TY - CHAP

T1 - Kin-related elder care in Russian families

T2 - Challenges for homemaking

AU - Tkach, Olga

N1 - Publisher Copyright: © 2018 Taylor & Francis.

PY - 2018/1/1

Y1 - 2018/1/1

N2 - Scholars working in the social sciences have criticized visions of home as a static space of uniqueness, stability and security. 1 Their standpoint reflects the social history of the twentieth century, when the ideal of domesticity as being exceptionally comfortable and consistent across generations was called into question. Urbanization, with its mass migrations and dramatic social transformations, caused some of this change, as did revolutions and wars that uprooted millions of people from their homes. Old concepts of home were also swept away by state policies and ideologies of mass housing and domesticity. For instance, in the Bolshevik era and Soviet Russia, home ceased to be a private matter, a fortress of private property and comfort, of bourgeois capitalism, or of women segregated into their own domain. 2 Studies of intergenerational and geographic mobility as well as feminist scholarship and research on marginalized social groups have significantly contributed to our understanding of the multisited house, unstable home and unpredictable domestic life. The first showed that houses, homes and related place identities change with family dynamics and the stage of one’s life cycle. 3 The latter broke out of a cycle that romanticized the intimate private domain, exposing how it can provoke feelings of frustration, unfairness, alienation, humiliation and fear. These feelings, studies showed, come about because of an unequal division of domestic labor or a traumatizing experience of domestic violence and segregation. 4 Both constructions of home are relevant and heuristic for the research of homebased kin-related elder care.

AB - Scholars working in the social sciences have criticized visions of home as a static space of uniqueness, stability and security. 1 Their standpoint reflects the social history of the twentieth century, when the ideal of domesticity as being exceptionally comfortable and consistent across generations was called into question. Urbanization, with its mass migrations and dramatic social transformations, caused some of this change, as did revolutions and wars that uprooted millions of people from their homes. Old concepts of home were also swept away by state policies and ideologies of mass housing and domesticity. For instance, in the Bolshevik era and Soviet Russia, home ceased to be a private matter, a fortress of private property and comfort, of bourgeois capitalism, or of women segregated into their own domain. 2 Studies of intergenerational and geographic mobility as well as feminist scholarship and research on marginalized social groups have significantly contributed to our understanding of the multisited house, unstable home and unpredictable domestic life. The first showed that houses, homes and related place identities change with family dynamics and the stage of one’s life cycle. 3 The latter broke out of a cycle that romanticized the intimate private domain, exposing how it can provoke feelings of frustration, unfairness, alienation, humiliation and fear. These feelings, studies showed, come about because of an unequal division of domestic labor or a traumatizing experience of domestic violence and segregation. 4 Both constructions of home are relevant and heuristic for the research of homebased kin-related elder care.

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85047039218&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1201/9781315180472

DO - 10.1201/9781315180472

M3 - Chapter

AN - SCOPUS:85047039218

SN - 9781138746411

SP - 217

EP - 237

BT - The Routledge Companion to Modernity, Space and Gender

PB - Taylor & Francis

ER -