Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change Summary
Garbes, Angela

Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change Overview

Angela Garbes's Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change interrogates the neoliberal nuclear family structure as a means of seeking new ways of mothering and caretaking. Throughout the text, Garbes relies upon stories and experiences from her parents' lives in the Philippines, her childhood as the daughter of immigrant parents, and her life as a wife, mother, and writer in the United States in order to shape her complex explorations. By reimagining her relationship with her own body and world, Garbes endeavors to reinvent what it means to care for and love others. The text explores themes including identity, community, and the body.