In what ways is care work a space for the negotiation of intergenerational inequalities, aspirations and forms of belonging in ageing societies?
The definitions of belonging are multiple. To belong can refer to being the property of, being a member of a particular group or organisation, having the right personal or social qualities to be a member of a particular group, or having an affinity for a specified place or situation.
To aspire refers to directing one’s hopes or ambitions towards achieving something. One can aspire to belong, to be a part of, to make something of oneself, to be successful, to change, and so on.
Yet, to what extent do vulnerability, illness, or ageing, alter forms of belongings and established aspirations? And how might the introduction of a carer affect belonging and aspirations, not only for the one cared for but also the carer?
This essay will address the ways in which care work is a space for the negotiation of intergenerational inequalities, aspirations, and forms of belonging in ageing societies. It will first look at how care work at once generates new forms of belonging and disrupts established ones. It will then focus on care work’s ability to enable but also prevent aspirations. Lastly, it will outline the fundamental inequality of care work.
To use the term belonging synonymously with kinship is to allow a rupture from older notions of descent. As Thelen and Coe note in their 2019 article Political Belonging through Elderly Care, this facilitates a move away from ‘essentialising notions towards a more constructivist and processual view [attending] to individual perspectives and pathways’. In looking at political belonging as created or destroyed by care, the multivalence of ‘belonging’ is valuable, precisely because of its vagueness. Indeed, given that it encompasses ‘formal rights as well as the ways in which people identify with and negotiate forms of political membership in everyday practices in multiple domains’, the concept of belonging shifts the focus form the ‘group’ perspective to the ‘micro-interactional production of mutuality as well as social actors’ understandings of such attachments as representing political belonging’.
Thelen and Coe concentrate on elderly care as a way to reveal the fluctuation of political belonging over the life course, as older persons ‘leave or enter privileged forms of citizenships or other forms of political membership on the basis of constructions or long-term reciprocities and mutualities’. This ‘deferred reciprocity’ across the lifespans fuels the idea that elderly care is ‘deserved, not only from kin, but also through state forms of exchange – for example, when pensions are interpreted as given in exchange for a lifetime of labour’. These fulfilled expectations of reciprocity in turn signal belonging and can be hugely important in relation to political legitimacy and stability. Thelen and Coe illustrate this through the poor’s inclusion in state care programs as a confirmation of their national belonging as well as a new way to ‘claim national resources and rights’. They remark how pensions schemes for poorer adults in various parts of the world such as Bangladesh, Namibia, South Africa, and Tanzania can lead to older persons being more recognised by their kin and to an elevation of status in their community as a consequence of these small, state issued, stipends, which they often share broadly within their social networks. Conversely, the lack of such state resources, denying political belonging, can ‘render older persons vulnerable and contribute to their exclusion from other forms of belonging as well’.
On a more individual level however, the distinction between political inclusion or exclusion can be rather ambivalent. For instance, migrant care workers are often associated with representations of ‘traditional’, ‘warmer’, care, which starkly contrasts ‘modern’ care in EuroAmerica. While some migrant care workers used this stereotype to their advantage insofar as emphasising their ‘traditional’ form of care often helps them gain employment in care work, this creates a narrative in which their ‘otherness’ and foreignness are highlighted. This results in an ambivalent sense of political belonging since ‘they are welcome to work in the private care market but only because of their difference, precisely because they do not belong to the national and its ‘modern’ ways of treating older persons’.
Hence, Thelen and Coe suggest that care can also construct new configurations of political belonging. In fact, Coe underlines how during her research, an elderly American man introduced her to ‘his ‘younger brother’ and ‘soulmate’, his care worker from Ghana’. Interestingly, he did not only regularly use these kin terms, he also ‘put them into practice materially by paying for the care worker’s further education as an American father is expected to do with his children’. As such, by means of this reciprocal care, he ‘enabled his national belonging to encompass his care worker, who experience this as a strong sign of acceptance in and thereby belonging to the US’. Consequently, new practices of elderly care can be seen to emerge, developing alongside new demographic conditions and transnational care migration. However, while they have an innovative potential, opening up ‘new spaces for mutuality and political belonging at the micro-level, these practices can also be the source of painful acts of inclusion, notably through the creation of new categories of difference or ‘othering’.
In addition to the relation between care and political belonging, the issue of care, migration, and emotional belonging. Constable (1999) inquires about how proximity, care, and belonging relate to one another. She notes that a prominent worry for Filipino domestic workers working in Hong Kong concerns how they will fit in when they go home; with many noting how after being away from home for so long, domestic workers often feel like strangers in their parents’ home. This challenges the idea that ‘home’ and ‘belonging’ are inherently tied, with new conceptions emerging of the ‘home’ as ‘involving some degree of both location (at least an imaginary one) and relations – thus constituting a social and physical ‘space’ as opposed to simply a ‘place’ (Abbas 1994), suggesting that belonging is contingent on distance to some extent. Constable notes that migration alters relationships ‘left behind’. Through being care workers in Hong Kong, Filipino women naturally carve out new identities and political spaces in Hong Kong. Thus, while migration does not entail the disappearance of belonging in the place one leaves, it does require the reworking and renegotiating of traditional relationships between husbands and wives, parents and children. As one domestic worker puts it, ‘you can go home. But you can’t start from where you left. To fit in, you have to create another place in that place you left behind’. As a result, Filipino women experience ambivalent belonging, having to re-belong to their home in the Philippines but also actively seek to belong in their new homes in Hong Kong. Hence, unlike those left behind in the Philippines who ‘are principally aware of one culture, one setting, one home’, Filipino overseas workers are ‘aware of at least two’; this plurality of belonging at once being alienating yet inspiring. Here, while migration has provided care workers with ‘new experiences, desires, options, and visions’, there are no ‘ready formulas for successfully transplanting them’. Belonging is as such always being negotiated and challenged.
This echoes Baldassar’s (2007) rapprochement between belonging and intent in relation to the globalisation of elderly care in the context of migration. By emphasising how ‘families, ethnicties and nations can be seen as imagined communities’ whereby, while one may be born into a family and a nation, the ‘sense of membership can be a matter of choice and negotiation’, she suggests that distance is not always an impediment to active transnational family relations. She underlines that despite many migrants being separated from their families by national borders, they ‘continue to maintain mutual care-giving relationships. Distance and the passage of time do not necessarily dimmish these care exchanges although they may disrupt, fracture, and transform them’.
Thus, while care can destroy established forms and feelings of belonging, it can also generate and promote new ones. Lamb, in her 2013 exploration of old age security in India, remarks on the naturalisation of the expectation of care from kin. Narayan Sakar, a retired engineer who she interviewed, reflected that ‘in our families, we raised our children – why? Our idea, our dream was that when we grew old, our sons and daughters-in-law would serve us. And it is our dream, and a natural thing, to hope for this, to want this. We did this for our parents, and they for theirs’ (emphasis mine). This expectation of intergenerational care stems largely from the widely practiced family set-up, that is, joint living. Co-residence across generations is still by far the most common living arrangement in India, with about ‘eighty percent of India’s population aged sixty or older [living] with adult children’. Lamb underlines that those of both older and younger generations relate that ‘in a joint family system, adult children, in particular sons and daughters-in-law, provide care for their ageing parents – out of love, a deep respect for elders, and a profound sense of moral, economic and even spiritual duty to attempt to repay the inerasable debts they owe their parents for all the effort, expense and affection their parents expended to produce and raise them’. Thus emerges a notion of pure reciprocity insofar as adult children reciprocate what their parents once gave them as young children – including ‘co-residence, food, material support, love, time together, assistance with daily routines, and toileting’ – when their parents become old. However, this ideal of pure reciprocity is challenged by contemporary realities, with an increasing number of children living abroad or favouring nuclear family living over joint living. Yet, in spite of this, stigma persists around non-kin provided elderly care; as Patrima outlines ‘[elderly care] is expensive and a hassle. Maybe an old age home would be a good solution, but the social stigma! What would people say? I could never do it’. Nonetheless, attempts to reconcile the ideal of elderly care and its reality are made, with many families making efforts to adapt to these new realities. For instance, some non-resident Indian children fund NGOs services when they are able to provide money but not time or proximity. The director such a NGO, the Agewell Foundation, compared hired elder-care counsellors to ‘surrogate sons’, commenting that while this may be a ‘sad situation indeed when children cannot gift their parents time’, it is a ‘contemporary reality that has to be faced’.
Further, given that time and proximity cannot be taken for granted anymore, some old age homes are trying to rework the narrative, distancing it from feelings of abandonment, lack of love, toward the potentiality of new forms of belonging. Sanjita, head of an old age home, stresses: ‘we are trying to wipe out the stigma of living in an old age home … ‘come happily stay with us’ is our motto. It’s not that children are throwing away their parents – it’s not always that … These are just the circumstances of modern society … Children are [more] than eager to pay for their parents’ happiness, and parents are also able to pay’. Additionally, some emphasise the value of old age homes as enabling belonging through the creation of new social ties, noting that living in an old age home is ‘less culturally alien and bizarre than what for some would have been the alternative option of living alone’, highlighting how ‘it is not natural for human beings to live alone’. Care is at once disruptive to established forms of belonging but also exciting in its potential to create and negotiate new ones.
What is more, care work can both enable yet prevent aspirations. In subtle ways, care workers witness people whose life courses have been altered or challenged in significant ways due to illness, which might lead to a renegotiation of aspirations in the face of the reality that one might age in a way different to the one envisioned. Through exchange with the elderly whose aspirations might have been cut short, or different than expected, care workers build up resilience as well as novel aspirations as a result.
Beyond this, care work can make aspirations reality. For instance, Constable (1999) reveals how for Filipino domestic workers, life in Hong Kong is a ‘source of independence, new pleasures, and new senses of personhood’. Notably, Acosta, one of the domestic workers Constable worked with, points out that despite feeling conflicted about whether it was best to be with her children or to send them money from abroad, there was no denying the empowerment, through negotiation of ‘independence and freedom’, that life in Hong Kong allowed. Further, she ‘did not relish giving up her autonomy to her husband’s various demands at home [and,] with her in Hong Kong, they could both feel like the boss’. Thus, care work enables the creation of new identities but also requires re-workings of old identities, as well as negotiation of how aspirations might fit into this new picture.
Nevertheless, as Buch (2018) uncovers in her work on the paradoxes of independence in American Home Care, care work can have an adverse effect on aspirations. Indeed, tensions arise when carers must sustain a client’s independence while not impeding on their own aspirations. Buch underlines that the ‘moral demands for carers to set their own needs and feelings aside in order to sustain the lives of others is at the very heart of the social relation that generates both independence and inequality’. As Maria explains, even when a care worker is having a tough time, they must not let it transpire in front of their client, since, as a caregiver, you are expected to be ‘happy’ and ‘show everyone such a good time that nobody even noticed where you lacked’. She recalls how when taking care of a blind woman she would cry in silence but, when asked how she was doing, would lie and say everything was fine. Buch argues that ‘Maria’s smile was a professional mask shielding her frail and vulnerable clients from sharing in her suffering’. Interestingly, ‘in her insistence that ‘my problems are not yours’, Maria acknowledged that American ideologies of responsibilities and independence held her alone responsible for her circumstances – even though many of her struggles were directly connected to low wages, long hours, and unpredictable schedules that created the conditions in which she cared for others’ (emphasis mine). Thus, while caregivers sustain and uphold the independence, aspirations, and feelings of belonging of the elderly, their own aspirations are limited and, to some extent, their independence becomes contingent on their work. Care workers are enablers yet vulnerable, facilitating aspirations and belonging for the ones cared for. This one-sided quality to care work thus alters the possible negotiations of belonging or aspirations that can take form.
‘Care’ work and care ‘work’ both fundamentally generate inequality. Notably, feelings of entitlement to kin provided care as well as obligations of care founded on guilt and moral pressure contribute to the intergenerational inequality in care. That kin care is considered a duty leaves little room for negotiation in unequal care practices. For instance, Baldassar (2007) remarks that ‘the most common pattern of informal care provided by the family, made possible by the traditional practice of living in close proximity to kin, is daily visits form daughters or daughters in law. This type of informal care is generally considered a normal duty that falls, first and foremost, on adult children, so much so that the care of the elderly is only considered a problem for those who do not have available relatives’. Yet, in the face of new contemporary realities of migration, with children living abroad, duties of care still fall on adult children, principally daughters. Baldassar underlines that ‘migrant daughters, in particular, feel a responsibility to participate in ‘hands-on’ care by engaging in extended return visits’. Interestingly, even in cases where the daughter stays behind and the son goes abroad, tensions ensue insofar as the sons make ‘all kinds of suggestions about their parent’s health care and living arrangements despite not ‘being there’ to help enact these’; one exhausted sister complains about her migrant brother: ‘he puts all kinds of ideas in Dad’s head but he’s not the one who has to run around trying to organise a second opinion or trying to change Dad’s mind’. Thus, informal care here becomes unequally gendered.
The distinction between ‘care’ work and care ‘work’ is often unclear. Conceptualisations of care can overshadow the realities of care. Buch (2018) observes that ‘ideologies of caring labor being something other than ‘real work’ have long been formalised by legal and regulatory structures in the United States, legitimising and exacerbating intersecting forms of economic, racial, and gender inequality’. In fact, though generally discussed separately, the fate of domestic workers, childcare workers, and care workers attending to both disabled and older adults are connected insofar as ‘each of these groups undertakes labor that has long been considered women’s duty to perform, unpaid, on behalf of kin. These fields are shaped by ongoing legacies of gender and racial discriminations such that they are dominated by women of color and immigrant women’. Hence, as a result of this unclear boundary between ‘care’ work and care ‘work’, this ambivalence manifests itself in inadequate valuations of care. Consequently, while the daily care provided by care workers ‘makes possible all other economic activity’, in return these workers are ‘paid so little that they and their families live in perpetually unstable and precarious conditions’. Moreover, Buch (2018) states that ‘in a nation founded on a belief in political and personal independence, we struggle to accommodate the profound interdependencies that make life possible. Those who care for the most vulnerable among us become ever more vulnerable themselves. It is a system that consumes those who sustain it’ (emphasis mine). Both ‘care’ work and care ‘work’ are both innately generative yet both fundamentally undervalued, albeit differently.
What is more, care ‘work’ is importantly unequal in relation to its lack of reciprocity. Indeed, care work entails two subjectivities, yet one is subject to erasure. Buch remarks how, despite Maria spending most of her adult lives caring for people in every direction, that is children, husband, elderly clients, she feels that ‘nobody really cares’. She notes that rather than interpret Maria’s own care as insecure, this can be interpreted as a comment on the ‘way her life [is] shaped by flows of empathic attunement that only [runs] in one direction – from her, and care workers like her, to those they [serve]’. Strikingly, in Maria’s experience, those for whom she cares at work are more concerned with ‘the ways in which her emotional performances [affect] them than with her actual wellbeing’. As a result, she used her permanent smile to ‘camouflage exhaustion and absent-mindedness produced by the unrelenting strain of economic and social precariousness’. As such, Buch contends that the implicit association of care with sentiment and moral practice is flawed. Indeed, ‘imagined as inherently private, care is paradigmatically found in bodily intimacies between mothers and children, and thus evokes notions of domestic warmth, attachment, love, and sustenance’. Yet, these associations make it difficult to think of care as a ‘source of violence or suffering’ with the term often used in ways that ‘excise or romanticise the physical pain, exhaustion, and exploitation that many carers experience’.
Buch maintains that home care as well as other forms of paid care are ‘especially important forms of generative labor in that they are multiply generative – making possible the lives of older adults, workers, and their respective families’. Further, it makes possible the ‘broader workings of an economy [dependent] on inexpensive care to make available other workers for more highly valued and lucrative occupations’. However, American emphasis on and idealisation of independence overshadows and understates the value of care work by casting it to the side in spite of its (largely unacknowledged) generative qualities. Indeed, with elderly clients being intensely desirous of independence, so as to maintain forms of established belonging or sustain aspirations, the care worker must conceal the client’s dependence, leading to a form of erasure of the care worker in favour of the client. But ‘concealing older adults’ dependence means effacing the most complex and nuanced aspects of care workers’ jobs’, insofar as these practices ‘exacerbate perceptions of home care as unskilled labor, and conceal the home care workers’ vital contributions’. Of note here is that such concealments are ‘facilitated by workers’ social marginality; their contributions [being] simultaneously naturalised and hidden by their gender, their poverty, and their race’. It is worth stressing that although home care workers ‘sustain older adults’ personhood and enable their residential stability in later life, their jobs do not enable workers to similarly create stable lives for themselves’, amplified by the stratified reproduction that care work generates.
To conclude, while care work may enable negotiations of aspirations and belonging, they are also inherently limited by the forms they can take. What is more, belonging, although outlined in this essay as elective and potentially made and re-made, also has a darker side, with care workers ‘belonging’ to exploitative caring systems which are characteristically unequal.
Bibliography
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Buch, E. (2018) Inequalities of Aging: Paradoxes of Independence in American Home Care, New York: New York University Press.
Bruckermann, C. (2017). Caring claims and the relational self across time: grandmothers overcoming reproductive crises in rural China. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 23(2), 356-375.
Constable, N. (1999). ‘At Home but Not at Home: Filipina Narratives of Ambivalent Returns’ Cultural Anthropology, 14(2), 203-228.
Lamb, Sarah with Ji Chen, Claire Ogden, Tirtza Schramm, and Lin Xinbei. "On Vulnerability, Resilience, and Age: Older Americans Reflect on the Pandemic." "The Age of Covid-19" Series. Available: http://somatosphere.net/2020/vulnerability-resilience-age.html/
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Thelen, T., & Coe, C. (2019). ‘Political Belonging through Elderly Care: Temporalities, Representations and Mutuality’. Anthropological Theory, 19(2), 279–299.