照護工作：文化觀點的考察

Abstract

本文從文化社會學的角度，考察文化如何建構我們認知、感受和處理照護工作的方式。既有文獻廣泛地討論了照護的私人化（privatization）作為一種支配性的文化架構，但學者們在運用「私人」一詞上指涉不同的意涵，包括家庭生活、情緒性、女性化以及市場化。我主張，我們必須拋棄公與私、愛與金錢以及有酬或無酬等二元思考的框架。為了避免對家庭親密關係以及私人家庭生活等概念抱持種族中心的假定，我們必須檢視照護工作是如何鑲嵌在特定的社會制度以及文化脈絡中，同時，我們要分析照護工作作為一個權力衝突的場域，如何形塑了家庭成員間的階層分工，並透過日常生活實作持續建構「家」所指涉的跨越公私領域的複雜意義。

This paper discusses how culture constitutes the way we understand and conduct carework. The existing literature has widely discussed the privatization of care as a dominant cultural framework, but scholars have used the term “private” with various connotations, including domesticity, emotionality, feminization and marketization. I argue that we need to reject binary thinking about the public and private, love and money, and paid and unpaid. To avoid ethnocentric assumptions about familial intimacy and private domesticity, we need to look into how carework is embedded in particular institutional regimes and cultural contexts. We should analyze carework as a terrain of power struggles that shape the stratified division of labor and a contextualized practice of constructing the family with intertwined meanings across the realms of market and intimacy.