sexist discourse can gradually stabilize as received wisdom in society (Leach and Mearns, 1996), enveloping, subsuming and degrading women activists over time. As we show, Duterte's masculinized rhetoric and chauvinistic framings attempted to normalize and legitimate violence against women and women activists, making such framings easier to enact and forgotten by the public (Peluso and Watts, 2001).

With time, discursive gendered violence becomes cemented as structural (patriarchal) violence within and between societal institutions. Structural violence involves the less visible, implicit violence built into and harnessed from institutions (e.g. male-centred judiciaries, property rights), ideologies (e.g. anti-leftist) and political histories (e.g. anti-Muslim) in and of the dominant society (Galtung, 1969). Recognizing that women are not simply victims — indeed, they, like others, resist and overcome — Anglin (1998/2010) notes that gendered structural violence involves disciplinary techniques in law, economy and politics that emerge from and normalize the ‘status quo’ of patriarchy in society. Gendered hierarchies of control curtail the life chances of women activists (and women in general) through the routinization and normalization of dominant patriarchal discourses that subordinate them and their struggles (Anglin, 1998/2010: 147), such as the difficulties Filipinas face divorcing their husbands.4 Gendered structural violence thus reflects the institutional modalities or natures of harm that become regularized against women activists. Duterte's illiberal authoritarian regime amplified this gendered violence, making it systemic and embodied.

Gendered violence subsumes women activists’ public and private lives in ‘slow’ and ‘fast’ ways. Slow violence can ‘occur gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space’ (Nixon, 2011: 2). It is both visceral and psychological, playing out incrementally to produce environmental, social and physical injustices and harm. For example, discursive violence can emerge slowly and powerfully, reaching women activists through intermittent text messages with harmful sexist taunts or death threats, or as periodic media misrepresentations. Such violence can be diffuse, and it can be difficult to trace, identify, or assign culpability to perpetrators until it is too late (Nixon, 2011). Structural violence, even less visible, is often historically institutionalized and normalized, obscuring the perpetrators and their effects from view. However, both forms of violence often converge and ‘erupt … into instant sensational visibility’, the makings of fast violence with deadly consequences (ibid.: 2).

As such violence converges over time and space, it can amplify as broader ‘violent atmospheres’ across society under authoritarian regimes, exacerbating multifaceted harms, fears and anxieties among women activists and other marginalized groups. Overlapping gendered violences co-produce pervasive violent atmospheres across political, economic, social and environmental spheres (Mostafanezhad and Dressler, 2021). Atmospheric violence permeates all aspects of women activists’ lives, shaped by social histories, political and economic struggles, patriarchal structures and the drive for surplus accumulation. It is not merely territorial or a societal epiphenomenon (Tyner and Inwood, 2014: 771); it manifests in visual, non-visual and material forms through auditory, tactile and electronic modes of transmission. Under strongman authoritarian rule, these violent atmospheres are saturated with sexist language and patriarchal power dynamics, subordinating laws and practices through intertwined ideologies of capital accumulation and anti-leftist sentiments. Intersectional gendered violence is never an isolated event with discrete impacts; it is a societal unfolding with differential consequences at the individual, family and community level (Springer, 2011: 90).

Hope as Agency?

Far from being passive victims of violence, Filipina activists draw on the agency of hopefulness to persist amidst the discrimination and disadvantages entrenched in violent atmospheres (Crenshaw, 1991; Nightingale, 2011). In the Philippines, women activists’ experiences and struggles embody hope as much as frustration, fuelling their emotional investments in the ‘long game’ of protecting human rights and the environment. For many, a hopeful persistence can be powerfully generative. Hope can overcome fear and frustration by creating the political conditions or openings for real change, both now and in the future (Anderson, 2006; Wright, 2019). It represents a sustained investment in future-making among women activists who believe that they can positively influence outcomes, despite the fears and uncertainties stemming from harassment and other forms of violence (Dressler, 2021a; Kleist and Jansen, 2016; Wright, 2019). However, their hopefulness, while striving for better possibilities, is set against fear and concern. They understand how violence works to constrain their lives and those of their families (Anderson, 2006: 749). Such hopefulness is, therefore, not inherent to women activists’ struggle; rather, it ebbs and flows depending on the politics of struggle and the tumult of everyday life.

Criminalizing Leftists Post-Marcos

After the People Power Revolt ousted Marcos in 1986, the harassment and killings of leftist activists temporarily subsided. The Corazon Aquino administration (1986–92) swiftly amended the Constitution in 1987, enshrining Indigenous rights, the right to protest and greater gender equality. However, these legislative gains were short-lived as political tensions between leftist activism, neoliberal extractivism and military repression once again escalated (Holden, 2014). Under President Fidel Ramos (1992–98) and subsequent administrations, neoliberal reforms and deregulation accelerated corporate investments in mining, plantations, dams and infrastructure on ancestral lands in frontier regions, such as Palawan (Dressler and Smith, 2023). Activists responded to corporate extractivism in different ways: some continued to support the radical left's armed struggle, while others shifted to peaceful protest, community organizing and policy reforms (Abinales, 2018; Dressler, 2009; Rutten, 2001). In both cases, state and non-state violence against activists persisted.

President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo's tenure (2001–10), coinciding with the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks in the USA, was especially violent for activists (Holden, 2011). Using millions of US dollars from foreign security agreements with the G.W. Bush administration, Arroyo launched a violent counter-terrorism campaign against Islamic terrorists and secessionist groups in Mindanao, the Sulu Archipelago, and southern Palawan (Regilme, 2021). She expanded counter-terrorism policies, reinforcing militarized masculinities within state forces and targeting ‘left-wing political opposition, critical journalists, government critics, and local political opponents’ (Regilme, 2021: 88). With little credible evidence, her strategy conflated peaceful activist groups critical of government policies with terrorists (ibid.: 75), with the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) often surveilling leftist activists during protests and marking them for execution (Holden, 2011). This normalization of counter-terrorism discourse and violence led to increased military interventions and a surge in extrajudicial killings, resulting in over 1,000 deaths during Arroyo's term, half of whom were affiliated with far-left NGOs (Karapatan, 2009). Of these, at least 131 were women activists (ibid.).

Rodrigo Duterte, then-mayor of Davao City, supported the Arroyo administration's violent suppression of insurgents and leftist activists. His endorsement of violent tactics, along with alleged ties to the ‘Davao Death Squad’ vigilante group — which targeted suspected criminals, street children and drug addicts — further fuelled the rise in extrajudicial killings under the guise of counter-terrorism. Although the killings of activists decreased under Benigno Aquino III's more pro-human rights presidency (2010–16) — 333 activists were killed, including 33 women among 139 human rights workers — Duterte's 2016 election as president led to a sharp escalation in state-sanctioned violence against environmental and human rights activists, particularly women defenders (Karapatan, 2021).

Duterte's Militarized Masculinity

After abandoning his campaign promises to tackle corruption, protect the environment and support Indigenous rights (Curato, 2016), Duterte pursued a violent blend of ‘authoritarian developmentalism’ across the country (Arsel et al., 2021; Bello, 2019; Crost and Felter, 2020). His administration, backed by Chinese infrastructure funding, lifted a nine-year moratorium on new mining and expanded palm oil plantations in Mindanao and Palawan, resulting in the repression and dispossession of rural smallholders (Bello, 2019; Dressler, 2021a). Partly to suppress rural resistance to extractivism, the president intensified legal and military offensives against remnants of the NPA insurgency and activists allegedly associated with the CPP (Dressler, 2021a). From 2017 to 2020, martial law was imposed in Mindanao, the National Taskforce to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC)7 was established, and the Anti-Terrorism Law (2020)8 was enacted. Almost anyone with leftist activist leanings was labelled a ‘communist’ terrorist and a threat to the state (McCoy, 2017a, 2017b).

Crucially, Duterte's revanchist and sexist rhetoric directed much of the discursive and structural violence towards women activists, with bloody consequences. As a ‘macho’ populist leader, his ‘militant form of masculinity’ was rooted in degrading women activists, crushing insurgents and targeting those involved, or accused of involvement, with drugs (Tapscott, 2020: 1570). Under Duterte, the historical link between the Philippine state, military service and masculine political authority (Brown et al., 2020: 18) was cemented through authoritarian strategies and violent tactics (Dressler, 2021a). Women and women activists bore the brunt of this toxic chauvinism, including harassment and intimidation.9

Duterte governed by wielding a violent mix of ‘street chauvinism’ and revanchist ‘jokes’ targeting women and their bodies, which resonated with predominantly male enforcement agencies (De Chavez and Pacheco, 2020; Gregorio, 2020). Cases of the president's misogyny abounded. After imposing martial law in Mindanao in 2017, for example, Duterte told male soldiers patrolling rural areas that they could rape up to three women without facing consequences (Gregorio, 2020), legitimizing the army's violent masculinity. His rhetoric then escalated when ‘joking’ about shooting rebel NPA women in the vagina as punishment for transgressing their roles as dutiful women and mothers (Parmanand, 2020). Without vaginas, he argued, these women would be ‘useless’ (Go, 2019: 34). Reflecting on the 1989 rape and murder of Australian missionary Jacqueline Hammill during his time as mayor of Davao, Duterte also infamously remarked, ‘I was angry because she was raped, that's one thing. But she was so beautiful, the mayor should have been first. What a waste’ (Burgos Jr. and Silva, 2016; Curato, 2016).

Duterte's weaponization of misogynistic discourse reinforced his governance agenda by sexualizing and degrading women's bodies and behaviours. This rhetoric further normalized sexism and toxic masculinity, emboldening other men to enact his misogyny through local violence (Rafael, 2020). Filipino human rights NGOs became increasingly alarmed by the escalating harassment, intimidation and killing of women activists under Duterte, with the NGO and human rights alliance Karapatan noting that: ‘while President Duterte rambles on with his sexist and anti-women rhetoric, poor women leaders are being killed in communities, while others face constant threats to their lives’ (Karapatan, cited in Gascon, 2018: 5). Duterte upheld patriarchal norms that policed women's bodies and behaviours, with his sexism serving as justification for often-violent outcomes (Manne, 2018).

The risks faced by women activists during Duterte's presidency intensified further during the COVID-19 pandemic. On 17 March 2020, Duterte declared the first ‘enhanced community quarantine’ for Metro Manila, with strict lockdowns imposed nationwide by early April (Aspinwall, 2020b). Under these emergency orders, the already dangerous work of women activists became even more perilous due to increased monitoring and restrictions. In rural and urban areas, activists who previously safeguarded themselves by altering travel routes, using safe houses and relying on protection from comrades were now spatially fixed — locked down — making them easier targets for state and non-state actors. At least half a dozen women activists were arrested, and two others were murdered by masked hitmen, as pandemic restrictions limited their ability to move (Dressler, 2021b).

The story of Elena Tijamo, 58, encapsulates the horror that many women activists endured during this time. Elena worked for an NGO, the Farmers Development Centre (FARDEC), offering paralegal advice to farmers on land disputes amidst widespread land grabbing (De Leon, 2020; Ecarma, 2020; Ellao, 2020; Esguerra, 2020; Marquez, 2020). Her rural activism (and that of FARDEC) allegedly ‘earned the ire of landlords in the region’ (Ellao, 2020).10 In early 2020, Elena reported a suspicious visit by individuals who claimed to be from the Department of Social Welfare and Development offering COVID-19 support, but who instead probed for personal information and failed to produce identification (Ecarma, 2020; Ellao, 2020). On the evening of 13 June 2020, six armed and masked men forcibly entered Elena's home (Ecarma, 2020). Her daughter and sister watched as she was allegedly thrown to the floor and had her hands bound and mouth gagged with duct tape. Despite their pleas and struggles, the figures dragged her away in front of her family members (Ecarma, 2020; Ellao, 2020; Esguerra, 2020). Over a year later, on 28 August 2021, Elena's body surfaced in a medical centre in Mandaluyong City. Her death remains unresolved (Ecarma and Bolledo, 2021; Enano, 2021).

Although the following cases on Palawan do not involve the murder of women activists, they highlight similar harassment and intimidation to that endured by Elena and others before their deaths under the regime. While each woman's situation is unique, they share common experiences of harassment, fear and grief. In the context of Palawan's social history, we present the lived experiences of three Indigenous women activists (Ate Carmela, Lambana Lazones, Felicita Labog) and two migrant activists (Ate Divina and Mahalia)11 from central and southern Palawan. These ‘centre-left’ activists continued their work under Duterte amidst a toxic mix of chauvinism, political repression and resource exploitation, on an island previously known more for its vast forests and biodiversity rather than for the harassment and intimidation of activists.

Women Activist Stories on Palawan

In the early 1990s, as part of the Palawan-focused environmental movements, several women lawyer-activists (who shared social networks and studied law together at the University of the Philippines) established NGOs in Puerto Princesa City, the provincial capital. In 1989, the Palawan NGO Network Incorporated (PNNI) was founded by the charismatic Maani Banang (pseudonym) to unite NGOs and rural communities in countering the rise of inappropriate development in Palawan. Reflecting on that period, Banang noted in a 2002 interview, ‘It was a time when many government projects were coming here with no one examining whether they were suitable for the province. It was all being done through a top-to-bottom approach. But at that time, there were many NGOs … and most of them did not coordinate with each other and attempted to operate on their own’.14

By this time, the CES was already providing paralegal training to Indigenous peoples, farmers and fisherfolk, with a focus on land rights and environmental justice. Over time, Ate Divina expanded CES support to Indigenous communities facing broader social, political and environmental challenges. A close friend of Divina, Ate Carmela, assisted her uncle, a well-known Tagbanua priest, to establish the Indigenous rights NGO, the Indigenous Environmental Collective (IEC), in 1989. Influenced by her uncle's organization, the Indigenous People's Apostolate (IPA), under Carmela's guidance, the IEC grew into a well-organized, highly respected collective (currently representing over 57 Indigenous associations that are involved in community mobilization, paralegal advocacy and awareness building across Palawan).

During her time with the IEC, Carmela collaborated with PANLIPI to negotiate with the Department of Environment and Natural Resources for rattan-harvesting concessions, and to establish certificates of ancestral domain claims and, later, titled claims (Certificates of Ancestral Domain Titles — CADTs) (Pinto, 2000). Since its inception, the IEC has used laws such as the Indigenous Peoples’ Rights Act of 1997 to help communities resist mining, plantation and other illegal activities in CADTs (or to negotiate with the perpetrators of such activities), while fostering partnerships with government agencies to award harvesting rights to Indigenous communities. Carmela recently left the organization to pursue intermittent activist work with Indigenous communities in southern Palawan.

In the early days, these women activists focused on building moral capital by investing in good ‘records and reputations’ (Hilhorst, 2000). Many NGOs relied on intermittently funded projects and community partnerships to raise Indigenous people's awareness of legal rights to ancestral lands and forests, enabling community mobilization and resistance against social and environmental crimes. The CES, PNNI and other NGOs provided paralegal training to local People's Organizations and Indigenous peoples, empowering them to carry out ‘citizen arrests’ of those involved in illegal resource harvesting. Larger corporations, such as mining companies, were taken to court. The more direct the intervention, the more violent the backlash against women activists and their colleagues.

Under multiple presidential administrations — from Ramos to Noynoy Aquino — mining operations and oil palm plantations expanded across central and southern Palawan Island (Dressler and Smith, 2023). By 2011, large-scale mining permits covered more than 38,303 hectares on the island, with additional applications targeting ancestral lands in the uplands (Novellino, 2014). Often flanking nickel mines, over 9,000 hectares of forests and farmland have been converted to oil palm plantations (Dressler, 2021a). Derived from ‘pinprick’ land grabs (Borras and Franco, 2024), smaller plantations for rubber, copra, cassava and other cash crops have also proliferated along new feeder roads, facilitating timber and wildlife poaching.

Recently, several young women activists have formed their own NGOs and POs to combat land grabs, extractive exploitation, and human rights abuses across Palawan. Many of the activists, including Mahalia, Lambana Lazones and Felicita Labog, serve as frontline defenders and community organizers. Mahalia, a migrant activist, co-founded and directs programmes at the Palawan Community Conservation Centre (PCCC), a female-led youth organization focused on Indigenous-led forest conservation. Lambana, an Indigenous woman, co-founded a PO that, in partnership with the IEC and PNNI, advocates against mining and palm oil plantations encroaching on ancestral lands. Felicita worked alongside her late husband, activist Librito Labog, to mobilize Tagbanua and Pala'wan communities in resisting land grabs, timber poaching and plantation expansion. Their PO was also affiliated with IEC and PNNI.

Below, the women activists describe navigating an increasingly violent atmosphere in both their public and private lives. Under Duterte, they faced chauvinistic harassment, red-tagging and threats of harm, all while balancing activism with family responsibilities.

Chauvinism-laced Harassment and Threats

Red-tagging

Women activists must regularly navigate the overlapping discursive and structural violence of being red-tagged as members or sympathizers of the CPP and NPA, including the deep psychological and bodily violence this unleashes over time. Ate Divina (from the CES) recently learned that her organization had been red-tagged by intelligence personnel for allegedly being sympathetic to the ‘communists and the rebels’. She was worried, claiming, ‘this is all “a lot of talk”, anecdotal stories, and a lot of dangerous hearsay’. With a hint of exasperation, she stressed that the government had a significant military budget to conduct intelligence work and that red-tagging was often done by corrupt individuals ‘just to earn money’.17 In this way, numerous centre-left NGOs experienced escalating levels of harassment and intimidation due to Duterte's anti-communist campaign, spearheaded by the NTF-ELCAC and the surge in militarization near (and within) Indigenous communities across the countryside.

The persistent threat of being red-tagged as a communist sympathizer posed a constant danger for mobile women activists working in remote areas of Palawan. This threat materialized through various means, including online trolling, public radio slander and official letters from the NTF-ELCAC — often without substantiation. The violence of red-tagging often escalates over time, manifesting through repeated public accusations and surveillance (Kunze et al., 2021). Powerful politicians frequently engage in systematic ‘smearing and tagging’ of NGO staff who oppose land deals and extractive projects that align with their financial interests or those of their constituents (Dressler, 2021b). The burden of proof then shifts to NGOs and women activists, forcing them to demonstrate that they have no ties to the CPP-NPA. Failure to do so can have severe consequences: red-tagging tarnishes organizational reputations, intensifies harassment and often culminates in the murder of staff members.

In the ensuing discussion, Lambana expressed concern that she might also be red-tagged one day.

Slow to Fast Violence

Among the many experiences shared with us, Felicita Labog recounted the profound emotional stress and sorrow she endured due to the violence inflicted on her, her husband and their children. She explained how the legacy of this brutality continues to affect her and her children to this day, noting that before her husband, Librito, was murdered: ‘In our area, we saw the plight of the katutubo […] we saw their situation and together formed a katutubo organization to defend various aspects of their lives, because sometimes the government does not heed their complaints …. We faced all sorts of problems concerning illegal activities. Threats followed’.21

The death of Felicita's husband and his colleague, along with the threats to her and her family, make this account deeply disturbing. While the PNNI and other NGOs assisted Felicita file a court case against those suspected of orchestrating Librito's murder, she and her children remained in mortal danger, forcing them to seek refuge in an undisclosed location (a ‘safe house’). The NGOs also assisted with her children's tuition fees and helped her establish a small sari-sari (general) store to provide additional income, lost after Librito's death. In this harrowing case, an activist mother and her children lost a loved one and had their lives and sense of security shattered, with little redress.

The combined impacts of military checkpoints, surveillance, red-tagging and heightened threats of sexual harassment have engendered deep fear and anxiety among these women activists. For many, the persistent fear of violence has severely restricted their daily mobility and quality of life. Remaining in one place to stay safe limits what can and cannot be done, constraining work and life chances. As the cumulative impact of ongoing harassment and sudden bodily violence lingers, these women activists and their families live in constant fear, with the entangled effects of slow and fast violence infiltrating their lives, compounding grief and suffering into the future. Indeed, Ate Divina acknowledged that learning about attacks on fellow women activists leaves her feeling anxious: ‘[it's] not good for [our] mental and emotional well-being … you also have to manage your stress … because there's still a lot of work to do’.26

Sustaining Hope and Persistence: ‘To Continue is to be Hopeful!’

Many women activists in Palawan emphasized that they would persevere with their work, despite the trials of balancing home life and the serious risks of activism. They explained that their moral commitments to social and ecological justice would endure while dealing with the responsibilities of caring for families and community activism in a male-dominated field (which implies having to work twice as hard as men to be heard and seen) laced with harassment and intimidation. Both Ate Carmela's and Felicita's stories illustrate how they sustained hope amidst the difficulties of balancing multiple roles and responsibilities.

Following her colleagues’ red-tagging experiences a few months earlier, she reflected further on being an Indigenous woman with a long-term commitment to helping katutubo: ‘For me, as long as I can help them, even in a small way, I will continue what I am doing. It's hard because you have to be balanced, since you have your family. I feel exhausted [but] there's still a lot of work that needs to be done’.28 Considerable emotional and physical labour goes into meeting the ever-changing needs of one's family, organization and Indigenous community partners. But hope fuels persistence. Mahalia found strength to continue her work in witnessing her colleagues’ determination to ‘keep fighting’ and ‘keep going’. For her, protecting the environment and supporting Indigenous peoples’ struggles for autonomy was ‘worth it. And at the end of the day, it's like you want to be on the right side of history’.29

Reflecting on the end of Duterte's term, Ate Divina and her staff also embraced a more hopeful politics. She noted that ‘we are hopeful. To continue is to be hopeful’, and argued that smaller local victories were the grounds for greater change at the national level: ‘perhaps there is hope’ in electing ‘a new set of leaders, a new president, who can again abide by what is in the constitution’.30 Filipina activists’ sense of hopefulness keeps them going in an increasingly constrained political space marked by discursive and structural violence. Ultimately, their perseverance is an investment in ‘future-making’ (Kleist and Jansen, 2016) with potential openings for positive change, despite the ongoing challenges of overwhelming sexism and violence. Remaining hopeful was — and is — a necessity.

The Tempos of Violent Atmospheres

As demonstrated here, ‘slow’ gendered violence unfolds gradually but intensifies through the sustained harassment and intimidation of women activists via red-tagging and surveillance. These cumulative actions often culminate in dramatic events such as arrests, enforced disappearances and even murder, permeating local atmospheres with fear and anxiety. Such discursive violence operates through naming, framing and enactment (Hall, 1985), subjecting individuals to damaging political rhetoric that feeds prejudice and racialization (e.g. ‘upland terrorists’, ‘Muslim insurgents’). Over time, these representations become embodied and enacted in society, reinforcing blame and degrading victims with severe emotional, biophysical and material consequences.

The chronic anxiety experienced by women activists under Duterte's chauvinistic political repression exemplifies a deeper form of slow violence. His politics of fear operated both overtly and covertly, manifesting through online sexist slander and threatening text messages concerning bodily safety (Curato, 2016; McCoy, 2017a). Such slow violence — persistent yet insidious — spreads across time and space, embodying a delayed destruction (Nixon, 2011: 2). Women activists in Palawan revealed how slow violence materializes as mental and physical distress, exacerbated by systemic misogyny, red-tagging and the convergence of private and public responsibilities (or the ‘double day’) (Dressler, 2021a). As Christian and Dowler (2019: 1072) observe, ‘the invisibility of slow violence is deeply linked to the invisibility of feminized experience and space more broadly’.

While slow violence may dissipate, its various sources —online harassment, texting, stalking, public notices — can gain momentum and converge with other political events and circumstances, leading to arrest, abduction, or even murder (see Figure 2). As activists challenge powerful political actors, tensions escalate, thresholds are breached and harassment intensifies, often culminating in eruptions of ‘fast’ violence. This violence is never an isolated event; it is politically orchestrated, can occur in public arenas or private spaces, day or night. Often, these acts occur in front of the families of women activists, even with children present. Inflicting both physical and emotional harm, such violence is difficult to recover from and, in the worst cases, fatal. There is a persistent fear of being attacked.

Blurring Boundaries: Contesting Motherhood, Activism and Hope

The slow tempo of structural violence is particularly damaging for women activists who juggle family responsibilities, income generation and activist commitments. Embedded in patriarchal relations and institutionalized chauvinism, structural violence drives a less visible, often implicit form of harm rooted in state law and governance against women (Tran, 2023). Routinized patriarchal discourses and legal barriers (such as difficulties in divorcing, securing alimony and sharing familial responsibilities) reinforce gendered hierarchies of control that severely limit the life chances of women activists and their families.

On Palawan and in the Philippines more broadly, women activists navigated multiple roles within families, communities and political organizations, blurring the boundaries between political violence, activism and family life. Here, the personal becomes profoundly political (Pain, 2015). Perpetrators of violence against women activists disrupt both the public and private spheres these women seek to defend through their work. As a result, activists and their families are suppressed, silenced and dispossessed; red-tagging, criminalization and collective punishment become intergenerational among activist families. For example, Felicita and her children endured sustained harassment and fear before, during and after the murder of her husband, requiring that they be placed in a safe house. As younger generations witness the atrocities committed against their activist mothers (and fathers), they may either choose to continue the struggle for human rights and environmental justice or withdraw in fear. Intergenerational violence against women activists underscores the deeply violent and intimate entanglements of motherhood and activism.

Women activists in Palawan voiced how issues around intimacy, bodies and safety became sites of public amusement, contestation and conflict, with slow discursive violence gradually scarring their flesh and soul — the ultimate sacrifice for opposing government authority and resisting socio-ecological injustices. Sexist and chauvinistic acts frame, subsume and denigrate their bodies, beliefs and work as out of place, unacceptable and in need of control. Women are expected to balance their ‘gendered commitment’ to a cause with socially imposed responsibilities to their families and communities. The chauvinism that underpins the necessity of this balancing act is both compounding and constraining, emerging through the discursive and structural violence in Philippine society and disproportionately affecting women, mothers and their families.

Nevertheless, most women activists draw on hope to persevere in the face of adversity, creating the political conditions and opportunities for sustained justice (Anderson, 2006). Shaped by social position, age, ethnicity and political struggle, women activists’ hopefulness forces ‘openings in the present’ and acknowledges real ‘possibility in the now and the future’ (Wright, 2019: 1505). This sense of hope is powerfully generative; it ‘can be associated with a different way of being in the world, and a tenacious commitment to organizing together to realize it’ (ibid.: 1506). For many, being or becoming hopeful in difficult circumstances becomes an ordinary yet vital act of activism, one that ‘enables bodies to keep going’ (Anderson and Fenton, 2008: 78). Sustaining hope through practice (such as community mobilizing and protest) ensures that it is shared and realized as an attainable objective (Kotzé et al., 2013). As Ahmed (2004: 16) notes, hope, as emotion, can help enact change individually but, more importantly, can be amplified through solidarity networks within communities with shared struggles. Yet, a woman activist's hope is also fragile. When intertwined with despair, it oscillates ‘between absence and presence’ in the face of pervasive violence in the Philippines (Anderson and Fenton, 2008: 78).

In conclusion, our effort to document the multifaceted violence against women activists is also an act of hopeful ‘witnessing’: a reminder of what Filipina activists contend with daily. As Rose (2004: 30) notes, witnessing serves as a partial antidote to violence; it is ‘a refusal to succumb to the violence and amnesia; witnessing promotes remembrance and works against death’. Similarly, Hatley (2012) suggests that witnessing is a means of responding to the plight of others, summoning an ‘attentiveness’ to the ‘gravity of violence directed towards’ a particular other (ibid.: 3). FPE's attentiveness to women's subjective and embodied experiences of intersectional violence, particularly the local emotional politics of resistance, is crucial to witnessing the geographies of social and environmental injustices. Women's struggles for justice in the Philippines mirror those in other parts of the world, where the murder of women activists remains alarmingly routine (Menton and Le Billon, 2021; Tran et al., 2020). There is an urgent need for further critical feminist analysis and the witnessing of women activists’ grassroots solidarity building and resistance in the face of extractivist plunder and the global rise of authoritarianism. Our contribution is but one of many that seek to listen attentively, amplify the voices of women activists during times of deepening repression, and unearth the stories of those whose everyday resistance to state violence might otherwise be lost.