Dialogues on intergenerational care: (de-)constructing gendered family scripts through online social interaction

In the ageing society, care of the older is a main social concern calling into play the role of both formal and informal networks of supports, with families playing a pivotal role. Within the domestic politics of care, women have historically been positioned as primary caregivers, with their roles being shaped by cultural discourses and lived experiences underpinned by stereotypical family scripts (Charenkova, 2023). This is especially relevant in Italy, due to its familistic culture, high life expectancy, and unequal distribution of social welfare services (Petrini et al., 2019). Drawing on conversational data from an Italian online forum, this presentation explores how women articulate, contest, and navigate these expectations through shared narratives, reflections, and emotions about caring for an older member of the family. As an epistemic arena, we contend this digital milieu presents several relevant features to research (Formenti, Cino, 2023): since the subjects of the enunciation are women, whose epistemic authority lies in their perspectives as insiders of the experience of care, their conversations revolve around contents deemed relevant and meaningful by the interacting parts; the affordances of the platform allow for a bottom-up process of collective meaning-making which is an indicator of informal learning (Zittoun and Brinkmann, 2012); the narrative agency, i.e. the ability of originating meaning, is distributed among parts contributing to framing care as an epistemic object (Goffman, 1974). Informed by socio-constructionism, these interactions are scrutinized through discourse analysis (Phillips & Hardy, 2002), situating discussions around caregiving within broader cultural and moral orders, and examining whether and how these discussions reflect and challenge the taken-for-grantedness (Schütz, 1944) of intergenerational care. Findings unpack the dialogic constitution of “good” and “bad” caregiving illustrating how, in a hermeneutic circle (Gadamer, 1975), stories, experiences, and worldviews shared on the forum ratify or question gendered family scripts through the epistemic and moral work performed in the conversations (Caronia, 2022).