Embodied care: affective touch as a facilitating resource for interaction between caregivers and residents in a care home for older adults

This article analyses how caregivers use affective touch as a resource to facilitate interaction. Through touch, caregivers construct positive socio-emotional relationships with their residents. The analysis of micro-level interaction is based on an interactional sociolinguistic framework, and reveals how caregivers display affection and intimacy while assisting the residents in everyday situations in a care home. All of the examples involve touching a person’s shoulder, stroking or giving half-embraces, typical resources used to construct affiliation between caregivers and residents. This article illustrates how affective touch facilitates interaction by regulating participation and calming down residents, by mitigating the controlling aspect of caring, and by fostering a positive interpersonal relationship. The care situations presented in this article contain crucial pauses within talk that are used to construct a peaceful atmosphere. During these crucial moments, embodied action effectively indicates an orientation to listening and establishes a presence to accomplish the actions in that situational talk. This analysis contributes to the studies on embodied interaction and on interpersonal relationships in care for older adults.I would like to thank Camilla Lindholm, an anonymous reviewer as well as Maria Frick and Hanna Lappalainen for valuable comments on the earlier versions of this article.

Embodying Inequality

This chapter analyzes the embodied care practices at the center of home care work. The chapter argues that these practices generate deep but fragile entanglements between the lives and bodies of older adults and those of their home care workers. These practices involve forms of empathy that blur the boundaries between older adults’ and home care workers’ bodies and their personhoods. I show how home care transforms seemingly straightforward tasks like cooking into moral practices that help older adults feel independent. Home care workers’ bodies become the ground upon which moral hierarchies between persons are built, experienced, and justified on a day-to-day basis. Daily home care practices generate ways of embodying social hierarchies and shape individual subjectivities, thereby making those hierarchies feel morally legitimate.

Care, Disability, and Violence: Theorizing Complex Dependency in Eva Kittay and Judith Butler

How do we theorize the experiences of caregivers abused by their children with autism without intensifying stigma toward disability? Eva Kittay emphasizes examples of extreme vulnerability to overturn myths of independence, but she ignores the possibility that dependents with disabilities may be vulnerable and aggressive. Instead, her work over‐emphasizes caregivers' capabilities and the constancy of disabled dependents' vulnerability. I turn to Judith Butler's ethics and her conception of the self as opaque to rethink care amid conflict. Person‐centered planning approaches, pioneered by disability rights activists, merge Butler's analysis of opacity with Kittay's work on embodied care, while also inviting a broader network of people to both interpret needs and change communities. By expanding our conceptions of dependency, feminist disability studies can continue the aim of both Kittay and Butler: to humanize unintelligible lives.