Abstract
This chapter challenges the misleading dualism of gender and highlights the implicit heterosexism of current literature on informal care, providing an alternative approach to gender which focuses on multiple dimensions of difference. Closely related to this alternative approach is the necessity to underscore the fundamental importance of emotions in creating a link between agency and structure, that is, between individual action and interaction, on the one hand, and the emergence, maintenance and transformation of social structure, on the other.
Isn’t it crazy, with all people in the world, to put all our eggs into the one basket of a family consisting of four people? How can we create new social forms, new forms of association and solidarity that fulfil people’s needs of intimacy in new ways?
Joan Williams
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
It is probably worth noting that when I talk about “gay and lesbian parents” I am not referring to an assumed (and debatable) presence of a community of gay and lesbian parents as such, but only to a specific subset of people who are involved in important childcare responsibilities and who define themselves as gay men and lesbian women. The main focus of this book, as mentioned elsewhere, is gay and lesbian parents, that is, carers involved in childcare, whose label “gay” and “lesbian” and whose belonging/status membership to an alleged gay/lesbian community at large are put into question, as we shall see, precisely by their parenthood status.
- 2.
This adjective should be intended here in the sense indicated by Jack Katz (2001) when he uses the rubric analytic research dropping the reference to “induction” to signal both his departure from several aspects of the tradition of analytic induction and his debt to the tradition’s essential guide to research practice. “Analytic field studies will not produce ‘proof,’ i.e. artefacts of evidence which speak in a standard language or specialised fashion about representativeness, reliability, and so forth. […] But analytic fieldwork does create an elaborate framework which can be used by researchers to assess how well they are doing and by readers to make evaluations. That framework is a social system, which, applied consistently in field research, will: force the researcher to focus on social process as experienced from within; induce research subjects to act toward the researcher as a meaningful member of the native world; enfranchise readers as colleagues competent to make an independent analysis of the relation between data and explanation; and shape a role which subsequent researchers can readily take up for testing substantive findings” (Katz 2001: 334).
- 3.
The main contribution of a phenomenologically oriented approach to qualitative research is twofold. On the one hand, it allows us to use the lifeworld as a source of evidence for our enquiries; on the other, it allows us to look for good ways of describing the “whatness” (what it is and what makes it what it is) of a phenomenon as it appears, so that we may better understand its nature, more than to build a whole and exhaustive theory.
- 4.
For an overview of possible relationships between care and justice, see also Joan Tronto, “Beyond Gender Difference to a Theory of Care”, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 1987, vol. 12, no. 4: 644–663, Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care, New York, Routledge, 1993; Virginia Held (Ed.) Justice and Care, Boulder, Colo., Westview Press, 1995; Diemut Bubeck, Care, Gender, and Justice, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995; Robin West, Caring for Justice, New York, New York University Press, 1997; Nel Noddings, Caring, Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 2003 (1984); Sara Ruddick, “Care as Labor and Relationship”, in Haber and Halfon (Eds.) Norms and Values, Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 1998, 3–25.
- 5.
She defined this “mystique” as the worthlessness women feel in roles that require them to be financially, intellectually and emotionally dependent upon their husbands. Through her findings, Friedan hypothesised that women are victims of a false belief system that requires them to find identity and meaning in their lives through their husbands and children.
- 6.
See Carol Gilligan, “In a Different Voice: Women’s Conceptions of Self and of Morality”, Harvard Educational Review 47, no. 4: 431–46; In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1982.
- 7.
- 8.
“The possibility that an ethic of care might lead to the reinforcement of existing social patterns also raises the question of relativism. It is difficult to imagine how an ethic of care could avoid the charge that it would embody different moral positions in different societies and at different times. […] The only way an ethic of care could entirely bypass the charge of relativism would be to posit some caring relationships, for example, the relationship of parent and child, as universal. This path, however, seems fraught with even greater difficulties for feminist scholars and prejudges in an unacceptably narrow way who ‘caretakers’ should be. […] The only other way to resolve this problem is to specify how social institutions might be arranged to expand these conventional understandings of the boundaries of care. Thus, the legitimacy of an ethic of care will depend on the adequacy of the social and political theory of which it is a part” (Tronto 1987: 661).
- 9.
Distributive justice is concerned with the normative principles designed to guide the fair allocation of the benefits, resources and burdens among diverse members of a community. Fair allocation typically takes into account the total amount of goods to be distributed, the distributing procedure and the patterns of distribution that result.
- 10.
Bubeck disagrees with those Marxists who claim that it is primarily the capitalist who benefits from women’s household work. She also finds limited and limiting those feminist scholars who argue that it is husbands who benefit. Rather, it is all men who benefit from women’s unpaid work, she maintains. We need to look at care as work, she says, in which women engage and are exploited. Therefore, care is most of all an exploitative practice. This is why Bubeck is less sympathetic to those feminist accounts, such as Noddings’ (1984) which, by overlooking the exploitative nature of care, reinscribe its oppressive functions.
- 11.
The gender strategy encompasses a course of action informed by cultural messages regarding notions of “maleness” and “femaleness”, as well as the emotion work one does in pursuing a course of action.
- 12.
An interesting, early exception in the panorama of works on American families and relationships is represented by Blumstein and Schwartz’s American Couples (1983), which is a book about how the challenges of conventional marriages can be better understood through the study of unconventional families. This pioneering book was the result of an impressive large-scale survey of four types of couples: married, cohabiting, heterosexual, gay and lesbian, which is remarkable for that time. By comparing these groups, the authors investigated the influence of gender (or its lack thereof) on couple interactions and compared married couples with couples in unconventional relationships. However, the lack of an explicit theory and the lack of reference to prior work on family, gender and sexuality make the authors’ comparative comments somehow difficult to interpret.
- 13.
For a review of the literature criticising the role of domesticity in perpetuating and reinforcing class and racial hierarchies among women, see Joan Williams, Unbending Gender, (2000).
- 14.
Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter, (1993: 137).
- 15.
The ethic of care should be situated in the context of existing political and social order. Social and political institutions that constitute the context of moral actors should be clearly specified each time. “Perhaps the most important characteristic of an ethic of care is that, within it, moral situations are defined not in terms of rights and responsibilities but in terms of relationships of care. The morally mature person understands the balance between caring for the self and caring for others. The perspective of care requires that conflict be worked out without damage to the continuing relationships. Moral problems can be expressed in terms of accommodating the needs of the self and of others, of balancing competition and cooperation, and of maintaining the social web of relations in which one finds oneself” (Tronto 1987: 658).
- 16.
- 17.
“We even construct biological sex—whether one is male or female—in terms of opposites—‘the opposite sex’—setting up the sexes to be completely different and as potentially in conflict with each other. This is a social priority, NOT something that is naturally occurring. While the sexes may be different, they are not, in fact, opposite. The reality is that neither sexuality nor biological sex is made up of opposites; yet, our dominant meaning system imposes that structure. These are both examples of thinking straight—thinking in terms of opposites and polarities when none exist and naturalizing social practices and beliefs rather than seeing them as social, political, and economic creations” (Ingraham 2005: 2).
- 18.
Michelle Fine (1994) highlights how sociological research is often implicated in the process of othering. When researchers define a group or type of people as objects of curiosity and targets of study, the unconscious subtext may be that “these people are interesting because they are different from us”. To focus attention on a group in this way—that is, from the implicit standpoint of the dominant culture—is, in effect, to contribute to their continued othering (Schwalbe 2000). This is the reason why I emphasise, from the outset, that the main focus of this study is the “carer” (with no attributes) and his/her emotions. However, for the sake of clarity, I am obliged to use the labels same-sex parents and heterosexual parents, female and male carers and so on and, by doing this, I somehow contribute to the othering process.
- 19.
- 20.
In other works, Hochschild (1979, 1989) describes the feeling rules and emotion ideologies that, by specifying how individuals should feel in a given situation and compelling individuals to do emotion management, benefit the privileged and reinforce the subordinate positioning of the disadvantaged. In any social situation, individuals must engage in emotion management to adapt the presentation of self to emotion ideologies, feeling rules and display rules about appropriate attitudes and emotional responses in basic spheres of activity. As a general rule, the higher the social status, the more attention is paid to one’s own feelings; the lower the social status, the more likely one is to manage emotions in the service of someone of higher status. In addressing the relationships between gender, social class and emotion management, Hochschild points out one of the contrasts that could be interpreted as an important component for the analysis of what I have called doing care as well as a further justification for the focus of this study on upper/middle class carers. The author claims that “More emotion management goes on in the families and jobs of the upper classes than in those of the lower classes. That is, in the class system, social conditions conspire to make it more prevalent at the top. In the gender system, on the other hand, the reverse is true: social conditions make it more prevalent, and prevalent in different ways, for those at the bottom—women. […] The reason, at bottom, is the fact that women in general have far less independent access to money, power, authority, or status in society” (Hochschild 1983: 162–163).
References
Abel, E. K., & Nelson, M. (Eds.). (1990). Circles of Care. Work and Identity in Women’s Lives. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Barbalet, J. M. (2001). Emotion, Social Theory, and Social Structure. A Macrosociological Approach. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Bem, S. (1993). The Lenses of Gender. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Blau, F., Ferber, M., & Winkler, E. (1998). The Economics of Women, Men, and Work (4th ed.). New York: Prentice Hall.
Blumstein, P., & Schwartz, P. (1983). American Couples; Money, Work, and Sex. New York: William Morrow.
Bubeck, D. E. (1995). Care, Gender, and Justice. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Butler, J. (1993). Bodies that Matter: On the Limits of “Sex”. London: Routledge.
Butler, J. (2004). Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge.
Cahn, N. (2000). The Power of Caretaking. Yale Journal of Law and Feminism, 12, 177–223.
Clark, C. (1990). Emotions and Micropolitics of Everyday Life: Some Patterns and Paradoxes of Place. In T. D. Kemper (Ed.), Research Agenda in the Sociology of Emotions (pp. 305–333). Albany: SUNY Press.
Collins, R. (1990). Stratification, Emotional Energy, and the Transient Emotions. In T. D. Kemper (Ed.), Research Agenda in the Sociology of Emotions (pp. 27–57). New York: State University of New York Press.
Collins, R. (1992). Women and the Production of Status Cultures. In M. Lamont & M. Fournier (Eds.), Cultivating Differences (pp. 213–231). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Collins, R. (1993). Emotional Energy and the Common Denominator of Rational Action. Rationality and Society, 5, 203–230.
Collins, R. (2004). Interaction Ritual Chains. Princeton, NJ; Oxford: Princeton University Press.
DeVault, M. L. (1991). Feeding the Family: The Social Organization of Caring as Gendered Work. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Epstein, C. F. (1997). The Multiple Realities of Sameness and Difference: Ideology and Practice. Journal of Social Issues, 53(2), 259–278.
Fenstermaker, S., & West, C. (2002). Doing Difference Revisited: Problems, Prospects, and the Dialogue in Feminist Theory. In S. Fenstermaker (Ed.), Doing Gender, Doing Difference: Inequality, Power, and Institutional Change (pp. 205–216). London: Routledge.
Ferree, M. M., Lorber, J., & Hess, B. (1999). Revisioning Gender. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Finch, J. (1989). Family Obligations and Social Change. Oxford; Cambridge: Polity Press.
Fine, M. (1994). Working the Hyphens: Reinventing Self and Other in Qualitative Research. In N. K. Denzin & Y. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of Qualitative Research (pp. 70–82). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Fineman, M. A. (2000). Cracking the Foundational Myths: Independence, Autonomy, and Self-Sufficiency. Journal of Gender, Social Policy, and the Law, 8, 13–29.
Fisher, B., & Tronto, J. (1990). Toward a Feminist Theory of Caring. In E. K. Abel & M. Nelson (Eds.), Circles of Care. Work and Identity in Women’s Lives (pp. 35–62). Albany: State University of New York Press.
Folbre, N. (2001). The Invisible Hearth: Economics and Family Values. New York: The New York Press.
Fraser, N. (2013). Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis. London: Verso Books.
Fraser, N. (2016). Contradictions of Capital and Care. New Left Review (p. 100). Retrieved from https://newleftreview.org/II/100/nancy-fraser-contradictions-of-capital-and-care
Fraser, N., & Bedford, W. K. (2008). Social Rights and Gender Justice in the Neoliberal Moment: A Conversation About Welfare and Transnational Politics. Feminist Theory, 9(2), 225–245.
Friedan, B. (1983). The Feminine Mystique. New York: DeU, reprint 1963.
Furstenberg, F. F., Jr. (1990). Divorce and the American family. Annual Review of Sociology, 16(1), 379–403.
Gabb, J. (2008). Researching Intimacy in Families. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Gabb, J. (2009). Researching Family Relationships: A Qualitative Mixed Methods Approach. Methodological Innovations Online, 4(2), 37–52.
Gabb, J., & Fink, J. (2015). Couple Relationships in the 21st Century. London: Springer.
Gabb, J., Klett-Davies, M., Fink, J., & Thomae, M. (2013). Enduring Love? Couple Relationships in the 21st Century. In Survey Findings Report. Milton Keynes: The Open University. Retrieved January 1, 2014.
Garey, A. I. (1999). Weaving, Work, and Motherhood. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Gerson, K. (1987). How Women Choose Between Employment and Family: A Developmental Perspective. In N. Gerstel & H. E. Gross (Eds.), Families and Work (pp. 270–288). Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Gillies, V. (2003). Family and Intimate Relationships: A Review of the Sociological Research. London: Families & Social Capital Research Group and South Bank University.
Gilligan, C. (1982). In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Goffman, E. (1959). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City, NY: Anchor.
Goffman, E. (1967). Interaction Ritual. New York: Anchor Books.
Gordon, S. L. (1990). Social Structural Effects on Emotion. In T. D. Kemper (Ed.), Research Agenda in the Sociology of Emotions (pp. 145–179). Albany: SUNY Press.
Graham, H. (1983). Caring: A Labor of Love. In J. Finch & D. Groves (Eds.), A Labor of Love: Women, Work and Caring (pp. 13–30). London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Hammond, M. (1990). Affective Maximization: A New Macro-Theory in the Sociology of Emotions. In T. D. Kemper (Ed.), Research Agendas in the Sociology of Emotions (pp. 58–81). Albany: SUNY Press.
Hertz, R. (1986). More Equal than Others. Women and Men in Dual-Career Marriages. Berkeley; Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Hicks, S. (2011). Lesbian, Gay and Queer Parenting: Families, Intimacies, Genealogies. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Hochschild, A. (1979). Emotion Work, Feeling Rules, and Social Structure. The American Journal of Sociology, 85(3), 551–575.
Hochschild, A. (1983). The Managed Heart. Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Hochschild, A. (1989). The Second Shift. New York: Avon Books.
Hochschild, A. (1995). The Culture of Politics: Traditional, Postmodern, Cold-Modern, and Warm-Modern Ideals of Care. Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State and Society, 2(3), 331–346.
Hochschild, A. (1997). The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work. New York: Metropolitan.
Hochschild, A. R. (1990). Ideology and Emotion Management: A Perspective and Path for Future Research. In T. D. Kemper (Ed.), Research Agendas in the Sociology of Emotions (pp. 117–142). Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
Holland, J., Weeks, J., & Gillies, V. (2003). Families, Intimacy and Social Capital. Social Policy and Society, 2(04), 339–348.
Ingraham, C. (2005). Thinking Straight. The Power, the Promise, and the Paradox of Heterosexuality. New York: Routledge.
Jacobs, J., & Gerson, K. (2004). The Time Divide. Work, Family, and Gender Inequality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Jacobs, J. A., & Gornick, J. C. (2002). Hours of Paid Work in Dual-Earner Couples: The United States in Crossnational Perspective. Sociological Focus, 35(2), 169–187.
James, J. B. (1997). What are the Social Issues Involved in Focusing on Difference in the Study of Gender? Journal of Social Issues, 53(2), 213–232.
Katz, J. (1999). How Emotions Work. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Katz, J. (2001). Analytic Induction Revisited. In R. M. Emerson (Ed.), Contemporary Field Research: Perspectives and Formulations (2nd ed., pp. 331–334). Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland.
Kemper, T. D. (Ed.). (1990). Research Agendas in the Sociology of Emotions. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Leidner, R. (1993). Fast Food, Fast Talk. Service Work and the Routinization of Everyday Life. Berkeley; Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Leidner, R. (1999). Emotional Labor in Service Work. Annals of the American Academy, 561, 81–95.
Leira, A. (1994). Concepts of Caring: Loving, Thinking, and Doing. Social Service Review, 68, 185–201.
Nagel, M. (1997). Critical Theory Meets the Ethic of Care: Engendering Social Justice and Social Identities. Social Theory and Practice, 23(2), 307.
Nixon, C. A. (2011). Working-Class Lesbian Parents’ Emotional Engagement with Their Children’s Education: Intersections of Class and Sexuality. Sexualities, 14(1), 79–99.
Noddings, N. (1984 [2003]). Caring. A Feminist Approach to Ethics and Moral Education (2nd ed.). Berkeley: University of California Press.
Orloff, A. S., & Monson, R. (2002). Citizens, Workers or Fathers? Men in the History of US Social Policy. In B. Hobson (Ed.), Making Men into Fathers. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Presser, H. B. (2003). Working in a 24/7 Economy: Challenges for American Families. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
Rapoport, R., Bailyn, L., Fletcher, J., & Pruitt, B. (2002). Beyond Work-Family Balance. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass (Wiley).
Rapoport, R., & Rapoport, R. (1978). Dual-Career Families: Progress and Prospects. Marriage and Family Review, 1, 1–12.
Ridgeway, C. L., & Correll, S. J. (2000). Limiting Inequality through Interaction: The End(s) of Gender. Contemporary Sociology, 29, 1,110–1,120.
Risman, B. J. (1998). Gender Vertigo. American Families in Transition. New Haven, CT; London: Yale University Press.
Ruddick, S. (1995 [1989]). Maternal Thinking. Towards a Politics of Peace (2nd ed.). Boston: Beacon Press.
Ruddick, S. (1998). Care as Labor and Relationship. In J. G. Haber & M. S. Halfon (Eds.), Norms and Values: Essays on the Work of Virginia Held (pp. 3–25). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Scheff, T. J. (1990). Microsociology Discourse, Emotion, and Social Structure. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Schwalbe, M. (2000). Charting Futures for Sociology: Inequality Mechanisms, Intersections, and Global Change. Contemporary Sociology, 29(1), 775–781.
Schwalbe, M., Godwin, S., Holden, D., et al. (2000). Generic Processes in the Reproduction of Inequality: An Interactionist Analysis. Social Forces, 79(2), 419–452.
Smith-Lovin, L. (1995). The Sociology of Affect and Emotion. In K. Cook, G. Fine, & J. S. House (Eds.), Sociological Perspectives on Social Psychology (pp. 118–148). Boston: Allyn and Bacon.
Stacey, J. (1990). Brave New Families: Stories of Domestic Upheaval in Late-Twentieth-Century America. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Stacey, J. (2005). The Families of Man: Gay Male Intimacy and Kinship in a Global Metropolis. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 30(3), 1911–1935.
Stacey, M. (1981). The Division of Labor Revisited or Overcoming the Two Adams. In P. Abrams, R. Deem, J. Finch, & P. Rock (Eds.), Practice and Progress. British Sociology 1950–1980. London: George Allen and Unwin Hyman.
Taylor, Y. (2007). Working-Class Lesbian Life: Classed Outsiders. New York: Springer.
Taylor, Y. (2009). Lesbian and Gay Parenting: Securing Social and Educational Capital. Dordrecht: Springer.
Taylor, Y. (2010). Complexities and Complications: Intersections of Class and Sexuality. In Theorizing Intersectionality and Sexuality (pp. 37–55). London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Thomas, C. (1993). De-Constructing Concepts of Care. Sociology, 27(4), 649–669.
Townsend, W. (2002). The Package Deal. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Travis, C. (1992). The Mismeasure of Woman. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Tronto, J. (1987). Beyond Gender Difference to a Theory of Care. Signs, 12(4), 644–663.
Turner, J. H. (1999). Toward a General Sociological Theory of Emotions. Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior, 29, 133–162.
Turner, J. H. (2000). On the Origins of Human Emotions. A Sociological Inquiry into the Evolution of Human Affect. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Turner, J. H. (2002). Face to Face. Toward a Sociological Theory of Interpersonal Behavior. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Turner, J. H. (Ed.). (2004). Theory and Research on Human Emotions. Amsterdam; Boston: Elsevier/JAI.
Turner, J. H., & Stets, J. E. (2005). The Sociology of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Weeks, J., Heaphy, B., & Donovan, C. (2001). Same Sex Intimacies: Families of Choice and Other Life Experiments. London: Routledge.
West, R. (1997). Caring for Justice. New York: New York University Press.
Weston, K. (1991 [2013]). Families We Choose. Lesbians, Gays, Kinship. New York; Oxford: Columbia University Press.
Williams, J. (2000). Unbending Gender. Why Family and Work Conflict and What to Do About It. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Williams, J. (2001). From Difference to Dominance to Domesticity: Care as Work, Gender as Tradition. Chicago-Kent Law Review, 76, 1441–1493.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Pratesi, A. (2018). The End of Inequality as We Know It. In: Doing Care, Doing Citizenship . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63109-7_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63109-7_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-63108-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-63109-7
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)