Framing Care: Gender, Labour and Governmentalities

Care is performed at the intersections of various social differentiations in which its gendering appears tenacious. This article delineates four thematic clusters that variously focus on the work, relations, practices and politics of care, and elaborates on some organising concepts, studies and arguments. These framings overlap and question each other: the sexual division of labour, mothering, the economic and social value of women’s domestic work and the work/care regime; gendered critiques of welfare regimes and a care regime; the care economy, a sharpening care crisis and care deficit with neo-liberal policies and demands for a work–life balance; and the rationalities, biopolitics and governmentalities of the social organisation and morality of care. Discussions diverge and converge in debates on the making of gender relations in work and political economy. Taking the labour of care seriously in the struggle against women’s subordination and gender inequalities appears inescapable.

Debating Gender Inequalities: Culture, Economics and Choice

This paper looks at a little-known part of Leela Dube’s writings through a debate between her and the economic historian, Dharma Kumar, on sex-selective abortion. Drawing on comparative and cross-cultural work on gender and kinship, Dube questioned the application of demandsupply dynamics to social relations and was prescient of later developments in the juvenile sex ratio. The paper argues that Dube and the debate draws attention to four themes that remain relevant to an understanding of sex ratios and gender relations. These are the significance and construction of the social, the depth, range and contours of diversity, understandings of preference, choice and agency, and state action and responsibility.

Stratified familialism: the care regime in India through the lens of childcare

This article explores the political and social economy of care in India through a focus on childcare practices, from the viewpoint of the care giver — a perspective frequently ignored or touched on only generally in earlier discussions on development or social policy. It is argued that the care regime is an ad hoc summation of informal, stratified practices. It is shaped by the institutional context, in particular the economic and social inequalities of work and livelihoods, as well as trends and absences in state economic and social policy. Central to the dynamics of care practices in India is the ideology of gendered familialism in public discourse and policy, which reiterates care as a familial and female responsibility and works to devalue and diminish the dimensions of care. By delineating the range of institutions through which everyday childcare practices are organized, this contribution draws out the differentiations and actualities of stratified familialism and care. At one end of the spectrum are those who have the possibility to retain familial carers at home and supplement them with paid and other institutional carers; at the other are those who are neither able to retain family members at home nor fill the care gap through formal institutions.