‘The Good Live-in Care Worker’ Subjectivation and Ethnicisation Processes in Austrian Live-in Care

This paper investigates subject formation processes in Austrian live-in care. Proceeding from a Foucauldian understanding of subjectivity as a product of powerful discourses and techniques and based on an intersectional discourse analysis of interviews with different actors involved in this arrangement, it shows how the ideal live-in care worker combines professional and language skills with characteristics such as an intrinsic motivation, emotional competences, and adaptability. Ethnicity-related discourses play an important role in this context, be it with regard to highly valued qualities or as a justification for control and/or support, and thus serve as a means to reproduce power relations.