Aging, care, and women’s work: a world-systems feminist approach to Filipina literature

This chapter shows how intersectional insights are produced by exploring works of world-literature through a feminist approach to world-systems analysis, taking twenty-first-century short fiction by two Filipina writers, Daryll Delgado and Adelaimar Arias Jose, as a case study. Authors from the Philippines are not well-known within Western literary scholarship, even when they choose to publish in English rather than Filipino-Tagalog, both official languages of the Republic. This chapter attends to this under-representation and how writing from the Philippines registers the related unevenness of material and social conditions within the current world-system, specifically in depictions of gender and patterns of care. Filipina fiction highlights how paid and unpaid care is frequently left to women, especially in family contexts where ill, ageing, or dying relatives need assistance, and adult children call on their parents to help with their infants, highlighting the importance of social reproduction to both national and global economies.