ABSTRACT
Across the western world, homecare has become the acknowledged ideal for the support of frail older and disabled people, seen as providing the best-quality care, as well as the only feasible form economically, in the context of rising levels of demand. The primary setting for service delivery has, thus, shifted decisively to the home. But we have only slowly begun to address the implications of this for both service delivery and the lives of older and disabled people. Home is familiar territory, so much so, indeed, that it can appear obvious, its complexities glossed over by the assumed and commonsensical. In fact it is a highly complex site in which material, symbolic, social, and cultural constructions mingle and interpenetrate. The coming of care potentially destabilizes and reconstitutes these meanings, refracting them through different discourses, different rationalities. Further complexity is added by the nature of the work within homecare-the fact that it primarily involves the body-so that the symbolic and spatial relations of home and care closely interact with those of the body and bodywork. Service delivery intrudes upon these relations, disturbs these privacies. The challenge of homecare is, thus, how to preserve the nature of this setting and protect the identity of the self in its material and socially embedded form-at ease, at home, located within its own time and space-and yet provide service support in a way that is consonant with the logic of economic production.
