Theoretical Framings: Feminist Standpoints, Gendered Political Economy and New Approaches to Care Ethics

Abstract

This chapter presents the main theoretical endeavour of this book. While I began from the premise of institutional ethnography and its underpinning standpoint theory, the empirical findings of this research led me to reach out for the literature on the ethics of care with the view of engaging to the fullest with the collected data. If the theoretical frame of the political economy of care proved vital to understanding the intersections of various regimes and the structures of relations, experiences and contestations so produced, explaining these experiences and struggles echoed too strongly with the ethics of care for this conversation to be ignored. This chapter thus recounts the theoretical journey of my research, from initial theoretical assumptions to the conversations in which the book intervenes on the basis of my research’s findings.