After the Wrath of Typhoon Haiyan: Unveiling Representation of Vulnerabilities as Beneficiaries of the Emergency Shelter Assistance for Survivors in the Philippines

This research paper focuses on how the Department of Social Welfare and Development constitute vulnerable people as beneficiaries of the Emergency Shelter Assistance and represent them in defining and delivering the housing intervention program. In answering this research question, I applied intersectionality and social exclusion as my theoretical framework and employed Critical Discourse Analysis and ‘What’s the Problem Represented to be?’ as techniques of analysis. I focused on six relevant national disaster policy documents and Haiyan- related disaster recovery and rehabilitation plans and frameworks in looking at the assumptions on people’s vulnerabilities. Findings show that there is a major problem on how the Philippine government perceive the underlying root cause of vulnerability by neglecting the historical and social aspects of disasters. This neglected root cause of vulnerability was reinforced by intersecting power relations on gender, sexuality, class, and ethnicity. People having these characteristics are automatically excluded in availing the ESA program: non-conforming man/woman, non-heterosexual families, people outside the lower income class, and heterosexual families whose houses were identified as safe zone under the Comprehensive Land Use Plan.