✦ Care & Social Reproduction (Extension) ✦

 To extend your understanding of social reproduction and care, focus on this passage from Thelen.

Thelen (2015, pp. 501–502) traces how theories of care have changed. As you read, notice that each new approach identifies something that the previous approach missed.

Thelen begins with the Marxist and feminist theories of social reproduction that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s. 

Central to early Marxist and feminist approaches was an understanding of unpaid care as the downside of public production, as the capitalist necessity of cheap reproduction of new labour. For example, Claude Meillassoux, included nutrition and subsistence in times of sickness and unemployment as well as raising children  in his reflections. Similarly for Maria Mies and Claudia von Werlhof the alimentation [providing food and nourishment] of husbands and the education of children are  subsumed under their concept of subsistence production. These studies essentially conceptualized care as domestic labour, characterizing it as ‘dull, monotonous and  traditional’ -- something to be overcome.  

The key idea here is that care is hidden labour that keeps capitalism running. Workers need to be fed and cared for when they are sick, and new generations of workers need to be raised. Much of this work is done unpaid within households, especially by women. But what might we miss if we understand care mainly as unpaid domestic labour? This is the problem Thelen turns to next.

While stressing the mutual dependence of supposedly public economy and private reproduction, the discussion was limited to unpaid activities within the household. Transitions and intersections between private care and labour in the public  sphere, such as paid housework or care practices in economic relationships, were  largely ignored. Like neoclassical economists, Marxists located love and altruism in  the female sphere of the family and household, whereas paid activities belonged to  the male-dominated public sphere.  Consequently, feminist scholars soon criticized this reductionist view of care.  Instead they stressed emotional aspects and the importance of care for processes  of identity formation. For example, Hilary Graham has argued that care consti-  tuted a process of female (in contrast to male) identity-building: ‘Caring is ‘‘given’’  to women: It becomes the defining characteristic of their self-identity and their  lifework. At the same time, caring is taken away from men: not caring becomes  a defining characteristic of manhood’. While the terminology  of social reproduction emphasizes stability, the perspective on gender added a more  processual view.  

The argument has now shifted. It is no longer simply that women do more care. Feminist scholars began asking how caring itself helps produce gender: women come to be understood—and to understand themselves—as naturally caring:

Thereby, and despite all the later criticism concerning the missing diversity of  (female) carers in the analysis, these early works represented a starting point for a  new strand of studies that focused on the evolving parallel naturalization of female-  male and public-private.4 In addition, comparative welfare studies showed how the  legal institutionalization of care – considered a female profession or obligation –  reflected that binary construction. Still today, considerable segments of care work are unpaid  or nominally paid, with poor working conditions and minimally institutionalized  social security. In this respect, care  reproduces and symbolizes a social inequality further exacerbated by global inequalities, resulting in the formation of transnational care chains (Hochschild,  2000).  

This has an important consequence: care can reproduce inequality. If caring is regarded as something women "naturally" do out of love, it becomes easier for care work to remain unpaid or poorly paid. And the inequality does not stop at the household. When wealthier families pay other people to perform care work, inequalities of gender, class and nationality can become interconnected. We will return to this later when we examine global care chains: for example, migrant women leaving their own families to provide paid childcare or elder care for families elsewhere. So we have moved from asking "Who does the unpaid work?" to asking "How does the organisation of care produce and reproduce social inequalities?"

Discussions around the diversity of carers, as well as the social inequality produced within the context of care practices, laid the basis for the processual model  developed by Joan Tronto (1993: 105–8). ... The best-known example is the model of the male-breadwinner, which prescribes that the man assume the care obligations for his family by earning money. This his wife receives to care for their children, and as the case may be, his parents as well. While this model represents a significant advancement, it still  included the recipients of care only in the last step . Framed this way, the concept came under criticism, mainly from representatives of the newly  developing area of disability research, which helped expand the  critique of the public–private divide into the realm of a parallel normative mapping  involving ‘good’ or ‘bad’ feelings.

Rather than: 

A cares for B 

Thelen wants something closer to: 

A ↔ B: through caring practices, a particular relationship between A and B is made, maintained, transformed—or dissolved.

For anthropologists, this is a more productive approach.

Thelen, T. (2015). Care as social organization: Creating, maintaining and dissolving significant relations. Anthropological theory, 15(4), 497-515.