Professionals, Carers or `Strangers'? Liminality and the Typification of Postnatal Home Care Workers

Abstract

The proliferation of home health care workers is an increasingly important trend in many contemporary societies, and its impact on the division of labour and the social meaning of care work is complex. In this article, these issues are analysed in relation to a new programme of domiciliary postnatal care in Australia. Coupled with early discharge from hospital, the programme is part of a reconfiguration that disrupts existing logics of care.The insertion of paid carers into the division of labour between `functionally diffuse', informal care and the `functional specificity' of professionals' work renders their status liminal, and their spatial location within the home transgresses symbolically important boundaries. Birthing women's responses include unease and a rejection of the workers based on the construction of them as `strangers'. It is argued that these responses demonstrate the lack of a `typification' based on contextual and spatialized knowledge of home health care workers.

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