Building on the earlier analyses of coupling and caring, this chapter therefore addresses four main questions: 1. How does shared participation in households affect people’s management of economic activity, of intimacy, and of their intersection? 2. What sorts of rights and obligations does household mem­bership entail, and how do those rights and obligations im­pinge on […]

>On February 28, 2004, the San Diego Union-Tribune published a father’s anguished query: Question: I find myself between a rock and a hard place. When I was divorced 14 years ago, my son was 3. I remarried and have three daughters with my second wife. I have always paid my child support in advance and […]

Caring relations involve sustained and/or intense personal attention that enhances the welfare of its recipient. Care becomes intimate care to the extent that at least one party to the relationship acquires information not widely available to third parties, and whose dissemi­nation could somehow hurt the information-giver. Intimate care in­volves strenuous relational work: establishing, matching, repairing, […]

The Faulks case involves contestation over professional medical care, much of which took place outside the patient’s home. It also involves competition between the claims of a foster son and those of the doctor that provided the care. What happens then when legal adversaries are members of the same family and when care occurs mainly […]

When confronted with disputes concerning the intersection of car-ing work and commercial transactions, American courts regularly adopt the three-part procedure we have seen operating in the court­room struggle between Gabina Lopez and the Rodriguez family. First, they locate the contested relationship within a larger grid of possible relationships. Second, within that grid they mark the […]

Sometimes, however, the provision of care—or its failure—becomes a matter of legal contention. When vital services, strong personal ties, rights, obligations, and financial stakes coincide, intense dis­putes concerning who owes what to whom often break out. Such disputes can easily go to court. If personal care forms the pivot of the questioned relationship, legal conflicts […]

Patients rapidly detect the difference in the caring relations that connect them to nurses and to physicians. Nurses serving in Ameri­can health care no longer usually wear the starched white uniforms, caps, and badges that once distinguished them. But they typically introduce themselves by their first (not their last) names and wear inconspicuously serviceable clothing. […]

Surprisingly, for all the differences between themselves and other types of care providers, hospital nurses reveal many of the same tensions in their caring work. Nurses differ from the majority of care workers in belonging to a profession: with government back­ing, nurses exercise at least a modicum of collective control over recruitment, training, licensing, rights, […]

When it comes to care outside of households, you might expect it to be steely, brisk, and efficient, thus a contradiction in terms. After all, care in this setting becomes formalized and commercialized. Providers themselves are often low-income workers who depend on caregiving wages for their own survival. These features call up im­ages of baby […]

In the commercialized United States of the early twenty-first cen­tury, then, household members still remain the principal providers of care to other household members. No doubt that household con­centration of caring services reinforces the supposition of a sharp division between the diffuse, sentimental, and noncommercial world of the family and the specialized, impersonal, and commercialized […]