Caring Masculinities and Race: On Racialized Workers and “New Fathers”

Abstract

Karla Elliott defines caring masculinities as both embracing care and rejecting domination. Most work within critical studies on men and masculinities that engages with masculinities and care focuses on care yet sidelines non-domination. In order for caring masculinities to not be/come a “white” concept, this article argues for a broad grounding of caring masculinities in a rejection of all forms of domination and starts with race. Bringing research on the international division of reproductive labor together with fatherhood studies, the article illustrates systemic oppression within the field of care. It is here that privileged men manage to actualize ideals such as involved fatherhood by relying on a marginalized workforce in the coloniality of labor. A workforce that simultaneously remains locked out of involved fathering. I close by advocating not for the “inclusion” of men in the margins but for exploding the dominating power that the center holds.

Decolonizing Care: Hegemonic Masculinity, Caring Masculinities, and the Material Configurations of Care

“…What is key to understand then, is how care emerges through a neo-colonial capitalist sexual division of labor that can come to augment patriarchal, colonial, and heteronormative relations. Prattes (2022), as one of the few scholars to engage with race and coloniality in men's caregiving, argues Elliott's emphasis on "non-domination," must extend beyond gender to engage with multiple intersecting inequalities. She identifies how "coloniality and racial systems of oppression remain anchoring points in many narratives of gender-equal 'progress'" (726).…”

“…This is evident not only in the transnational migration of doctors, nurses, caregivers, and other healthcare service providers, but also in the circulation and "flows" of knowledge, technologies, human and non-human matter around the globe. Caring masculinities cannot be abstracted out from these "uneven" postcolonial interdependencies, to do so whitens the concept (Prattes, 2022). Instead, decolonizing care puts race inequalities at the heart of these interrelations, globally situating our everyday "carescapes."…”

“…Decolonial scholarship identifies the centrality of race in care relations (Näre 2010; Raghuram 2019; Prattes 2022), and the historically classed and racialized processes leading to “white care” (Sieler 2020) in the US being constituted as under threat by the prospect of “Obamacare,” via the Affordable Care Act (Lopez 2019). This impulse is felt where Elliott (2020) draws on black feminist scholar bell hooks to rethink care at the margins to include Black and working-class men.…”

“…These dynamics are more pronounced in times of austerity with cuts in welfare benefit, a state withdrawal of services, increasing longevity and “care-precarity” throughout much of the global north (Boyer et al 2017; Warren 2022), resulting in growing care needs in a shrinking state (England and Alcorn 2018). These processes serve to accelerate the international migration of healthcare workers to the north, reproduce colonial binaries (Prattes 2022), enhance white privilege, and engender the outsourcing of care from the public to the private sector; sharpening inequalities when it comes to who can afford care and of what quality that might be.…”

The material effects of Whiteness: Institutional racism in the German welfare state

“…And while there is some understanding of ‘negative attitudes’ as a problem, exoticisation and reflections on graduations of ‘threat’ are normalised rather than recognised as dehumanising. This framing is part of the racialisation of ‘Others’ who are positioned as suitable for care and domestic work in this specific context (see Prattes [2022] who discusses this in relation to masculinities) – but also the expression of a wider disavowal of Germany’s colonial legacies. ‘Coming to terms with being the perpetrators of antisemitic genocide’, as Lentin (2020, p. 71) notes, has gone ‘hand in hand with a denial of the coterminousness of the Holocaust and colonial rule’.…”