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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the practices of care in Indian transnational families, highlighting how caregiving responsibilities disproportionately fall on women. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, it examines how gendered expectations of maintaining family ties across borders, deepens gendered inequalities.

Paper long abstract:

In India, as in many Asian countries, unlike the West, co-resident family units have traditionally served as the prime source of caregiving for older and younger family members (Mishra & Kaur, 2021; Samanta, 2019). The centrality of family in caregiving arrangements in India is also linked to the non-availability of state-sponsored care arrangements (Mishra, 2021). However, the shifting mobility of adult children because of rapid urbanization and employment-related migration to bigger Indian cities and internationally (Ugargol et al., 2016; Visaria 2001) leads to the rising proportion of aged persons living alone (LASI, 2020). These shifting demographic and residential familial arrangements complicate questions of caregiving and receiving for older persons (Jadhav. et al., 2013) and gender as a structuring factor continues to remain central in these discussions.

In Indian families, women often shoulder the bulk of caregiving responsibilities, whether as daughters-in-law, wives, or daughters (Lamb, 2009). Given the above context, this paper interrogates the gendered practices of care arrangements in Indian transnational families. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in 25 such families, this paper illustrates how the burden of maintaining transnational family ties across borders falls onto women only. For female migrants, the challenge is compounded by the expectation to balance caregiving responsibilities for their ageing parents and/or her in-laws back home and their immediate families in the host country. This triple burden can exacerbate gendered inequalities within the family structure. These dynamics often lead to renegotiations of traditional gender roles but also place significant emotional and physical strain on women.

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This study reframes families as sites of relational (dis)advantages to explain persistent gendered care practices among China’s One-Child generation. It reveals how intergenerational assets enable women to redistribute caregiving, highlighting how familial dynamics shape care negotiations.

Paper long abstract:

Are women from China's One-Child generation equal partners in care provision within their households? This study addresses gaps in the literature on gendered care practices by reframing families as sequential, interconnected sites of cumulative relational (dis)advantages that significantly shape care dynamics. Focusing on siblingless women born between 1980 and 1987, the study investigates how gendered care practices persist despite changing family structures. Drawing on 82 in-depth interviews, it reveals that families adapt, challenge, and reinterpret traditional patriarchal norms of caregiving based on their socioeconomic, cultural, and geographical (dis)advantages.

The findings reveal that women's socioeconomic, cultural, and financial positioning becomes relational upon transitioning into marriage and parenthood. When their positionality is inferior to that of their husbands and in-laws, women face significant barriers in negotiating an equal share of care responsibilities. This relational inferiority further reinforces their subordination, perpetuating traditional caregiving roles. Conversely, women who gained "negotiation power" through intergenerational transfers of assets—such as financial resources or hukou status superior to their husbands—were better able to resist unequal caregiving arrangements. However, these "gender egalitarians" did not seek equality in caregiving within marriage. Instead, they strategically leveraged their resources and kinship networks to outsource or redistribute caregiving responsibilities, enabling them to pursue career ambitions without fundamentally challenging the division of care.

By focusing on the relational dynamics of socioeconomic and cultural (dis)advantages of families, this study provides new insights into how gendered care practices are negotiated and sustained within the unique context of China's first One-Child generation.

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Paper short abstract:

This study highlights the shifting role of daughters in elder care due to urbanization, nuclear families, and rising female workforce participation. Using LASI data, it emphasizes the need for policies like financial support, mental health services, and community care to ensure equitable caregiving.

Paper long abstract:

The social structures have historically been positioned around patriarchal, patrilineal, and patrilocal principles, with the intergenerational contract (IGC) placing sons at the centre of responsibilities of elderly care in India. However, recent societal shifts—driven by urbanization and increasing female labour force participation—are challenging these entrenched norms. Particularly noteworthy is the fact that 25% of the elderly population in India no longer resides with their children whereas a significant proportion of elderly are cared by their daughters.

Drawing on data from the Longitudinal Ageing Study in India (LASI), this study delves into the evolving role of daughters in elder care, examining the socio-cultural, gendered, and economic dimensions of this transition. The findings reveal a clear shift in caregiving responsibilities, with daughters increasingly taking on roles traditionally reserved for sons not only in the urban and semi-urban settings but also rural India. This shift marks a fundamental change in the caregiving landscape, with daughters balancing caregiving responsibilities alongside their own careers, personal lives, and social obligations. Additionally, the study highlights how urbanization and the decline of joint family structures are further altering caregiving practices. The rise of nuclear family units and daughter-only households especially in urban settings is reshaping caregiving dynamics, with elderly parents are increasingly relying on daughters for both co-residence and care. The study emphasizes the need for policy reforms to support daughters in elder care through financial, mental health, and community-based interventions, ensuring equitable caregiving responsibilities and a sustainable caregiving ecosystem.

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This paper looks at the changing son-centred intergenerational contract within more affluent Indian families, to examine the changing role of daughters as old age support systems for parents, and the consequences of such shifts on daughters' abilities to manage multiple conflicting responsibilities.

Paper long abstract:

In recent years, the idea of the “Indian joint family”, has given way to newer and more “modified” nuclear forms of family living arrangements, especially in India’s cities. Such changes have brought into question the traditional role of sons as old age support systems for parents. A subsequent “modernization” of the intergenerational contract, some argue, has resulted in “a reduction in familial generational and gender hierarchies”. Based on in-depth interviews conducted with over 75 daughters and parents belonging to higher income families in Delhi-NCR, this paper argues that while changing filial imperatives and social norms have indeed altered inter-generational obligations for sons and daughters, such change is far from disruptive. Although daughters are increasingly being viewed as a “more dependable” support system for parents, especially among parents from higher income families who primarily expect care in the form of emotional support, such preference is intricately tied to feminine stereotypes of nurturing and caring daughters, which re-essentialize and valorise caregiving as gendered kin work. Moreover, conceptions of “good daughterhood” emerging from these trends reflect specific gendered forms of reciprocity, rooted in gratitude and obligation towards parents, which unfairly penalize “forever daughters” with the “double burden” of simultaneous caretaking in their natal and marital homes, while retaining pre-existing patriarchal gendered roles within and outside the home. Consequently, daughters’ desires to care for their parents, and frequent failures to do so in the face of systemic challenges, I argue, operates as a form of “cruel optimism”, reaffirming their status as “Paraya Dhan”.

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Based on longitudinal fieldwork conducted in Shenzhen with 15 families, this study explores evolving gender and generational dynamics in China’s middle-class families. It opens theoretical spaces to address the linkages between family, culture, and class in contemporary China.

Paper long abstract:

Based on longitudinal fieldwork conducted in Shenzhen with 15 families, this study explores evolving gender and generational dynamics in China’s middle-class. I report the following findings. First, in the context of escalating social stratification, low fertility and a patchy and unequal welfare system, rampant social anxieties among middle-class families to avoid downward social mobility predispose them to strategies of social reproduction via strengthening children’s educational prospects. Adding to the anxieties is an educational system that is hierarchical, stressful and elitist with high-stakes exams to screen out ‘losers’ from early on. As such, childrearing becomes an expansive and expensive project that involves an intergenerational coalition. Second, the childrearing coalition, comprising of parents and (increasingly maternal) grandparents, follows gendered and generationalized division of labour in an all-hands-on-deck approach to facilitate the child(ren)’s ‘all-round’ development, especially in educational competence. At the core of this coalition stands the ‘project-manager’ mother, whose dual responsibilities subject them to conflicting demands: whereas the workplace expects their maximum productivity as de-gendered workaholics, a re-gendered domestic sphere asks of her full commitment as the educational project-manager. Meanwhile, grandparents (often grandmothers) serve as the family ‘reserve labour force’ to pick up the bulk of housework and other ‘unskilled’ aspects of childcare. Findings point to intricate gender and generational negotiation at work in carrying out the families’ collective project of childrearing. The study uncovers coexisting resilience and vulnerabilities of middle-class families in a neoliberal economy and opens theoretical spaces to address the linkages between family, culture, and class in contemporary China.

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This paper explores how middle-class mothers in Delhi-NCR face an ethical double bind: expected to provide care but unable to seek it. Women’s refusal of medical care, or ‘noble deaths,’ protest the caregiving pressures and reorient familial flows of care amidst a changing intergenerational contract

Paper long abstract:

The literature on labour has established that the work of caregiving, motherhood, and social reproduction is often overlooked and devalued, while work outside the home is prioritised and compensated. However, there’s less focus on how caregivers receive care themselves, and how this impacts their choices around paid work, self-worth and even if they choose to continue to live. Drawing from a larger ethnography on the suicide stories told by married middle-class women in Delhi-NCR, this paper examines how the affective experiences of motherhood echo the sacrificial themes in suicide stories, revealing the ‘noble death’ phenomenon - where women wilfully refuse medical care to avoid being a burden to their children.

Using case studies of women at different stages of motherhood, this paper explores how women face an ethical double bind: expected to provide unlimited care, yet unable to ask for care in return. Cultural expectations of what I term "committed motherhood" require women to reorient their desires, actions, and sense of self around their children. Meanwhile, in the shifting intergenerational contract, philosophies of aging increasingly emphasise independence and self-reliance (Lamb 2009) making it even harder for women to seek reciprocal care. In this context, work outside the home becomes a respite from the demands of committed motherhood. Yet it is also a site where ideologies of motherhood and successful aging are reified. Hence, the refusal to seek care serves as both a protest against these pressures and a way to reorient the flow of care within families.

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This paper explores how ASHA workers in Kerala's 'ghost' city, Pathanamthitta, fare on gendered expectations of care both from their families and from the 'state'. We bring out contradictions and contestations in how shifting intergenerational contract implicates 'state' and the 'caregiving-woman'.

Paper long abstract:

Though care work involves very intimate and personal spaces of one’s daily life — like home, family and body — it has also moved to public spheres like the state, not-for-profit actors, non-governmental organisations and the market (Addati et al., 2018; Folbre, 1994; Folbre & Nelson, 2000; Nelson, 1999). And yet, women continue to be disproportionately assigned the responsibility to deliver care (Lynch, 2022). Given the state-initiated construct of feminised community work of various kinds, particularly care, we argue that patriarchal-neoliberal notions underlie the public provisioning of critical services in India.

As illustrations of these attempts, we seek to undertake a critical reading of the category of community care worker by juxtaposing the official 'state' language on the subject matter with conversations on ASHA workers' everyday realities. It is in Pathanamthitta's context of an ageing society, where a higher proportion of the working-age population has migrated leaving the dependents back home that we imagine this study. These illustrations reveal the wilful state construct of 'ASHA' that allows for feminisation of care responsibilities at two levels — an all-woman workforce doing community care-work and being available for care provisioning in their own family. This means that the government facilitates a second shift (Folbre, 2006) or double care-burden in the lives of working women. A discussion on community workers thus highlights a) the existence of an unpaid-underpaid-paid work continuum which fills gaps in care provisioning and b) the evolving intergenerational care contract that redefines roles performed by 'state' and 'caregiving woman'.

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Paper short abstract:

This study finds that the way educational care is organised in Chinese urban middle-class families intensifies gender inequalities in the family, though some of the inequalities can be offset by mobilising grandparental educational care through the daughter-centred intergenerational contract.

Paper long abstract:

In today’s China, marked by low fertility, population ageing, limited state welfare provision and social risks, and an increasingly competitive economy, family relations are characterised by what Yan (2018) refers to as neofamilism. With the “4-2-1 family” structure becoming more common, and the quest for social mobility, intergenerational relations have become increasingly child-centred, characterized by a downward flow of emotional and material resources to raise the “perfect child”. This study examines the contours of educational care and asks how it relates to gender and intergenerational relations in urban middle-class China. Based on fieldwork in Beijing it finds that intense educational care is a hallmark of good and responsible mothering, creating dilemmas when mothers reconcile their own and their children's priorities and needs. Rather than mobilising fathers to share educational care work, intensive mothering ideals motivate women to mobilise their own mothers as educational caregivers. Fathers' call for less intense educational care practices without active involvement effectively shifts the responsibility of educational care onto mothers. In particular siblingless mothers, whose own mother is an urbanite with an educational degree of her own, are able to benefit from grandparental educational care. For other mothers, withdrawing from the labour market is the only way to enable educational care according to the ideals of intensive mothering. As such, the daughter-centred intergenerational contract can be an important factor for reproducing urban middleclassness and maintaining gender equality in career prospects, while it may replace a more gender equal distribution of educational care.