"With cogent observations on contemporary fiction, poetry, film, migration, domestic labor, and politics, Harrod Suarez illuminates the fraught ways in which the Philippines is imagined as Inang Bayan, 'mother country.' The Work of Mothering beautifully captures the nuances of language, gesture, and emotion, demonstrating how the practice of careful reading can help us look beyond the oppressive structures of nation, gender, and capital and rethink the most foundational of human relationships."--Josephine Lee, coeditor of Asian American Plays for a New Generation
"The Work of Mothering brilliantly shows how the figure of the Filipina mother as a national symbol and transnational worker becomes a gateway to engaging and challenging nationalist and globalist projects. As an analysis of the racial, gendered and cultural aesthetics of nationalism and diaspora, Suarez's book intervenes into questions that live at the center of many fields." - Roderick Ferguson, author of The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference