Jennifer Jihye Chun, Cynthia J. Cranford, Yang-Sook Kim, Jennifer Nazareno
This article utilizes a multilevel intersectional framework to analyze how Asian immigrant women workers in state-funded care provisioning make sense of and contest the relations of servitude that have long plagued low-paid domestic work. Our research, which draws on in-depth interviews with Chinese, Korean, and Filipina/o/x women in California’s In-Home Supportive Services program, shows that workers across all three groups face coercive labor conditions in private homes that severely constrain their ability to refuse excessive demands on their time and tasks, including when care is publicly funded and means tested, provided by paid relatives, managed by the state, and regulated under union collective-bargaining agreements. Yet, our comparative analysis also shows that workers from different groups have varying understandings of what constitutes servitude and how it can be challenged, especially when care receiver–employers are similarly marginalized and are part of workers’ families and ethnic communities. Meso-level institutions such as labor markets, immigrant networks, community organizations, and labor unions play a significant role in mediating workers’ subjective understandings and group-level responses to ongoing conditions of de facto servitude.
{"title":"Confronting Servitude: Asian Immigrant Women Workers in State-Funded Homecare","authors":"Jennifer Jihye Chun, Cynthia J. Cranford, Yang-Sook Kim, Jennifer Nazareno","doi":"10.1086/725842","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/725842","url":null,"abstract":"This article utilizes a multilevel intersectional framework to analyze how Asian immigrant women workers in state-funded care provisioning make sense of and contest the relations of servitude that have long plagued low-paid domestic work. Our research, which draws on in-depth interviews with Chinese, Korean, and Filipina/o/x women in California’s In-Home Supportive Services program, shows that workers across all three groups face coercive labor conditions in private homes that severely constrain their ability to refuse excessive demands on their time and tasks, including when care is publicly funded and means tested, provided by paid relatives, managed by the state, and regulated under union collective-bargaining agreements. Yet, our comparative analysis also shows that workers from different groups have varying understandings of what constitutes servitude and how it can be challenged, especially when care receiver–employers are similarly marginalized and are part of workers’ families and ethnic communities. Meso-level institutions such as labor markets, immigrant networks, community organizations, and labor unions play a significant role in mediating workers’ subjective understandings and group-level responses to ongoing conditions of de facto servitude.","PeriodicalId":51382,"journal":{"name":"Signs","volume":"22 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135588873","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
On film, care for people with dementia looks like bleak work. Tragedy and horror are the film genres most often deployed to represent dementia care, reflecting the austere material realities of that care in the United States today. Despite decades of feminist organizing around the importance of care labor, the current shortage of carers for aging and disabled people in the United States suggests that few view it as a first-choice job. Two recent documentaries, cocreated by a person with dementia and their carer, dispute the horror story of dementia care: Michelle Memran and Irene Fornes’s The Rest I Make Up and Kirsten Johnson and Dick Johnson’s Dick Johnson Is Dead reveal the creative possibilities of dementia care as well as the care work fundamental to filmmaking. I compare the labor of filmmaking with the labor of caring in these documentaries to argue that they transform dementia care into aspirational labor—labor that, like filmmaking itself, can be recognized and experienced as valuable, creative work. I assert that these films reconfigure a landscape of bleak and austere care labor, experiment with ways of living in which care work is well distributed and well liked, and envision dementia care as care we all might give and receive.
{"title":"Toward Aspirational Care Labor: Dementia Care Meets Documentary Filmmaking","authors":"Danielle Drees","doi":"10.1086/725831","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/725831","url":null,"abstract":"On film, care for people with dementia looks like bleak work. Tragedy and horror are the film genres most often deployed to represent dementia care, reflecting the austere material realities of that care in the United States today. Despite decades of feminist organizing around the importance of care labor, the current shortage of carers for aging and disabled people in the United States suggests that few view it as a first-choice job. Two recent documentaries, cocreated by a person with dementia and their carer, dispute the horror story of dementia care: Michelle Memran and Irene Fornes’s The Rest I Make Up and Kirsten Johnson and Dick Johnson’s Dick Johnson Is Dead reveal the creative possibilities of dementia care as well as the care work fundamental to filmmaking. I compare the labor of filmmaking with the labor of caring in these documentaries to argue that they transform dementia care into aspirational labor—labor that, like filmmaking itself, can be recognized and experienced as valuable, creative work. I assert that these films reconfigure a landscape of bleak and austere care labor, experiment with ways of living in which care work is well distributed and well liked, and envision dementia care as care we all might give and receive.","PeriodicalId":51382,"journal":{"name":"Signs","volume":"10 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135588046","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This introduction situates our special issue’s focus on care, as concept and practice, within several lineages of feminist scholarship to grapple with the difficulties of the present moment. Over the past four decades of feminist scholarship and practice, notions of care and caring, as noun and verb, have had great traction across disciplinary divides, spurring debates about power and positionality while challenging binaries of equality and difference, public and private, the rational and irrational, and paid and unpaid labor. It is in the differing institutional, national, and community contexts explored in this issue that new perspectives on the complexity of care and caring emerge.
{"title":"Introduction: Complexities of Care and Caring","authors":"Linda M. Blum, Amber Jamilla Musser","doi":"10.1086/725829","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/725829","url":null,"abstract":"This introduction situates our special issue’s focus on care, as concept and practice, within several lineages of feminist scholarship to grapple with the difficulties of the present moment. Over the past four decades of feminist scholarship and practice, notions of care and caring, as noun and verb, have had great traction across disciplinary divides, spurring debates about power and positionality while challenging binaries of equality and difference, public and private, the rational and irrational, and paid and unpaid labor. It is in the differing institutional, national, and community contexts explored in this issue that new perspectives on the complexity of care and caring emerge.","PeriodicalId":51382,"journal":{"name":"Signs","volume":"45 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135588874","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Care-work research has been largely dominated by two accounts of emotions in care: as love/attachment or as “emotional labor.” These two accounts have led scholars to focus on questions of authenticity and motive—for example, how much do caregivers really feel for their charges?—rather than questions of skill, interaction, and sense making. The domination of these two accounts has also left the care-work field open to critiques from critical race theorists and disability scholars, who argue that existing research amplifies the “love rhetoric” that depoliticizes and de-skills the work of care; uses emotional care to make distinctions that naturalize racialized visions of care-work, for example, between “nurturant care and reproductive labor”; and is insufficiently attuned to intragender inequalities. These critics often advocate for the field to deemphasize emotion in care-work analyses. I propose instead that we address these issues by complicating and deepening our reckoning of the emotional dimensions of care. As part of this effort, I offer the term “connective labor” to capture the work of using emotion to see and reflect an understanding of the other, work that overlaps with but is not identical to notions of recognition, acknowledgment, and pastoral power. Relying on examples from interviews and observations with more than sixty care-work practitioners, I elaborate on the connective labor concept, review how the care-work literature treats emotion and the critiques thereof, and explore how connective labor affords us a different view of the politics, inequality, and mutuality of care.
{"title":"Connective Labor as Emotional Vocabulary: Inequality, Mutuality, and the Politics of Feelings in Care-Work","authors":"Allison J. Pugh","doi":"10.1086/725837","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/725837","url":null,"abstract":"Care-work research has been largely dominated by two accounts of emotions in care: as love/attachment or as “emotional labor.” These two accounts have led scholars to focus on questions of authenticity and motive—for example, how much do caregivers really feel for their charges?—rather than questions of skill, interaction, and sense making. The domination of these two accounts has also left the care-work field open to critiques from critical race theorists and disability scholars, who argue that existing research amplifies the “love rhetoric” that depoliticizes and de-skills the work of care; uses emotional care to make distinctions that naturalize racialized visions of care-work, for example, between “nurturant care and reproductive labor”; and is insufficiently attuned to intragender inequalities. These critics often advocate for the field to deemphasize emotion in care-work analyses. I propose instead that we address these issues by complicating and deepening our reckoning of the emotional dimensions of care. As part of this effort, I offer the term “connective labor” to capture the work of using emotion to see and reflect an understanding of the other, work that overlaps with but is not identical to notions of recognition, acknowledgment, and pastoral power. Relying on examples from interviews and observations with more than sixty care-work practitioners, I elaborate on the connective labor concept, review how the care-work literature treats emotion and the critiques thereof, and explore how connective labor affords us a different view of the politics, inequality, and mutuality of care.","PeriodicalId":51382,"journal":{"name":"Signs","volume":"10 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135587876","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Polygenic screening is a new form of embryo testing that assesses the probability that an embryo will later develop a wide range of health conditions. This technology purports to help prospective parents choose which embryos to implant during in-vitro fertilization to ensure the “healthiest” baby. In this essay, we interrogate polygenic screening as part of the broader economy of finance capital–backed fertility technologies that are redefining notions of care to stress individual risk mitigation and neo-eugenic genetic selection as a way to promote the ableist mirage of “healthy” futures for generations to come. Contesting these false promises, our essay reveals the political-economic interests that lurk behind this problematic notion of care, juxtaposing it with an alternative vision of collective care by engaging radical Black, Indigenous, and socialist feminist calls for reproductive justice, mutual aid, and the revaluation and reorganization of reproductive labor. We argue that the embrace of polygenic screening obfuscates the political roots of our crisis of reproductive labor and care—an obfuscation that also silences the ecological precarity upon which the settler state is predicated. We thus bring neoliberal, eugenic, and ultimately settler colonial ideologies of privatized care into stark relief with an alternative that will more likely open up futures for all of our children and kin. Foregrounding radical collective approaches to care repoliticizes discussions of maternal/parental care; it also points to the necessary political movement building required if we are to cherish and protect the lives of current and future generations, the planet, and all its inhabitants.
{"title":"Shared Futures or Financialized Futures: Polygenic Screening, Reproductive Justice, and the Radical Charge of Collective Care","authors":"Jennifer Denbow, Tamara Lea Spira","doi":"10.1086/725832","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/725832","url":null,"abstract":"Polygenic screening is a new form of embryo testing that assesses the probability that an embryo will later develop a wide range of health conditions. This technology purports to help prospective parents choose which embryos to implant during in-vitro fertilization to ensure the “healthiest” baby. In this essay, we interrogate polygenic screening as part of the broader economy of finance capital–backed fertility technologies that are redefining notions of care to stress individual risk mitigation and neo-eugenic genetic selection as a way to promote the ableist mirage of “healthy” futures for generations to come. Contesting these false promises, our essay reveals the political-economic interests that lurk behind this problematic notion of care, juxtaposing it with an alternative vision of collective care by engaging radical Black, Indigenous, and socialist feminist calls for reproductive justice, mutual aid, and the revaluation and reorganization of reproductive labor. We argue that the embrace of polygenic screening obfuscates the political roots of our crisis of reproductive labor and care—an obfuscation that also silences the ecological precarity upon which the settler state is predicated. We thus bring neoliberal, eugenic, and ultimately settler colonial ideologies of privatized care into stark relief with an alternative that will more likely open up futures for all of our children and kin. Foregrounding radical collective approaches to care repoliticizes discussions of maternal/parental care; it also points to the necessary political movement building required if we are to cherish and protect the lives of current and future generations, the planet, and all its inhabitants.","PeriodicalId":51382,"journal":{"name":"Signs","volume":"3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135588872","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Previous article FreeAbout the ContributorsPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmailPrint SectionsMoreMorgan E. Barry is a PhD candidate at Northwestern University’s Department of History and a fellow of Northwestern’s Gender and Sexuality Studies Program. She studies how ideas about race, gender, and sexuality shaped political repression and surveillance practices in the twentieth-century United States. Barry holds an MA in history from Northwestern (2020) and a BA from Boston University (2017).Jana Cattien is assistant professor in social and political philosophy at the University of Amsterdam. She holds a PhD from SOAS, University of London, and works mainly in feminist philosophy and critical race and postcolonial theory. Recent publications include “What Is Leitkultur?,” New German Critique 48, no. 1 (2021): 181–209; “On (Not) Becoming Chinese: The Racialization of Compliance,” Radical Philosophy 212 (2022): 3–9; and, with Richard Stopford, “The Appropriating Subject: Cultural Appreciation, Property, and Entitlement,” Philosophy and Social Criticism (prepublished online, March 2022).Suyun Choi is assistant professor of gender and women’s studies at Saint Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Indiana. Her research focuses neoliberal reconfigurations of care that generates new conditions of labor and power during a care crisis in South Korea. Her recent work appears in Asian Journal of Women’s Studies. She is working on a book project tentatively titled “Going into Labor: A Crisis and the Work of Care in Neoliberal South Korea.”Susana Galán is a researcher in gender studies and the digital sphere at the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3) of the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. She has a PhD in women’s and gender studies from Rutgers University. Her work has been published in the Journal of International Women’s Studies, the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, Kohl: A Journal for Body and Gender Research, the Observatori del Conflicte Social, and the books Freedom without Permission: Bodies and Space in the Arab Revolutions, edited by Frances S. Hasso and Zakia Salime (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), and Beyond the Square: Urbanism and the Arab Uprisings, edited by Deen Sharp and Claire Panetta (New York: Terreform, 2016).Jennifer Garrison ([email protected]) is a scholar of medieval literature and feminist theory, as well as a trade union organizer. Her research focuses on how medieval religious discourses shape and restrict individuals’ access to power. Her first book, Challenging Communion, was published by The Ohio State University Press in 2017. Recent articles include “Transforming Community: Women’s Rape Narratives and Gower’s Confessio Amantis,” Medieval Feminist Forum 57, no. 1 (2021), and “Mankind and the Masculine Pleasures of Penance,” Exemplaria 31 (2019): 46–62. She holds a PhD in English literature from Rutgers University.Amand
{"title":"About the Contributors","authors":"","doi":"10.1086/724422","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/724422","url":null,"abstract":"Previous article FreeAbout the ContributorsPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmailPrint SectionsMoreMorgan E. Barry is a PhD candidate at Northwestern University’s Department of History and a fellow of Northwestern’s Gender and Sexuality Studies Program. She studies how ideas about race, gender, and sexuality shaped political repression and surveillance practices in the twentieth-century United States. Barry holds an MA in history from Northwestern (2020) and a BA from Boston University (2017).Jana Cattien is assistant professor in social and political philosophy at the University of Amsterdam. She holds a PhD from SOAS, University of London, and works mainly in feminist philosophy and critical race and postcolonial theory. Recent publications include “What Is Leitkultur?,” New German Critique 48, no. 1 (2021): 181–209; “On (Not) Becoming Chinese: The Racialization of Compliance,” Radical Philosophy 212 (2022): 3–9; and, with Richard Stopford, “The Appropriating Subject: Cultural Appreciation, Property, and Entitlement,” Philosophy and Social Criticism (prepublished online, March 2022).Suyun Choi is assistant professor of gender and women’s studies at Saint Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Indiana. Her research focuses neoliberal reconfigurations of care that generates new conditions of labor and power during a care crisis in South Korea. Her recent work appears in Asian Journal of Women’s Studies. She is working on a book project tentatively titled “Going into Labor: A Crisis and the Work of Care in Neoliberal South Korea.”Susana Galán is a researcher in gender studies and the digital sphere at the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3) of the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. She has a PhD in women’s and gender studies from Rutgers University. Her work has been published in the Journal of International Women’s Studies, the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, Kohl: A Journal for Body and Gender Research, the Observatori del Conflicte Social, and the books Freedom without Permission: Bodies and Space in the Arab Revolutions, edited by Frances S. Hasso and Zakia Salime (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), and Beyond the Square: Urbanism and the Arab Uprisings, edited by Deen Sharp and Claire Panetta (New York: Terreform, 2016).Jennifer Garrison ([email protected]) is a scholar of medieval literature and feminist theory, as well as a trade union organizer. Her research focuses on how medieval religious discourses shape and restrict individuals’ access to power. Her first book, Challenging Communion, was published by The Ohio State University Press in 2017. Recent articles include “Transforming Community: Women’s Rape Narratives and Gower’s Confessio Amantis,” Medieval Feminist Forum 57, no. 1 (2021), and “Mankind and the Masculine Pleasures of Penance,” Exemplaria 31 (2019): 46–62. She holds a PhD in English literature from Rutgers University.Amand","PeriodicalId":51382,"journal":{"name":"Signs","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136169684","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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