Teodor Mladenov
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Independent Living and the family
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Chapter 5 explores the relationships between Independent Living and the family as the third organising principle of social welfare, alongside the state and the market. Thus, if Chapter 3 focused on state-based biopower, and Chapter 4 on market-based psychopower, Chapter 5 discusses family-based parental power. The main argument is that Independent Living has promoted qualified defamilialisation that has resonated with the movement’s advocacy for qualified deétatisation (Chapter 3) and qualified decommodification (Chapter 4). To explain this, the first part of the chapter revisits the welfare regimes explored so far by discussing the role of the family in each of them, as well as the specific responses of the Independent Living movement to the corresponding versions of familialism. This is followed by a discussion of the links between gender equity and Independent Living, approached through a study of recent parental mobilisations for disability rights in postsocialist Central and Eastern Europe. Following Nancy Fraser, three different models of gender equity are identified: universal breadwinning, caregiver parity, and universal caregiving. The analysis reveals that Independent Living is commensurate with universal caregiving and the attendant ‘demotherisation’ of welfare, but also that universal caregiving needs to be complemented by universal care-receiving to enable egalitarian (as opposed to paternalist) care. In conclusion, the approach of Independent Living to the family is identified as one of challenging parental power and familialism while affirming familial support and relationships. Independent Living is thus about living in families of self-determining equals, in concert with the concept of egalitarian care.

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