Gender, Care and Sensibility in Family and Kin Relationships

Abstract

This chapter explores concepts of care and responsibility for others in the context of family and kin relationships. There has been a great deal of research activity and scholarship on these issues, particularly since the 1970s, and much of it centres on a distinction between the ideas of caring about, involving feelings and emotions of a non-active nature, and caring for, involving care or servicing labour which is conceptualised in a more active fashion. Whilst the distinction between caring about and caring for has been a useful one, I am going to suggest ways of moving beyond it. I shall argue that there is a way of caring in family and kin relationships which takes up a great deal of the time and energy of those who do it (usually but not exclusively women), and which does not sit comfortably within either of these formulations. I approach this task by focusing on aspects of care which have conventionally been defined as caring about, especially those connected with thinking, feeling, and emotion, because I think it is these which have been under-theorised in recent scholarship. I shall begin by drawing on various intellectual debates which have addressed these issues to some extent, and then go on to apply and develop some of the key ideas in relation to my own work on family and kin relationships.