Redefining Boundaries & Crossing Borders: Implications of Women's Provisioning Work in Community
Crossing borders is a metaphor for how individuals and communities develop new identities, expand citizenship claims and form coalitions for social change. The concept of citizenship may have moved beyond national borders but still maintains the separation of public and private spheres with one sphere valued more than the other. Thus women are doing more caring work just when they are also expected to become breadwinners and absorb the impact of service cuts. This paper presents data from a study of the provisioning work done by women living on low incomes in four Canadian cities. Provisioning refers to strategies women use to produce and distribute what is needed for people to survive and flourish. Provisioning is seen as a basis for citizenship claims.
Findings indicate that the responsibilty boundaries women draw do not map neatly onto dominant definitions of family, household, neighbour and work relations, rather they extend across several arenas and change over time. Relationships of provisioning can become the pathways along which situated knowledges are constructed alternatives imagined. In this study the collectivities with which women were associated,(a food coop, a community resource centre, a homecare agency, and an employability centre for women leaving abusive relationships), were important arenas for helping women re-define the boundaries and claims associated with provisioning responsibilities. If one accepts the growing evidence that nation-state citizenships are gendered, racialized, heterosexualized, as well as class differentiated, such divisions affect women?s participation in civil society. Local groups can help women build identity, provisioning and citizenship capacity that the family and market spheres undermine. These become spaces where women can transgress traditional boundaries that separate market, household, informal and care work. Of importance for social policy and social work practice is understanding the implications of how women negotiate the competing demands made on them to provision, and how relationships and community work help women cross the borders that demand they are either breadwinners or family carers.