| dc.description.abstract | The contemporary mother faces difficult choices when
deciding whether to be either a ‘stay at home’ or a ‘working
mother’. Conflicting discourses of good and bad
mothering revolve around a political divide under pressure,
one that territorialises the public and private domains.
Gilligan (1982) famously highlighted the existence
of these domains by challenging Kohlberg’s findings
that men were endowed with higher moral reasoning
powers than women. Disappointed by what she identified
as the masculinist bias of Kohlberg’s work, Gilligan conducted
her own research, finding that men and women
reasoned differently but equitably. Gilligan’s thesis now
theoretically informs a feminist ethics of care that has reputedly
transformed political spatial boundaries of the
public and private domains, domains traditionally gendered
as masculine and feminine. Yet the ‘care’ that Gilligan
has drawn our attention to is seemingly a new phenomenon.
Appearing in language around the same time
as the birth of Gilligan’s feminist ethics and indeed
amidst the growing dilemma of the working mother, this
care shows no visible sign of its maternal origins. In this
paper, I attempt to define and locate care amidst the dismantling
of the spatial divide that separates the public
and private, a dismantling that coincides with the commodification
of care within a global market. | en |
