The moral pioneers of care: Solo living in the context of cancer care

Abstract

In this article, we examine first person experiences of living alone while being sick from cancer and in need of care. We explore how ongoing changes in the political economy of the welfare state, including expectations of the involvement of family in care practices, unfold in specific everyday situations. Based on detailed representations of two interlocutors, Lise and Henrik, we suggest that attending to care as generative work (Buch, 2018) highlights the many, disparate forms of practice through which people work to make life happen. We attend to care as exchange and bodywork and show how negotiations of care unfold in the intersection between the political economy of the welfare state and moral imaginaries of relatedness and independence. We conclude that people living alone, when they fall ill, are thrown into moral pioneering work (Rapp, 1999), which involves intergenerational nego- tiations, and which reflects changes in the welfare state's historically great attention to the care profession.