Social care, gender and the transformation of identities

Abstract

Nowadays social care crisis facilitates the emergence of different institutional measures that try to reformulate the unequal distribution of care responsibilities between the market, the state, the family and the civil society, as it is, in the Spanish case, the development of the Law of the Promotion of Personal Autonomy and the Attention to dependent people. In this article, we analyze the frames of sense promoted by this law, as well as the current context in which the social organization of care is being transformed, to understand their contribution to a reformulation of the identities of the care givers and the gender’s social order. Also, the understanding of public policies as a result of the symbolic fights between different social actors, allows us to analyze the main interactions and the hegemonic discourses that influence the definition of social reality, related to social care recognition and its distribution.