👤💬👤4. Gender & Care (Vanuatu, El Salvador, Taiwan, Balinese, & USA)--Interactive Exercise

Overview: Care is shaped by gender. Across cultures, men and women are often expected to care in different ways, for different people, and with different value attached.

Goals:

• Identify how care practices reinforce or challenge gender norms.

• Compare gendered care roles in family, more-than-human, migration, and fatherhood contexts.

• Reflect on how ethnographic stories reveal aspects of care that statistics or policy can’t capture.

Structure: After an introduction on various ethnographic cases--Salvadoran grandmother, Vanuatu pig care, Taiwanese migrant carers, Balinese husbands of Dutch wives, and U.S. fathers of disabled children. Each is followed by discussion questions linking to gender and other concepts from this subject.

Introduction: Gender & Care

Femminisation  of Care

As we know, gender is culturally constructed. But in what ways? In many cultural contexts, people identified as women are considered to be the primary providers of direct, hands-on care. As Jackson notes, this is particularly the case for mothers::

the association of women with dependence and a “natural” tendency to care is embedded in societal and cultural understandings about how men and women, as fathers and mothers, should think and behave—a normative set of expectations and responsibilities that can confine women to the domestic sphere and lead to a dependence on male, economic providers.

The association between women, dependence, and a “natural” tendency to care is deeply embedded in societal expectations of how men and women should think and behave. As a result in all societies we know of, mothers are usually do "much more of this direct, hands-on care" (Jackson, 2023, p. 71).

These gender norms can confine women to the domestic sphere and reinforce dependence on male economic providers. In our course, we seen how similar ideas are extended to women in transnational care work. In Japan and Taiwan, for example, Filipina and Indonesian women are recruited into caregiving roles not simply because they have the skills, but because they are believed to be naturally suited to care. As Lan’s work shows, this is not a neutral compliment — it is an idealised and heavily constructed identity, shaped through recruitment processes, training regimes, and employer expectations. Anthropologists describe this as both the feminisation of care.

In your own care networks, do you find that:

1. You receive more care from people identifying as women than men?
2. Care is idealised as a feminine quality (i.e. that care is feminised?

Now consider how the ideas and practices in your network compare to the following cases.

Margaret Jolly – Gendered Pig Care in Vanuatu

 In Vanuatu, pigs are more-than-human beings with social and cosmic significance. Jolly observes that the daily, intimate care of pigs — feeding them, tending them, even suckling orphaned piglets — is usually women’s work. She suggests “pig wifery” is a more accurate term than “pig husbandry.” Men, however, usually appropriate these pigs for ceremonial exchange, redistribution, or slaughter. While women sometimes influence the direction of exchange, men’s control in these public, prestigious contexts is widespread, and disagreements can cause disputes between husbands and wives. Women’s pig care involves embodied intimacy.

How does this parallel wider patterns in human caregiving, where women provide daily care but men may control key decisions or resources?

Salvadorian ideas on gender & care

We saw how the Salvadorian mother instilled gendered values of care in her children

She complimented her sons on being responsible fathers and hoped “que sepan educar a sus hijos porque ya en otro país, pienso que no es igual que aquí en El Salvador” (may you know how to raise your children, because once in another country, I think it must be different from here in El Salvador). She urged her nineteen-year-old daughter Serena to cuidarse (take care of herself), highly gendered advice to remain chaste and avoid pregnancy (Arnold 2021, 138)

This, Arnold (2021, 139) notes,  "simultaneously communicates concern and affection for her children alongside normative gendered models of care"

Why would a woman insist on reinforcing sexist/patriarchal values?

Migrant Women as ‘Deferential Surrogates’ in Taiwan’s Care Regime"

Now another example from our subject.. In Taiwan, taking care of elderly parents is traditionally considered the filial duty of sons and daughters-in-law, but a growing share of this work is now done by migrant women. Lan describes how commercial brokers deliberately recruit “village women without previous overseas experiences” to match employers’ expectations of docility. Prospective workers are sent to live-in training centres, sometimes for months, where their bodies, dress, and behaviour are regulated. One recruiter explained his “golden rule”: “the poorer, the better.” Training aims to produce “deferential surrogates” — workers who not only master housekeeping and elder care, but also “cultivate an attitude of subservience toward employers.”  For many Taiwanese households, employing a live-in migrant enables the continuation of the familistic model of care — adult children can claim to uphold filial duty while outsourcing the daily, embodied labour to a non-relative. Yet, Lan notes, migrant caregivers can also form new kinds of intimacy with elders.:

I was often surprised at the changing behaviors of Taiwanese elders. When the caregivers softly kissed their cheek or tightly hugged them saying “I love you,” the elders, who probably never verbally expressed affection to their children in an explicit way, replied in broken English, with a smile: “I love you, too!”

How does the recruitment and training of “deferential surrogates” reveal the intersection of gender, migration, and care?

In what ways is this similar or different to women raising pigs or the Salvadoran mother ?

Balinese ideas on gender & care

Bali is an Indonesian island famous as a tourist destination. Some Balinese men marry holidaying Dutch women. In "Balinese Migrant Masculinities", Dragajlovic describes how these Balinese men adapt to life in the Netherlands:

most of the men can only find work in low-paid manual labor. In situations where a Dutch spouse has a much higher annual income than the Balinese spouse.... Balinese men often take on most of the domestic labor and child rearing duties and often work part-time outside the home. Some of the men take on casual domestic work. Grounded in understandings of ethnicized domestic labor that draws on the Dutch imaginary of colonial servitude and obliging Indonesian workers, Balinese (and other Indonesian) people have easier access to the domestic labor market. Thus, Balinese men take on domestic and caring work, which in Bali is considered ‘women’s work’. Such shifts in gender relations leads to an ongoing negotiation of the masculine self.

The Netherlands colonised Indonesia, so Dutch people are familiar with the idea of Indonesians as servants. As a result Balinese men can get work doing domestic labour. 

What is the colonial connection here? 

Do you think it is a form of exploitation?

Earl's Experience--Caring & Masculinity

In many cultures, masculinity has been associated with independence, control, and emotional restraint. But what happens when men become deeply involved in caregiving—especially for children who require intensive, daily, embodied forms of care?  

Aaron J. Jackson’s article explores how men like Earl navigate fatherhood in ways that challenge dominant gender expectations. In the passage below, Earl reflects on how his relationship with his son Zachary—who lives with a severe disability—transformed his understanding of masculinity, care, and success.  As you read, pay attention to moments of bodily care, emotional change, and identity transformation.   Jackson relates the moving story of Earl: 

 After the birth of his son, who was born with a rare congenital malfor- mation of the brain, Earl recalled throwing himself into “taking care of the things men do,” namely, breadwinning. He tried to hide from his grief over lost expectations by shutting down and tuning out from his family. Over time, however, the intimacy he slowly established with his son began to deepen his receptivity and press upon his identity as a father.

What caused Earl to "shut down" initially do you think? Can you think of other cases where men faced with caring shut down?

“I’d never been down this road of having a child with a disability,” Earl recalled of those early years one day as we sat in the lounge room of his beige two-story home in Arizona, situated amid Scottsdale’s suburban stucco sprawl. “We can’t play baseball with our kids, go bowling, you know, do typical things. I found myself completely isolated. I couldn’t find other dads with a child with a disability, someone else I could share with and could model myself after. I was going through everything new,” he said. “What happened?” I asked. He was silent for a moment. Finally, he nodded, and said, “It took years before I was able to identify how I felt about Zachary and how he felt about me. We would roll around and wres- tle on the floor in the evening when I was home, and he’d just giggle and laugh. He couldn’t crawl or walk. He would roll to get to me, and it was just like, God, how do you not be touched by that?”

How does Earl’s growing physical and emotional connection with Zachary challenge conventional kinship expectations of “what fathers do”? Why is the embodied aspect of care—physical closeness, touch, shared space—important for understanding transformations in gender identity? How does it relate to the embodied care we read about in northern Thailand?

Earl confessed that his personal history of gendered experiences had ill-prepared him for fatherhood. Impoverished ideas about manhood and how fathers are supposed to act and what they’re supposed to do had done little to develop his ethical capacity for intimacy and care. Men are supposed to be dominant and avoid emotional vulnerability, and women are supposed to be empathetic and avoid dominance. Prescriptive gender stereotypes vary across groups and can change over time. For the men like Earl that I came to know, fears over being judged as emotionally vulnerable or weak often posed the greatest obstacles to being the fathers their children needed them to be. Over time though, as Earl became more involved in Zachary’s life and his own marriage, giving and receiving emotional support, his life slowly dropped out of sync with the gender role expectations that had set him adrift from confronting the challenges his family needed him to. He began to embody a better version of himself.

What cultural messages about masculinity did Earl have to unlearn, and what new “habits of care” replaced them? Is there an embodied element to this?   

Talking about how mainstream media representations of fatherhood are entrenched in certain kinds of ideas about masculinity that are antithetical to dependence and vulnerability, Earl said, “It’s like whatever is on the TV is what masculinity and success are,” he said. “But success is relationships with people. It’s reaching your potential in life and helping others reach theirs.” He came to see that by helping others grow we often become more responsive to our own needs to grow. “Zachary doesn’t need me more than another dad. He just needs me in different ways. We have to allow ourselves to grow into meeting those needs and being there for our children.” Caregiving can be difficult and unglamorous. However, the meanings that arise through the emotional intimacy parents establish with their children can help them meet the challenges of sustaining it. In this small story, we see how fathers’ identities as caregivers emerge and solidify through such moments of steadfast presence within the moment- to-moment experience of intimacy?

Earl’s story invites reflection on how intimacy, disability, and daily care can transform inherited ideas of manhood. How did it make you feel?

Conclusion

We have read from different ethnographic accounts above. In what ways can ethnographic storytelling reveal aspects of care and gender that statistics or policy discussions might miss?