Paper short abstract:

I propose to discuss the crucial importance of heterosexuality, understood as a political regime (Wittig, 1992), to address the social organization of care for elderly, drawn from experiences and practices of lesbians in Barcelona.

Paper long abstract:

I propose to discuss the crucial importance of heterosexuality, understood as a political regime (Wittig, 1992), to address the social organization of care for elderly, drawn from my ongoing ethnographic investigation for my PhD thesis in Barcelona. The objective will be to show how approaching care from experiences and practices of lesbians allows us to highlight not only the patriarchal but also the heteronormative organization of elderly care in Spain, and how the pandemic has stressed out and somehow accentuated some of its manifestations.

Care work can be considered as a paradigmatic illustration of social, sexual, racial and international division of labour (Davis, 1981; Nakano Glenn, 1992; Galerand and Kergoat, 2008). In Spain, the social organization of care, especially for elderly, is strongly family-based, meaning that for one-hand, families, and concretely women, assume an actual important care work, and on the other-hand, weave and organise the “mosaic of care” (Soronellas and Comas-d'Argemir, 2017) and mobilise the different actors needed. If gender is a key to understanding women’s assignment to care tasks, as well as class, race and nationality, I want to discuss the impact of heterosexuality in this division, as a political regime that both allows to understand the weight of family, as an institution, in the social care organization, but also the specific care responsibility faced by adult lesbians within families for living outside the hegemonic model.