6: Care in feminist welfare state analysis: The Unfinished Agenda

This chapter provides an overview of key theoretical approaches used to study care and its relation to gender inequality. By interrogating the literature to analyze how care was defined in different research traditions, it shows that the prominence of the perspective of women family caregivers in feminist social policy analysis has left care-receivers and paid care workers at the margin. Despite the considerable conceptual and theoretical innovation generated by this scholarship, the conceptualization of care has remained incomplete when it comes to theorizing the relationship and complicated interdependencies between the needs and rights of paid care workers, family caregivers and care-receivers. The chapter concludes by offering some considerations about the future agenda for care research and the need to develop a relational perspective that questions notions of autonomy and dependence and puts the multiple inequalities existing in relations of care at the centre of the analysis. ; Published