Gendered care, empathy and un/doing difference in the Danish welfare state

This article explores how municipal care managers negotiate tensions inpolicy logics and state discourses in encounters with ethnic minorityfamilies in Denmark. It focuses on the “self-appointed helper arrangement”,an option in the Danish Social Service Act under which municipalitiescan employ family members to care for older citizen at home. Basedon ethnographic fieldwork, I examine the consequences of this carearrangement from the perspective of care managers, focusing on genderdynamics and state-family divides in need assessments and care provision.I demonstrate how care managers slip in and out of their roles as administrators,health professionals and morally concerned citizens in encounterswith different caregivers. While they focus mainly on equal access tocare for all older citizens, sometimes they shift perspective and focus moreon the wellbeing of the self-appointed helper in question. These shifts inmoral registers are triggered by empathetic encounters with young ethnicminority women. However, care managers’ empathy is double-sided andambivalent. Although striving to undo difference and include thesewomen in a community of independent Danish female citizens, theyalso tend to place them and their families in a different category thanthe majority population and thus risk further marginalizing them.