Bathing - the Body and Community Care

Community care lies at the intersection of day-to-day life and the public world of service provision. Using the lens of one particular activity, bathing, this book explores what happens when the public world of professional and service provision enter the lives of older and disabled people. Focusing on the body, it explores how recipients feel about personal care and how careworkers feel about giving it. Drawing on her findings from an empirical study of help with washing and bathing, Julia Twigg explores the world of front-line care workers, their employment situations and the impact of these on their day-to-day work practices. In doing so she deploys traditions of analysis that have developed in other fields, most notably those relating to the body, but also historical, sociological and anthropological theorising, in order to widen the context within which community life is understood. The study provides an accessible overview of literature on the body as well as taking a novel approach to examining a routine activity.