Gendered ironies in home care: surveillance, gender struggles and infantilisation

Abstract

Women are normatively expected to provide nurturance to the men in their lives through emotional support, and to the children in their lives through active, involved and expert mothering – indeed, being a caregiver is a master status for adult women in modernity. While this may be the case for all women, mothers who are disabled can have more a complicated relationship to caregiving than others, because they are both receivers and providers of care in the home. Women with chronic disabilities are often recipients of home care services that are designed to provide them with ongoing personal care, housekeeping assistance and health or support services. Conversely, mothers with disabilities, like all mothers, are expected to be providers of services to their partners and children. In this article, I examine the contradictions and tensions embedded in disabled mothers' relations of care, with a particular focus on the ways that barriers embedded in public home care service delivery complicate disabled mothers' abilities to provide care. I find that home care policies operate in ways that assume that disabled women will not, perhaps even should not, fill gendered partnership or mothering roles. In turn, this can cause problems for these women in terms of providing care, of achieving adequate mothering and occasionally, of maintaining custody of their children.

Keywords:

• mothers
• disabilities
• policy
• personal services
• caregiving
• motherhood
• sexuality
• child custody
• infantilisation

Acknowledgements

The author thanks the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and the University of Lethbridge Research Fund for supporting this project, as well as research assistants Tiffany Boulton, Lynette Schick, Jill Veenendaal, Stefanie DuGuay, and Michelle Volkart for their contributions, and Leslie Roman for her stewardship of The Unruly Salon Series.