For author Janna Klostermann, reaching her limits and resigning from care work felt like a crisis of self. In the aftermath of this upheaval, this is the book she needed to write. At the Limits of Care is a book that will change how you think about care work and about the women who provide it.
Now an assistant professor in sociology and a radical care scholar, Klostermann interrogates women’s counter-stories of reaching their limits, crossing ethical lines, and stepping back from paid or unpaid care work roles. She weaves feminist sociological analyses with memoir to challenge dominant narratives around women and care, transforming the ways we think about ourselves and our relationships.
The book makes a major contribution in how and what constitutes care research. Drawing on in-depth life history interviews with women ages twenty-seven to seventy-eight in Ontario, Canada, Klostermann enacts a “counter politics of care” approach that centres untold and lesser-told stories of care work. She pushes readers to rethink gendered power dynamics, question prevailing tropes of care, and imagine more equitable, emancipatory futures.
Acknowledgments
Part 1: Care Junkie Diaries: The Memoir
1. Starting at the Limits
2. Ship of Fools?
3. Care Junkie Diaries
4. Turned In
5. Daddy Loves You
6. Escape Velocity
7. The Flinch Factor
Part 2: Towards a Counter Politics of Care
8. Focusing Questions
9. Advancing a Counter Politics of Care through Feminist Research
10. Outline of the Book
Part 3: What Stories Do We Tell about Care, and How Can We Tell New Ones?
11. Women Talking
12. Situating Stories of Women and Care
13. Care Conditions in Ontario
Part 4: Reaching the Limits: Inequitable Care Conditions and the Moral,
Feminine Impossible
14. Narrative Silences: Did It Rattle You as Well or Do You Remember?
15. Moralizing Tropes: Reaching Ones Limits as an Embodied Breaking Point
and Moral, Feminine Achievement
16. The Body Says "No"
17. People that Care the Most
18. Guilt on Top of That
19. Rethinking Moral Captivity, Even If Thats Just How the Story Gets Told
20. Final Thoughts
Part 5: Loosening the Grip: Reimagined "Care Ethics" and the Politics of
Responsibility
21. "Heartbreakers Leave" and Other Tropes
22. Women Leave: Finding Flow or Wading through Swamps
23. The Strategies Women Use to "Get Out" Tell Us What They Are Up Against
24. Negotiating Ones Own and Others Care Needs
25. Rethinking and Challenging Moral, Gendered Imperatives to Care
26. Imagining Alternatives for Ones Life and Work
27. Rethinking Care as a Domain of Struggle
28. Final Thoughts
29. Interlude: A Different Kind of #MeToo?
Part 6: Thinking "Differently and More Deeply about Care Stories": Women
"Set Up" and Summoned across the Life Course
30. "Some People Like a Big Frenzy" and Other Tropes
31. "Set Up" and Summoned across the Life Course: Shifting Gender Relations
and What "Care" Evokes
32. "Whats not to love?": Finding Meaning in the Care One Is Coerced to
Provide
33. "Good Girls" and "Rebels": Recasting the Caring Role
34. The "Only One," the "Only Thing," or "Part of the Team": Intimate and
Institutional Relations
35. Rethinking Individualizing Tropes, Imagining Conditions to Pull Things
Off
36. Final Thoughts
Conclusion: A Counter Politics Playbook?
37. What the Research Reveals
38. The Power of the Process: A Counter Politics Playbook?
Appendix 1: Care Junkie Recovery Group
Appendix 2: Overview of Participants and Interview Process
References
Index
About the Author
Janna Klostermann is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Calgary.
