Guest Editors’ Introduction

This issue of Gender & Society offers in-depth analyses of carework in a wide variety of circumstances and locations around the globe: Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Botswana, Brazil, Canada, China, the Philippines, Spain, Taiwan, and the United States. In soliciting submissions for this issue, we asked not only for major, analytic papers but also for perspectives pieces that would acquaint readers with carework situations and issues from specific countries or regions. The purpose of our article is to introduce and situate these various contributions. First, we devote some attention to locating the study of gender and carework within the broader frame of globaliza- tion, pointing to the lack of social research on global carework issues. We note that the articles in this special issue highlight and demonstrate the wider applicability of several key concepts and theoretical observations drawn from the existing carework literature. These concepts and theoretical approaches, in turn, provide a basis for organizing and discussing each of the contributions. We end this article by pulling together the contents of the issue to identify three main conclusions. Despite the diversity of local contexts and sociocultural forces shaping the varieties of women's carework studied in these articles, there are a number of striking commonalities, particularly when examined in relation to recent feminist sociological research and writing on carework.