Suffering, Sociality, and Citizenship Among Family Caregivers Available to Purchase

This chapter traces caregivers’ social lives and citizenship demands under biopolitical paternalism. It shows that by asking people to fend for themselves and their families, neoliberal social policies neglect people’s need for dependency and exacerbate their vulnerability. These experiences, along with their suffering as former socialist workers, reveal to caregivers the state’s hypocrisy—that is, the way it rhetorically invokes but practically abandons promises of paternalism. They thus teach each other to make the most of welfare and leisure resources, and some of them have begun to flip the demand of guan back onto the state. They ask the state to recognize their contribution to biopolitical paternalism, to provide for its past and present workers, and to be a proper parent who nurtures its vulnerable children. This chapter ends with examining the concrete requests stemming from this “paternalistic citizenship,” as well as its limits in practice.