Family as the institutional site of care

Care is not only about the work it entails, just as family as an institution is not only about the households that family members inhabit. Care is also a relationship of intimacy and connection among individuals who may or may not be counted as such. As marriage rights have expanded legally and the state benefits of being recognized as being a family remain substantial, how might feminists rethink what family is as an institution? The responsibilities of caring – material support, physical labor and emotional connection – are often defined politically but as the boundaries of family as an institution change, the capacities of actual familial ties to carry relationships across space and time are increasingly challenged. One response to these challenges is to commodify the labor and the intimacy of caring. The inequalities that are built into commodified carework and commodified intimacy remain highly gendered and racialized, but are imagined as being more “public” than those inequalities built upon less commodified forms. But the fictitious division between public and private obscures the public dimensions of caring that are embedded in and expressed through the language of family. Redrawing the borders of what counts as family through same-sex marriage and transnational adoption helps to make the public dimensions of non-commodified caring more visible than when these were hidden behind ascribed gendered personalities and supposedly “private” preferences. If families can’t rely on “women” to make public choices to prefer childcare to making a killing in the stock market, what are the institutional supports that will still value and reward childcare? Or elder care? Or “kin-keeping” or any of the other forms of intimacy-supporting relationships? Family – more flexibly constructed -- is needed to be actually valued to sustain democracy, value noncommodified “natural” resources, and resolve conflicts non-violently.