Abstract
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.
The great revolution in our generation is the discovery that human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives.
William James
Our life is what our thoughts make it.
Marcus Aurelius
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Notes
- 1.
See also Taylor’s theory of positive illusions (Taylor 1989) and the vast, growing literature on the so-called “positive psychology”.
- 2.
“If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences”. The theorem was originally formulated by William Thomas and Dorothy Swaine Thomas in their book The Child in America: Behaviour Problems and Programs, Thomas and Thomas (1928): 572.
- 3.
See Collins’ Interaction Ritual Chains model (2004).
- 4.
Whilst the book’s main aim is to develop inclusive, empirically grounded and innovative ideas of care, inequality and entitlements overcoming current limitations, unresolved contradictions and gaps, intersectionality sits on the backstage of this book and represents one of its general aspirations and recommendations for further developments. I am entirely convinced that any study of care that truly aimed to fill those gaps will need to carefully address these multiple systems and experiences of exclusion and inequality. However, for the reasons I exposed in the first two chapters, in this book I purposely focus on a specific segment of care and carers. By including too many sociological variables, I would have nullified the strength connected to the empirical grounding of theory on such a specific part/segment of the whole phenomenon (see also Scheff 1997).
- 5.
See: Friedan (1983/[1963]).
- 6.
Cf. Stone, D. “Why We Need A Care Movement” in The Nation, March 13, 2000.
- 7.
A simple internet search will provide a clear idea of this growing phenomenon.
- 8.
There are also different-sex couples who cannot become parents by chance for different reasons, and their additional challenges have been recently documented, among others, in the work by Nordqvist and Smart (2014). However, whilst for different-sex couples this occurrence represents an exception, for same-sex couples it is an unescapable rule.
- 9.
According to several studies, gay people’s non-conformity to traditional gender norms and family patterns penalise gay/bisexual men’s income and tend to have ambivalent effects on gay/bisexual women. Gay and bisexual male workers can experience up to 32 per cent income disadvantage relative to heterosexual peers with the same experience, education, occupation, marital status and region of residence. The evidence for lesbian and bisexual women is more variable. However, several studies indicate that the earnings for lesbian women can be between 20 and 30 per cent higher than for heterosexual women, because lesbian employees would be exempt from marriage-based gender discrimination (Goldin 1990). See also Black et al. (2003), Badgett (1995) and Blanford (2003).
- 10.
Scholars addressing the impact of identity politics widely agree that participation in the grassroots feminist, civil rights, student, anti-war and so on movements has usually stamped a lasting imprint on the occupations, incomes and personal lives of activists as an effect of ideology and more specifically of the fact that these activists made of their life a political project and subordinated career to politics. Taylor and Raeburn (1995) argue that when gay and lesbian activism is involved, the backlash effects of identity politics can be even more direct: less mediated by the activists’ ideology and more directly forthcoming from the overt repression of the dominants groups.
- 11.
My ethnographic work on same-sex parenthood included taking part in recreational and cultural activities at one of the largest LGBT community centres in Philadelphia and the analysis of the messages that parents exchanged on the online common forums of LGBT parents associations (in Europe and the United States). The range of messages was vast and multiform; sometimes they were dealing with health, medical or legal issues related to the specificity of same-sex parenthood, some others with issues related to common matters these parents faced in their everyday lives. The messages could be related to school matters, health problems, behavioural bewilderments, emotional troubles, legal advice, birth or baby shower announcements, informal meetings and many other social and private occurrences or requests of help and/or information. Debates on surrogacy were quite often part of these conversations.
- 12.
A self-help discussion group of gay men (most of them openly gay and some of them still in the closet) who are still in a heterosexual marriage.
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Pratesi, A. (2018). Emotional Stratification, Social Inclusion and Citizenship. In: Doing Care, Doing Citizenship . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63109-7_8
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