CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2025
| Author | Marín-Rodríguez, Maria Juliana |
|---|---|
| Title | Who Cares? Caregiving Subjectivity and Redistribution in Bogota's District Care System |
| Summary | This research analyzes how Bogotá’s District Care System addresses the redistribution of unpaid care work, focusing on understanding its strategies to transform perceptions and gender norms around care. Following the debates around the construction of certain subjectivities as regulatory mechanisms under capitalism, the category of caregiving subjectivity will be developed to understand the challenges of redistributing unpaid care work in Bogotá. To ponder upon this connection, I will address the following research question: What are the links between the construction of caregiving subjectivity and redistribution in the political economy of care, and how do those links make them interdependent? In order to approach this question, semi-structured interviews with caregivers and staff of the Care Blocks and with members of the local and national government were conducted, as well as participant observation at the Care Blocks of Suba, Mártires, and the city Center. From this, it is concluded that caregiving subjectivity is predominantly embodied by women, emerging as a collateral and co-constitutive effect of their disciplining into domesticity. Although it is a product of capitalism's sexual division of labor, it is labeled natural, shrouding women's socially imposed caregiving duties in a mystical veil. This caregiving subjectivity hinders the redistribution of care work by convincing those who embody it that they possess an innate obligation, while absolving those privileged under the pretext of lacking either ability or duty. In that regard, the existence of a caregiving subjectivity and the possibility of redistributing care work are shown to be interdependent. |
| Supervisor | Sachseder, Julia |
| Department | Gender Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2025/marin_juliana.pdf |
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