ABSTRACT
Carework refers to the work of caring for others, including unpaid care for family members and friends, as well as paid care for wards and clients. As a form of reproductive labor, carework is necessary to the maintenance of individuals, families, and communities. It includes emotional and nursing care for children, elders, the sick, and the disabled, as well as domestic work such as cooking and cleaning (Misra 2007). By deploying the term “carework,” scholars and advocates emphasize that care is hard work-physically and emotionally-whose value is nevertheless overrated and underpaid. Viewed in this way, care is no longer an expression of women’s natural feelings or endowments, but concrete labor performed in society. This chapter discusses how culture constitutes the ways we understand and conduct
carework. “Culture” designates two meanings here. First, the cultures of carework refer to the ideologies, values, norms, customs, and common senses about how care should be organized and done. They provide a “tool kit” of cultural resources (Swidler 1986) from which individuals and families develop strategies of actions. Second, the scripts and practices of carework vary and travel across socio-cultural contexts. Here culture designates worldviews and lifestyles shared by particular ethnic groups, religious communities, or nation-states. Previous scholars have widely discussed the privatization of care as a dominant cultural
framework, but they have used the term “private” with a variety of significations. I will identify and distinguish its various connotations, including domesticity, emotionality, feminization, and marketization. I argue that we need to reject binary thinking about the public and private, love and money, and paid and unpaid. To avoid ethnocentric assumptions about familial intimacy and private domesticity, we need to look into how carework is embedded in particular institutional regimes and cultural contexts. And we should analyze carework as a terrain of power struggles that shape the stratified division of labor and as a contextualized practice of constructing the family with intertwined meanings across the realms of market and intimacy.
