Author Description

"Care is one of our most essential and endangered resources. From birth to death, caregiving extends from the most intimate relationships between mother and child to impersonal institutional settings. The act of caregiving is often idealized but it comes with physical and emotional challenges and expectations about gender and race. Arguing that social and political failures of modern care arrangements start with a failure of the imagination, Rachel Adams explores the stories we tell about care, and those who depend on it. She reveals the ways in which memoirs, novels, films, graphic novels, and visual art work illuminate the problems with our current systems of care. In considering the "art of interdependency" Adams emphasizes the creativity and resourcefulness of dependents and caregivers. In Love, Money, Duty. Rachel Adams considers narratives told from the perspectives of both providers and recipients of care. She reveals how they offer a fuller spectrum of the personal and emotional aspects of caregiving, accessing currents of shame, resentment, hostility, and boredom that may flow beneath even the most tender exchanges. On a broader level, as Adams shows, care has the potential to upend the values, norms, and practices that govern our modern social and economic systems. The individual chapters build from works that focus on the first and most intimate caring relationship, between people who identify as mothers and the children who receive their care, to the unpaid exchange of care in other familial relationships, to paid care work in the home, to institutions of care, and concludes with a look at the rise of care robots. She also draws on her own experiences of caring and being cared for as a reminder of the standpoint that anchors her work as a scholar and writer"--