Alessandro Pratesi

The Productivity of Care: Contextualizing Care in Situated Interaction and Shedding Light on its Latent Purposes

Care work may be connected with emotional and psychological exhaustion but also gratification, reward, and self-empowerment. Caregivers experience both positive and negative emotional states in caring situations, and further studies on the rewarding and energizing aspects of care may help us to broaden our understanding of how we can reduce the degree of burden while increasing the sense of satisfaction. This article shows how the focus on emotion is a necessary step to show the ambivalences and the grey areas connected with the concept of care as well as to challenge the not fully explored assumption that care is often associated with burden and stress and viewed as a result of circumstances. It reports the findings of a micro-situated study of daily care activities among 80 caregivers. Care is seen as a strategic site to grasp deeper insights into the interactional mechanisms through which the emotional dynamics revolving around care produce unanticipated outcomes in terms of symbolic and practical productivity.

A Respectable Scandal: Same-Sex Parenthood, Emotional Dynamics, and Social Change

Most of the scholarship and current literature on parental care focuses on its gendered costs and unbalances. Less attention is paid to the consequences of being excluded from this specific type of care—what we could call the right to parent. Gay and lesbian parents claiming their right to parent represents a momentous historical change: the increasing visibility of these parents is one of the most important components of such change. Emotional dynamics are key to this social change. Emotions constitute the link between doing parenting at the micro level of interactions and doing, or undoing, difference at the macro level of social structures; similarly, different ways to do parenting and to do gender must be taken into account if we want to grasp a truly comprehensive picture of the phenomenon of parenthood. This article draws on a wider study on different kinds of care and caregivers, whose aim is to offer a more inclusive interpretation and a more reliable discourse on family care and parenthood. Parenthood is still societally significant, but different ways to attain parenthood (biologically, through adoption, surrogacy, etc.) or to be a parent (single or in a couple, gay or heterosexual, married or unmarried, etc.) seem to mark a more important difference. While such difference can translate into inequality, this is now being challenged by these increasingly more visible parents. Our findings show that the divide between the categories of “parents” and “non-parents” dissolves the divide between the categories of “gay/lesbian” and “non-gay/lesbian.” Gay and lesbian parents produce social change by taking the sexuality out of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered (GLBT) politics in the mainstream arena. Same-sex parenthood may still be perceived by many as a “scandal,” but more and more as a respectable one.

Feeling the Experience of Care: Emotional Typologies

This chapter provides accounts of the multiple ways in which people choose care or experience it as a gift, the specific form of rationality characterising care practices, and the felt and lived experience of care, accounts which are summarised in a preliminary emotional and existential typology of the caregivers I interviewed. Through their care practices, people experience an entire emotional spectrum outlining and shaping their daily care practices and choices but also their broader, long-term attitudes towards life and the ongoing process of definition of their identities.

Macro-Structural Relevance of Emotions

This chapter illustrates Collins’ theory of Interaction Ritual Chains (Interaction Ritual Chains. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004) describing social structures in terms of processes which are interactionally and situationally reproduced through emotional dynamics. This chapter also clarifies how this theoretical approach challenges our conventional views of care-related inequality and helps us shedding light on less visible and less explored implications of care.

The Dark Sides of Care

This chapter explores the “dark sides of care”; more specifically, it illustrates and discusses the conditions under which care becomes a potential context of unsuccessful and emotionally draining forms of interaction rituals. It also shows, however, how even in the darkest regions of the phenomenology of care there is room for unanticipated glimpses of light which further emphasise the strategic role of care as a context where emotion-based, interactional forms of social inclusion are constantly produced.

Emotional Stratification, Social Inclusion and Citizenship

This chapter explores the possibilities for a new conceptual framework to study care, its multiple implications in terms of status, entitlement and social inequality and its real (rather than reified) intersections with gender and sexualities. The inequality connected to parental care is not merely related to people’s gender, marital status or sexual orientation. It is the difference between those who do have childcare responsibilities and those who do not have such responsibilities that determines the unequal distribution of status, emotional capital and entitlement to rights, therefore, unequal forms of citizenship. In this sense, the still relatively invisible experiences of same-sex families possess important implications in terms of social inclusion, citizenship and social change.

Future Directions and Possible Applications

This chapter discusses the extent to which same-sex parents represent a possible theoretical model of inclusive and anti-assimilationist citizenship precisely because of the still ambivalent and politically undetermined nature of their civic entitlements. This chapter examines how this micro-situated and emotion-based model of social inclusion can be applied to other marginalised social groups or liminal communities, creating the foundations for more caring, more just and more inclusive societies.

The End of Inequality as We Know It

This chapter challenges the misleading dualism of gender and highlights the implicit heterosexism of current literature on informal care, providing an alternative approach to gender which focuses on multiple dimensions of difference. Closely related to this alternative approach is the necessity to underscore the fundamental importance of emotions in creating a link between agency and structure, that is, between individual action and interaction, on the one hand, and the emergence, maintenance and transformation of social structure, on the other.

Towards a Reconsideration of Current Theoretical Perspectives on Care

The second chapter of the book reviews and discusses current and past theoretical perspectives on care and clarifies how emotions can help us to unpack and highlight its less visible rationales. This chapter also describes the sample of caregivers on which the empirical research was based.

Grounding Citizenship to an Ethic of Care: Conclusions and Implications

The final chapter of the book summarises the main research objectives and findings. Being a parent still makes a significant difference in our societies, but different ways to attain parenthood or to be a parent make an even more important difference: a difference that translates into inequality, but that can be challenged by reconsidering the role and the multiple implications of care and emotions in our life. By doing care we also do citizenship, social inclusion and social change: through emotions.