The Work of Mothering: Globalization and the Filipino Diaspora (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780252041440)

Women make up a majority of the Filipino workforce laboring overseas. Their frequent employment in nurturing, maternal jobs--nanny, maid, caretaker, nurse--has found expression in a significant but understudied body of Filipino and Filipino American literature and cinema.

Harrod J. Suarez's innovative readings of this cultural production explores issues of diaspora, gender, and labor. He details the ways literature and cinema play critical roles in encountering, addressing, and problematizing what we think we know about overseas Filipina workers. Though often seen as compliant subjects, the Filipina mother can also destabilize knowledge production that serves the interests of global empire, capitalism, and Philippine nationalism. Suarez examines canonical writers like Nick Joaquín, Carlos Bulosan, and Jessica Hagedorn to explore this disruption and understand the maternal specificity of the construction of overseas Filipina workers. The result is a series of readings that develop new ways of thinking through diasporic maternal labor that engages with the sociological imaginary.

Author: Harrod J. Suarez
ISBN-10: 0252041445
ISBN-13: 9780252041440
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Language: English
Published: 10/16/2017
Pages: 224
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 0.93lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.00w x 0.80d