"Caring as a girl: a Feminist New Materialism approach to the learning of care within the family in Finland."

Abstract

This study explores how feminist new materialisms, particularly Karen Barad’s agential realism (2007), reorient the ontoepistemological conception of the phenomena of gendered care. Recuperating girls’ voices, it delves into how materiality, corporeality, and emotion intra-act in the entanglement of the girl-learning-how-to-care within the family in Finland. The study involved ten Finnish girls aged 6-12. A post-humanist Baradian approach guided the methodology. Conceptualising interviews as performative accounts allowed the merging of transcript, translation, and recording for data analysis. An original three-reading method identifying matter, body, emotion, and their entanglement, was introduced to analyse their intra-action. The girl-learning-how-to-care becomes through her embodied and emotional intra-action with the material world. Matter provides a framework containing the learning process, enabling the occurrence of care and the acquisition of caregiving skills. Care’s existence occurs through/with/for the bodies. Corporeality allows recognising needed, successful or received care. Emotions reinforce or produce approval, disapproval, encouragement, or empathy towards care. They were present within the experiences described during their narration and enacted during the intra-action with the researcher. This study contributes to the Feminist Research field by conceiving girls as agentic, embodied and emotional caretakers, analysing their accounts care is a skill learnt in a specific manner by females; in the Care Studies field by exploring the role materiality/corporeality/emotion in girls’ learning and to the Education field by analysing care as the result of a learning process, unveiling the impact and importance matter/body/emotion withhold in it, calling attention to refine and advance current pedagogical practices to support these elements.