NotNormativelyHuman 263
throughcareagencies,governmentalregulationsofcare,etc.Inaddition,
care is an affectively saturated if not overdetermined relationship. We
needonlytogotopublicationslikeTheInspiredCaregiver:FindingJoy
While Caring for Those You Love(2013) to find proof and also the
collective voice of oughtness in pious nostrums like these: "To care for
thosewhooncecaredforusisoneofthehighesthonors"or"Caregiving
often calls us to lean into love we didn't know possible" (Speers 12).
Phrases like these circulate in the cultural domain as a more or less
outspoken norm concerning relationships between young and old in the
contextofeldercare.
Meanwhile, it would seem wrong to me, especially from a cultural
critical point of view, to extol, romanticize, or otherwise idealize this
everyday practice. Differences in age, class, culture, especially if they
emergeinintimatesettingslikecare,canbejarring.Thedarksideofthe
affectivelychargedsystemofeldercare isabuse,oftentimesofaviolent
kind.Anestimatedoneintenpeopleinhomecarereportssuchabuse;in
institutional care, the numbers are even higher. Only recently, in
Savannah, GA, an elder care provider was charged with 188 (!) counts
of elder abuse in a senior living facility (Skutch n. pag.). Of course,
elderabuseisnotrestrictedtoinstitutionalsettings,italsooccurs,much
moreclandestinely,intheprivacyofthefamilyhome.
Caregiving, even more so than receiving care, is also a deeply
gendered practice, which, in recent years, has become transnational and
transcultural. Most of the time, it is women from the Global South who
deliver care in faraway places; and while they are doing this, they are
often sorely missed at home, by their children but also by the sick and
elderly in their own families who would, in previous times, have been
the principal beneficiaries of their care-giving. Caring here, in the
Global North, makes coping elsewhere necessary. This has been called
"care drain" (Hochschild 339),^95 whose material and affective dynamics
canbeillustratedbytheplightofFilipinawomenworkinginSingapore
as caregivers. When in December 2014 a typhoon hit the Philippines
causingmassivedestructionandthelossofmanylives,evenmanydays
later, these women still did not know whether their loved ones had
survived. But they could not relinquish their posts giving care for
(^95) Onthe"carecrisis"intheglobalSouthseeCalasanti145.