En tvåkönad livsvärld : Omsorgspersonals upplevelse av normalisering ur ett genusperspektiv

Sammanfattning: This study aims to examine attitudes and conceptions of staff who work with mentally disabled persons, concerning normalization and gender. Six qualitative interviews with such professionals were performed and subsequently analyzed. Since the method of this study is qualitative, no claim of generalizability is made. The interview material has been categorized into themes by means of coding. The result of the study is presented according to those themes. Important theoretical concepts are normalization, gender and intersectionality. The result showed that the staff claims that there are common views about the actual and ideal characteristics of women and men in society. However, they state that those views play no part in the professional care they and their colleagues give to mentally disabled persons. Nevertheless, their accounts of concrete professional situations show that gender stereotypes do influence important decisions about caretaker´s lives. In the concrete caregiving context, normalization as accessibility to the standards of society turn out to be difficult to separate from normalization as behavior modification, due to the caretaker´s dependency on the caregiver. The staff, which is predominantly female, has considerable power to monitor the lives of both male and female caretakers. Hence, women are not always subordinated to men.