Boundaried Caring and Gendered Emotion Management in Hospice Work

Caring work, which is premised on caring for and caring about recipients, involves a great deal of emotion management. Feeling rules shape expectations about emotion management and are informally shared through workers' narratives about quality work. Using qualitative data from hospice workers in the southwestern US, I find that narratives of quality within hospice include emotion-management skills such as listening, truly caring, keeping calm and maintaining boundaries. Through an analysis of how workers discuss and map skills onto individual women and men co-workers, this article highlights two gendered patterns. First, even when women and men are thought to share high-quality skills, the ways these skills are described reinforce naturalistic understandings of gender. Second, men are seen to hold a broad range of emotion-management skills, but women are not described as holding the most important emotion-management skill: keeping boundaries. Understanding this differential application of emotion-management skills helps us to understand how gender and gender inequality are reproduced within caring work.