At the Limits of Care

“This book offers powerful insights from the messy and contradictory emotional and political insides of care. Focused on the stories of women who have stepped back or reached their limits of care – including her own – Klostermann weaves together a series of metaphors to counter dominant cultural imperatives. In doing so, she offers a pathway through discomfort to reconsider the conditions of care and begin to understand what might be needed in order to stay.”
“Blending brutally honest memoir with penetrating sociological analysis, Klostermann brilliantly exposes the profound ambivalences of care when care workers are not cared for themselves. Moving, funny, and provocative, At the Limits of Care makes an important contribution to this increasingly necessary field of study.”
“This is an impressive, innovative study of women and care. Based on in-depth life history interviews and an auto-ethnographic memoir, Klostermann provides a multi-layered analysis of gendered power relations and their constraining effects on women’s lives. She documents women’s agency and the institutional structures and meanings that compel women to do care work. She also asks how society might ensure care security for all without women’s endless caring under debilitating conditions.”
“Klostermann imagines possibilities of how we might redefine carework to make it more equitable. Greater recognition of carework is needed. And maybe, for myself and anyone involved with carework—all of us, really—it’s about reckoning with that word ‘limits.’”

Janna Klostermann is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Calgary.

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