I am guessing that care will mean different things to different people - so it is worthwhile I think to set out what it is I am talking about when I refer to 'care'.
When I set out on my thesis I was convinced that women-as-mothers had agency a conviction was shaken over time though never abandoned. I came to approach tensions between structure and agency in the lives as women-as-mothers from two angles - the macrosocial - the social structuring of care and - the microsocial - interactions between mothers and their infants.
Here today I am talking about the social structuring of care - macrosocial factors that significantly influence our everyday lives, that is after the birth of an infant, but also if we are responsible for the care of our aged parents/friends, disabled family/friends or someone who is unable to care for themselves - say friends or family suffering with Aids or any other debilitating illness. My perspective on this has been informed by the work of both Eva Feder Kittay in Loves Labour and Martha Fineman in The Myth of Autonomy (amongst other of their publications) but also Nancy Folbre, Anne Orloff, Martha Nussbaum, Selma Sevenhuijsen and Alison Jagger.
Families exist within a social system that privatizes care for dependents, infants in this case, within the family, through a divide in law and policy between the public, state and market, and private family arenas. The work of care has been represented as private, associated with roles and responsibilities, and thus related to identity; with an associated moral or value perspective on the good or bad mother, and the good or bad provider. This privatization has been upheld by an understanding of the autonomous individual who is not responsible for care. This notion of autonomy has informed rights discourse and is thus an anathema to the position of the primary care-giver, who is generally a woman. A divide in law and policy effectively blocks the primary care-giver from access to full citizenship rights and has held back trends towards gender equity. It is important to recognize that the discourse relevant to the experience of women-as-mothers is often individualized in theory through notions of equity, and gendered through associations with care. Dependency theory provides for critique, while an emergent body of literature on care is seeking out new ways to conceptualize non-gendered structuring of dependency. The notion of care as an analytical category is evident in debates involving feminist theory, moral philosophy, and the economics of care that are canvassed in chapter six of my thesis. Here I am referring to ‘care’ as social practice, as set out by Beasley and Bacci rather than as an abstract moral disposition.
Something, anyhow, by way of a start ......
for now, J
