Copyright is owned by the Author of the thesis.  Permission is given for 
a copy to be downloaded by an individual for the purpose of research and 
private study only.  The thesis may not be reproduced elsewhere without 
the permission of the Author. 
 



 
 

 

 

 

Transforming feminist care ethics: Tracing (un)memorable mother-daughter 
relations through psychoanalytic inquiry 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirement for the degree of 

Doctor of Philosophy 

in Psychology 

 

 

Massey University, Manawatu Campus, 

New Zealand 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ann Lois Rogerson 

2014  



 
 

 



i 
 

 

Abstract 

 

This thesis draws upon traditional and feminist theories of psychoanalysis, and 

embarks upon a journey of inquiry initiated by a personal experience of end-of-life 

care for my mother. Positioned as responsible caregiver, I found myself unable to 

articulate my experiences as anything other than caregiver-patient who suffered a 

combination of ‘exhaustion and grief’ leading to hallucination manifesting as 

hysterical symptom. The constraints on positioning available to me generated the 

following question as the catalyst for present study. How can mother and daughter 

relations be spoken within contemporary discourse and how is care positioned in 

relation to mother-daughter encounter? The inquiry begins with a critical reading of 

contemporary literature on mothering, care and caring to locate the study within a 

genealogy of feminist engagement with ethics of care. After situating both feminist 

care ethics and hysteria within the trajectory of psychoanalytic development, I 

explore Lacan’s rereading of Freud’s mapping of the unconscious, pre-conscious and 

conscious as the initial theoretical framework for inquiry, given that this is where 

hysteria linguistically intertwines with psychoanalysis as a product of caregiving 

stress. Within the genre of searching, I follow a series of journeys, investigating texts 

for gaps and pathways enabling a mother-daughter encounter to be remembered and 

spoken differently. Each journey informs and transforms the problematics of 

remembering and articulating mother-daughter encounter. Yet they reiterate 

constrictions at the place where perception meets thought, and each journey is 

hindered by a metaphorical wall of language. After discussing how the wall locates 

mother-daughter encounter and care within discourse and shapes reality as a constant 

series of assimilating, marginalising and discriminating I extend the scope of inquiry 



ii 
 

through reading feminist theorists of difference including Irigaray’s concepts of 

mimesis and fluidity, Ettinger’s matrixial borderspace and Braidotti’s nomadic 

subject. This allows a rereading of feminist care ethics and possibilities of 

transformations, where theorising a more inclusive grammatical structure can be 

thought as enabling possibilities for speaking, writing and remembering women’s 

encounters with women and a daughter’s encounter with her mother. 



iii 
 

Acknowledgements 

 
I would like to thank my supervisors, Professor Mandy Morgan and Dr Leigh 

Coombes for allowing me the space in which to grow my research. Your knowledge, 

support, guidance, patience, encouragement and wisdom have been invaluable to the 

the development of my project and writing skills. Bernice, thank you for your 

support: you have supported me through every step of this endeavour and never 

stopped believing in me. Thank you Coach Carrmel, Jannene, Mike and Pat. You 

accompanied me on my attempt to swim Cook Strait and consoled me through my 

inconsolable moments when the currents turned against us. A special thanks to my 

open- water- swimming friends around the country and all the members of Roskill 

Masters Swimming Club. Each time we meet, you welcome me as if I had never left 

to undertake this quest. I would like to acknowledge Massey University for awarding 

me a Doctoral Scholarship and the School of Psychology for providing a pathway for 

professional development through the Graduate Assistant initiative. This initiative 

has also surrounded me with an abundance of peer support and new friends and 

colleagues. Thank you to all members of the GAs and Alumni Social Group and 

especially to Maria, Kacey, Steph, Mel and my past office companion, Annette. 

Love to my nephew Fraser: thanks for those phone calls that just seemed to come 

when I needed them most. 

  



iv 
 

  



v 
 

 

 

A memorable story 

One of the few loving mother-daughter bonds depicted in 

western mythology is that of Demeter and Persephone. Within 

available versions of Greek mythology, Demeter is one of the 

twelve Olympians, a Goddess who has powers over, or 

inextricably intertwined with, the fertility of the earth. Demeter 

and her daughter Persephone are inseparable and totally 

devoted to each other (Guthrie, 1955; Irigaray, 1994). As the 

result of a deal made by Persephone’s father, Zeus, Persephone is 

abducted by Hades and taken to the underworld. Demeter, 

devastated by her daughter’s abduction, roams the earth in 

search of her daughter (Guthrie, 1955). She renders the earth 

barren, initiating widespread famine. Finally, Hades agrees to 

release Persephone, but not before he tricks her into eating a 

pomegranate seed. By eating the seed, she commits herself to 

return to the underworld every year for several months, as his 

bride (Gray, 2007; Kerényi, 1949/1985a). Winter is the direct 

result of her abduction, the time of the year that Persephone 

spends with Hades and a time of forced separation from her 

mother (Irigaray, 1994; Gray, 2007).  

 

 

  



vi 
 

  



vii 
 

Preface: Where is care? 
 

Some years ago, I became a caregiver for my mother, who was terminally ill 

and had a short time to live. Given that I was the only daughter, I fully understood 

that this is what daughters do, having witnessed my mother care for both her mother 

and my father’s mother at the end of their lives. My mother wished to die at home 

and there was never any question in my mind that it should be any other way: I set 

out to accommodate her wish. Given that my mother’s health deteriorated rapidly as 

she came out of remission, virtually overnight I became endowed with ‘what it takes’ 

to responsibly care for a beloved family member. Some years later, I sat down to 

write of my experiences. I initially wrote something like, “I was my mother’s 

caregiver.” There were few words and many tears. I had retained vivid memories of 

those days along with a strange mix of grief and anger, spoken as grief that she was 

no longer here, anger that she had left. 

When I moved back into the family home and took up my new position, my 

mother was bedridden; having chosen my old bedroom as the place in the house that 

she would prefer to die. As she became weaker, she insisted on taking frequent trips 

to the bathroom. Movement caused her great pain over and above the effects of the 

drugs, but she was an intensely private person and insistent that she did not want to 

be a burden. Her insistence to do things on her own meant that I was with her for as 

many hours as I could stay awake. Indeed when I found the time to sleep, I recall 

being woken to go and assist my mother who was on the move again. Exhaustion 

was inevitable as her condition became one of sleeping, waking, asking ‘is that you 

dear’ until finally she slipped into a morphine induced coma.  

The night before she died, a friend arranged for a hospice nurse to come into 

the house so I could get some rest. That night, while I was sitting with my friend, I 



viii 
 

experienced some odd hallucinations. I felt my stature change to that of my mother’s 

and when I looked at my hands they had changed shape. They were no longer mine. 

They were hers. I became very frightened and silently asked her to leave. There was 

no doubt in my mind at the time that she was there and I was addressing her. She 

left, and I was left with the guilt of sending her away. Guilt seems most fitting since 

the request for to her to leave was driven by fear and not compassion. Early next 

morning I returned to the house. She was still alive. Not long after I had settled 

myself in the chair beside her, she opened her eyes, they were clear and alert, as if 

observing something directly in front of her. She closed them, let out a gentle sigh 

and she was gone, an exit, I learned later, that was assisted by an increased dose of 

morphine deemed necessary by the visiting nurse.  

This is not a story that I told many people: perhaps to a few of my closest 

friends not long after these events played out. The general ‘diagnosis’ was 

hallucinations caused by exhaustion and the stresses of caregiving. So I stored these 

recollections away until ‘caregiving’ became the focus of my research some years 

later. Yet there was always a feeling of loss, not just the physical loss of a mother, 

but something else, an uneasy feeling that I too had lost a part of myself. Something 

was missing in the telling as our parting, played out within our discursive positions, 

and within the early beginnings of formulating research topics, I began to wonder 

where the daughter was during the time that I became my mother’s caregiver. When 

a daughter and mother’s last days are positioned as caregiver and patient directing 

the discursive interactions between the two of them, where are the daughter and her 

mother?  

Driven by my experiences, this thesis focuses on the search for a daughter’s 

lost encounter, and an exercise of hysterical enquiry. While this story begins my 



ix 
 

search, and I have now undertaken the inquiry, and written the thesis, I start out with 

the assumption that I am positioned in discourse as I study and write, as I am when I 

tell the story of my mother and me. To acknowledge the multiple possibilities of 

positioning as a daughter, which are elaborated specifically and transformed as the 

inquiry unfolds, the third person address is used throughout the thesis to draw 

attention to positioning and multiplicity.  

As a case study, the daughter is engaged in caring activities. An over 

propensity to care according to Breuer, can be considered an hysterical symptom of 

hysteria (Freud & Breuer, 1893/1974; Verhaeghe, 1999). Moreover, traditional case 

studies, such as that of Anna O reveal that exhaustion from caregiving is a common 

trigger for bouts of hysteria that culminate in hallucination (Freud & Breuer, 

1893/1974). The hysterical character of this enquiry, given the hallucinatory 

symptoms invoked through the hysterical pursuit of caregiving, places this study 

firmly within a framework of psychoanalysis.  

Within psychology, psychoanalysis is not necessarily a favoured theoretical 

framework, yet the influence of psychoanalysis in relation to developmental theory, 

and mother–child relations, remains significant. According to Tyson, Jones & Elcock 

(2011), psychoanalysis is sometimes considered psychology, although not often by 

psychologists, who rarely acknowledge its influence. Psychoanalysis may be 

regarded as unscientific given that its modes of inquiry are traditionally steeped in 

the analysis of case studies and mythology. However, as a theory of discourse, 

psychoanalysis is no longer the study of the individual but theorises how language 

shapes an individual, how language shapes the reality of the individual, how 

language marginalises and excludes. Through employing psychoanalysis as a 

theoretical framework for critical social psychological inquiry, we can consider how 



x 
 

discourse erects boundaries and categorisations, how it intrudes, colonises and 

specularises (Irigaray, 1985a). Within the context of this thesis, given that I seek to 

locate a mother-daughter encounter, psychoanalysis is taken up as feminist 

epistemological pathways to consider the marginalisation, exclusion, intrusion, 

colonisation and specularisation of women. And as Freud’s work linguistically 

creates an uneasy gap within the genealogy of psychology, somewhere around the 

theoretical underpinnings of scientific inquiry and behaviourism, it theoretically 

offers terrain within which these inquiries can begin.  

Putting aside the marginalised position of psychoanalysis and indeed critical 

social psychology within the discipline, it is crucial, in the context of this project, to 

acknowledge that Freud’s interest in hysteria plays a foundational role in the birth of 

psychoanalysis. Hysteria is still present as a series of genealogical connections 

interwoven within theories of human development, maternal subjectivity, morality, 

care ethics and educational psychology.  

Freud’s interest in hysteria came from his training as a neuro-scientist and 

was sparked by a notion that the many and varied symptoms of hysteria could not be 

traced to physical pathology, but were a condition of the psyche with no fixed 

location within the body. Arguably then, psychoanalysis evolved from fruitless 

avenues of scientific inquiry delving into the anatomical functions of the brain, into 

the psychic origins of hysteria. Its ‘cure’ was identified as being possible through 

abreaction, the talking away of the symptoms as a therapeutic practice, hence the 

first connection between discourse and the study of the individual who is shaped by 

discourse within psychoanalysis. The ‘talking cure’ was named by the object of one 

of the first recorded hysterical case studies, Anna O. Hysterical cure, then, is enabled 

by clear articulation, a catharsis within available discourse.  



xi 
 

Freud (1977) also describes the process that a mother and daughter must go 

through to ensure normative development of the child, a process that includes 

rejecting the mother. Kleinian (1932, 1957, 1960) Object Relations Theory, as a 

further development of Freudian psychoanalytic theory, heavily underpins traditional 

and contemporary theories of maternal subjectivity, intersubjectivity and trans-

subjectivity. As an act of questioning, hysterical enquiry returns the daughter to her 

theoretical and historical roots to investigate the pathways that have articulated her 

development, her condition and subsequent theories of mother-daughter bonds. 

Hence the scope of the daughter’s original inquiry is set through Freudian and 

Lacanian concepts of the unconscious. In effect, the daughter’s search begins as a 

search of herself, within a contextualised metaphorical framework, created within 

available discourse and masculine theories of psychoanalysis. 

Psychoanalysis therefore, not only provides the theoretical underpinnings of 

inquiry, but in terms of this thesis, it sets the boundaries within which the daughter 

can initially inquire. The limitations of hysterical encounter are set within the 

borders of Freud’s unconscious as described in letter 52 to Fliess (Freud & Fliess, 

1985). Lacan (1997b) rereads Freud’s work as a theory of discourse, each realm that 

Freud describes becomes an interactive layer of language structure, including a 

difficult area of transition between unconscious-pre-conscious, that translates 

through Lacan into a ‘wall of language’. This is the place where pure perception 

meets with sound and thought to create meaning, the very foundations of how an 

encounter can begin to be said. What better place for a daughter to initiate her 

search, than the home from whence her hysterical experience has emerged, to trace 

her encounter back to a difficult transition and hopefully, through the wall of 

language. The wall metaphor features prominently throughout this thesis, appearing 



xii 
 

within Chapter One in relation to the barriers between intensive and stay at home 

mothering (Hays, 1996), the private and public, difficulties of transition, 

transcendence, of traversing borders, boundaries, the margins, and the confines of 

containers.  

A psychoanalytic theory involving discourse reveals a depth of language 

structure and a vast yet confined area of inquiry to trace what the project will reveal 

as being a current, fleeting perceptual moment. Hysterical enquiry traverses Freud’s 

(1985) unconscious layers, metaphor, metonym, synchrony, and diachrony (Lacan, 

1997a; 1997b); Lacan’s Symbolic and Imaginary (Lacan, 1997a, 1997b), Levinas’ 

(1978/1995; 1979; 1998) Same, Other and arguably anachrony, the ‘there is’ (Brody, 

1998) and the Real (Lacan, 1997a, 1997b). Gaps are sensed through an uneasiness 

when investigating signifying chains of knowledge, a feeling that perhaps the 

daughter has been here before, yet can’t remember. Grammar and syntax create a 

Symbolic structural conscious connectedness to be negotiated, through which traces, 

as uneasy moments of (un)memorable encounter can emerge/submerge through gaps 

of reality created through inquiry. As the daughter senses the gaps, I take the 

opportunity to search the unconscious pathways they reveal.  

Psychoanalytic theories of masquerade provide added texture to the terrain 

that the daughter searches. Lacan reinterprets traditional mainstream theory as 

creating an impasse of speaking positions. Riviere’s (1929/2008) original mask 

provided a sanctuary in an exemplary display of femininity. Lacan’s mask somehow 

disenfranchises the place of safety as non-existent, highlighting the necessity to 

distinguish between the speaking positions and their available discourses. For 

example, within this thesis, I interpret the mainstream position as suggesting there is 

nothing behind the mask (Tauchert, 2007). The hysteric within a position of enquiry 



xiii 
 

asks questions of these restrictions. Within the mask, the Real and the ‘there is’ is 

unavailable, whereas, within the scope of hysterical enquiry mapped out within the 

bounds of Freud and Lacan’s theories of the unconscious, they are possible spaces to 

seek, even if they can’t be found. Hence, within the text, there are places where I 

have written within/beyond. This is to accommodate both speaking positions. 

Clearly, there are anomalies in relation to speaking positions if we consider the 

context of the inquiry, the most explicit of these being the mother-daughter 

encounter when framed as ‘caregiver-patient’. 

A clarification of these positions has prompted me to draw on Lacan’s four 

discourses, the master, the hysteric, the academic and the analyst to help clarify the 

daughter’s speaking positions as a starting place within the thesis. Again, these 

create an initial framework to consider the multiple positions that enable alternative 

pathways within the scope of the inquiry that is Freud’s unconscious structure. 

Each of the four positions introduced by Lacan take, as explained in Chapter 

Two, particular discursive pathways/speaking positions within the work. For 

example, the daughter labelled as caregiver, speaks from the position of master, as 

does the daughter who fears and shuns her hallucinatory hysteric symptoms. The 

daughter, who speaks the discourses of exhaustion uneasily and wishes to find a way 

to speak her experience, speaks from the position of the hysteric. The daughter who 

conducts the academic inquiry as a genealogy of care is the academic daughter, 

speaking in the discourse of the university and the daughter who critically reads the 

gaps is the analytic daughter. These are the initial positions occupied by the 

daughters and they can change rapidly. I do not always explicitly label the daughters 

throughout the work, given that they may change quickly. Distinctions between them 

can be made by readers, differently.  



xiv 
 

The other jouissance (Lacan, 1999) is also important to hysterical enquiry as 

a point of contention between the discourse of the master and the discourse of the 

hysteric. The hysteric interprets the other jouissance as a possible site for inquiry 

since it might include mother-daughter memory. The contention is born where the 

other jouissance may be situated within/or beyond the realms of consciousness, 

theorised through masculine speaking positions of consciousness. The contention is 

based on a difference in how each daughter speaks the boundaries of the unconscious 

or whose unconscious they are speaking. For example, at least one daughter 

‘believes’ that the other jouissance may exist as ‘possession’ behind Riviere’s mask, 

this being a space that falls within the scope of her inquiry.  

At the end of Chapter Six, the daughter unexpectedly finds herself in the 

ontological and metaphorical wilderness, having stepped outside the boundaries 

within which she is produced, enabling her to extend the scope of inquiry in an effort 

to articulate, and therefore remember an alternative way of becoming. This is 

because linguistic, structural and theoretical frameworks within the existing scope of 

inquiry fail to speak her encounters.  

Now that the daughter has pushed the boundaries past the initial scope of 

inquiry, I introduce the work of Luce Irigaray (1985a), whose critique of both Freud 

and Lacan’s work extends these boundaries and enables Woman, not as a Lacanian 

(1999) not whole, but as non-existent commodified object within the realms phallic 

discourse. Chapters Eight and Nine, continue working with Irigaray’s 

reading/writing in search of memorable mother-daughter encounter, and care. 

Chapter Ten, introduces Bracha Ettinger’s (2006a) work, extending the realms of 

feminine unconsciousness, enabling the daughter to explore further afield than 

previously possible within an unconscious that is theoretically reputed to be 



xv 
 

exclusively feminine. Within the broadening of the scope of hysterical enquiry, the 

daughter continues to (re)tell her story, reworking shifts that she is beginning to 

remember.  

The hysteric searches for her lost encounter. She sets off on a series of 

cyclical quests seeking answers to remember the (un)memorable. Her quests are 

enabled through Butler’s (1987/2004; 2000) critique of Hegel, hence the rhythm of 

the genre is revealed in Chapter Four, within a discussion between Benjamin (1998, 

2007) and Butler (2000) on the theoretical properties of intersubjective thirdness’. 

Within the searching genre, two self-consciousnesses fight to the death within an 

inevitable cycle of failure, however, within the bounds of hysterical enquiry, the 

failure of each cycle does not constitute the failure of the quest. Within the genre of 

hysterical enquiry, each cycle enables the collection of traces and a shift in 

(un)consciousness. Each encounter leaves traces because the daughters’ quest is 

irrevocably altered, whenever the encounter cannot be recalled. Explicitly we seek 

traces for they alert the analytical daughter to gaps and gaps open up a fresh journey 

for the daughters to continue her quest. Implicitly, we note the shift. For example, 

the first quest is initiated by a moment of uneasiness. Throughout her journey, the 

daughter collects traces, a collection of eloquent silences. As the daughter gets closer 

to the wall, the voices become louder. As she shifts the boundaries, the voices can be 

heard as an awakening of trace, enabled by the shifting of the wall. The rhythm of 

the text is also apparent within a retelling of her story and the retelling and 

rethinking of other stories within the interludes, this I like to call, given that the 

genre searches for gaps and paradox, the rhythms of disruption. In Chapter Six we 

are made conscious of another layer of the daughters’ questing, when we consider 

the repetitive discourses of mythology and how they recurrently structure 



xvi 
 

contemporary discourse. There is some merging of the borders here between genre 

and methodology. The genre of the work enables the appearance of methodological 

strategies and materials as the work shifts. Therefore, in itself, the genre is part of the 

methodology of hysterical enquiry.  

Hysterical enquiry as a methodology consists of several strategies. Care is 

pursued and its traces collected and connected within a genealogy of care. I sift 

through theoretical boundaries that string words together synchronically within a 

phallic chain of signifiers to find gaps. However, the pathways enabled by 

unconscious linguistic structure allow the daughter to traverse both consciousness 

and unconsciousness and consider the possibilities that may lie beyond.  

A genealogy of care is assembled, gleaned from our journeys, and put 

together to help build the texture of the inquiry. For example, the thesis begins with 

an exploration of commodified care, within an historical and contemporary context. 

Later, I trace care from Gilligan’s (1977, 1982) work to the present day, and from 

Klein (1932, 1957, 1964) to Gilligan in relation to maternal subjectivity, 

intersubjectivity and trans-subjectivity. I also address the commodification of care, 

its ethical considerations, economic rationalism, and impending techno-ethical 

problems in relation to a feminist ethics of care. Care is explored as other jouissance, 

hysterical symptom and unconscious leakage from prenatal intra-uterine phantasy, a 

lost voice and a lost encounter. Care is not entirely chronologically ordered once 

thought therefore, given that we are made aware of unconscious care within the gaps. 

Hence the non-linear presentation of care genealogy reads as a disruptive strategy to 

the chronological order of historical ‘fact’. Connectedness weaves and dances 

through the realms, threads and texture of the work and although encounters must be 



xvii 
 

pulled into the Said in available and constricting ways, I have left gaps, disruptions 

of chronology emphasising what cannot be said. 

The daughter searches, journeys, encounters, collects her traces and voices, in 

a traditionally cyclical fashion accompanying the eloquent silences where care might 

be, if she could only hear them. As the daughter gets closer to traversing the wall, the 

voices become louder and increase in number thickening and texturing the inquiry as 

we traverse the terrain enabled within the scope of inquiry.  

As mentioned earlier, the daughter’s story can be thought as a psychoanalytic 

case study of hysteria. Hysterical enquiry works within the study and its methods 

unfold as the inquiry proceeds. As I introduce feminist psychoanalytic theory 

through the work of Irigaray and Ettinger, possibilities of memorable diachronic 

genealogy are explored. Genealogy is enabled differently 

In Chapter Seven, Irigaray’s (1985a) concept of mimesis is explored and the 

daughter realises, that a mimetic daughter has been present from the start. She has 

been observing and describing her own case study, her own journey within the strict 

confines of Freud’s unconscious. Hence, it becomes apparent that not all the voices 

within the first part of the thesis are necessarily contained through the four Lacanian 

daughters. Irigaray’s daughter has always been there, she has been unable to be 

heard until now.  

In Chapter Ten, Ettinger’s (2006a) artwork is surveyed as a layered building 

of texture, shade and light, from which a uniquely feminine borderspace can emerge. 

Hence, the reader is invited to reflect upon the thesis as an artwork, where words are 

perceived as shape, shade and colour to build texture. The texture develops from 

chapter to chapter as layer after layer is traversed. Again, this strategy messes with 

the linear and directional properties of conventional academic writing. Hysterical 



xviii 
 

enquiry not only unearths and follows traces of care, jouissance and (un)memory but 

uncovers, through a shifting consciousness, another previously unconscious 

methodological strategy, the possibilities of which can be thought in conjunction 

with Chapter Eight as a trick of the light.  

Within the problematics of the journeys’ confusing directions, with method 

gradually unfolding as the thesis shifts, I have wondered where the (non)cohesion of 

the inquiry emerges. (Non)cohesion is aided by a series of interludes throughout the 

work that appear as disruptions in several forms. Interludes are composed of asides, 

distractions or quests outside of the general scope or rhythm of the chapter. For 

example, there are Borromean Knot interludes that entertain the possibilities of the 

knot and sinthome as areas of inquiry. There are interludes that are an exercise in 

thinking the current area of search with something mentioned earlier in the thesis, 

reframing past or future directions. For example, there is a discussion on the 

similarities between Schreber and Oedipus that exaggerate the searching genre and 

entertain irony. There are also interludes that are positioned between chapters, pieces 

written through various voices that relate to what has been and what might become. 

They sit within chapters, perhaps to fill the gaps and connect the unconnectable. This 

work has accumulated over four years of daily writing; there are many journeys that 

have not made their way into the thesis. I sense the gaps that they leave.  

The thesis is also punctuated with a series of computer generated drawings 

that have been produced throughout the course of my work, most of which have 

appeared on PowerPoint presentations at various conferences and research days. 

They come from ‘fleeting thoughts while writing’ and they are usually produced for 

amusement. I hope you enjoy them and consider them as disruptions of thought, also 

made with a splash of irony, whether conscious or not. 



xix 
 

There are the italic disruptions that read as poetic interludes of feminine 

ecriture, another methodological strategy enabled within the shifting of 

consciousness. These are written by a collection of enabled voices, into which the 

telling of various daughters’ stories merge. Certainly, the structure of the thesis 

becomes more disruptive yet more inclusive as voices are enabled through an 

expanding, shifting scope of inquiry. Disruption is texturalised by the presence of the 

chorus, an ancient form of creative theatre of which little is known, except that they 

articulate themselves within a variety of collective ways. 

The inclusion of the chorus as a strategy to enable voices and ‘being’ 

differently, emphasises the difficulty of writing inclusion within a language that 

isolates speaking positions, amidst a shifting of consciousness and a plasticity of 

ontological boundaries. The following is a fictitious example to demonstrate some of 

the difficulties in writing from several writing positions: ...where I/the daughter(s), 

or all of us integratedly/separately are/is entertaining the possibilit(y)ies...  

As the work shifts, it becomes increasingly difficult to write a feminine 

conscious ‘being’ within the bounds of existing language structure. I have employed 

several writing strategies and phrases to help with this. One of these is the use of /. 

Where I write mother/daughter, I would consider this as an integration of the two. 

Mother-daughter portrays a mother-daughter bond as articulated within mainstream 

theoretical linguistic applications of philosophical perceptions of ‘I’. Therefore, if I 

write something like ‘I/us/integrated interactive yet separate being(s)’, please bear 

with me. I am trying to convey a consciousness of being that does not exist within 

phallic discourse and phallic discourse is the only medium I have to write this work. 

Some of the methodological strategies I have explained, such as mimesis and ‘thesis 

as artwork’ and ‘feminine ecriture’, emergent methodology, and drawing with a 



xx 
 

shakey mouse, are collective strategies I have woken to enact shifts that are not 

easily written. Likewise, the use of I, the daughter, the daughters, the hysterical, 

academic, analytic daughter, the mimetic daughter, are reminders that there is a 

growing collection of voices within the text that are not always easy to 

specify/contain, especially within a project that consciously endeavours to enact a 

shift of consciousness within itself.  

A linear view of the chapters presented 

Having introduced the non-linear and cyclical aspects of the work, what 

follows is an overview or map of the project, to guide you as you journey with us. 

The first four chapters can be seen to provide the foundations for; the genealogy of 

care, care ethics, theoretical underpinnings, the contextualising of hysteria and the 

theories of maternal ‘third’ spaces in which the daughter can initially search for her 

mother-daughter encounter. Chapter One investigates contemporary care in search of 

mother-daughter and traces care to contemporary times through historical caring 

practices, a feminist ethics of care, economic rationalism, political moral practice 

and the mother’s work-life dilemma. This chapter establishes an hysterical catch cry, 

where is care? Where is the encounter that precedes the word? 

In Chapter Two, the daughter turns to psychoanalysis to seek out care. I 

explain the realms of Freud’s unconscious structure and unpack the theoretical 

assumptions that drive this thesis. I clarify my reading of the four initial speaking 

positions and consider how the daughter’s ‘empty care’ can be rationalised through 

Lacan’s theory of discourse. The hysterical daughter asks that we investigate Lacan’s 

claim that ‘woman is not whole’. We listen to the words of the hysteric and 

collectively prepare to investigate the part of woman that can’t be spoken. 



xxi 
 

Having listened to the hysterical daughter, in Chapter Three, I introduce 

Lacan’s (1999) concept of the not whole woman and the other jouissance as possible 

spaces to look for the daughter’s lost encounter. The chapter also provides a 

historical overview of hysteria and it’s ‘origins’ to contextualise methodological 

hysterical enquiry and reveals some interesting connections between hysteria and 

care. Riviere’s (1929/2008) Womanliness as Masquerade is introduced, generated 

from an hysterical position as a possible place where care and the other jouissance 

may be concealed behind the hysterical mask of femininity. 

In Chapter Four the daughter searches a gap exposed by Doane and Hodges 

(1995) in the genealogy of maternal subjectivity. Benjamin’s (1998/2007) ‘third’ is 

then investigated as a possible site for a memorable encounter. Alerted to another 

gap, an uneasiness recorded by Baraitser (2009,) the journey moves deep into the 

confines of Freud’s unconscious structure in search of a mother-child encounter 

within the theoretical confines of Levinas’ paternal alterity. Chapter Four initially 

sets the scene for the genre of the work. The daughters’ searching is aided by the 

introduction of both Butler’s (2000, 1987/2004, 2010) critique of Hegel (1977) and 

Jessica Benjamin’s (1998, 2007) theorising of intersubjectivity. The limits of 

transcendence and the dangers of enquiring beyond signification, such as death and 

madness are explored. 

Having witnessed the madness descending around Antigone’s ethics (Lacan, 

1997a) between Chapters Four and Five, the daughter embarks on a journey into the 

madness of President Schreber’s (1903/2000) memoirs in search of a way to speak 

her hallucinations signified as caregiving exhaustion and therefore hysteria. She 

reads Schreber’s memoirs as an excruciatingly painful splitting that takes place at the 

wall of language. In the process, she is left with an uneasy feeling that there is just as 



xxii 
 

much of interest within the writings of Schreber as for any legitimised theorist of 

‘being’ or ‘becoming’. The question emerges, where are our voices?  

In Chapter Six the daughter sets out on a quest for voice to articulate her 

encounter through the gaps created by a reading of Freud’s (1913/1958) Theme of 

the Three Caskets. She somehow finds herself beyond memory through a trace of the 

forgotten that may well enable her encounter, yet she is at a loss to understand how 

she may speak of it. So her question becomes, how can we enable our voices? In 

other words, she has found fractured integrated voices who are now no longer able to 

speak. She discovers that even silence can be spoken as eloquent and perhaps even 

heard by those whose boundaries of consciousness have shifted. Chapter Six also 

adds texture to the cyclical searching genre of the project. 

Chapter Seven shifts to a reading of Luce Irigaray’s (1985a) Speculum. We 

extend mainstream theoretical frameworks in an effort to reawaken the silenced 

voices that perhaps surface occasionally in discourse as an eloquent silence. This 

chapter provides an overview of Irigaray’s critique of Freud’s essays on woman’s 

sexuality and discusses some anomalies that arise once we extend the boundaries of 

our theoretical framework within a series of interludes. The chapter also sees the 

introduction of another daughter, the mimetic daughter, who, as we explore the 

enabling properties of mimesis, provides one of the first explicit signs of shifting 

borders. 

In Chapter Eight the daughter accompanies Irigaray on her critique of Plato’s 

cave. Although, in Chapters Four and Five, the daughter has misgivings around 

transcendence, the cave offers her a confusion of both direction and light. The 

daughter explains how transcendence toward the light is not all that it initially seems. 



xxiii 
 

Directional confusion suggests that the shadows may be a more fruitful area of 

hysterical enquiry; she has been searching in the wrong direction.  

Chapter Nine addresses how the walls and borders introduced in Chapters 

One and Two may offer a pathway that allows the daughter’s encounter with her 

mother to be spoken if we turn towards them. Yet the borders themselves are 

interesting specular constructions that reflect, incarcerate, shift, relocate and 

displace. 

In an effort to confront the borderspaces she has turned toward, in Chapter 

Ten the daughter journeys into Ettinger’s (2006b) matrixial borderspace. The matrix 

offers a uniquely feminine unconscious space that harbours the other jouissance and 

compassion. This chapter discusses the difficulties of transforming a matrixial 

artwork into phallic discourse. I briefly discuss the possibilities of reversing this 

process, turning phallic discourse into artwork. We discuss the subversive 

possibilities of fluidity as an alternative life force to the matrix, the light it requires 

and gaze at the texture of the work we have so far put together. 

Chapter Ten revisits contemporary care within a global age that pushes 

traditional care ethics into uncharted territory. Braidotti (2006) argues that a feminist 

ethics of care is no longer relevant within a state of advanced capitalism and Tronto 

(2013) discusses why it is, when framed as a democratic ethics. A close rereading of 

Tronto’s definition adds textural depth to Irigaray’s fluidity and Braidotti’s feminist 

uptake of nomadic ethics to open a gateway to transformation, empowerment, 

subjectivity and a means of remembering.  



xxiv 
 

  



xxv 
 

 

Readers’ note: Neo liberalism within the context of hysterical 

enquiry 

Throughout this study, I refer to economic theories of liberalism and neo-

liberalism from time to time. In my understanding, liberalism is underpinned by 

concepts of individual good and personal responsibility. It stems from ‘Smith’s 

invisible hand’ ideology, advocating a minimum of government intervention 

(Becker, 1964). However, Hill (2003) suggests that neo-liberalism requires strong 

government participation, seemingly led by multi-national companies focused on 

profit. For Hill, there has been a shift in power from hands off governing of classic 

liberalism, to global corporations, whom in turn demand strong governance from 

the western world. This governance requires cuts on spending, often targeting 

health services to increase profit margins and the opening up of borders to multi-

national exploration, such as within the oil industry (Hill, 2003), and the 

production of bio-fuels. I discuss neo-liberalism within the context of commodified 

care as a global industry, care as knowledge, the shifting of boundaries and the 

displacement of people within contemporary society. We can also consider 

neoliberal global economics in relation to my reference to discourses of public 

consensus that monitor moral behaviours in the context of health (Chapter Four), 

the mother’s role in caring for the human capital of the future (Chapter One) and 

perhaps even the monitoring of hysterical outbursts through a digitally driven 

practice of witch hunting (Chapter Three). Certainly, neo-liberalism can be thought 

within a paradigm of governing discourses of human behaviour. Gordon, (1991, p. 

43) suggests that neo-liberalism is a mixture of economics and behaviourism. 



xxvi 
 

...whereas homo economicus [within eighteenth century liberalism] 

originally meant that subject the springs of whose activity must remain 

forever untouchable by government, the American neo-liberal homo 

economicus is manipulable man, man who is perpetually responsive to 

changes in his environment. Economic government here joins hands 

with behaviourism.  

 

 

  



xxvii 
 

Contents 

Abstract i 

Acknowledgements iii 

A memorable story v 

Preface: Where is care? vii 

A linear view of the chapters presented xx 

Readers’ note: Neo liberalism within the context of hysterical enquiry xxv 

Contents xxvii 

Table of figures xxxv 

Chapter One: Searching for mother-daughter care within mainstream care research 

and ethical practice 1 

Emerging tensions 2 

Encountering resistance 6 

Engendering ethical divisions 8 

Splitting morality: Justice and care 10 

How to care, ethically 12 

Caring publically 14 

Care’s meanings? 17 

Incalculable care 21 

Commodifying care 22 

How to trade ethically 26 

Rationalisation 27 

Equality and equity as terms of trade 35 

Where is care? 38 



xxviii 
 

Chapter Two: Up against the wall of language 41 

Mapping the contours of the scope of inquiry 42 

Building pathways 44 

Adding texture: Symbolic, Imaginary and Real 45 

“Here we are then, up against the wall” 47 

The signifier and the signified, or  48 

Four available pathways for speaking 51 

Speaking care as... 56 

...the master 57 

...the university 59 

...the analyst 59 

... the hysteric 60 

Care and the master 61 

Interlude: The Borromean Knot 63 

There is nothing beyond discourse 64 

Family complexities: Premature birth 69 

Family reflections: The social ‘I’ 73 

The thing: Desiring the unattainable mother 75 

Over the wall and into the wilderness? 77 

Chapter Three: Opening pathways through contextualising hysterical enquiry 79 

The other jouissance as lost within the pathways of the scope of inquiry 80 

Care, hysteria, jouissance and an uneasy feeling... 82 

Expanding silences 82 

Mapping hysteria 84 

The first lady of psychoanalysis 87 



xxix 
 

Hysterical caring 88 

A problem with articulation 89 

Interlude: A short story of mother-daughter hallucinations 91 

Writing the mother out of hysteria 92 

A quarter turn 96 

Interlude: The Borromean Knot...again 96 

Women, witches, hysterics, mothers, daughters, caregivers... 100 

Hysterical men or just men behaving badly? 101 

Why witches are women 102 

Hysteria bleeds 104 

Masquerading mothers and closing down an avenue for hysterical enquiry 108 

Readers’ note: Chapter Four 115 

Chapter Four: (Un)memorable encounters 117 

Maternal objects 118 

A ‘good-enough’ mother 121 

The mother’s presence as object: Mothering a nation 123 

The Mother’s absence as subject: Mothering a daughter 125 

A maternal space of encounter 126 

Creating spaces 128 

An uneasy feeling in translation 130 

Exploring the gap: A mother’s hysterical journey 131 

A fleeting encounter 134 

Transcending to the Said 139 

Something forgotten: Sexuality, Eros, and the other jouissance 140 

The father, son and genealogical infinity 143 



xxx 
 

Resurrection 144 

What of mother-daughter (un)memories 147 

Inter-chapter interlude: A gap filled with the daughter’s journeying thoughts…

 151 

Sophocles, Antigone and a strange alliance between tragedy and beauty 153 

Antigone’s fate: An hysterical warning 157 

A short and unexpected auditory hallucination from the chorus 158 

A very short note on the chorus 159 

Chapter Five: Precarious pathways: Schreber, God and  the feminine 161 

Reflections 163 

Weaving reality: Schreber’s historic legacy 165 

Rationalising rationality 167 

Passive thoughts and a rush of libido 169 

Interlude: The severing/feathering of other jouissance 171 

For the love of God 173 

Interlude: The Borromean Knot...yet again 176 

Submitting to God 176 

Marrying God 177 

Conversing with God 179 

An impossible relation 179 

Reflections of a nervous illness 180 

Inter-chapter interlude: The Sphinx’s story 185 

Interlude within an interlude: Some thoughts on riddling 187 

Chapter Six: Murmuring silences 191 

A widening gap between gods and men 193 



xxxi 
 

Finding a path through metaphorical congestion 195 

A choice of three 197 

The value of silence 198 

Interlude: Silence speaks 200 

An eloquent silence 201 

Missing voices in cyclical myth 203 

Primary echo 205 

Shifting perceptions 207 

A woman for each season 210 

Interlude: Exit, stage right 211 

Ideological shifts and a confusion of numbers 212 

Interlude: Treading the boards 213 

Counting reflections 215 

Shifting consciousness and enabling pathways 216 

Into the wilderness...and out of the scope of inquiry 218 

Inter-chapter interlude: Demeter and Persephone 223 

Chapter Seven: The mysteries of femininity 229 

What do women want? 230 

A biological inscription of philosophical essence 232 

Interlude: Thoughts on passivity, activity, hysteria, Antigone, Schreber and 

sinthome 235 

The development of female sexuality 238 

The daughter-mother split 240 

Interlude: So what about a daughter born from a mother-daughter union? 240 

The benevolent father and the malevolent mother 242 



xxxii 
 

Masculine genealogy 244 

Woman as ‘lack’: A phallic economy 247 

The impotence of a phallic economy 248 

The fruit of a phallic economy 251 

The goods of the phallic economy 252 

Interludes 253 

Essence, essentialism and Irigaray 253 

Mimesis 258 

Masquerade revisited: Some handy things to know about woman’s lack: 260 

Narcissism 260 

Weaving the threads of Freud’s mask 261 

Penis envy as the basis for feminist care ethics 261 

Masquerade 262 

Masquerade, mimesis, sadness, and a touch of irony 263 

Interlude: The intensive and the working mother revisited 266 

Chapter Eight: The myth of the cave 271 

Form by firelight 272 

A mirror double abyss 281 

Interlude: A short revision of care so far 283 

Chapter Nine: Shifting shadows and impermeable boundaries 287 

Blurred shapes, shifting lines 288 

Bio-medical ethical boundaries 292 

A feminine corporeal ethics 294 

Colonisation of women’s bodies 295 



xxxiii 
 

Solidity, fluidity, and abjection 296 

Abjection 298 

Interlude: Echoes 299 

Echoes and mud puddles 303 

Disturbing leakage 308 

Chapter Ten: Borderspace: Texture, light and shadow 313 

Emerging from the canvas: Shadow and light 314 

Filling the void within the texture of the canvas: A gap in the genealogy of care

 316 

The phallic gaze 318 

The artist’s gaze 318 

Womb phantasy and the mother’s phantasy 320 

Me-not me 321 

A womb with a view? 323 

Contextualising the matrix 326 

Active in part and passive in part 329 

The return of her secret 329 

A poetic pause for refraction 332 

Care’s resonance as a product of hysterical pursuit 332 

Care as a product of the matrix 333 

The production of care as a contemporary commodity 334 

Strings of care that dapple the textural production of light and shadow 337 

A daughter’s story revisited through the gaze of the prism? 339 

“As air is to echo of a voice, so is the gaze to painting” 341 

Fluidity of poetics and/or the poetics of fluidity 344 



xxxiv 
 

I and not I? 344 

A fluid pause beyond ontology 346 

A caregiver’s encounter, shifting again 346 

Chapter Eleven: Rewriting (un)memory 349 

A schizophrenic society 353 

Care-bots and robo-dogs 355 

I care 358 

A democratic feminist ethics 362 

…web, matrix, river, fluidity, sound, writing, reading ebbing, flowing… 378 

Postscript: A specular journey through Freud’s (un)conscious and beyond: 

Transformations 381 

References 393 

  



xxxv 
 

Table of figures 

Figure 1. Hays’ wall. 7 

Figure 2. The author’s reproduction of de Saussure’s original formula (Thom, 1981, 

p. 11). 49 

Figure 3. The author’s reproduction of Lacan’s (re)interpretation of de Saussure’s 

notion of the shifting nature of the signified (Lacan, 2006a, p. 416-417). 50 

Figure 4. The four set positions around which Lacan's equations revolve in quarter 

turns. 51 

Figure 5. An inevitable shifting of the set positions. (Lacan, 2007, p. 93). 52 

Figure 6. Lacan's four discourses (Lacan, 1999, p. 16). 54 

Figure 7. Four speaking positions as they rotate to the position of agency. 56 

Figure 8. The Borromean Knot and the four daughters of Lacan. 64 

Figure 9. The Borromean Knot breaks amidst a flurry of hysterical writing. 99 

Figure 10. An exercise in hysterical enquiry. 146 

Figure 11. Moses and the burning bush. 175 

Figure 12. Oedipus’ theory of human development. 246 

Figure 13. Plato's cave. 277 

Figure 14. A typical ending. 285 

Figure 15. Reading care. 365 

 

  



xxxvi 
 

  



1 
 

Chapter One: Searching for mother-daughter care within 

mainstream care research and ethical practice 
 

I write this chapter as a daughter exploring the relationship I shared with my 

mother and the positioning of myself through a gendered role of caregiver at the end 

of her life. From this position, I efficiently struggled as caregiver, acting the part of 

responsible daughter, while I silently screamed at my impending loss; an 

indescribable and unspeakable loss. I still ponder as to where mother and daughter 

were when this tragedy played out within public discourses of home care. How did 

mother and daughter become positioned in the final scene as caregiver and caree?  

In an effort to locate both mother and daughter, I explore discourses of 

contemporary public-private motherhood and the growing confusion over the 

meaning of care, along with the growing responsibilities for mothers to care 

appropriately for their children. Within discourses of nature versus nurture, expert 

knowledge appears to be winning the battle over a mother’s private capacity to care 

for her child. The chapter traces how child-care has become positioned as something 

that mothers need to be taught, including lessons on the physical activities of 

actually doing it. The contemporary notion of care as meaning an ethical practice to 

be taught and learned, leads to a discussion of the emergence of a feminist ethics of 

care around the early 1980s. Through the work of Carol Gilligan (1982), endorsed in 

the 1990s by Tronto (1993) and Sevenhuijsen (1998), feminist ethics of care is 

connected through political theories of citizenship and responsibility to its capacity 

for guiding a global age within an eclectic array of disciplines. 

 



2 
 

Emerging tensions 

Western ideologies of liberalism and Christianity endorse a belief that 

motherhood skills are not innate, in-born, that they can be learned and should be 

taught. The correct way to mother can be discovered through scientific research and 

this knowledge is accredited to the less capable through cultural norms and education 

(Hays, 1996). Although in contemporary times care teachings may now manifest 

differently in the form of programmes or courses, the idea that mothers should be 

instructed how to mother has evolved from early colonial evangelism (Skeggs, 

1997). In the late 1800s and early 1900s, for example, women’s homes were 

established as products of Christian based social work to save poor, fallen, morally 

bereft and pregnant women, impart mothering skills and to set them on a path of 

righteousness (Hays, 1996; Tennant, 1992). Chapman (2003, p. 85) airs the views of 

Frederick Truby King, the founder of the New Zealand Plunket society, on mothers 

and their need to be instructed in mothering:  

His description of women as 'densely ignorant' of the duties of maternity 

helps explain his simplification of feeding schedules. King wanted a 

simple regime for baby feeding that could be taught by Plunket nurses and 

adhered to by nursing mothers. 

A legacy of writings by child rearing experts such as Brazelton (1983, 1987) 

and Dr. Spock (1946) emphasise that mothers must be careful not to psychologically 

damage the child by impeding normal development through inadvertent acts of bad 

mothering (Hays, 1996). Good intentions and animal instinct were considered 

insufficient means to nurture children. Now, in 2014, ‘parenting’ courses are rife, 

administered to inexperienced, experienced, bad, abused and/or financially 

struggling mothers by experts represented within contemporary society as resources 



3 
 

of knowledge (Millei & Lee, 2007). Internet sites offer many of these courses. For 

example, “Love, Laughter, and Limits (2013) “teaches you practical ways to be a 

warm, positive, and happy parent” and the success of the programme is attributed to 

it being “based on extensive research.”  

Many parenting and caregiving courses advertised on the internet place an 

emphasis on caring in the private sphere. Some are propped up by government 

funding and often offered alongside relationship counselling and budget advisory 

services as interventions for family violence, child neglect and poverty. Since 2004, 

the New Zealand Government has committed millions of dollars to the contractual 

delivery of parenting courses alongside policies of child protection, risk assessment 

and early intervention (Bennett, 2009, 2012).  

In the context of global neoliberal economic policy, these courses operate in 

a contractual basis of decentralisation (Vandenbroeck, 2006), providing superficial 

answers to the contemporary hardships of western globalisation, such as the 

widening of the gap between rich and poor (Vandenbroek, Roose & De Bie, 2011). 

Recently, the introduction of a Corporate-Government food-in-schools programme 

has seen much public ideological debate on the inabilities and irresponsibility of the 

poor and the marginalised in providing for their children (Edwards, 2013). Across 

the Tasman, Australia’s semi-funded Smart Population Foundation Initiative is one 

of many globally distributed organisations that position children at risk and parents 

as responsible for gaining sufficient skill for ‘good’ or ‘smart’ parenting. The 

foundation expounds universal truths about parenting through fundamental rules that 

apply to all cultures (Millei & Lee, 2007). The mother’s role is seen as pivotal to the 

normative development of the child and within neo-liberal policies of individual 

responsibility, everyone has the same opportunities to succeed; the mother is 



4 
 

ultimately responsible for any hardships the child may be perceived as suffering 

(Vandenbroeck, 2006).  

The mother as individual, increasingly shoulders a huge global responsibility. 

The correct development of the child is considered vital for the future of western 

civilisation in the guise of potential knowledge, human capital and adequate 

workforce (Millei & Lee, 2007). This development is deemed dependent on the 

performance of the mother, and the magnitude or intensity of the mothering asserted. 

The mother is a good mother, or a bad mother (Johnson & Swanson, 2006; Marshall, 

Godfrey & Renfrew, 2007).  

Within normative development theory, a bad mother can be both smothering 

and overbearing or cause harmful health problems to her children through neglect: 

both can impede normative development. A good mother strikes a successful balance 

between the two outer margins of bad mothering (Soler, 2006). She requires the 

skills of a tightrope walker, to tiptoe perfectly down the middle of two extremes 

carefully abiding by what socially constitutes responsible caregiving practices, 

within conflicting discourses of good mothering. Within western society, what 

constitutes either a good and a bad mother is becoming more and more difficult to 

fathom within changing economic ideals. For example, scientific mothering research 

recognises the nutritional and developmental benefits of breastfeeding for the child 

(Winikoff & Laukaran, 1989), although breastfeeding in public is not socially 

encouraged (Mahon-Daley & Andrews, 2002); a difficult dilemma when feeding on 

demand is the preferred practice over rigid time schedules once advocated by experts 

such as Dr. Spock (1946). Debates on the correct way to mother, therefore are 

ongoing. One debate concerns the benefits and risks of parent-infant co-sleeping as a 

western practice, impacting on a mother’s responsibility to her family and 



5 
 

contemporary society as a whole (Keller & Goldberg, 2004; McKenna, Mosko, 

Richard, Drummond, Catel & Arpaia, 1994; Millei & Lee, 2007). 

Mothers are no longer required to stay at home; indeed, they are encouraged 

to work, a trend pushed by global politics and economic policy (Dyson, 2004; 

McInnes, 2006). Contemporary economics has further complicated the boundaries 

that constitute a good mother. Although Western women’s participation in the 

workforce is an economic necessity for both domestic and global success (McInnes, 

2006), the guilt of immersing the child within a professional day-care or caregiving 

system remains (Hays, 1996; Kahu & Morgan, 2007).  

The discourses of working mothers have adapted to highlight the positive 

aspects of early separation so that when the mother pursues her own goals, she is 

available and stimulated to spend quality time with the child. This is more beneficial 

to her child than the quantity of time that the intensive, unfulfilled mother has 

available for mothering duties (Barnett, 2005; Bianchi, 2000; Galinsky, 2005; 

Johnson & Swanson, 2007). For the working mother, day care provides socialisation 

skills and early learning opportunities. Having the child in day-care also gives the 

working mother the freedom to develop her self-actualisation (Lupton & Schmied, 

2002) and self-realisation (Bailey, 2000) in a space outside of motherhood where she 

has her own goals and an opportunity to achieve them. Working mothers therefore 

articulate the integration of motherhood and public life as beneficial to both mother 

and child. 

The discourses of stay at home intensive mothers induce worries about the 

changing attitudes and contemporary economic pressures to go out to work. 

Intensive mothers struggle, like the working mother, with shifting motherhood 

ideologies of what makes a good mother and a bad mother (Hays, 1996). Staying 



6 
 

with her child for at least the first few years of its life is vital for the child’s normal 

development. The more time the mother spends with her child, the better the quality 

of the care the child receives. The stay at home mother articulates her role as 

necessary for the child: it is better for the child to be with the mother than to be 

amongst strangers at day-care (Barnett, 2005; Bianchi, 2000; Galinsky, 2005; 

Johnson & Swanson, 2007; Kahu & Morgan, 2007). The early mother-child bond 

becomes a necessary component of good mothering and healthy child development. 

Self-actualisation is constituted as a selfish act of bad mothering and cannot compete 

with the pleasures of selfless mothering (Bailey, 2000; Lupton & Schmied, 2002). 

Now that the economy requires a dual-earning household, the intensive 

mother increasingly feels pressured to join the workforce. To be socially acceptable, 

the decision to home-mother requires the economic stability of a partner who earns 

enough for all of them (Barnett, 2005). Economically speaking, ‘public concensus’ 

seemingly offers a rationale that stay at home solo mothers produce babies for 

money as a lazy alternative to employment, draining limited economic resources that 

could be allocated to those really in need of a ‘hand up’ as opposed to a ‘hand out’ 

(Key, 2008). On bowing to economic pressure and public consensus to enter the 

workforce, the work predominantly available in the public domain for women is 

casual, part-time, poorly paid and service related (Connolly & Gregory, 2008; Fine, 

2007). Even an adequate or good wage becomes problematic with the limited hours 

of work offered within the public domain (Barnett, 2005). 

Encountering resistance 

The journey that contemporary motherhood embarks upon from the private 

domain to the public domain is disrupted by a boundary or divide that marks the 

threshold between two economic discourses (Hays, 1996). The contemporary good 



7 
 

mother is indeed required to walk a confusing line between the extremes of a 

neglectful working mother and a smothering intensive mother, finding a perfect 

work-life balance. Work-life balancing acts embrace part-time, casual and 

contractual work as flexible working hours created for the good of the mother and 

the child. Hays (1996) describes the mother’s predicament as follows: 

The wall between the public and private spheres, always inadequately 

maintained, now has many cracks...one would expect this fragile barrier to 

completely crumble and the ideology of intensive mothering to be crushed 

under its weight. (p. 153) 

 

Figure 1. Hays’ wall. 

The wall, as described by Hays is a dangerous place for the intensive mother, 

yet the journey across, or indeed, along it, for the working mother must also be 

precarious, with the prospects of falling into the murky depths of bad motherhood on 

both sides of the divide. The working mother, in an economic act of good mothering, 

strains the wall of public-private divide to breaking point and threatens to crush a 

DANGER  



8 
 

long-standing philosophical ideal, the moral good of being a full time mother, once 

considered the epitome of good mothering. Hays’ wall metaphor highlights a place 

of conflict, a busy place of confusion where what is constituted as good mothering 

constantly shifts and slides, creating continuous change between a supposedly 

natural universal responsibility to the child and what is required to achieve it. Hays’ 

metaphorical wall represents a site of contestation. It separates the private and public 

domains like a linguistic tectonic plate and its instability holds unexplained dangers 

for both intensive and working mothers. These dangers appear to be initiated at the 

point of or the surrounds of, ethical impasse as maternal care reluctantly goes public. 

Engendering ethical divisions 

The shifting ethical dilemmas of the public and private spatial boundaries are 

not specifically centred around contemporary questions of mothers’ work-life 

balance: they are ongoing and were most famously accentuated by Carol Gilligan 

(1977, 1982) through a critique of Lawrence Kohlberg’s (1981) work on the moral 

reasoning of children. Inspired by the work of Rawls on liberalism and justice and 

both Freud and Piaget’s theories on normative development, Kohlberg studied moral 

reasoning (Okin, 1989). He developed a range of stories, followed by questions, the 

answers divided into six hierarchical levels of response: the answer to each dilemma 

decided the participant’s stage of moral reasoning. Initially working with a cohort of 

60 boys, Kohlberg concluded that there was a natural progression of reasoning 

stages, the highest of which was not necessarily attainable for everyone (Porter, 

1972). Gilligan (1977, 1982), incensed by what she considered to be Kohlberg’s 

biased sampling and findings, implemented her own series of studies and critiques 

that included vignettes developed for Kohlberg’s scale. 



9 
 

Child participants Jake and Amy considered the following fictitious situation. 

Heinz has a sick wife who is dying from a specific kind of cancer and is in 

immediate need of medication. A druggist has developed the medicine and is 

outrageously overcharging for it. Heinz has managed to borrow half of the money, 

but the druggist will not take this as a payment, even though he would still be 

making a handsome profit (Kohlberg, 1981; Porter, 1972).  

In accordance with Kohlberg’s (1981) questionnaire, Gilligan’s (1982) 

participants were asked if it would be morally acceptable for Heinz to steal the 

medicine to save his wife’s life. Jake suggested that it would be morally justifiable. 

His wife is irreplaceable and the chemist can recoup the money from other 

customers. Saving the life of his wife in this fashion requires a moral judgement 

above the law and such a judgement, for Kohlberg scores higher on his stages of 

moral reasoning. For Amy, the decision is far more complicated. She knows that 

Heinz’s wife will die without medicine, yet there must be other ways to procure it 

without stealing. Heinz must try to reason with the chemist and make him see sense 

before resorting to crime. Besides, what would happen to his wife if Heinz was sent 

to jail? Who would procure the medicine for the next time she needed it urgently? 

How would the incarceration of Hans affect his family and friends? Amy’s 

reluctance to reason above the law would score her lower on Kohlberg’s scale of 

moral reasoning. 

Within a combination of methodological and theoretical uneasiness towards 

Kohlberg’s original findings, Gilligan (1982) disputed Kohlberg’s (1981, 1982) 

measurement of moral reasoning as andocentric. In other words, a masculine bias 

within experimental research methods and western cultural social norms were the 

reasons for the hierarchical positioning of masculine and feminine responses to 



10 
 

Kohlberg’s questionnaire. Although Gilligan agreed that there were differences in 

the moral reasoning of boys and girls as demonstrated by their differing answers, she 

argues that one form of reasoning was in no way superior or inferior to the other. For 

Gilligan, boy’s reason with a public morality of justice while girl’s reason with a 

private morality of care.  

Splitting morality: Justice and care  

The different psychoanalytic underpinnings to both Kohlberg and Gilligan’s 

work were possibly a catalyst to the reinterpretation of Kohlberg’s (1981) research. 

While Kohlberg relied on the androcentric reasoning of Freud and Piaget’s work 

(Gilligan, 1977, 1982), Gilligan was influenced by the theorising of Chodorow 

(1978) who was also uncomfortable with the masculine bias of mainstream 

psychoanalysis. Mainstream psychoanalysis insists that girls be alienated from their 

mothers as part of the process of normative development. According to Chodorow 

(1978, p.167) however: 

Girls emerge with a stronger basis for experiencing another’s needs or 

feelings as one’s own (or of thinking that one is so experiencing another’s 

needs and feelings). Furthermore, girls do not define themselves in terms 

of the denial of pre-oedipal relational modes to the same extent as do boys. 

Therefore, regression to these modes tends not to feel as much a basic 

threat to their ego. From very early, then, because they are parented by a 

person of the same gender ... girls come to experience themselves as less 

differentiated than boys, as more continuous with and related to the 

external object-world and as differently oriented to their inner object-

world as well. 

Masculinity, according to Chodorow, develops through maternal separation 

and femininity through strong and continuous maternal ties. As relationship builders 



11 
 

and kin-keepers, girls are framed as different but equal, the woman centred on the 

care of others and the man, centred on justice, individualism and perhaps moral 

education. 

Within Gilligan’s (1982) study, Amy’s reasoning around the dilemma of 

Heinz and his wife shows a response that strives to strengthen community 

networking and normative hetero-sexual relations through the relational questions 

that inform her response. Although Kohlberg’s (1981) work suggests that girls 

followed the same pathway as boys ‘badly’, the influence of Chodorow on Gilligan’s 

research allowed Gilligan to discover that there are different dialectic ethical 

pathways open for women and men. 

Gilligan’s (1977, 1982) ‘discovery’ of private moral care-centre reasoning 

has not been without its adversaries. Kohlberg (1982) vigorously disputed the 

suggestion of androcentrism and two separate, gendered moralities, suggesting any 

anomalies of gender were due to ‘position’ and economic status. There have also 

been questions raised by Kerber (1986) over the rigour of Gilligan’s research, 

suggesting that the differences identified by Gilligan are due to socio-economic 

factors, such as educational opportunity that are somehow unrelated to gendered 

moral reasoning. Kerber also suggests Gilligan’s work can be framed as simplistic 

romanticism, with no real theoretical or historical substance. A criticism by Stack 

(1986) frames Gilligan’s research as firmly entrenched in middle class white hetero-

normativity and this is most definitely the case, even though originally driven by the 

inequities of masculinist research design. Gilligan (1986) herself notes that her 

critics are quick to point to similar research indicating that there is in fact no 

difference at all between the reasoning styles of men and women. Yet she suggests 

that these critiques must also concede there is every indication within society that 



12 
 

there is a difference. Women most definitely adhere and respond to sets of feminine 

tasks and responsibilities that convey cultural expectations.  

Kerber (1986) also articulates another criticism levelled at Gilligan. Although 

Chodorow (1978), who underpins Gilligan’s work, advocates cultural expectations 

as the catalyst for the formation of gender identity (in that mothers are culturally 

responsible for childcare and girls stay aligned with the mother longer than boys do), 

Gilligan has been charged with producing a theory of biological determinism. In 

hindsight, this is not surprising: Gilligan is one of the early advocates of equitable 

sexual difference, and such theories are continually dogged with charges of 

biological determinism whether justified or not (Chanter, 2006). Indeed, Gilligan’s 

somewhat ambiguous disclaimer (1982, p. 2) does little to clarify her stance:  

No claims are made about the origins of differences described or their 

distribution in the wider population, across cultures or through time. Clearly 

these differences arise in a social context where factors of social status and 

power combine with reproductive biology to shape the experience of males and 

females and the relation of the sexes. 

Yet despite these criticisms and the ambiguity of her defence, Gilligan’s 

work has continued to be acknowledged as a foundational basis from which to 

theorise feminist care ethics. 

How to care, ethically 

Nel Nodding (1984) reframes the underpinnings of Gilligan’s care by 

situating care as an Aristotelian virtuous practice. Such a practice is possible only in 

a good home within the private domain where it is administered by the long-

suffering stay at home mother. Thus, ethical care continues within the framework 

criticised by Stack (1986) as a luxury of the white middle classes, endorsing neo-



13 
 

liberal doctrines of individual responsibility. If you are poor, your child suffers, and 

it is ultimately your fault (Vandenbroeck, Roose & De Bie, 2011). 

Despite these disturbing restrictions of economic class, culture and colour, 

Aristotelian virtue ethics continues a prominent role within discourses of care ethics 

and good mothering. McLaren (2001), who suggests that a feminist ethics of care 

would be better framed as a virtue ethics, is concerned that Gilligan’s (1982) ethics 

frames care as a uniquely feminine attribute even though women’s responsibility for 

care is a product of western cultural oppression. It becomes difficult for McLaren to 

imagine how a difference that is the product of oppression could enhance women. As 

an alternative, McLaren suggests that the Aristotelian ethical virtues of neatness and 

sensitivity to shame can be adopted to counteract the oppression of women that 

forms the basis of feminist care. Virtue ethics equates living a good and beautiful life 

to a public or social good and it appears that McLaren is tempering the private 

somewhat sullied caring attributes of women with the justice of man to not only add 

rigour, but also to escape the ever present criticisms of ‘gendered’ biological 

determinism. The integration of care with virtue ethics requires a movement of care 

ethics from the private domain of normative gendered development into the public 

domain of the social good in an attempt to blur, or in other words, reunite, the 

boundaries between the two. 

Tessman (2001) suggests that living the good life in the Aristotelian sense is 

oppressive to the poor and the marginalised, framing them as morally damaged yet 

still individually accountable. Both McLaren (2001) and Nodding’s (1984) melding 

of care and virtue cripple and enable simultaneously, producing a form of care that 

tends to its own damage, yet again indicating a somewhat turbulent encounter close 

to the border of the public and private. As the history of debated feminist care ethics 



14 
 

implies, the main aim appears to be blurring this boundary between the public and 

private, (re)uniting care with justice however paradoxical and risky it might be. For 

instance, Kohlberg’s ethical hierarchical stages that frame women and their caring 

practices as inferior, refuses to acknowledge distinctions of public/private, 

justice/care yet the turn to Aristotelian virtue ethics in contemporary feminist ethics 

of care unwittingly advocates just that. 

Gilligan (1977, 1982) has accentuated a much discussed and contested 

difference, centred on the shifting borders of the public and private that form the 

basis of care ethics. An ethics of care, however, paradoxically strives to eliminate 

difference by championing the equity of care and justice publically, the difference 

being a conscious alignment between the two. Yet within cultural and linguistic 

structures of androcentrism, the (re)amalgamation of the two can only mean that care 

again becomes subordinate to justice. Chodorow’s and Gilligan’s maternal care gets 

lost when a feminist ethical care joins the intensive and the working mother and 

totters precariously on Hays’ metaphoric wall, as it shifts its alignment to public, 

political and global concerns. 

Caring publically 

For Tronto (1993), ethical differences are born from the exclusion of women 

from positions of political power rather than the psychoanalytically underpinned 

formation of gendered identities. This important shift in the formation of care ethics 

is emphasised by Fisher and Tronto’s heavily quoted definition of both a feminist 

ethics of care and its practical applications in feminist care ethics writing:  

On the most general level, we suggest that caring be viewed as a species 

activity that includes everything that we do to maintain our ‘world’ so that we 

can live as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, ourselves, and our 



15 
 

environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex life sustaining 

web. (Tronto, 1993, p. 103) 

A politicised care, as suggested by Tronto (1993) frames care as a practice 

where a heightened awareness of another’s needs must also heighten an awareness of 

justice. Tronto has developed guidelines for ethical practice that comprises of four 

stages: attentiveness, responsibility, competence and responsiveness. These stages of 

awareness describe a process of identifying need and an ethical responsibility to act. 

Sevenhuijsen (1998, p. 137) endorses Tronto’s guidelines for implementing public 

policy to ensure equitable citizenship: 

In order to understand the political dimensions of these values, it should be 

emphasised that they are not abstract norms that can be invoked when 

considering a particular situation; rather they should be seen as moral and 

cognitive attitudes or ‘epistemological’ virtues. 

The political referred to by Tronto (1993) and Sevenhuijsen (1998) therefore 

appears steeped within philosophical ethics of encounter and morality, inclusive of a 

social ethics of virtue, the sort of virtue that has the potential, through prescriptive 

moral practice, to create the morally inept and the socially inferior while 

simultaneously setting up the means for their salvation. To care or not to care, who 

cares, who doesn’t care, who is in need of care, who fits into theoretical guidelines as 

deserving: these are philosophical questions of ethical moral practice that are 

noticeable within varied and various ethical codes that are adhered to by different 

sectors of health professionals. They are questions generated from a public notion of 

care, shifting further and further away from the private developmental origins 

identified by Gilligan (1977, 1982). 



16 
 

Hollway’s (2006) thesis incorporates Tronto’s (1993) description of ethical 

care to guide care back to its maternal beginnings. Hollway combines mother-child 

intersubjectivity in the form of the (un)thought known, a mother-child 

intersubjective pre-post natal relation with the long-suffering mother-child-object 

generated from Klein (1932, 1957, 1960) and Winnicott’s (1975, 1987, 1989) 

theories of object-relations. For Hollway, the role of the long-suffering mother plays 

out within a triadic relationship of parent-child. The triadic relationship shifts a dual 

mother-child emphasis to a parent-child triad, rendering the mother linguistically 

indistinguishable from the father. Hollway suggests that triadic parental 

responsibility equates with equity in both the public and private domains. 

The triad in the context of Hollway’s (2006) work, is a contemporary 

development of Chodorow’s (1978) mother-daughter attachment theory, and sits 

well within the current trend for parental tuition, dual role caring duties and work-

life balance, although it trivialises the emphasis on mother-child relations for stay at 

home mothers. For example, in a study by Kahu (2006), a participant struggled to 

name her relationship with her child, until the interviewer suggested that perhaps the 

word she was searching for was mothering. 

Yet Hollway (2006) does make some distinctions between parent-child and 

mother-child relations from within the paradigm of object-relations theory. For 

Hollway, the mother-child connection develops the capacity to care and the ability to 

function normally within the public domain. This connection is also available to a 

caregiver although it is not as strong given the lack of the pre-birth mother-child 

connections. Long-suffering motherhood is a contributing factor to developing a 

caring capacity, achievable also through caring friendships. Although Hollway takes 

care public and parental within contemporary work-life balance discourse, she is 



17 
 

careful to insist on its feminine origins. Therefore, she fuses care and the embodied 

feminine with contemporary politics and its confusing ethical dilemmas, leaving us 

no better off in our pursuit of understanding it. We are still not sure what care is, let 

alone where it is, even though Tronto (1993) supplies a broad set of guidelines to 

detect its need and administer it when necessary.  

Since care’s entrance into contemporary public discourse, a feminist ethics of 

care has been discussed as a solution to ethical dilemmas of child-care (Cockburn, 

2005) disability (Morris, 2001) business (Borgerson, 2007; Burton & Dunn, 1996; 

Simola, 2003), nursing (Condon, 1992), economics (Sevenhuijsen, 1998, 2002, 

2003; Smith, 2005), geography (Popke, 2006) and globalisation (Held, 1998, 2008; 

Tronto, 2003, 2006, 2008). This widespread acceptance appears unconditional of 

theoretical racist, masculinist and classist skeletons in the metaphorical closet and a 

disturbing conundrum as to what care signifies remains a puzzling mystery. 

Care’s meanings? 

Establishing what constitutes care and how we produce it is a difficult if not 

impossible task. Gilligan’s (1982) and Hollway’s (2006) care is underpinned by 

maternal care, yet this care is disengaged when taken up as a political and a public 

issue. Care also becomes confused with questions of philosophical encounter when 

discussed within the bounds of virtue ethics, long-suffering motherhood and 

caregiving. 

Within traditional research, taking care of another person manifests as a list 

of physical activities such as washing, toileting, transporting, shopping, gardening 

and administrating with no complicating consideration of companionship and 

psychological support (Gubrium, 1995; James, 1992). This has prompted Gubrium 



18 
 

(1995) to suggest that some understanding of the diversity of care and the multiple 

discourses that represent it is necessary to ensure its delivery. 

Both Forbat (2005) and Stalker (2003) agree that care is a relatively recent 

word from which many derivatives are developing. These include formal and 

informal care, carers and carees, service providers and service users as well as 

‘inadequate’ care that is representative of ‘abusive’ care. The term ‘care’ first 

appeared in research in the late 1970s (Bytheway & Johnson, 1998), not long before 

Gilligan’s (1982) groundbreaking discovery of gendered differences in moral 

reasoning. ‘Care’ did not appear formally in dictionaries until 1984 (Forbat, 2005) 

and its appearance and subsequent expansion of meaning coincides with the 

resurgence of a western global knowledge based economy, the mother’s work-home 

dilemma and the advent of carers’ associations.  

Carers’ associations have developed to support those caring for family at 

home by providing them with peer groups and government funding (Barnes, 2006). 

Indeed, the first carers’ association established in Britain in 1981, evolved in 

conjunction with one of the first working definitions of care. In the context of this 

definition, carers are described as “Anyone who is leading a restricted life because of 

the need to look after a person who is mentally or physically handicapped or ill, or 

impaired by old age” (Stalker, 2003, p. 17), noticeably excluding mothers of 

dependent children. The description places the carer as ‘burdened’ and according to 

Stalker there is a vast body of early care research that investigates caring in this light, 

generated by feminist concern for the burdens and hardship caring imposed on 

unpaid and unsupported familial caregivers. Therefore, from the early 1980s to the 

present day, mainstream research has investigated the mysteriously constituted care 

and the effects, either good or bad that its administration might have on the carer. 



19 
 

This research covers caregiver burden (Essex & Hong, 2005), caregiver strain 

(Bernard & Guarnaccia, 2003), caregiver stresslessness (Pinquant & Sorenson, 

2005), caregiver aggression (Shaffer, Dooley & Williamson, 2007), caregiver 

distress (Gallagher-Thompson & Coon, 2007), caregiver attachment (Cicerelli, 

1995), caregiver’s decision-making (Cicerelli, 2006), caregiver’s personality traits 

(Hollis-Sawyer, 2003) and caregiving skill (Schumacher, Stewart, Archbold, Dodd 

& Dibble, 2000). Yet there has been little emphasis on how care affects both the 

cared for and the relationship between them and the carer (Bowlby, 2011). 

Meanwhile, the production of definitions of both care and caregivers 

continues. A common definition of caring, according to Walker, Pratt and Eddy 

(1995, p. 402), requires “one or more family members [to] give aid or assistance to 

other family members beyond that required of normal everyday life.” Yet according 

to Walker and Pratt (1991), this exposes the difficulty of separating friendship, 

companionship and acts of aid. A family friend, shopping for a family member, may 

be doing so out of friendship, not because the friend cannot do his or her own 

shopping. This conflation of friendship and caring confuses the Schofield et al. 

(1998, pp. 3-4) definition of caregivers as “people who are under obligation to care 

because of their close kinship or emotional bond with the care recipient.” Within this 

description, caregiving requires burden and obligation beyond ordinary acts of 

friendship. 

According to Ross (2005, p. 181), the United Kingdom legally defines the 

caregiver as “an individual who provides or intends to provide a substantive amount 

of care on a regular basis for another person.” Care goes beyond obligation and 

burden by becoming definable through quantity and stability over time. This legal 

definition also provides another new aspect to care: care by intention. If an 



20 
 

individual signals intent to care, or perhaps even intention to act in a way that has 

been ambiguously defined as caring, then inadequate care or no care can be 

‘supplied’ although the one with intent remains the caregiver. Interesting new forms 

of potentially substandard care are noted in research by Brechin, Barton and Stein 

(2003, p. 165) in the form of “difficulties in care relationships”, “care that might give 

cause for concern” and “suboptimal care.” 

To complicate matters even further, contemporary economic practice now 

also demands that definitions of caregivers are compatible with the needs of 

measurement and statistical analysis (OECD, 2011). This is because clear definitions 

are necessary in a global economy that is obsessed with counting and assessing care 

practiced in the private domain. According to Fine (2007, p. 30) a carer publically 

defined as such in the private domain is not paid and is not a neighbour, friend or 

teacher. Carers are not “mothers, fathers, step-parents, foster-parents and custodians 

of children who are not disabled or suffering a long term health condition...” nor are 

they “grandparents providing care for grandchildren and people with disabilities 

caring for their own or other children...” 

Attempts to define care in Fine’s (2007) analysis can only end in frustration 

and dispute. Fine (2007, p. 31) posits care as a “social phenomenon that is 

constituted and reconstituted by our actions, so that its meaning cannot be held still 

to study.” Such a definition suggests that we should be cautious of statistical findings 

generated by official definitions of care through primary indicators. For example, 

according to Stalker (2003) statistics reveal that there are increasing numbers of male 

carers: therefore, the gap in numbers between the men and women carers is 

decreasing. Care is no longer a feminine ethical attribute as once discovered by 

Gilligan (1982). Yet considering the ambiguous nature of care and the rigid 



21 
 

perspectives of the economic indicators used to measure caring practice, it would be 

difficult to take Stalker’s revelation seriously without considering what constitutes 

care within the context of its definition and measurement. 

Incalculable care 

If care measured through statistical analysis, struggles to reflect the 

multiplicity of definitions that produce measurable indicators, then it becomes even 

more difficult to locate a care inaccurately reflected or left out of definitions. The 

care that we have with us today is a subjective matter with no concrete substance that 

changes, as Fine (2007) suggests, with each situation. This is not altogether 

surprising when we recall that care is a relatively new phenomenon, slipping almost 

unnoticed into our vocabulary in the 1970s. Yet in a matter of a few decades, 

commodified public care sits comfortably in formal language, discourses of social 

justice, moral development and western legislation as if it were a fixed entity that has 

always been there. Although Fine (2007) and others hint at the anomalies of care’s 

meaning and it’s inadequacies as a signifier, it is difficult to lament the loss of 

adequate signification for that which once was linguistically non-existent and is now 

present, even though we are unsure of its content as a construct and disagree on its 

origins. 

A problem with care’s linguistic arrival as a new public phenomenon is that it 

no longer sits compatibly with mainstream theories of development, such as the 

work of Object Relations Theory followers like Hollway (2006), who link caring 

practice to human development and mother-child relations. The incompatibility is 

evident in O’Conner’s (2007) study of the differences in positioning of daughters 

and caregivers caring for their mothers/patients. She found that when daughters 

identify themselves as caregivers and their mothers as patients, they are more likely 



22 
 

to make paternalistic decisions, defying their mother’s wishes and opting for what 

they deem as ‘best for the patient,’ than the daughters who identify themselves as 

daughters. 

Barnes (2006) also acknowledges a subtle shift in signification that she feels 

is a necessity for caregiver recognition and support within the public community. For 

Barnes, this shift from mother-daughter to patient-caregiver is a small sacrifice made 

for eligibility to the public funding and support that will make women’s caring duties 

more palatable, or in other words, increase recognition of financial inequity and 

reduce the much researched ‘caregiver burdens’. Once, according to Barnes (2006), 

familial nursing was a natural private duty for women: a duty not deemed as care, 

but as ‘just something women did’. In other words, for the acknowledgement, 

support and funding of caregivers in the public domain, care must be publically 

recognisable, even if this is detrimental to mother-daughter relations. The care that 

Barnes (2006) and O’Conner (2007) locate appears as a floating or empty signifier, 

cut adrift from its silent maternal origins, its meaning entirely dependent on the 

context of its visibility and usage within the public domain. 

Commodifying care 

A shift into the public domain sees care becoming an increasing force within 

a western global economy. Relentless pushing to have private care recognised, 

funded and take its place as an equitable public construct equal to justice, is 

attributable in some part to the work of campaigners like Barnes (2006), 

Sevenhuijsen (1998) and Tronto (1993). Yet a bid for an equitable care within the 

public domain generates a barrage of indicators and complicated statistical gathering 

by the OECD within the workings of globalised knowledge based economies (KBE). 

A KBE works towards the production, distribution and the implementation of 



23 
 

knowledge, a progression from the growth of the technological age and the 

increasing usage of modern technologies. As described by the OECD (1996, p. 9): 

“Knowledge, as embodied in human beings and in technology, has always been 

central to economic development. But only over the last few years has its relative 

importance been recognised, just as that importance is growing.” A KBE monitors 

the environmental, economic and social factors within an economy that works 

towards resource sustainability (OECD, 1996, 1999, 2000). Care is just one such 

resource, reduced to a series of indicators that are continually modified and 

increased.  

Although a KBE is not to be confused with a knowledge economy (KE), 

again there is some ambiguity in relation to precise definition. A KE represents a 

methodology that shifts in relation to the project it underpins. In principle, a KE 

encourages an educated workforce and measures the impact of knowledge within the 

economy. It is concerned with resources or the location of knowledge within the 

human workforce (Ministry of Labour, 2009) and identifies knowledge occupations 

and knowledge workers (Drucker, 1999) of which the health industry has a high 

proportion. According to Drucker (1999), the crucial question for knowledge 

workers is “What is the task?” and it is up to the knowledge workers, being experts, 

to decide the response. An example provided by Drucker (1999) explores how 

nurses, as knowledge workers, can make better use of their knowledge and provide a 

quality service for their patients. Two of the tasks identified as reducing the quality 

of care provided by nurses are ‘responding to patients’ emergency bells’ and ‘taking 

phone calls from relatives’. Such tasks reduce the knowledge bearer’s time to 

perform other tasks, especially when less qualified or less knowing staff members 

who require a lesser wage can complete them. 



24 
 

There are some disturbing similarities between Tronto’s (1993) guidelines for 

a feminist ethics of care and the requirements of a knowledge worker in the care 

industry. The health professional remains attentive and is required to identify need 

through the knowledge retained as a professional. They have a responsibility to act 

on this need if it falls in the jurisdiction of the productivity of ‘quality’ care. For a 

nurse as an applied knowledge worker, a patient who rings a bell is not in the 

immediate need of the level of expertise that she/he sustains. Nor is the nurse 

required to relay her knowledgeable opinion to distressed relatives: their distress is 

not an immediate concern and interferes with the delivery of ‘good’ care. There is no 

doubt that the knowledge worker must be competent enough to perform the 

identified specific task or to relay her expertise to others. Responsiveness, as in a 

feminist ethics of care, relies solely on the knowledge workers expert identification 

or the specificity of such a need. Knowledge as an applied resource within both a KE 

and a feminist ethics of care requires a response to those in need with the best quality 

of intervention for the patient. Herein lays the problem. Both a feminist ethics of care 

and care in an economic model appear to have lost sight or are unsure of what care 

is, unaware of the subtle changes in caring relationships brought about by shifting 

signification and contemporary focus on expertise. Such shifts not only change 

relationships but also the identification of who requires care, whatever care may be. 

Meanwhile, an OECD driven KBE/KE relentlessly collects statistics that 

increasingly put pressure on the wall/boundary that separates the public and the 

private domains. Satellite accounts provide a way to monitor unpaid care within the 

private domain and turn it into economic worth. In simple terms, a satellite account 

is a specialised national account that does not affect the Gross National Product. It 

provides a standalone way to monitor, measure and accrue intangible wealth such as 



25 
 

household chores, private care and caregiving (Landefeild & McCulla, 2000). 

Dyson’s (2004) Action Plan for Women contains strategies to smooth women’s 

transition from intensive mother to working mother, simultaneously collecting data 

on the private caring activities of women. To monitor output, private care becomes a 

set of indicators and variables to measure women’s productivity in the forms of care 

and caregiving. Within the private domain, women morph mothers, wives and 

friends into unpaid caregivers, informally caring for spouses, siblings, other family 

members, friends and neighbours identified as qualifying for care. The OECD (2011, 

p. 10) explains the distinction between unpaid work (that includes private care) and 

leisure activities: 

Unpaid work is the production of goods and services by family members 

that are not sold on the market... The boundary between unpaid work and 

leisure is determined by the ‘third-person criterion’. If a person could be 

paid to do the activity, it is considered to be work. 

This definition does little to solve the problem of deciding whether taking an 

elderly relative shopping is familial leisure or work. This clearly depends on whether 

money could have changed hands in the process.  

We might say that this private care gone public is potentially a triumph for 

women who have campaigned for the blurring of boundaries between the public and 

private, such as Barnes (2006), Sevenhuijsen (1998) and Tronto (1993), as a means 

towards equality and recognition for doing what was once invisible. Although 

economics has not recognised informal care as an unwaged activity in the past, 

satellite accounts invent a way to insert the worth of private care into a public 

accounting system to bolster the books.  



26 
 

Yet satellite accounts cannot signify or measure pre-commodified maternal 

care, if there is indeed such a construct. Arguably, if it cannot be measured, it cannot 

exist. Nor can creative accounting accurately capture what care is or take into 

consideration the confusing ethical underpinnings and the political motives for 

politicising ‘care’, that generate a pool of transferable knowledge administered by 

expert (usually medical) knowledge workers and indeed, a spiralling business in 

caring courses administered by experts, even if somewhat suspect and non-

directional.  

How to trade ethically 

By dividing ethics and securing masculine and feminine ethics within public 

and private domains, Gilligan’s (1982) ethics of care has framed these domains as 

sites of ethical spatial relations, paving the way for research on where care happens 

and how a particular space affects caring relationships. A feminist ethics of care that 

takes care from the private domain and integrates it into the public domain turns to a 

discussion about the shifting or a contestation of boundaries, revealing one of the 

biggest potential displacements of people ever. Amid the public birth of care, such 

misplacement initiates the disappearance of mother-daughter relationships from the 

private domain, sending them into the public domain as androgynous contributors to 

a knowledge-based community. 

It is difficult to imagine that such a mass displacement of people can be 

considered as providing ethical outcomes, given that ethics is traditionally 

interpreted as “the philosophical study of morality” (Taylor, 1972b, p. 3). Within the 

medical/caring professions, this morality strives to work towards the greater good of 

humanity, providing care for those deemed in need. Yet need goes hand in hand with 

the new care that, although initially designed by feminist care advoc