Rethinking the Care Crisis: Social Reproduction, Gendered Households, and Global Care Regimes

• In Event: Family Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 3: Caregiving and Support Exchanges Across the Life Course

Abstract

Across the Global North, families are described as facing a growing crisis in the domestic sphere, marked by increasing difficulty in meeting household members’ needs for care and domestic chores. Building from Arat-Koc’s analysis of the “crisis of domestic sphere,” this paper asks how contemporary care deficits are produced and managed, and what their organization reveals about the political economy of social reproduction. I reconceptualize the care crisis not as a private time deficit or a simple service shortage, but as a crisis of social reproduction that emerges from the interaction of gendered motherhood ideals, welfare state arrangements, and neoliberal market restructuring.

The paper identifies three interrelated factors that aggravate the crisis. First, the construction of the duties of motherhood vis-à-vis childbearing institutionalizes care as women’s primary responsibility and becomes embedded in childcare and parental leave regimes that presume maternal caregiving. Second, even where women’s employment expands and policy contexts shift, the gendered organization of household work in relation to paid labor reproduces unequal accountability for care within families, sustaining second-shift dynamics and intensifying women’s mental and relational labor. Third, the conflation of labor with love and the increasing blurring of the private and public obscure unpaid intimate labor while shifting care burdens into households under welfare retrenchment.

I then ask how such care deficits are resolved and theorize the international transfer of reproductive labor as a structural outcome of this configuration. Drawing on scholarship on racialized care labor and global householding, I show how care deficits in liberal states are managed through stratified labor markets and migration regimes that redistribute reproductive labor across classed, racialized, and citizenship-based hierarchies. By linking household-level gender dynamics to welfare retrenchment and transnational care circuits, the paper demonstrates how families both navigate and reproduce inequality under the ongoing global care crisis.

Author

• Shabnoor Nabi, University of Toronto