Caring at home, caring for homes: women’s caring practices over the course of their residential trajectories in Barcelona

In the context of the housing crisis experienced in Barcelona since 2008, women are exposed to residential exclusion to different degrees, depending on their specific position on different axes of inequality, including class, race, migratory status, age or household composition, alongside gender. However, all the women who participated in our ethnographic survey between 2021 and 2022 by disclosing their residential trajectories reported a common concern for the threats to their own housing conditions and those of the people who depended on them. Another shared pattern emerging from our empirical data was the central role that care played in shaping their housing conditions, options and choices, either through the imposition of constraints, or by motivating efforts to secure and/or retain a home, both in a material and in a symbolic sense and through both individual and collective practices. The experiences collected in this research thus highlight the role of housing as an infrastructure of care, contributing to an understanding of the care-housing nexus in promoting or hindering domestic and societal reproduction, an operation that relies on a gendered division of household-related everyday tasks and responsibilities.