When the Hand Stops: Corporeal Reorganization, Masculinity, and Body Work in Dementia Caregiving

• In Event: Sociology of the Body and Embodiment Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 3: Bodies & Health

Abstract

In Italy, men represent 42 percent of family members providing care at least weekly but fewer than 11 percent of dedicated full-time caregivers. Something happens at the threshold where caregiving shifts from logistical coordination to sustained intimate body work, the washing, holding, and repositioning of another person's body, that produces systematic male withdrawal. Existing scholarship examines this threshold through role strain and emotional adjustment. What has not been asked is what happens at the level of the body when caregiving demands the very contact that masculine embodiment forecloses.

Drawing on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Emilia-Romagna, Italy, including semi-structured interviews with 10 men caring for family members with dementia and participant observation in caregiver support groups, we identify corporeal reorganization: the process through which individuals, scaffolded by practical support infrastructure, acquire bodily capacities that their prior socialization was organized to foreclose. The concept builds on Twigg's body work framework by bringing the laboring body itself into the analysis.

Three findings organize the paper. First, men described the initial encounter with intimate body work in a consistent bodily idiom: hands that would not move, proximity that felt impossible, a physical incapacity preceding any emotional response. Second, the pathway out of this structural contradiction ran through technicization: converting intimate contact into technical procedure with correct sequence, positioning, and application of force. Caregiver support groups succeeded because they transmitted technique rather than inviting emotional processing. Third, reorganization is distinct from habituation. Where habituation is passive, what we document is active: the body acquiring new capacities through deliberate, collectively guided practice.

The paper's primary contribution is specifying the mechanism through which men cross the threshold from incapacity to competence. That this acquisition proved dependent on infrastructure reveals a dimension of care inequality prior to who performs care: who possesses the conditions to learn.

Authors

• Elisa Castellaccio, The University of Bologna

• Cameron Gabriel Beckett, University of Chicago