Gender and intimate state encounters

This chapter explores the gendered complexities of the home encounter. It builds brings together the anthropological debates on the state and street-level bureaucracy to include feminist analysis of care and racialized motherhood. This chapter details how particular meanings that are imbued in the ‘private’ and domestic space heighten the gendered nature of governing relationships, placing more work on women and simultaneously excluding men. The chapter explores how family organisation and inscribed gender roles therein can exacerbate or ease the uncertainty and confusion within home encounters. The chapter not only examines how home encounters shape the relationships among Romanian Roma women and men, but also relationships between women and, typically, female support workers and, typically, male church volunteers. The chapter argues that those who perform ‘appropriate’ subjects of care (as mothers) can be positioned as objects of care (of the state) and consequently that men are excluded from these processes.