Boundaried Caring and Gendered Emotion Management in Hospice Work

Abstract

Caring work, which is premised on caring for and caring about recipients, involves a great deal of emotion management. Feeling rules shape expectations about emotion management and are informally shared through workers’ narratives about quality work. Using qualitative data from hospice workers in the southwestern US, I find that narratives of quality within hospice include emotion‐management skills such as listening, truly caring, keeping calm and maintaining boundaries. Through an analysis of how workers discuss and map skills onto individual women and men co‐workers, this article highlights two gendered patterns. First, even when women and men are thought to share high‐quality skills, the ways these skills are described reinforce naturalistic understandings of gender. Second, men are seen to hold a broad range of emotion‐management skills, but women are not described as holding the most important emotion‐management skill: keeping boundaries. Understanding this differential application of emotion‐management skills helps us to understand how gender and gender inequality are reproduced within caring work.

‘Please tell me when you are in pain’: A heartbreaking story of care, grief and female–canine companionship

“…First, through the story of Kerttu, we described the sensory-based and embodied ways, and fine-grained details, of everyday behaviours through which caring and grieving companionship within a dog-human relation was materialized. This insight complements the existing literature on gendered body work (Cohen & Wolkowitz, 2018;Gimlin, 2007;Twigg et al, 2011;Wolkowitz, 2002Wolkowitz, , 2006 see also Graham, 1983;Mik-Meyer et al, 2018) and the gendered aspects of care (e.g., Cain, 2017;Cohen & Wolkowitz, 2018;Gimlin, 2007;Lyon, 2010) by illustrating how palliative care and grief as a complex conceptual pair affect our relations with our companion animals.…”

“…3 | A STORY OF FEMALE-CANINE COMPANIONSHIP: PADDING BETWEEN GRIEF AND THE PALLIATIVE CARE OF THE ANIMAL 3.1 | From one precious companionship to another 'Dogs occupy the niche between our fantasies about intimacy and our more practical, realistic needs in relation to others, our needs for boundary and autonomy and distance', suggests Knapp (1998, p. 210). To continue with her idea, the attempt of building boundaries for caring between the pet and the keeper, and the tension between truly caring and maintaining boundaries (Cain, 2017) and thus detaching emotionally from the animal (Hamilton & McCabe, 2016), is visible in the following autoethnographic note: As the autoethnographic note above exemplifies, the human does not necessarily make a conscious decision or an active choice to care for the dog until the very end. As Schuurman and Franklin (2018) state, 'the situation can be arrived at unintentionally' (p. 110).…”

“…‘Dogs occupy the niche between our fantasies about intimacy and our more practical, realistic needs in relation to others, our needs for boundary and autonomy and distance’, suggests Knapp (, p. 210). To continue with her idea, the attempt of building boundaries for caring between the pet and the keeper, and the tension between truly caring and maintaining boundaries (Cain, ) and thus detaching emotionally from the animal (Hamilton & McCabe, ), is visible in the following autoethnographic note:

I always knew I wanted a dog, and funnily, through my friends who had Golden Retrievers, I fell in love with this breed. I have had three Goldens now, and Kerttu is the third one.

…”

“…The note above illustrates C. Thomas's () notion of caring as an emotional connection to another and the ways the attempts for ‘emotional disconnections between human and animals’ (Hamilton & McCabe, , p. 346) become a part of the keeper's body work (Wolkowitz, ), continuously worked on in the life course of the companionship. In this way, separate from the idea of ‘caring about’ another human (Cain, ; Thomas, ), caring for an animal is about constantly negotiating non‐verbal, bodily interactions in which animal agency comes into being (Schuurman, ; see also Buller, ) by ‘constructing an image of a family’ (Greenebaum, , p. 119) and in which grief and palliative care are manifested as well.…”

“…More recent debates on the gendered aspects of care ask why embodied care work and work entailing physical touch is ‘largely performed by women’ (Cohen & Wolkowitz, ) and explore the complex boundaries of caring (Cain, ) as well as the fascinating tension between ‘care as love and care as labour’ (Lyon, ). Recently, and connected to the concept of care, grief has been discussed from the perspective of organizational mourning (e.g., Bell & Taylor, ) as well as the practices and individual experiences of grieving, loss and death (Doka & Martin, ; Driver, ; Kessler, Heron, & Dopson, ; Klass et al, ; Palgi & Abramovitch, ; Schuurman, ) in the field of organization and social studies.…”