This book offers powerful insights from the messy and contradictory emotional and political insides of care. Focused on the stories of women who have stepped back or reached their limits of care including her own Klostermann weaves together a series of metaphors to counter dominant cultural imperatives. In doing so, she offers a pathway through discomfort to reconsider the conditions of care and begin to understand what might be needed in order to stay. -- Amanda Grenier, Norman and Honey Schipper Chair in Gerontological Social Work, University of Toronto and Baycrest Academy for Research and Education Blending brutally honest memoir with penetrating sociological analysis, Klostermann brilliantly exposes the profound ambivalences of care when care workers are not cared for themselves. Moving, funny, and provocative, At the Limits of Care makes an important contribution to this increasingly necessary field of study. -- Jamie Hakim, Senior Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies, Kings College London, and Member, The Care Collective This is an impressive, innovative study of women and care. Based on in-depth life history interviews and an auto-ethnographic memoir, Klostermann provides a multi-layered analysis of gendered power relations and their constraining effects on womens lives. She documents womens agency and the institutional structures and meanings that compel women to do care work. She also asks how society might ensure care security for all without womens endless caring under debilitating conditions. -- Meg Luxton, Professor Emerita and Senior Scholar, School of Gender, Sexuality and Womens Studies, York University
