Rethinking the value of unpaid care work: lessons from participatory visual research in central Tanzania

Abstract

The contemporary international development agenda addresses several important gender issues, including the contribution of unpaid care work (UCW) to human well-being. The inclusion of UCW into the mainstream policy debate is undoubtedly a major milestone in the history of feminist scholarship and activism. However, we argue that the universalistic and capitalocentric assumptions laden in the dominant policy discourse belie the diversity of the lived experiences and subjective meanings of UCW often performed by women and girls in different cultural and geographical contexts, particularly in the predominantly agrarian global South. We draw on participatory and visual ethnographic fieldwork to show that rural women in Tanzania perceive UCW as an experience that entails not only physical toil and drudgery, but also positive emotions of joy, satisfaction, and fulfilment, which are integral to affirming their self-perceived identities and roles as farmers and mothers in their communities. These material, affective, and symbolic dimensions of UCW emerge from agrarian women’s situated knowledges and experiences of ensuring household social reproduction on and with the land, as well as the gender relations and seasonal dynamics that shape the organization of work tasks in agrarian landscapes. To achieve transnational gender justice, we suggest that a more fine-tuned and nuanced approach to understanding the variability and complexity of care work as practiced and perceived by heterogeneous groups of women (and men) in particular places and times is needed.

Keywords:

• Photovoice
• social reproduction
• sustainable development goals
• Tanzania
• unpaid care work

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Dr Ambonesigwe Mbwaga for facilitating our access to the District Agriculture and Livestock Development Office, and Heather Larkin, Benard Lema, Sophia Mtemele, Salum, and Senkoro for their research assistance. We are also grateful to the editors and three anonymous reviewers of Gender, Place, and Culture for their insightful comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Youjin Brigitte Chung is an assistant professor in the Graduate School of Geography at Clark University. Her research is broadly concerned with the relationship between development, gender and intersectionality, and agrarian and ecological change in Sub-Saharan Africa. Her current research focuses on the intersectional politics of a stalled large-scale land deal in coastal Tanzania.

Sera Lewise Young is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at Northwestern University. Her research focuses on reducing maternal and child undernutrition in areas with low-resource settings, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. She draws on her training in medical anthropology, international nutrition, and HIV infection to take a biocultural approach to understanding how mothers cope to preserve their health and that of their families. http://serayoung.org/

Rachel Bezner Kerr is an associate professor in the Department of Development Sociology at Cornell University. Her research interests focus on farmer-led agroecology, critical examinations of neoliberal approaches to agriculture, and the historical, political, economic and gender dynamics that shape food security in sub-Saharan Africa.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the McKnight Foundation's Collaborative Crop Research Project [grant number 12-395]. SLY was supported by the National Institute of Mental Health [grant number K01 MH098902]. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the McKnight Foundation, National Institute of Mental Health, or the National Institutes of Health.