ETHICS OF CARE IN THE SPANISH PARLIAMENT: ANALYSIS OF THE USE OF THE TERM CUIDADOS ( CARE ) IN PARLIAMENTARY DISCOURSE

In western societies, the sexual division of labour resulting from the patriarchal and capitalist system assigned women the role of caregivers. In recent decades, the feminist movement has asserted the value of care and denounced its relegation to the private sphere. We investigate the stance taken by political formations regarding the concept of care in Spanish parliamentary debate during the first semester of the XIV legislature (from December 2019 to June 2020), which includes the first wave of the COVID19 pandemic. We analyse how their discourse promotes or hampers recognition of the value of care and the progress in policies that can lead to improvements in this area. For the present study, we have selected the left-wing formations -which have traditionally aligned themselves with feminist advances- with the aim of analysing their use of the term care in the Spanish parliamentary debate. The methodology combines a quantitative analysis of all speeches from the plenary sessions of the studied period, with a sample of 114 interventions and 202 occurrences of the term care, , and qualitative research based on critical discourse analysis. The results provide evidence that the use of the term is concentrated at the points of the debate on COVID-19, economy, employment, salaries and pensions and gender-based violence and sexual abuse, and that it is mainly used to claim the importance of care, thank caregivers and denounce the feminization of care, which for the moment does not activate the political force of the term nor does it lead to transformative action.