Care work: a performative dance of entangling bodily becoming(s)

The concept of care and care work has witnessed an upsurge in recent years. Both as an academic research interest and in public discourse, facilitating important discussions of how to understand and enable the organizing of such work, in particular, as a response to what has been coined as a care crisis affecting the recruitment and retention of people willing to perform care work within societal institutions.
The organizing of care work in child, health and elderly care has been approached with different research foci. While some work stresses the organizational issues and the (de)valuation of this work. (Banerjee et al., 2015; Melgaard et el., 2018; Rockwell, 2012) other work focus more specifically on politics and ethics of care often underpinned by feminist theory (Gilligan, 1982; Tronto, 1993; Noddings, 2003).
The first strand tends to highlight formal aspects of care work, such as, structure and hierarchy as well as point to and discuss care professional capacities and traits of care-givers hence articulating a form of individualizing perspective. The latter emphasizes care ethical dilemmas, political underpinnings, human/nonhuman multiplicity as becomings - offering analytical sensitivities to understand the organizing of care work beyond formal structures, roles, traits and forefronting embodied and relational perspectives (Adams, 2017; Kittay & Feder, 2003; Molterer et al., 2019).
This paper extends both strands by bridging their insights and developing a feminist view (Barad, 2003) of care work organizing in nursing homes as performative movements (Manning, 2014) of dancing relations of different care bodies, things, doings and affects. More specifically, we show how dancing produces care, not as a specified set of (care)moves or capacities or in isolation, but in and through its relationality with those engaged in care work and their contexts. Concretely, we will unfold experiences of ‘dance’ both as an actual practice of providing care within nursing homes, where the first author carried out fieldwork, and as a way to reconceptualize how these movements that are involved in dancing come to produce particular care practices and body-worldlings. As such, the paper develops a theoretical appreciation that rests in theorizings of posthuman performativity (Barad, 2003, 2007; Kuhn et al., 2007) and a philosophy of movement (Manning, 2014; Manning & Massumi, 2014).

Building on a case study of elderly care in Denmark, comprising interview data, field notes and photographs, our paper shows how care work unfolds through fluid practices and movements rather than merely through a professional logic of linear sets of activities and formal traits or acts of documentation (Hennion & Vidal-Naquet, 2017; Molterer & Hoyer, 2023). In this view, care work becomes a practice and activity deeply interconnected and constituted by its relationality to other bodies and the environment in which it unfolds (Fotaki, 2023, 2019). To this end, we nurture insights and develop a new critical vocabulary that expands traditional understandings of the body, experience, and the world by moving beyond the limitations of a subject-centered and individualized perspective. Instead, we highlight how care work and the organizing of care is embedded in relationships and social and material contexts, comprising heterogenous movements of juggling, balancing, negotiation –a performative dance producing not only care work but the becoming of a care worker body that challenges dominant frameworks that marginalize or oversimplify care. As such our paper offers an affirmative critique (Raffnsøe et al., 2022) by rearticulating the meaning and matter of care.