Where the Wound Still Lives: Assaults on the Subjectivity of Women Caring for Dying Mothers Who Maltreat(ed) Them

Abstract

There is extensive evidence for gendered inequities in the intensity and complexity of unpaid care labor for family members with life-limiting illnesses, and in the harmful physical, emotional, and socioeconomic impacts of this labor on those who provide it. Women caring for parents experience disproportionate harms associated their care labor, and those experiencing conflict and lack of choice are especially at risk; yet violence and constraints of agency in the context of care for parents have been largely ignored in nursing scholarship. In this study, we used a feminist poststructuralist theoretical framework to deconstruct dialogic narratives with 16 women who provided end-of-life care to mothers who maltreated them in childhood. We identified "the good family" as a dominant discourse obscuring three subjugated narratives: "recursive assaults on subjectivity," "making a good death for a bad mother," and "medical complicity." These narratives illuminate mechanisms whereby dominant discourse constitutes, and is constituted by, violence perpetrated against daughters in the public and private realms of unpaid care labor for mothers with life-limiting illnesses. By creating and disseminating composite narratives exposing parallel processes of dehumanization and exploitation in cis-hetero-patriarchal family and medical systems, we present a new form of emancipatory praxis for nursing scholars.

Keywords: care labor; childhood maltreatment; critical gerontology; end‐of‐life; family caregiving; feminist; narrative; poststructuralism; trauma.