Gender, Kinship & Care is a paper that seeks to re-theorise care by examining it in the context of recent work on gender, subjectivity and kinship. The emerging ethnographic studies of care in a multitude of settings challenges and provokes a reassessment of the points of connection and disjuncture between life and death, kinship & friendship, intimacy and distance, subjectivity and public and professional identities. Who “cares” for whom, in what ways and to what effects are growing areas of anthropological interest, as are concerns with and for the nature of care as well as abuse and “zones of social abandonment” (Biehl). By using a variety of theoretical and interpretive approaches that draw in work on life processes and generational scales, this paper will seek to locate the study of care in a whole range of societies, cultures and settings, including Britain today. Furthermore, ideas about the constitution of intimate and caring relationships, “caring power” as well as technological and subjectivised “self-care” allow us to explore the complex and varied gendering of the self in multiple cultural locations and domains (kinship, medicine, law, governance) with important theoretical consequences for how we evaluate what counts as “care” and what constitutes well-being.
Further information including a list of lecture courses and background reading can be found in the Paper Guide in the Paper Resources section to the right of this page.