Lesbians giving and receiving care

Abstract

Abstract — In western social welfare jurisdictions, responsibility for the care of people who are disabled or frail is typically pressed out of the public domain to the private domain of families and, within them, to women. Feminist critiques of this social division and privatizing of care have seldom addressed the possibilities of care giving and receiving in nonfamilial contexts. A study of lesbians caring for and being cared for by other lesbians in the context of partnerships, friendships, and community networks explores these more spacious and relatively unremarked possibilities. Conceptually, a focus on lesbian experience provides a fruitful point of entry for thinking about alternative ways of building supportive social ties, thus contributing to the wider feminist vision of a public culture of care in which the legitimacy of needs for assistance and the value of care are regarded as important matters for collective concern and response.