There are at least three main reasons that make of care
a crucial territory of inquiry. First, care is a universal experience and a familiar phenomenon to everyone. All of us have provided help to or received a helping hand from others and many of us are most likely going to provide care to significant others in the future. Second, due to the ongoing changes in family structures, working patterns, demographic trends and social security systems, the problem of providing care in flexible and responsive ways is becoming increasingly important. And third, at present, there is no agreement on how to frame a sociological discourse on this significant phenomenon.
This book illustrates the emotional implications of informal care
1 by focusing on different kinds of care arrangements, as they emerge in different types of family contexts and other forms of intimate relationships. Partners, relatives and friends are the most important providers of informal care; their practices and individualities provide a fundamental basis to understand this universally shared experience and to shape new approaches to study this complex phenomenon within the context of our rapidly changing societies. To get closer to the core of its nature, different methodological approaches are needed, based on the collection of new high-quality data, focusing on detailed narratives and phenomenological interpretations of different care experiences in different family contexts. By definition, what comes into play with care is something that cannot be subsumed under any kind of statistical generalisation without the risk of failing to catch important and not-so-visible aspects of this phenomenon. Care
cannot be fully understood or explained without considering how it is experienced by the different social actors directly involved and what it means for them; in other words, without immersing ourselves into a 360-degree phenomenology of care.
The theoretical background of this research considers the heuristic and epistemological potential of phenomenology for a critical understanding of symbolic interactionism and ethnomethodology. These traditions of inquiry seem the most suitable to get insights into the multiple ways through which the emotional dynamics of the caregivers shape their experience of care and produce different outcomes in terms of inequality and social exclusion. The phenomenological perspective allowed me to highlight the natural but not necessarily evident links between symbolic interactionism, social constructionism and ethnomethodology, the latter being more specifically identified with the approach of Sarah Fenstermaker
and Candace West
(2002). The authors conceptualise gender in terms of a fluid, contingent and situated accomplishment (Fenstermaker and West 2002) through which outcomes of inequality are constantly reproduced. They use the expression
doing gender
suggesting that the performative aspects of gender can be interpreted and understood as a way of
doing difference
. My argument is that a careful, phenomenological investigation of the processes involved in
doing care
provides significant clues to interpret and visualise the concept of
doing citizenship
, in other words the multiple ways in which inequalities and dynamics of inclusion/exclusion based on socially constructed categories result from ongoing interactional accomplishments. Care environments
are places where dynamics of inclusion and exclusion are constantly produced; therefore, they represent a strategic site to reveal the invisible, emotion-based, interactional mechanisms through which social exclusion and inequality, on the one hand, but also social inclusion, status membership and citizenship, on the other, are constantly reproduced at the micro-level of analysis. The integration of Fenstermaker
and West
ās ethnomethodological approach with some of the most recent advances in the sociology of emotions was intended to help me overcome the limitations of a traditional study on the gendered division of care work, and to offer a more reliable picture of feminine and masculine ways of thinking, feeling and doing care within a heterogeneous set of family and non-family contexts.
Several scholars lament the absence of theoretical frameworks able to analyse individualsā behaviours transcending traditional sociological dichotomies such as public and private, work and home, structure and agency, rationality and emotionality, continuity and change, and so on. In our concerns, this makes it all the more difficult to formulate a comprehensive theory of care that might help us to clarify several unsolved contradictions, such as the contradictions connected with the gendered definition of private and public spheres. Many arguments about care proceed from misleading dichotomies between a female world of expressiveness and care and a male world of instrumentality and rationality, reproducing empirical and theoretical divides between the two worlds of sentiment and rationality. The Cartesian dualism
between mind and body which has characterised for centuries Western culture has pushed the emotional components of individuals and their social systems out of view. One of the issues I address in this book is the necessity to overcome these dichotomist ideologies and look for more innovative, flexible and reliable ways to think about inequality and social exclusion; the necessity, in other words, āto grasp the interplay of individuals and society, of biography and history, of self and worldā (Mills 2000: 1). This can be done by putting emotions at the centre of current sociological thinking and theorising. It is only by focusing on individual, emotionally driven and micro-situated care interactions rather than on assumed differences between male and female care
work that we can extend our understanding of the phenomenon of care. In this sense, the inclusion in the research of care models that cannot be gender based for the simple reason that they are performed within the context of same-sex couples or other unconventional family arrangements reveals important insights. Once the conceptual categories of gender and care are expanded and the real (rather than assumed) dynamics of inequality and exclusion associated with
doing care
are visualised, the next theoretical and empirical achievement of this book is identifying and understanding the less visible rationales and implications of care, which force us rethinking both care and inequality. Thus, the sample included a variety of caregivers: partnered/married and single caregivers, male and female caregivers, heterosexual and gay/lesbian caregivers.
The specific focus of this book on same-sex parents
is essential to address care and gender through a critical approach aimed to challenge cultural scripts according to which nuclear family and heterosexuality represent the norm. When I started my research on the phenomenology of informal care, I decided to include same-sex parents not only because they had been largely excluded from conventional research on informal care (or, when included, that was typically to highlight the alleged specificities of their parental practices) but also because they are key to visualise the emotional dynamics of social inclusion/exclusion people produce while caring for others. I realised only later, as I clarify in the last chapter, that they also constitute a key subject to visualise and understand another crucial link between micro-situated (inter)actions and macro-structural dynamics: in this specific case, between care and social change; or better, between
doing care
and
doing social inclusion
and
social change
. During the more than two-year long empirical research, the parents I met made me question common assumptions and conventional ideas about fatherhood and motherhood and induced me to challenge deceptive comparisons between same-sex and heterosexual parents. And if, for research-related reasons, I was forced to use the label same-sex parents throughout my entire work, I share the position of all those mothers and fathers who told me that āparents are parentsā and they do not need any specific label or tag to qualify their parenthood.
Emotions
represent the missing link to explain the realārather than allegedādynamics by which inequality is reproduced situationally, beyond the rigid and reifying categorisations of sex, sexuality and gender. By looking at the inner, interactive, emotional dimensions of informal care, this book illustrates how, by doing care, people create forms of emotional stratification at the micro-level that affect their social position at the macro-level. One of the researchās goals was to emphasise the necessity of an embodied social theory of care, which is not worried of being accused of psychologism
in its attempt to reconcile micro- and macro-realities of social life by looking at the experience of care in terms of an emotionally charged experience with important sociological and political implications. In this sense, the new image of the social actor and the reformulation of rational action emerging from some of the latest theoretical advances in the sociology of emotions (notably Collins 2004) seemed a promising start to overcome both the unclear issues left unsolved by rational choice theories and several contradictions still left unanswered by current literature on care.
The analytic perspective I present in this work provides a more detailed description of the person who cares and a broader phenomenological approach to the issues of care and care related inequalities. By looking at peopleās narratives about their lived and felt experience of care, the book offers a better understanding of the phenomenon of care, its multiple and not-so-visible purposes and implications, and its core nature. The methodological approach is based on an interpretive process aimed at rethinking the phenomenon of care in a more inclusive perspective, by offering rich, innovative qualitative analyses of non-conventional family contexts. This approach intends to build up a phenomenology of the emotions revolving around care through a thick description (Geertz 1973) of the qualitative data collected at the micro-level: where informal care
is actually experienced and felt; it also aims to illustrate the crucial importance of inductive research and interpretive phenomenological analyses for a deeper, more thorough explanation of the emotional processes
involved in care work and in the reproduction of inequality. Based on a comprehensive, ethnographic immersion into informal care which lasted more than two years, this work reports the findings of a micro-situated study of daily care activities within the context of different types of family contexts, with an explicit focus of same-sex parents
. All the caregivers I met and interviewedābe they single or partnered/married, heterosexual or homosexualācontributed to the completion of the study illustrated in this book, and I feel an enormous and sincere sense of gratitude for each of them. Without them and their generous contributions, this work would have not been accomplished and my knowledge of care would have remained underdeveloped. Their stories made me think, laugh, cry, reflect and understand; but, above all, they radically changed both my personal perspective on and my intellectual interpretation of care. Being immersed for more than two years in all these experiences of care, so heterogeneous and yet so similar, allowed me not only to develop my theoretical understanding of this fundamental phenomenon but also to cultivate and refine my own subjective interpretation and appreciation of it. Even more, it made me understand the extent to which empirical research can create contexts of learning and growth where the pleasure of knowledge is never merely cognitive or intellectual.
The interpretive phenomenological analysis I illustrate in this book provides new empirical evidence of peopleās embeddedness in gender systems and cultural beliefs, but it also helps us to get significant insights into the inner, interactional and emotional mechanisms through which individuals, by doing care, open the doors to social change. Like all works based on interpretation, this work is not meant to be exhaustive or conclusive. It is instead open to the readersā own interpretations and, above all, it is meant to initiate a dialogue with scholars interested in shaping new theories and new methods of inquiry to understand the phenomenon of care as well as the sociological and political relevance of emotions in our life.
References
Collins, R. (2004). Interaction Ritual Chains. Princeton, NJ; Oxford: Princeton University Press.
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. 205ā216). London: Routledge.
Geertz, C. (1973). The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books.
Michelson, W. H. (2015). Time Use: Expanding Explanation in the Social Sciences. New York: Routledge.
Footnotes
1
Defined as unpaid, non-professional care of a physical, emotional and social nature that is provided by adults within the context of families, relationships and intimacies.
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