Care capital: gendered school duties and the voluntary caring responsibilities of young women

This article proposes the addition of a concept of ‘care capital’: a gendered form of Bourdieu’s theories of capital that provides an understanding of the experiences of young women participating in a school-based youth volunteering project. The article builds on feminist research that challenges the representation of women’s agency in theories of capital and the space for emotion and identity formation. The three distinct research fields of home, school and wider society are examined through ethnographic research with six young women. In each of the fields, care was present as a form of symbolic violence and habitus playing a gender-specific role in the way the young women were engaged in school duties and volunteering in their local community. A connection to care in the lives of all the young women, legitimised by specific institutionalised practices, intersected in the way the young women were represented in school and society through constructs of youth and gender. However, this article also argues that care can be a resource that the young women use to navigate power relations within school and society and to define their identity. The way Bourdieu’s theories can be extended to illuminate the way care manifests in the lives of young women provides legitimacy for rethinking Bourdieu’s theories and applying extended theories of capital to studies of care.