Thesis title: Cura per gli anziani e intersezionalità: come le assistenti familiari stanno mutando il settore in Italia
Care for the elderly is a phenomenon that is becoming more and more relavant nowadays for several reasons. Current social transformations are influencing (and been influenced by) economic e political ones, as well as the cultural constructions linked to this activity contribute to it regulation and manage in different social fields. Even if care is a job, in its formal and informal forms (i.d. waged and unwaged), that is ubiquitous in the world, it’s evident that care is characterized and articulated diffently basing on resources, feauters and perspectives of the different contexts in which care is executed, Currently in Italy, care has a crucial role for the general efficiency of the country, regarding creations of job positions, productivity, assistance measures, health and wellness praxes, ageing processess and family dynamics. In particular, care involved three dimensions: gender, migration (as well as ethinicy and race) and social class. If gender has been already studied in relation to care in general, the other two dimensions are somehow new in this field, through a process that is started forty years ago but that is becoming more stabile in a more recent present. The figure of “badante”, or for better saying “family assistant”, represents a complex subject, under some aspects original and surely not sufficientely analyzed yet. This complexity of the subject is trasforming care. This mutation is partially due to a missing recognizing of some of its features and of the ways these features guides actors’ actions, specially in the interactions with the context they live and with the other actors in the same context. In this regard, the preliminary aspects to consider respect to these subjects is their peculiar identity, that is “intersectional”. Intersectionality as a theory is a the centre of several international academic debates, even though not all the academic contexts around the world are partecipating to these debates in the same ways. In Italy, intersectionality is not fully utilized yet, even if there are many contributions to the theory. For this reason, although it is possible to individuate multiple care studies in Italy, the ones that apply intersectionality to this phenomenon are very few, with the consequence of ignore an important aspect of family assistants experiences. In the present research, one of the main aim is to contribute to this debate and the construction of knowledge reagardin intersectionality in Italy by the analysis of care for the elderly. Due to the contextual nature of the theory itself, concentrating on a specific intersectional group and by studing its interactions with(in) the contexts under consideration, in order to understand the consequences of the praxes that are elaborated and engaged, could be pretty usefull for a double scope. The first one is studing the actual processess of identification and belonging that are riconducted to the construction and recognition of an intersectional identity. The second one allows to fully analyzed a very large phenomenon, maybe not so easely connected to intersectionality (that is care nowadays), in order to understand its evolution and possibile future development. Intersectionality and care for the elderly don’t only share the actors involved, but also implied dynamics that are connected to particular manifestation of discrimination that are not always evident. Any pathetic point of view regarding the family assistants will be rejected (i.e. these workers won’t be seen as “simple victims”); as said before, the focus will be on the complexity of this experiences, especially through the analysis of their agency. These actions require a new point of observation, that has to taking into account the specific position of the intersectional group, in order to identify the obstacles this group face daily as well as the opportunities (present and future) they can reach.