‘Plenty of Disabled People Care’: Revealing Reciprocity and Interdependence in Disabled People’s Everyday Caregiving Practices

Abstract

Care has historically been framed as something done to disabled people. Disability rights scholars have critiqued the loss of control and dependency associated with care; meanwhile, feminist care ethics has emphasised a relational conception of humans as interdependent care givers and receivers. Engaging these two perspectives, this paper reveals the intricacies of disabled people’s reciprocal care relations and caregiving practices through qualitative research with disabled people in Ireland. The paper describes the breadth of participants’ everyday caregiving – within their families, for friends, neighbours, members of their disability community, for the planet, as well as through their own paid roles within Disabled Persons’ Organisations. Participants also detail their emotional labour to sustain personal assistants and care workers engaged in their paid care. Disabled people’s experiences demonstrate the relationality of caring, recast the boundaries between formal and informal care as porous and shifting, and unsettle notions of a carer/cared-for binary.