skip to content

Department of Social Anthropology

 

John Fahy - Dancing for Krishna

 

Gender, Kinship & Care is a paper that seeks to re-theorise care by examining it in the context of recent work on gender, subjectivity, intimacy 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 gender and sexuality, 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.

Paper Resources

SAN13 Paper Guide

For lecture reading lists, additional teaching materials, past exam questions and exam reports please see the SAN13 Gender, Kinship and Care Moodle Course.

Please note teaching staff and students enrolled on Gender, Kinship and Care will automatically be enrolled on the Moodle course and you will find a link to the course in the ‘My Home’ section of Moodle.

If you are a member of the University of Cambridge and you wish to view the reading lists, past exam questions and exam reports then you can access the Gender, Kinship and Care Moodle Course as a guest. For more information on how to access Moodle Courses as a guest please see Moodle Help.