This article attends to the intimate contradictions that differentially shape and limit caring ca... more This article attends to the intimate contradictions that differentially shape and limit caring capacities and relations in a violent world, and the embodied ethical and political transformations at the heart of learning to care otherwise. From manifestos calling for "universal care" in defiance of the state-sanctioned horrors of the pandemic era, to the abolitionist politics of care developed by BLM organizers through movement building and healing, and the proliferation of mutual-aid infrastructures to meet needs and distribute resources in the face of overwhelming crisis and neglect-these examples and so many others illustrate with undeniable clarity that radical care is finally on the agenda. In what follows, I hope to contribute to this urgent conversation by pointing to how care is shaped in fundamentally contradictory ways under conditions of entrenched structural violence, and the limitations of normative frameworks when confronting this reality. To unambiguously valorize care in ethical and political life is to risk occluding the constitutive violence of existing social structures and norms, its impact on the intimacies of caring relations, and ultimately the ways that communities mobilize alternate economies and practices of care towards healing and social change. While it is crucial to value care and work for a more caring society, I claim that efforts to transform patterns of relational harm and develop new sensibilities should also be highlighted as integral components of radical caring praxis.
Hil Malatino has written a beautiful book rooted in what he terms a t4t (trans for trans) praxis ... more Hil Malatino has written a beautiful book rooted in what he terms a t4t (trans for trans) praxis of love. Trans Care speaks to the joys of weaving and reweaving trans community, even as it bears witness to the barriers to flourishing that mark many trans lives. Written from within the care webs he describes, the book provides an example of trans care as both a living ethos, and as reparative, generative, labor. The opening section, "Surviving Trans Antagonism," situates Trans Care in the context of what Malatino terms the "trans mundane." This is a political and ethical move against a moment in which "trans lives are recurrently and brutally utilized as a political wedge issue in order to consolidate horrifyingly ascendant forms of ethnonationalism and the ongoing violence of liberal austerity." Against a logic that seeks to reify trans subjects as undeserving of care, or, conversely, as deserving victims, he asks, "what ethos, what practice of living otherwise, might enable more liberatory forms of trans existence?" (5). The body of the book is composed of essays associated in ways that mirror and express webs of trans care. Malatino begins with a critique of the hierarchical and individualized presuppositions of the "burnout" model of care, posing instead a conception of trans mutual aid rooted in the complexities of resonant traumas and shifting, reciprocal, and interdependent relations between recipients and carers (24). In the central chapter, "Theorizing Trans Care," he presents trans care as an emergent ethos immanently critical of dominant political and moral economies of care. The subsequent discussion of his archival work, "Something Other Than Trancestors: Hirstory Lessons," can be read as an application of this ethics. Asking how to "care for these ghosts that take such care of us," he honors the crucial, even lifesaving, role of hirstorical memory in trans communities, but stays with the trouble of projection and fantasy, as well as the dangers posed by historical erasure and overkill. His closing section, "Trans Care within and against the Medical-Industrial Complex," speaks to the systemic, persistent denial of medical care to trans individuals, and its disproportionate impacts on multiply marginalized trans people. 1 He also discusses emergent community responses to this neglect of institutional care. Here, "showing up" for this intricate labor exemplifies the double movement of trans care: at once attentive to the danger of reproducing the intersecting oppressions so definitive of normative care, and prefigurative of a world of trans flourishing. What I find so transformative, even revolutionary, in Malatino's account of trans care is that it is both prefigurative and attentive to the specificity of trans lives and
My dissertation attends to the embodied and relational dimensions of caring ethics and politics. ... more My dissertation attends to the embodied and relational dimensions of caring ethics and politics. I locate my analysis in conditions in which devaluing, exploiting, and extracting the care of multiply oppressed people is a structural component of many contemporary institutions, social forms, and intimate realities—as is the denial of care to those most impacted by systemic harms. I argue that prominent articulations of care as a naturalistically construed ethical good on the one hand, or an exploited form of labor on the other, sidestep the constitutive violence of these social structures and norms, the impact of this violence on the intimacies of caring relations themselves, and ultimately the generative and transformational role that alternative economies and practices of care play in movements for social change. In particular, my project critically engages i.) feminist care ethical understandings of care as a moral value and ii.) Marxist feminist analyses of care labor as an essential, if disavowed, component of capitalist accumulation and extraction. Together, these orientations towards ethics and labor speak to fundamental dimensions of care—which, insofar as it is concerned with meeting emotional and material needs, is, in Sara Ruddick’s famous phrasing, both a form of labor and an ethical relationship (Ruddick 1998). However, I claim that isolating these material and normative realities poses an unworkable dualism, which ultimately occludes the intimacies of struggle and transformation at the heart of caring ethics and politics. I find more generative approaches to these questions in two discourses in particular: On the one hand, I discuss how intersectional feminist methods highlight the interlocking oppressions manifest in social organizations and divisions of caring labor, and how this violence can become engrained in the very forms of caring attention (responsiveness, empathy, other-directedness, etc.) that care ethicists often uncritically naturalize. On the other, I engage notions of communization and life making developed by largely untranslated contemporary Latin American social reproduction feminists, who place affective and intimate critique and transformation at the heart of the politics of social reproduction in ways that transcend traditional Marxist notions of labor and labor politics.
Special Issue: The Politics of Social Reproduction
Ed. Kelly Gawel and Cinzia Arruzza
https://doc... more Special Issue: The Politics of Social Reproduction Ed. Kelly Gawel and Cinzia Arruzza https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol22/iss2/
The Politics of Social Reproduction. An Introduction Cinzia Arruzza and Kelly Gawel
Social Reproduction in the Making: Recentering the Margins, Expanding the Directions Zhivka Valiavicharska
Social Reproduction Theory and the Form of Labor Power Aaron Jaffe
Labor Valorization and Social Reproduction: What is Valuable about the Labor Theory of Value? Kate Doyle Griffiths
Fourier, Marx, and Social Reproduction Blanca Missé
Toward an Ecology of Life-making: The Re-membering of Meridel Le Sueur Rosemary Hennessy
No estamos todas, faltan las presas! Contemporary Feminist Practices Building Paths toward Prison Abolition Susana Draper
Detroit’s Water Wars: Race, Failing Social Reproduction, and Infrastructure Brian Whitener
Readymade or Made [to be] Ready, Replicant or Surplus: Social Reproduction and the Biopolitics of Abstraction Prefigured in Contemporary Art Jaleh Mansoor
10 Theses on Feminist Economics (or the antagonism between the strike and finance) Luci Cavallero and Verónica Gago
Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy
This article claims that Asha Bhandary’s theory of justice in Freedom to Care:
Liberalism, Depend... more This article claims that Asha Bhandary’s theory of justice in Freedom to Care: Liberalism, Dependency Care, and Culture is right to stress the interdependency of justice and care in addressing structural oppressions, but wrong in upholding liberalism’s capacity for doing so. Against her procedural mechanism of education for caregiving skills in particular, I point to the critical and generative methods of social reproduction feminism and Transformative Justice as models of radical praxis in the collective work of politically centering and radically transforming cultures of care.
The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing, 2019
In what follows I offer a perspective on how the ‘dialectical image’ might speak to what is revol... more In what follows I offer a perspective on how the ‘dialectical image’ might speak to what is revolutionary and catastrophic in our experiences and relations. It may be impossible to directly address the psychic and affective content of our moment of danger, or the pain, and perhaps ecstasy, of the constellations that might emerge from it. Here I approach these contradictions by way of mimetic invocation. I make an offering to an unspeakable passing, perhaps a space these things can move through, or reside. It comes out of my fraught yet potent attempts to inhabit such possibilities and limits and hopes to speak to these places in those who read it.
This article attends to the intimate contradictions that differentially shape and limit caring ca... more This article attends to the intimate contradictions that differentially shape and limit caring capacities and relations in a violent world, and the embodied ethical and political transformations at the heart of learning to care otherwise. From manifestos calling for "universal care" in defiance of the state-sanctioned horrors of the pandemic era, to the abolitionist politics of care developed by BLM organizers through movement building and healing, and the proliferation of mutual-aid infrastructures to meet needs and distribute resources in the face of overwhelming crisis and neglect-these examples and so many others illustrate with undeniable clarity that radical care is finally on the agenda. In what follows, I hope to contribute to this urgent conversation by pointing to how care is shaped in fundamentally contradictory ways under conditions of entrenched structural violence, and the limitations of normative frameworks when confronting this reality. To unambiguously valorize care in ethical and political life is to risk occluding the constitutive violence of existing social structures and norms, its impact on the intimacies of caring relations, and ultimately the ways that communities mobilize alternate economies and practices of care towards healing and social change. While it is crucial to value care and work for a more caring society, I claim that efforts to transform patterns of relational harm and develop new sensibilities should also be highlighted as integral components of radical caring praxis.
ABSTRACT In what follows I offer a perspective on how the ‘dialectical image’ might speak to what... more ABSTRACT In what follows I offer a perspective on how the ‘dialectical image’ might speak to what is revolutionary and catastrophic in our experiences and relations. It may be impossible to directly address the psychic and affective content of our moment of danger, or the pain, and perhaps ecstasy, of the constellations that might emerge from it. Here I approach these contradictions by way of mimetic invocation. I make an offering to an unspeakable passing, perhaps a space these things can move through, or reside. It comes out of my fraught yet potent attempts to inhabit such possibilities and limits and hopes to speak to these places in those who read it.
Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, May 10, 2021
This article claims that Asha Bhandary’s theory of justice in Freedom to Care: Liberalism, Depend... more This article claims that Asha Bhandary’s theory of justice in Freedom to Care: Liberalism, Dependency Care, and Culture is right to stress the interdependency of justice and care in addressing stru...
This article attends to the intimate contradictions that differentially shape and limit caring ca... more This article attends to the intimate contradictions that differentially shape and limit caring capacities and relations in a violent world, and the embodied ethical and political transformations at the heart of learning to care otherwise. From manifestos calling for "universal care" in defiance of the state-sanctioned horrors of the pandemic era, to the abolitionist politics of care developed by BLM organizers through movement building and healing, and the proliferation of mutual-aid infrastructures to meet needs and distribute resources in the face of overwhelming crisis and neglect-these examples and so many others illustrate with undeniable clarity that radical care is finally on the agenda. In what follows, I hope to contribute to this urgent conversation by pointing to how care is shaped in fundamentally contradictory ways under conditions of entrenched structural violence, and the limitations of normative frameworks when confronting this reality. To unambiguously valorize care in ethical and political life is to risk occluding the constitutive violence of existing social structures and norms, its impact on the intimacies of caring relations, and ultimately the ways that communities mobilize alternate economies and practices of care towards healing and social change. While it is crucial to value care and work for a more caring society, I claim that efforts to transform patterns of relational harm and develop new sensibilities should also be highlighted as integral components of radical caring praxis.
Hil Malatino has written a beautiful book rooted in what he terms a t4t (trans for trans) praxis ... more Hil Malatino has written a beautiful book rooted in what he terms a t4t (trans for trans) praxis of love. Trans Care speaks to the joys of weaving and reweaving trans community, even as it bears witness to the barriers to flourishing that mark many trans lives. Written from within the care webs he describes, the book provides an example of trans care as both a living ethos, and as reparative, generative, labor. The opening section, "Surviving Trans Antagonism," situates Trans Care in the context of what Malatino terms the "trans mundane." This is a political and ethical move against a moment in which "trans lives are recurrently and brutally utilized as a political wedge issue in order to consolidate horrifyingly ascendant forms of ethnonationalism and the ongoing violence of liberal austerity." Against a logic that seeks to reify trans subjects as undeserving of care, or, conversely, as deserving victims, he asks, "what ethos, what practice of living otherwise, might enable more liberatory forms of trans existence?" (5). The body of the book is composed of essays associated in ways that mirror and express webs of trans care. Malatino begins with a critique of the hierarchical and individualized presuppositions of the "burnout" model of care, posing instead a conception of trans mutual aid rooted in the complexities of resonant traumas and shifting, reciprocal, and interdependent relations between recipients and carers (24). In the central chapter, "Theorizing Trans Care," he presents trans care as an emergent ethos immanently critical of dominant political and moral economies of care. The subsequent discussion of his archival work, "Something Other Than Trancestors: Hirstory Lessons," can be read as an application of this ethics. Asking how to "care for these ghosts that take such care of us," he honors the crucial, even lifesaving, role of hirstorical memory in trans communities, but stays with the trouble of projection and fantasy, as well as the dangers posed by historical erasure and overkill. His closing section, "Trans Care within and against the Medical-Industrial Complex," speaks to the systemic, persistent denial of medical care to trans individuals, and its disproportionate impacts on multiply marginalized trans people. 1 He also discusses emergent community responses to this neglect of institutional care. Here, "showing up" for this intricate labor exemplifies the double movement of trans care: at once attentive to the danger of reproducing the intersecting oppressions so definitive of normative care, and prefigurative of a world of trans flourishing. What I find so transformative, even revolutionary, in Malatino's account of trans care is that it is both prefigurative and attentive to the specificity of trans lives and
My dissertation attends to the embodied and relational dimensions of caring ethics and politics. ... more My dissertation attends to the embodied and relational dimensions of caring ethics and politics. I locate my analysis in conditions in which devaluing, exploiting, and extracting the care of multiply oppressed people is a structural component of many contemporary institutions, social forms, and intimate realities—as is the denial of care to those most impacted by systemic harms. I argue that prominent articulations of care as a naturalistically construed ethical good on the one hand, or an exploited form of labor on the other, sidestep the constitutive violence of these social structures and norms, the impact of this violence on the intimacies of caring relations themselves, and ultimately the generative and transformational role that alternative economies and practices of care play in movements for social change. In particular, my project critically engages i.) feminist care ethical understandings of care as a moral value and ii.) Marxist feminist analyses of care labor as an essential, if disavowed, component of capitalist accumulation and extraction. Together, these orientations towards ethics and labor speak to fundamental dimensions of care—which, insofar as it is concerned with meeting emotional and material needs, is, in Sara Ruddick’s famous phrasing, both a form of labor and an ethical relationship (Ruddick 1998). However, I claim that isolating these material and normative realities poses an unworkable dualism, which ultimately occludes the intimacies of struggle and transformation at the heart of caring ethics and politics. I find more generative approaches to these questions in two discourses in particular: On the one hand, I discuss how intersectional feminist methods highlight the interlocking oppressions manifest in social organizations and divisions of caring labor, and how this violence can become engrained in the very forms of caring attention (responsiveness, empathy, other-directedness, etc.) that care ethicists often uncritically naturalize. On the other, I engage notions of communization and life making developed by largely untranslated contemporary Latin American social reproduction feminists, who place affective and intimate critique and transformation at the heart of the politics of social reproduction in ways that transcend traditional Marxist notions of labor and labor politics.
Special Issue: The Politics of Social Reproduction
Ed. Kelly Gawel and Cinzia Arruzza
https://doc... more Special Issue: The Politics of Social Reproduction Ed. Kelly Gawel and Cinzia Arruzza https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol22/iss2/
The Politics of Social Reproduction. An Introduction Cinzia Arruzza and Kelly Gawel
Social Reproduction in the Making: Recentering the Margins, Expanding the Directions Zhivka Valiavicharska
Social Reproduction Theory and the Form of Labor Power Aaron Jaffe
Labor Valorization and Social Reproduction: What is Valuable about the Labor Theory of Value? Kate Doyle Griffiths
Fourier, Marx, and Social Reproduction Blanca Missé
Toward an Ecology of Life-making: The Re-membering of Meridel Le Sueur Rosemary Hennessy
No estamos todas, faltan las presas! Contemporary Feminist Practices Building Paths toward Prison Abolition Susana Draper
Detroit’s Water Wars: Race, Failing Social Reproduction, and Infrastructure Brian Whitener
Readymade or Made [to be] Ready, Replicant or Surplus: Social Reproduction and the Biopolitics of Abstraction Prefigured in Contemporary Art Jaleh Mansoor
10 Theses on Feminist Economics (or the antagonism between the strike and finance) Luci Cavallero and Verónica Gago
Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy
This article claims that Asha Bhandary’s theory of justice in Freedom to Care:
Liberalism, Depend... more This article claims that Asha Bhandary’s theory of justice in Freedom to Care: Liberalism, Dependency Care, and Culture is right to stress the interdependency of justice and care in addressing structural oppressions, but wrong in upholding liberalism’s capacity for doing so. Against her procedural mechanism of education for caregiving skills in particular, I point to the critical and generative methods of social reproduction feminism and Transformative Justice as models of radical praxis in the collective work of politically centering and radically transforming cultures of care.
The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing, 2019
In what follows I offer a perspective on how the ‘dialectical image’ might speak to what is revol... more In what follows I offer a perspective on how the ‘dialectical image’ might speak to what is revolutionary and catastrophic in our experiences and relations. It may be impossible to directly address the psychic and affective content of our moment of danger, or the pain, and perhaps ecstasy, of the constellations that might emerge from it. Here I approach these contradictions by way of mimetic invocation. I make an offering to an unspeakable passing, perhaps a space these things can move through, or reside. It comes out of my fraught yet potent attempts to inhabit such possibilities and limits and hopes to speak to these places in those who read it.
This article attends to the intimate contradictions that differentially shape and limit caring ca... more This article attends to the intimate contradictions that differentially shape and limit caring capacities and relations in a violent world, and the embodied ethical and political transformations at the heart of learning to care otherwise. From manifestos calling for "universal care" in defiance of the state-sanctioned horrors of the pandemic era, to the abolitionist politics of care developed by BLM organizers through movement building and healing, and the proliferation of mutual-aid infrastructures to meet needs and distribute resources in the face of overwhelming crisis and neglect-these examples and so many others illustrate with undeniable clarity that radical care is finally on the agenda. In what follows, I hope to contribute to this urgent conversation by pointing to how care is shaped in fundamentally contradictory ways under conditions of entrenched structural violence, and the limitations of normative frameworks when confronting this reality. To unambiguously valorize care in ethical and political life is to risk occluding the constitutive violence of existing social structures and norms, its impact on the intimacies of caring relations, and ultimately the ways that communities mobilize alternate economies and practices of care towards healing and social change. While it is crucial to value care and work for a more caring society, I claim that efforts to transform patterns of relational harm and develop new sensibilities should also be highlighted as integral components of radical caring praxis.
ABSTRACT In what follows I offer a perspective on how the ‘dialectical image’ might speak to what... more ABSTRACT In what follows I offer a perspective on how the ‘dialectical image’ might speak to what is revolutionary and catastrophic in our experiences and relations. It may be impossible to directly address the psychic and affective content of our moment of danger, or the pain, and perhaps ecstasy, of the constellations that might emerge from it. Here I approach these contradictions by way of mimetic invocation. I make an offering to an unspeakable passing, perhaps a space these things can move through, or reside. It comes out of my fraught yet potent attempts to inhabit such possibilities and limits and hopes to speak to these places in those who read it.
Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, May 10, 2021
This article claims that Asha Bhandary’s theory of justice in Freedom to Care: Liberalism, Depend... more This article claims that Asha Bhandary’s theory of justice in Freedom to Care: Liberalism, Dependency Care, and Culture is right to stress the interdependency of justice and care in addressing stru...
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Papers by Kelly Gawel
In particular, my project critically engages i.) feminist care ethical understandings of care as a moral value and ii.) Marxist feminist analyses of care labor as an essential, if disavowed, component of capitalist accumulation and extraction. Together, these orientations towards ethics and labor speak to fundamental dimensions of care—which, insofar as it is concerned with meeting emotional and material needs, is, in Sara Ruddick’s famous phrasing, both a form of labor and an ethical relationship (Ruddick 1998). However, I claim that isolating these material and normative realities poses an unworkable dualism, which ultimately occludes the intimacies of struggle and transformation at the heart of caring ethics and politics. I find more generative approaches to these questions in two discourses in particular: On the one hand, I discuss how intersectional feminist methods highlight the interlocking oppressions manifest in social organizations and divisions of caring labor, and how this violence can become engrained in the very forms of caring attention (responsiveness, empathy, other-directedness, etc.) that care ethicists often uncritically naturalize.
On the other, I engage notions of communization and life making developed by largely untranslated contemporary Latin American social reproduction feminists, who place affective and intimate critique and transformation at the heart of the politics of social reproduction in ways that transcend traditional Marxist notions of labor and labor politics.
Ed. Kelly Gawel and Cinzia Arruzza
https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol22/iss2/
The Politics of Social Reproduction. An Introduction
Cinzia Arruzza and Kelly Gawel
Social Reproduction in the Making: Recentering the Margins, Expanding the Directions
Zhivka Valiavicharska
Social Reproduction Theory and the Form of Labor Power
Aaron Jaffe
Labor Valorization and Social Reproduction: What is Valuable about the Labor Theory of Value?
Kate Doyle Griffiths
Fourier, Marx, and Social Reproduction
Blanca Missé
Toward an Ecology of Life-making: The Re-membering of Meridel Le Sueur
Rosemary Hennessy
No estamos todas, faltan las presas! Contemporary Feminist Practices Building Paths toward Prison Abolition
Susana Draper
Detroit’s Water Wars: Race, Failing Social Reproduction, and Infrastructure
Brian Whitener
Readymade or Made [to be] Ready, Replicant or Surplus: Social Reproduction and the Biopolitics of Abstraction Prefigured in Contemporary Art
Jaleh Mansoor
10 Theses on Feminist Economics (or the antagonism between the strike and finance)
Luci Cavallero and Verónica Gago
Liberalism, Dependency Care, and Culture is right to stress the interdependency of justice and care in addressing structural oppressions, but wrong in upholding liberalism’s capacity for doing so. Against her procedural mechanism of education for caregiving skills in particular, I point to the critical and generative methods of social reproduction feminism and Transformative Justice as models of radical praxis in the collective work of politically centering and radically transforming cultures of care.
In particular, my project critically engages i.) feminist care ethical understandings of care as a moral value and ii.) Marxist feminist analyses of care labor as an essential, if disavowed, component of capitalist accumulation and extraction. Together, these orientations towards ethics and labor speak to fundamental dimensions of care—which, insofar as it is concerned with meeting emotional and material needs, is, in Sara Ruddick’s famous phrasing, both a form of labor and an ethical relationship (Ruddick 1998). However, I claim that isolating these material and normative realities poses an unworkable dualism, which ultimately occludes the intimacies of struggle and transformation at the heart of caring ethics and politics. I find more generative approaches to these questions in two discourses in particular: On the one hand, I discuss how intersectional feminist methods highlight the interlocking oppressions manifest in social organizations and divisions of caring labor, and how this violence can become engrained in the very forms of caring attention (responsiveness, empathy, other-directedness, etc.) that care ethicists often uncritically naturalize.
On the other, I engage notions of communization and life making developed by largely untranslated contemporary Latin American social reproduction feminists, who place affective and intimate critique and transformation at the heart of the politics of social reproduction in ways that transcend traditional Marxist notions of labor and labor politics.
Ed. Kelly Gawel and Cinzia Arruzza
https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol22/iss2/
The Politics of Social Reproduction. An Introduction
Cinzia Arruzza and Kelly Gawel
Social Reproduction in the Making: Recentering the Margins, Expanding the Directions
Zhivka Valiavicharska
Social Reproduction Theory and the Form of Labor Power
Aaron Jaffe
Labor Valorization and Social Reproduction: What is Valuable about the Labor Theory of Value?
Kate Doyle Griffiths
Fourier, Marx, and Social Reproduction
Blanca Missé
Toward an Ecology of Life-making: The Re-membering of Meridel Le Sueur
Rosemary Hennessy
No estamos todas, faltan las presas! Contemporary Feminist Practices Building Paths toward Prison Abolition
Susana Draper
Detroit’s Water Wars: Race, Failing Social Reproduction, and Infrastructure
Brian Whitener
Readymade or Made [to be] Ready, Replicant or Surplus: Social Reproduction and the Biopolitics of Abstraction Prefigured in Contemporary Art
Jaleh Mansoor
10 Theses on Feminist Economics (or the antagonism between the strike and finance)
Luci Cavallero and Verónica Gago
Liberalism, Dependency Care, and Culture is right to stress the interdependency of justice and care in addressing structural oppressions, but wrong in upholding liberalism’s capacity for doing so. Against her procedural mechanism of education for caregiving skills in particular, I point to the critical and generative methods of social reproduction feminism and Transformative Justice as models of radical praxis in the collective work of politically centering and radically transforming cultures of care.