How to make homey meal in not-so-homey kitchen: Home metaphors in repertoires of institutional dining
Abstract
This paper describes the role of the home metaphor in repertoires of dining in "care homes for persons with disabilities", contributing to the broader research of modes of ordering dis/ability.The metaphor of "home" organises regimes of care around the idealised notions of communality and privacy. In institutions offering services to up to three hundred people, various activities and events of everyday life could be sanctioned by reference to benefits of homey atmosphere.
In this context, the notion of ideal home for disabled-identified could pertain to collective living, favouring commune cause over privacy and individual differences. Against this, in the discourse of "transformation of the social services", the normalising faculty of "home" serves to enforce right to privacy, postulated on the basis of the equality and the normality principles.
The comparison with "the ways we do it at home" positions the practices of the care home in relation to private, locally situated lives of the carers and the cared-for. Apart of normative, legitimizing and positioning functions of the home metaphor in the institutionalized modes of ordering care, "home" - real and imagined - also serves as ideal site for engrossment, motivational displacement and reciprocity, described by the relational model of care.
However, in the eyes of the carers, the ethical ideals of relational care are often compromised by the very same modes of ordering care which claim to enhance the domesticity of the care settings. While different and often incompatible conditions of possibility for a home-like living (including the making of a homey meal) are being postulated and strived for, the relation between privatizing and decentralisation of "homes for persons with disabilities" and enactment of the ethical ideal of relational care is by no means straightforward.