from Part One - Openings and Orientations
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 September 2023
Focusing on key themes, this chapter highlights how kinship and relatedness constitute a vital lens for understanding gender. First, the everyday is the principal ground for examining relatedness. It illumines how gender shapes our lives and is, in turn, formed, maintained, and altered over time. The borders between gender and other aspects of life can be porous. Second, the seemingly merely domestic or intimate can be generative – a theme that builds on earlier feminist insights. Kinship has wider consequences, including for politics or economics. Finally, kinship is imbued with the potential for hierarchy and inequality, ambivalence, ruptures, and failure. Its generativity includes its less amiable aspects. Gendered inequities and enmities arise from these aspects. Breaks in the fabric of kinship, however, imply the possibility of repair, which may depend on gendered forms of labor. Threading through these themes is care, a key aspect of everyday life and relatedness alike. Care encompasses whole economies and traverses national borders. Care speaks, too, to the vulnerability that is at the heart of what it means to be human. It mirrors, and at times heightens, the difficulties inherent in kinship.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.