4. Gender: The Gendered Burden of Care (Brazil)
Welcome to Module 4 of Transforming Lives through Care.
In previous modules, we explored care through kinship, gifts, more-than-human relationships, and embodied practice. This week we turn to one of the most important questions in the anthropology of care: Why is care so often women's work?
Across much of the world, women perform most childcare, housework, emotional labour, and care for older relatives. Yet this pattern is neither universal nor inevitable. Anthropologists ask how different societies organise care, how ideas about femininity and masculinity shape expectations, and why caring labour is often undervalued. In this module, we use the concept of gender to examine how care is distributed and experienced.
🎯 Learning Goals
- Define gender as a social and cultural concept.
- Explain how caring responsibilities are often distributed along gendered lines.
- Understand how gender shapes expectations and experiences of care work.
- Examine how men navigate masculinity when engaged in caregiving roles.
- Reflect on how intimate acts of care may challenge or transform traditional gender norms.
🚦 Introduction
The concept of "gender" in anthropology refers to the culturally and socially constructed roles, behaviours, and expectations assigned to individuals based on perceived sex, and is distinct from biological determinism; it helps anthropologists understand how identities, power relations, and care practices are shaped differently across societies. In this subject, we’ve seen how care work is often feminised. But what happens when men enter caregiving spaces? How does this affect their sense of masculinity? And how does their presence shape the care they provide?
This week, we explore these questions through ethnographic stories, reflective tasks, and readings that highlight how caregiving fathers and stay-at-home dads negotiate changing ideas about gender and care
📘 Essential Materials
📖 Read: Scheper-Hughes, N. (1989, October 1). The Human Strategy: Death Without Weeping. Natural History, 8.
"In the absence of firm expectation that a child will survive, mother love as we conceptualize it (whether in popular terms or in the psychobiological notion of maternal bonding) is attenuated and delayed with consequences for infant survival. In an environment already precarious to young life, the emotional detachment of mothers toward some of their babies contributes even further to the spiral of high mortality"
Summary: In her study of poor mothers in Northeast Brazil, anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes challenges common assumptions about motherhood. Faced with extreme poverty, mothers sometimes appear emotionally distant from sick infants. Rather than seeing this as a lack of care, Scheper-Hughes argues that maternal love itself is shaped by social and economic conditions. The reading encourages us to question the idea that caring behaviours are simply natural expressions of womanhood.
Watch this presentation on Gender and Care:
Here are the slides if you'd like.
📚 Recommended Materials
🏁 Conclusion
Summary
Care work is not just shaped by gender—it is also a practice where gender norms are made and unmade. This week, we’ve seen how men who engage in care confront and often reshape ideas about masculinity, responsibility, and emotional labour.
Significance
Understanding how masculinity shifts in caregiving contexts helps us rethink who is imagined as capable of care. It shows that care is not biologically destined or socially fixed—it is relational, dynamic, and political.
What’s Next
Our prompt for next module is this: if caring is so important, why is it largely unpaid?
🔎 Further Research
Notes: Jackson explores how modern fatherhood challenges old ideas of masculinity. Caring dads are reshaping gender norms, emphasizing emotion, connection, and shared responsibility
🗣️ Interactive tasks
Complete the Earl's Experience worksheet.Rethinking Masculinity Through Care. Read the extended story of Earl (from Jackson’s article) and respond to two short questions. Earl’s story invites reflection on how intimacy, disability, and daily care can transform inherited ideas of manhood
I have been criticized more than once for presenting an unflattering portrait of poor Brazilian women, women who are, after all, themselves the victims of severe social and institutional neglect. I have de- scribed these women as allowing some of their children to die, as if this were an unnatural and inhuman act rather than, as I would assert, the way any one of us might act, reasonably and rationally, un- der similarly desperate conditions. Perhaps I have not emphasized enough the real pathogens in this environment of high risk: poverty, deprivation, sexism, chronic hunger, and economic exploitation.
When she describes the condition and environment, which anthropological principle is she putting into practice?
If mother love is, as many psychologists and some feminists believe, a seemingly natural and universal maternal script, what does it mean to women for whom scarcity, loss, sickness, and deprivation have made that love frantic and robbed them of their grief, seeming to turn their hearts to stone.
What do you think. How much is a mother's love natural? How much is environmnental? How much is it cultural.
🏁 Conclusion
Summary
Care work is not just shaped by gender—it is also a site where gender norms are made and unmade. This week, we’ve seen how men who engage in care confront and often reshape ideas about masculinity, responsibility, and emotional labour.
Significance
Understanding how masculinity shifts in caregiving contexts helps us rethink who is imagined as capable of care. It shows that care is not biologically destined or socially fixed—it is relational, dynamic, and political.
What’s Next
Next week, we turn to care in transnational families—how migration reshapes intimacy, kinship, and obligation across distance.
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