SDG 5 aims to achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls. Browse books and journal articles relating to this SDG below and find out more on the UN Sustainable Development Goals website.
Goal 5: Gender Equality
This chapter demonstrates how ailment mobilises concrete, embodied and emotional responses in immediate social encounters and care work, along with discussing the gendered, racialised and classed divisions of care labour that extend to a global scale. The relatedness and variance inherent in ailment – and care as a key response to it – mean that there is a large degree of unpredictability in the chain reactions that ailment creates. Moreover, as responses to ailment may include neglect, violence and humiliation, a variety of ethical and political identities and structures can ensue. Societal structures and the organisation of care work specifically affect and ail those who have less power, influence and money: typically, working-class women, racialised minorities and international migrants. The varying responses to ailment in the world may be imagined as an emergent and constantly changing network of relatedness and affects that organise societies. Within these local and global networks, those caring for others are also affected by their care relationships and may suffer various kinds of distress, which are discussed in terms of caregiver ailment. Political and institutional actors who ignore the relationality of care and often disregard the needs of the caregiver play a major role in engendering and perpetuating caregiver ailment.
This chapter introduces the concept of ailment, which is about generalised care needs, including the need for self-care. Ailment does not indicate an immediate dependency on others. Rather, it is a human condition and force that mobilises emotions, actions and relations. Responses to ailment extend from concrete encounters between human beings in the immediate environment to political and institutional responses in societies across the world. The political relatedness that ailment enacts in the world and the different kinds of social orders that emerge through different personal and collective responses to the needs of ailing subjects are discussed.
Deficiencies in old age care are some of the most pressing human rights concerns in mature welfare states.
This book radically challenges the ethics of viewing care as a tradeable commodity and introduces a novel framework for understanding and analysing social care through the concept of ailment. Providing examples from the British and Finnish welfare states, it demonstrates how ailment shapes societies from the micro to the macro level. Addressing the marketisation and financialisation of care, the authors bring to light increasing inequalities in care.
This book argues that ailment is part of human life and society, and therefore the politics of care should begin with a politics of ailment.
This chapter concludes the book by focusing on today’s circumstances, with ailing bodies having become sources of profit making and the ailments of their caregivers largely unacknowledged or misrecognised. It is time to change how humans are perceived. The notion of homo aegrotus – the ailing human – recognises ailment as a permanent and all-encompassing feature of societies. It generates a variety of responses and creates webs of connections between individuals, families, communities, regions and countries. When approaching the field of care with the concept of ailment, a new political regime becomes imaginable. The new political regime derives from ailment in its two senses: the existential state of human ailing, and the affective or responsive state of being bothered by it. The ailing earth is also implicated here, emphasising human interdependency with biodiversity and ecosystems and thus opening possibilities for research into and the development of sustainable, caring policies. From this perspective, large portions of modern societies appear to be built around ailment.
This chapter examines how the marketisation and financialisation of care are transforming and challenging the social and care policies developed during the heyday of the welfare state. Marketisation and financialisation significantly affect these politics of ailment by introducing the mechanisms of profit making, competition and choice as solutions to human ailment and by replacing the ailing subject with a market actor as the target of social policies. Nevertheless, ailment continues to be a mobilising force that simultaneously generates both social and care relations and market and financial activities. The problem with these trends and the neoliberal vision on which they rely is that the logic of the market is different from – and largely incompatible with – responses to ailment that are based on a logic of care. While businesses perceive ailment as producing unlimited market opportunities, they fail as to the more profound recognition of ailment as an existential human condition warranting ethically sound responses such as affordable care.
This chapter’s sections – ‘Sanctioning the ailing’, ‘Protecting the ailing workforce’, ‘Acknowledging ailment’ and ‘Failing the ailing’ – trace how ailment as a social force has historically manifested itself in social and care policies in western societies. In pre-modern Europe, workhouses and other disciplinary institutions were used to control and sanction ailing individuals. Later, social policies began to recognise the need to protect the ailing workforce to secure the demands of an industrialising world. After the Second World War, social and care policies began addressing ailment throughout the life course, and collective and public responses to the needs of ailing individuals expanded to several areas of life as part of the modern welfare state. The transformation of the welfare state and the austerity politics of recent decades have undermined the acknowledgement of ailment in social and care policies. Through this exploration, it is demonstrated how ailment creates various relations and responses and how these responses combine elements of care, control and profit making to different degrees, depending on the historical, political and social context.
This chapter moves away from considering individual trajectories of activists, and focuses on the substantive issues that are made visible during processes of austerity activism. In so doing the focus here also moves away from ‘horizontal’ forms of local activism that involve community connection and support, to more conventional ‘resistance’ or ‘vertical’ practices that directly address those in power, within repertoires of anti-austerity activism (Craddock, 2020). Nonetheless, in line with my sense of interwoven processes of ‘resilience, resistance and re-working’ (MacLeavy et al, 2021), I do not see these forms of activism as forming opposing categories, but rather as inter-related articulations of citizenship and political subjectivity (Martin et al, 2007).
In particular, as discussed in Chapter 1, I am interested in what may be made visible during processes of anti-austerity activism, in how these might be seen as politically productive interventions that can bring matters of care into politics in new ways, even when planned-for cuts go ahead. This is significant given the taken-for-granted nature of care, the ways in which it is entangled with everyday lives and experiences (Hall, 2019a). As already discussed, changes affecting care wrought by austerity, from reduced household budgets to benefit changes and service reductions, do not necessarily result in visible ‘crises’, but more often are coped with, managed and absorbed into everyday lives (Jupp et al, 2019).
Furthermore, the ways in which welfare services and forms of support are reduced under austerity tends to be a process rather than a dramatic event, which can also function to render changes invisible over time (Kiely, 2021).
This chapter considers a politics of care, firstly via a discussion of care ethics and conceptualisations of care in broad terms, before moving on to consider care and transformations of the welfare state and economy, including in relation to gender roles and processes of austerity. Care is an everyday and ongoing set of practices and relationship. In this book, the forms of care at stake include caring for children (especially as a mother), care for neighbours, care for older people and those with disabilities, ‘young carers’ supporting their parents, forms of community care, especially among migrant families newly arrived in the UK, and notions of ‘self-care’ and nurturing. All these forms of care involve vulnerabilities, needs and dependencies. However these forms and practices of care are not individual relational matters but in themselves caught up in wider structures and institutions that may be caring or uncaring. Forms of care may be sustained in the most hostile and uncaring environments. As such, a politics of care, as Joan Tronto (2015: 4) writes, must ‘start in the middle of things. Care practices don’t suddenly begin, they are already ongoing’. Within this book, the research projects discussed did not initially have a focus on care, rather I came to see that care practices and politics were crucial both for the actions of local activists, and the wider economic and political structures that framed these actions.
How, then, to approach this diffuse and everyday terrain? Theorising care has been a key concern for feminist scholars over decades.
What kinds of care are being offered or withdrawn by the welfare state? What does this mean for the caring practices and interventions of local activists?
Shedding new light on austerity and neoliberal welfare reform in the UK, this vital book considers local action and activism within contexts of crisis, including the COVID-19 pandemic.
Presenting compelling case studies of local action, from protesting cuts to children’s services to local food provisioning and support for migrant women, this book makes visible often unseen practices of activism. It shows how the creativity and persistence of such local practices can be seen as enacting wider visions of how care should be provided by society.
This chapter continues the themes of the previous chapter, but with a focus on how the issues discussed, of gendered dynamics of care in society, social welfare and conditions of austerity, create a context for forms of political subjectivity and action, or citizenship. This begins with a focus on the specific context of the UK state, and its relationship to the scale of community and local action. The second section focuses on more conceptual issues around citizenship and the ‘politics of everyday life’, including notions of vulnerability, the lifecourse and storytelling as forming aspects of political action, that can enable us to trace this emergent politics.
‘Community’ is obviously a contested term (Joseph, 2002), suggesting both a local scale and also a social entity denoting belonging and inclusion or exclusion. Communities may be based on locations or on identities or both. For the purposes of this book, community represents a space for action, a space both material, but also emotional, relational and political. As will be further explored, the spaces of community potentially offer spaces for political action and citizenship to those who are unable to participate in more formal and wider scales of politics (Staeheli, 2008). There are debates around the definitions of ‘activism’ at such a scale (Martin et al, 2007), an issue discussed further in the next section of this chapter. For the purposes of this book, I generally use the terms ‘local action’ or ‘activism’ as opposed to ‘community action’, as I feel these terms enable links to wider debates around politics and citizenship that the term ‘community’ can render problematic, as will be explained.
