Introduction

Abstract

This chapter introduces the constellation of figures that make up the global Filipina body—the mail-order bride, the sex worker / trafficked woman, and the domestic helper / overseas contract worker—as the embodiment of racialized and gendered labor that the Philippine nation provides for a global capitalist economy. Within Filipina/o diasporic cultural production, the global Filipina body represents the failure of the heteropatriarchal Philippine nation under neoliberal globalization. Situating this book within the overlapping fields of Philippine studies, Filipina/o American studies, transnational feminisms, and queer studies, this chapter argues that the queering of the figure of the global Filipina body allows for a queer and feminist engagement with the politics of nationalism(s) in the context of the diaspora.