Reconfiguring care and family in the era of the ‘outsourced self’
Julie Stephens · Journal of Family Studies · 2015
This paper theorizes a cultural shift in our understanding of the affective dimensions of care, dependency, family and mothering as represented in contemporary social transformations, namely, the trend towards the outsourcing of complicated feelings and emotions and new discourses around technology and care. Using an interdisciplinary approach that draws on sociology, policy studies, discourse analysis and a feminist ethic of care framework, the article argues that these developments alter prevailing understandings of what it means to care for infants, children, the sick and the frail elderly and, moreover, that these changes somehow alienate us from the weighty, embedded and often conflicted emotions that such caring engenders. At their most extreme, some of these developments risk transforming human intimacy and the role of the family in social reproduction.