“We can’t allow ourselves to fall ill”: Health and (self-)discipline in female family caregivers from a gender perspective

Abstract

Research has shown significant differences and inequalities in the health of women and men who care for older dependent family members, with women having poorer health and suffering more from overload. Women internalize a cultural model of caregiving involving social norms whereby caring becomes a central dimension of gender-female identity, cutting across other aspects of life. This study takes a biopsychosocial approach, understanding gender as a determinant of health, in order to investigate the processes of subjectivation (and “technologies of the self”) that mediate between the social organization of care and the health of women. A reflexive thematic analysis was undertaken in this qualitative study, following in-depth interviews with nineteen women caring for family members. The results show that women’s biopsychosocial health is affected by the subjective positions they adopt in order to submit to or resist gender-based social norms about caring in three dimensions: their relationship to their own health problems, their experience of vulnerability, and the place of love and morality in relation to being a caregiver. Those (inter)subjective processes reflect the neoliberal update of the gendered social organization of care and the way its social discourses, such as free choice and unstinting performance, relate to female caregivers’ biopsychosocial health. It is necessary to deconstruct this traditional model and the self-regulated processes as recast by the neoliberal order for the sake of women’s health, to relieve them of this burden. It is essential to commit to sociopolitical articulations aimed at shared responsibility in care.