The politics of gender in the care crisis: a broken social contract in the Nordics?

Through a focus on gender and the politics of gender equality in the Nordic welfare regime, this paper explores the emerging care crisis for formal and informal care assemblages and its implications for social justice and the current social contract. Our aim is to investigate if a new social, contractual order is emerging in the shadows of the care crisis (Hansen, Dahl and Horn, 2022; Fraser, 1989; 2015; Walby, 1990). A social contract is a negotiated, institutionalized ideal about the good life in a just society, which is the result of previous, political struggles. A gender and intersectionality perspective (Crenshaw, 1989; Fraser, 2007), is applied where gender is understood as a cultural, social and political structure which interlocks with other principles of difference and inequalities in the shaping of positionalities, roles, power and division of labor in the emerging care crisis. Theoretically, we draw on care crisis literature (Dowling, 2022; Fraser, 2017, 2022; Hansen, Dahl, and Horn, 2022; Lynch 2022), gender contract theory (Hirdman, 1989; Selberg, 2022; Sihto and Zechner, 2024), depletion theory (Rai, 2024) and base our analysis on existing, empirical research. The Nordic welfare states are based on a social contract between the state and citizens characterized by a gender contract, referring to the specific social division of labor, a dual-earner-dual carer model with the state as additional and professional caregiver, and a social order valuing universalism (Fraser, 2015; Hirdman, 1998; Sihto and Zechner, 2024). This contract also constitutes a political care contract, where gendered, racial, and class-based care work is produced in specific care landscapes relegating care to a misrecognized infrastructure of society (Fraser, 2018; Lazar, 2023; Biesecker & Winterfeld, 2018). Feminist theory has shown increasing interest in examining how capitalism and neoliberal governance change relations between men and women and between different groups of women (Fraser, 2015, p. 10; Lynch, 2022). We contribute to this research and pose the following research questions: In which ways, does the emerging care crisis entail a new social contractual order, through which political struggles is it articulated, and does it carry potentials for new ways to recognize care work?