The Paradox of Care: Emotional Labor in Chinese State-Owned Social Welfare Institutions

Feminist scholars have highlighted the potential of care ethics to challenge the neoliberal social paradigm by underscoring the power of emotion and affect in shaping intersubjectivity. In a similar vein, Hardt and Negri (2001, 2005) stressed the power of affect to challenge capitalism. Other scholars, however, have challenged these positive aspects of emotion in care practices, citing the potential harm caused when affective ties to care recipients or the obligation to provide emotional care exploits workers. This article discusses the paradox of care that simultaneously enables and hurts, nurtures and harms. Based on ethnographic field work in five Chinese state-owned social welfare institutions (SWIs) caring for orphans, this article argues that the emotional labor in SWIs on the one hand produces intersubjectivity among caregivers and children in their care, and on the other hand it harms caregivers emotionally, leading them to use strategies such as drawing emotional boundaries with the orphans to protect themselves from the pain of losing “their” children when they are adopted. This article contributes to the geography of care literature by challenging the fantasy and romanticization of affect in care settings and stressing the paradox of care and affect.