Contradictions of Care

ABSTRACT 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. Contradictions of Care VIOLENCE AND REVOLUTION IN CARING RELATIONS Kelly Gawel June 2023 Submitted to The New School for Social Research of The New School in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Dissertation Committee Dr. Jay Bernstein Dr. Cinzia Arruzza Dr. Linda Martín Alcoff i Dr. Emma Park ACKNOWLEDGMENTS At all levels, this writing would be inconceivable without the contributions of beloved friends, collaborators, family, teachers, and mentors. I am grateful to my mother who instilled in me my deepest values, showed me the meaning of both care and wisdom, and taught me the humor and grit needed to persevere. To my father, my spirit kin, for teaching me gratitude, mystery, and the art of living. To Cinzia Arruzza, thank you for inspiring this work and showing me what I can aspire to. The power of your truth has taught me to speak truth to power. To Jay Bernstein, you taught me to argue and to teach— and to call on new visions of beauty and reason in doing so. Thank you for seeing me, and believing in my work even (especially) when I lost my way. To Caffyn Jesse, my counternormative role-model for queering ethics and living in alignment with purpose and pleasure. John Campion, thank you for encouraging me to find a work I can live in, and for showing the way by walking it. To Veronica Dakota Padilla, Teresa Casas Hernández, Angelica Stathopoulos—my work needs your friendship and love, as well as your writing, thinking, and being. To B Love, the power of your magic and healing truly weaves worlds—I can’t wait to teach and write together. To Zhivka Valiavicharska—beloved comradess and keeper of the social reproductive temple— thank you for inviting me into your worlds, and for teaching me to live and relate in new ways. Esra Atamer, for showing me what is possible. Melissa Buzzeo, for teaching me radical beauty, voice, and what it means to belong. Cassandra Troyan, for sparking this project, and the Care Cadre for nourishing it into being. To Sandra Stephens and Ciclón Olivares: your art, as well as our friendship, togetherness—and above all our jouissance—have taught me what chosen family is and can be. ii Silvia Birklein, deepest teacher of my feminist lineage, and of my soul, I will always be grateful. To isele phoenix harper—life pal and poly bestie, our conversations have taught me more than any book cited herein, and they imbue every page. To Mithra Lehn and Cille Varselev—thank you for teaching me new horizons of praxis, and new depths of communion and solidarity. To A. Sef, your embodiment inspires cultures, may the mesh be with you always. To Sarah Kamens, you are a star; thank you for showing me I am too. Rosalyn Temple, for the power of your voice, presence, and art. Rima Hussein, for showing me that philosophy is worth fighting for, and for bringing play, delight, and secure attachment to the process. Thank you, Aaron Neber, your brilliant heart and mind (and your concrete suggestions!) truly saved me. I can’t wait to see where our philosophical conversations, and our friendship, take us. Thank you to Linda Martín Alcoff, your work has made new worlds of philosophy possible, and actual, for so many. Thank you, Emma Park, for the care, generosity, and rigor you brought to my project. And to Drucilla Cornell, I wanted you to be the spiritual mother of my work. May you rest in power and joy. All of you, and many others, have transformed my writing, and my caring, beyond what words can express. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements ii Introduction: The Possibility of Radical Care 1 I. II. III. IV. V. Beyond the Parallelism of Ethics and Labor The Contradictions of Care Why ‘Radical’ Care Political and Theoretical Contexts Organization of Chapters 2 7 9 15 19 Chapter One: How Can a Radical Ethics of Care be Possible? 24 I. II. III. IV. V. Introduction: Contradictions in The Ethics of Care The Value of Care: Care Ethics’ Feminist Critique of Moral Philosophy The Politics of Care: Care Ethical Perspectives Naturalistic/Naturalized Epistemologies of Care: Getting the Problem into View Conclusion: Caring Attention—Ethical Given or Situated Praxis? Chapter Two: There is No Universal Care: Interlocking Oppressions and the Politics of Experience in Intersectional Theories of Care I. II. III. IV. V. Introduction: Caring Through Difference? Intersectional Perspectives on Care Engrossment and Empathy: Contradictory Manifestations of Care The Ethics of Care in Political Context Conclusion: New Caring Tools Chapter Three: How Can a Radical Politics of Social Reproduction be Possible? I. iv Introduction: Contradictions in the Labor of Care 25 32 42 52 62 72 73 80 95 107 118 120 121 II. Critical and Methodological Considerations on Social Reproduction III. Autonomist and Socialist Perspectives on Reproductive Labor a. Autonomist Perspectives b. Socialist Perspectives IV. The Limits of the Labor Paradigm V. Conclusion: Traditions of Economism and Productivism Chapter Four: The Ethics of Social Reproduction: Affect, Embodiment, and the Politics of Life-Making I. II. III. IV. V. VI. Introduction: Care in Crisis Structural Contradictions of Care: Marxist Feminist Perspectives on the Care Crisis The Ethics of Labor: Two Perspectives Moral and Material Economies of Reproduction The Affective Labor Debates Conclusion: The Erotics of Life-Making Conclusion: Holding Contradiction I. Opacity and Caring After II. For the Remainder: Or a Promissory Note in the Key of Feminist Economics a. Commons and Luchas en Defensa de la Vida b. Transformative Justice: Abolitionist Alternatives for Care III. Conclusion: The Call of Radical Care Bibliography v 126 134 135 145 153 167 173 174 178 184 196 211 223 228 229 234 235 241 247 250 Introduction: The Possibility of Radical Care 1 Radical care is a personal devotion to shifting how we meet each other in small ways and also how we bring that into social spaces to organize for what we believe in politically. It is a lifelong dedication towards something bigger than yourself and knowing that you may not even see the fruits of your labor and the structural changes in your lifetime, but still holding the hope to organize for it anyways. Radical care is actively believing and organizing for the inevitability of a better world. -Moon Radical care, to me, is having a new perspective on all of the things that we were taught to be normal and recognizing that the oppression that comes from the devaluation of care intersects with other types of oppression… -Esther I think teaching and educating my community. Teaching them how to read, where the resources are at, how to nurture themselves, where to look for community, how to do a resume, how to upkeep taxes, their rights, how to use Narcan, how to take care of themselves, how to apply for Medicare/Medicaid, educating them on material, educating them on how to plant, where the abortion clinics are, what to do if arrests happen, how to deal with conflicts collectively. -Tecuane Mutual aid, primarily. Mending relationships with loved ones and working on being a better feminist. Intersectional feminist. -Sarah Unlearning -Hannah1 I. Beyond the Parallelism of Ethics and Labor Care is the social, material, and emotional weaving that sustains life and connects us to others. From midwifing new life, nurturing the young, the work of sex, and the tending of death, trauma, disability, and physical and mental illness, it is vital in every life stage and process. And yet, despite its ubiquity in all aspects of life, care has been routinely neglected and even dismissed by hegemonic and radical theorists alike. The fact that care has finally gained purchase in mainstream political and moral theory is thus something to be celebrated, as is the labor of the thinkers and activists, often marginalized themselves, who have long placed care at the center of 1 Student responses to the prompt: “What does radical care mean to you?” during the concluding discussion of “Radical Care and Social Transformation”—Pratt Institute, May 2023, Brooklyn NY. 2 the moral and political universe. However, this ‘caring turn’ has yet to fully address care’s imbrication with conditions of systemic social inequality, or the role of care in movements for social change. The following dissertation attends to the embodied and relational dimensions of caring ethics and politics and does so in light of structural 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 understand care in a broad sense as the material and affective labor and relations through which social bonds and individuals are reproduced. Care is thus conditioned by, and upholds, social forms (family, labor) and institutional life (civic, religious, legal). At the heart of daily and intergenerational reproduction, it involves modes of knowing, perceiving, and relating that are highly subtle and skilled, and culturally and historically specific. It is thus a fundamental site of cultural reproduction: through care we learn to embody and emotionally invest in the norms of a given social context—or resist and/or transform them. The argument and chapters that follow are structured around my claim that prominent feminist 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. My aim in juxtaposing the distinct and divergent legacies of care ethics and Marxist feminism is not arbitrary, nor does it simply follow from Sarah Ruddick’s compelling claim 3 (1998) that ethics and labor simply are fundamental dimensions of care. Rather, a foundational assumption of this dissertation is that the parallelism manifest in these materialist and normative paradigms is itself reflective of institutional forms and knowledge validation processes (Collins Black Feminist Thought) that have excluded care from ethical and political life. This division of care-as-labor from care-as-ethics undergirding these respective traditions presents problems for those of us striving to center and transform care, and to uproot the injustices entrenched in so many caring relations, without re-instantiating the very forms of violence we seek to overcome. If it is true that this division is itself an unwitting reification of moral and political economies that foundationally invisibilize and devalue care and the ostensibly private, natural, and personal realms of life over which it holds sway, then what avenues are left for forging new meanings and embodiments for care? Because it is not as if the philosophers and activists who gave their hearts and minds to these revolutionary feminist projects were content with prevalent notions and norms. They too had such new feminist architectures (Anzaldúa 44, Lorde 112-123) in mind— and new feminist tools in hand. On the one hand, feminist ethicists are right to reclaim the ethical value of care, and to situate it in its rightful place at the center of political theory and action. But the fact of care’s lifesustaining capacities does not in itself make it an unequivocal good. Indeed, it points to an unsettling ambiguity. Particularly under conditions of widespread oppression and dominance, caring practices and relations can themselves be shaped by, and even play a role in reproducing, forms of violence that are anathema to the life and flourishing of many people, even the earth itself. Exploiting and extracting the care labor of subjugated people—as well as systemically neglecting those most in need of care—is, and has historically been, a constitutive feature of the social reproduction of violent institutions. Nor is care given as a species activity when called 4 upon in social movements or as a collective survival strategy: transformative practices of care play a vital role in how marginalized communities sustain themselves under these conditions, mobilize forms of resistance against them, and nurture possibilities of living otherwise. On the other hand, Marxist feminist theorists of social reproduction do politically center the unequal gendered, racialized, and international divisions of caring labor and access through which so many systemic inequalities are reproduced—as well as the centrality of caring labors in the social reproduction of both capitalism and anti-capitalist struggle alike. By calling attention to the devaluation, naturalization, and brutal exploitation of reproductive labors at the heart of capitalist social life, these feminist organizers and theorists have radically shifted the terrain of anti-capitalist political theory and praxis. However, this Marxist feminist move—particularly from those prominent on the Western academic Left—largely reduces care to labor and thus narrows the politics of care and social reproduction to the vision of struggle and liberation elaborated in Marx’s critique of capitalism. But, much like traditional moral philosophy, many Marxist critiques of political economy and liberatory imaginaries of classless society have constitutively excluded care. Reducing the politics of social reproduction to a Marxian labor lens thus risks stripping care—and social reproduction itself—of its ethical and political specificity: flattening the painful dilemmas that circumscribe care and sex work, for example, as well as the horizons of transformation they bring into view. It is as damaging to reduce care to labor politics as it is view it as a transparent ethical good, as neither perspective sheds light on the dimensions of harm, struggle, healing, and transformation specific to relations and practices of care—or their essential, and essentially contested, role in ethical and political life-making. Together, these assumptions support and motivate my claim that care is not outside of or beyond violence and social transformation. A 5 crucial takeaway from these observations is that the harms reproduced in caring institutions and relations are not intrinsic to care as such but features of social relations and norms that both moralize and devalue it along multiple and intersecting axes of oppression. “Dangers” such as paternalism and parochialism2 thus should not be construed as pathologies inherent to care, but rather as examples of historically specific harms corresponding, in large part, to contemporary social forms and institutions: e.g. cultural and familial chauvinism in the case of parochial care, or, in the case of paternalistic care, the individualizing narratives of responsibilization and deservingness at play in the allocation of ever dwindling services. Finally, my claim that care, as a locus of struggle and transformation, cannot be adequately brought into view or engaged within the parameters of this parallelism ultimately stems from—and, I hope, supports—both care ethical and materialist feminist insights. To claim that care should not be reduced to a natural, biological, instinctive, or given facticity is not to contradict care ethicists’ claim that it is an essential component of human ethics and worldmaking. While I contest care ethicists’ move to derive the ethical value of care from a universal species activity or set of intuitive dispositions, this does not dispute the fact of care’s necessary, fundamental, and irreducible role in our lives—or its ethical and political stakes. Analogously, my claim that human beings’ affective, embodied, and relational capacities for care should not be subsumed under a historical materialist concept of labor is ultimately a historical and materialist claim: namely, that care, like labor, is conditioned by, and generative of, material and social relations.3 2 For Joan Tronto, parochial care is a “way to excuse the inattention of the privileged” (Moral Boundaries 146) and paternalistic care is care “in which care givers assume that they know better than care receivers what those care receivers need” (“Creating Caring Institutions” 161). 3 I want to acknowledge and thank Linda Alcoff and Jay Bernstein for their powerful critiques of this anti-naturalist line in my dissertation defense. While I cannot address their criticisms here, one approach could be to strategically bracket the question of naturalism, and, following Emma Park’s suggestion in the same defense, to highlight the historical situatedness of human caring dispositions and norms. 6 II. The Contradictions of Care A basic assumption of this dissertation is that care is shaped in fundamentally contradictory ways under conditions of structural violence. By structural violence I mean relations of exploitation, extraction, abuse, and coercion that are societally systemic, which often trace multiple and intersecting forms of oppression, and which condition social forms, institutions, and patterns of intimate attachment in fundamental ways. Moreover, such systemic harms are often normalized, naturalized, and mystified by given moral and political economies of care themselves. Care is necessary for life and world making, yet its practices and relations are also shaped by systemic oppressions that are anathema to the life they make possible. This struggle at the heart of caring relations is what I am addressing with the term ‘contradictions of care.’ The contradictions I address in what follows should not be understood through the meaning of ‘structural’ implied by many Marxist uses of this term.4 The contradictions of care also include the intimate and ethical impasses that arise when the life-giving labors and relations of care become integral to the reproduction of violent social relations and norms. Care is often violently and interpersonally normative: e.g. in the gendered, racialized, ethnocentric “ideologies of care” (Dowling) mobilized by institutions and individuals alike to justify and normalize inequalities in caring relations. If it is true that capacities for affective and relational engagement are often differentially shaped and attenuated vis a vis multiple and intersecting axes of oppression, this means that the contradictions of care can, and do, show up even in attempts to address them. This is a key 4 E.g. in the notion of the contradictory “tendency of the rate of profit to fall,” the conflict between forces and relations of production, and even the development of proletarian class consciousness itself, which are often seen by orthodox Marxists to stem from the self-undermining tendencies intrinsic to capital’s accumulation imperative. This tendency is by no means universal to Marxist accounts. Nancy Fraser, for example, offers a nuanced Marxist feminist theory of structural contradiction in her discussion of the economic, political, environmental, and socialreproductive “crisis tendencies” of contemporary capitalism (“Crisis of Care?” 22-24). I discuss these arguments in Chapter Three and Four. 7 takeaway of the notion of contradiction I develop in this dissertation. The contradictions of care are moral and political, systemic and intimate—and as such point to the need for both ethical and structural transformation in caring relations and norms. But this is simply to re-state the issue, especially when it comes to organizing and praxis. In practice, this painful reality points to the at-once collective and local nature of the problem, and radical care’s co-evolutionary relationship with sustainable and transformational social movements. While care is in a structural state of crisis, this plays out on the most intimate terrains of people’s lives and thus cannot be addressed through distributive, or collectivist, approaches alone. Unwinding the intimate and relational dimensions of these contradictions also requires sustained and collective efforts to transform embodied patterns of relational harm and develop new caring sensibilities as integral components of radical and liberatory social change. This is a fraught, inevitably pluralistic, task—but one that both care ethicists and Marxist feminists have largely, if unintentionally, avoided. I focus on these intimate and embodied dimensions of caring contradictions, as well as political and ethical transformation, for several reasons. First, to situate this inquiry in the domain most proper to care itself—and thus to center lived experiences of care politically and ethically: both the harms that characterize many caring relations, as well as the specific textures of transformation—the sensibilities, emotions, embodiments, and relational intimacies that are brought into play and become possible when people cultivate and mobilize care in counternormative ways. Second, to call for the respectful study of, and engagement with, the many, often buried, practices of insurgent care that communities have developed, and continue to deploy, in confronting, indeed contradicting, their oppression. Finally, I focus on the intimate dimensions of caring ethics and politics to point to what legacies of feminist and intersectional 8 praxis have long taught us about the paradigm shifts and openings made possible when we politically situate, and politicize, our lived experiences and relationships in and through organizing against systemic harms. A politics of lived experience is indispensable to radical care: without it, we fail to engage care on its own terms. III. Why ‘Radical’ Care? This dissertation argues for a radical politics of care and a radical ethics of social reproduction. I use ‘radical’ in both the critical and revolutionary senses of the word, to name the violence at the root of social organizations and divisions of caring labor, as well as the essential and integral role of care in building and sustaining social change.5 And yet, caring practices and relations are inescapably plural and particular: as care ethicists have long noted, care exceeds and confounds theoretical abstraction and global prescription. The success of my argument thus hinges on its ability to illuminate how historical and present inequalities in caring relations can (and do) impact people’s lived experiences and relationships, and the specific ways they can (and do) care in ways that resist and transform these injustices in large and small ways. Forms of care are emergent in the sense that they are deeply engrained at psychosocial and somatic levels and are relational and responsive—that is, unpredictable (Puig de la Bellacasa 21, 138). Our experiences of giving and receiving care, or lack thereof, shape the very contours of our sensory worlds and embodied relations to others. And yet we can cultivate new embodiments, sensibilities, emotions, and capacities for relationship by cultivating relational 5 A few crucial and related points I want to make clear are: i). innumerable instances of radical care already exist in social movements and political struggles; ii). they are essential to sustaining and building these struggles; and iii). they often constitute their most revolutionary as well as endangered edges. Caring elements of struggle are thus often subject to brutal repression from the State and reactionary forces. J Edgar Hoover’s infamous characterization of the Black Panther Party’s breakfast program as the greatest internal security threat to the US is a paradigmatic case in point. See Spade 2020. 9 containers and responding in creative ways to the needs of others, ourselves, our communities, and our struggles. Once again this opens more questions than it answers, and points to the need for engaged and embodied learning: learning, for example, methods of political and ethical education that unwind the vigilance, relax the hyper-attunement, enliven the insensibility, and diffuse the entitlement through which social inequalities shape or attenuate people’s capacities to give and receive care. Or to notice and intervene in the often subtle and intersubjective mechanisms through which care is extracted, denied, or coerced. In this sense, my argument about radical care follows care ethical insights about the specific and relational nature of care, which, in its intimate pains and joys, can only be known from the inside. At the same time, tools forged through engaged praxis can also prove useful across contexts—e.g. by developing, practicing, and teaching modalities for how to concretely address such inequalities and the attendant, enduring, blindness to the labor and skills of care at the center of human life and meaning; how to cultivate and sustain the kinds of multigenerational, international, coalitions and processes that might actively facilitate such profound shifts in caring relations at both structural and intimate levels; or how to honor and celebrate the horizons, however small or fleeting, that open when we do begin to care otherwise. In this spirit, my argument builds on the following, preliminary, assertions. First, Western moral and political theory’s neglect and even dismissal of care as an ethical and political issue is not superficial: it points to limitations in its foundational methods and self-conceptions. If something is indeed rotten at the core of the normative order, then simply replacing care for justice, or construing it as a criterion of moral judgement, for example, would amount to yet another refusal to engage care on its own terms, or contend with how deeply it unsettles the 10 methodological centrality of foundations and principles itself (Tronto 1994, Held 2006).6 Taking care seriously requires fundamental shifts in perception: i.e. methods and tools that are capable of sensing and engaging care as a phenomenal and material reality. In many philosophies of care, for example, relationships rather than individuals become the primary ontological, ethical, political, and epistemic starting point. This brings political, ethical, and epistemic realities into view that the political atomism and normative, ontological, and epistemic individualism of liberal models simply cannot see. Care ethicists and (many) Marxist feminists have used similar lines of argument in their calls for radical epistemic and practical shifts in these discourses. Acknowledging care as an essential category of moral and political thought points to the limits of liberalism’s foundational conceptions of individualized selfhood and agency, and also to their extension into its procedural and distributive approaches to justice.7 As I discuss in Chapter Four, these methods for administrating goods and services, while useful tools in their own right, rest upon a constitutive blindness to the dependencies and interdependencies of care (Kittay). Just as liberalism’s methodological individualism cannot perceive the ethical stakes of caring relations, its models of contractual egalitarianism are insensible to how inequalities condition not only the normative meaning of care, but the social forms (e.g., marriage, family) and institutions (e.g., legal, medical, electoral, social services, etc.) that necessarily mediate such procedural and distributive mechanisms of justice. Of course, it is so often these very institutional mediators who regulate and maintain (if not actively exploit) blatantly unjust distributions of caring labor and access. While it would be foolish to wholly reject these tools in 6 See my critique of Michael Slote and Stephanie Collins in Chapter Two, where I develop this point. I develop this line of thinking in my critical and generative engagement with Asha Bhandary’s liberal theory of care (“Conditions of Radical Care”). 7 11 a time of austerity and fascist reaction, nor can we model caring politics on institutional practices that both perpetuate and mystify caring inequalities.8 The second assumption undergirding this dissertation follows from these observations about the deep methodological, conceptual, and practical limitations of Western normative and political theory when it comes to addressing inequities in caring relations. Namely, that the very social conditions which systemically devalue, exploit, extract, and invisibilize care also make it very difficult to see care beyond the perspectives of those who continue benefit from its disavowal as a political and moral reality. Below I argue that, in their very attempts to do such crucial work, the traditions of care ethicists and Marxist feminism have—understandably and perhaps inevitably—at times inadvertently resorted to assumptions of this sort. Care ethicists’ unequivocal valuation of naturalized caring dispositions, for example, often fail to address the structural and interpersonal dynamics of oppression they seek to center in their work. As I argue in Chapter One and Two, an ethics of care that relies on a universalized and naturalistic notion of care as a moral good, like the urge to make care a new foundation or 8 While the following influential authors develop incredibly important and nuanced perspectives, they, like many care ethicists, do not fully account for the impacts of power dynamics on people’s lived experiences of, and capacities for, care, or the need for transformative political and ethical approaches that address them. In their Care Manifesto, the members of the ‘Care Collective” (Andreas Chatzidakis, Jamie Hakim, Jo Littler, Catherine Rottenberg, and Lynne Segalcall) call for a “politics that puts care at the centre of life.” Their definition is rich and expansive, including affective, material, social, and ecological dimensions: care, for them, is “a social capacity and activity involving the nurturing of all that is necessary for the welfare and flourishing of life. Above all, to put care centre stage means recognising and embracing our interdependencies” (Care Collective 11). However, while they advocate for a notion of universal care in which ‘genuine care’ and collective responsibility form the keynote of social relations at all levels, they offer only positive definitions of care as a good, and procedural approaches (e.g., better distribution and education) to how we might arrive at this goal. Maria Puig de la Ballacasa articulates an emergent, ecological, and speculative ethics of care that refuses normative and a priori notions of ethical agency in favor of a relational ontology based on interdependence and attunement, but she often lacks a critical and transformative, that is, political, approach to how power dynamics might fundamentally condition such coemergence and relation, and thus how we might transform them in collective and politicized ways (Matters of Care, Emma Dowling articulates very helpful notions of the structural nature of the care crisis, the insidious austeritybased ‘care fixes’ that further externalize care work onto marginalized people (The Care Crisis 32), and the ideologies and romanticizations of care that normalize and naturalize the allocation of care work along racialized, gendered, and national lines (70-72). However, while crucial, her structural analysis too tends to leave out the relational and ethical transformations that must be generated alongside and through structural changes if we are not to reproduce new forms of oppressive and exploitative power at interpersonal and institutional levels alike. 12 criterion of moral action, risk importing the leveling normativity of liberalism and its normalization and naturalization of social inequality. Whereas normative approaches to care— exemplified in but not limited to feminist care ethics—rarely succeed in developing a radical perspective capable of addressing the violence conditioning normative conceptions of care, the Marxist feminists I engage in this dissertation often fail to address the ethical and political textures of care itself in their radical politics of social reproduction. For their part, the socialist feminists working under the aegis of “Social Reproduction Theory” (SRT) focus on the structural crisis tendencies informing the contradictory realities of care, as well as the reorganizations of both reproductive and productive labor necessary to overcome them—but often fail to attend to the dimensions of life and struggle specific to social reproduction as such. Autonomist theories of social reproduction, on the other hand, do speak about these intimate dimensions of violence and social transformation to some extent, but their calls for the ‘commoning’ and collectivization of social reproduction do not address the challenges that the very dispossession and exploitation of reproductive life they place at the center of their theories pose to such efforts. Neither Marxist feminist tradition attends to the ethical dilemmas specific to capitalist social reproduction, nor to the qualitative transformations in caring relations upon which the success of their feminist projects depends. Like the normative presuppositions of care ethicists, their structural focus threatens to sideline the ways that violence shapes and ruptures people’s relationships and capacities for care, as well as the agencies they mobilize against it. Crucially, both positions often occlude the intersectional realities that shape people’s vastly different experiences of care, and thus the ethical and political stakes of transforming these intimate embodiments and attachments. Socialist and autonomist feminist calls to better 13 distribute caring labor, or reclaim the commons (respectively) are necessary, but far from sufficient, to this task. Radical attention to care—that is, attention to the oppression at the root of how care is distributed both interpersonally and societally as well as the horizons of transformation that alternative relations of care make possible—shows that, despite the massive shifts in ethics and politics they have made possible, these feminist approaches to caring ethics and labor have proven somewhat inadequate on their own terms. Insofar as they rely on the political economic and normative foundations of the frameworks they seek to overcome, neither can attend to the layers of struggle and transformation implied by their own theories. The final grounding assumption of my radical theory of care is that reconstituting caring practices and relations on intimate and relational levels, in and through movement building and collective healing, is a vital component of transforming cultures of care in ways that are aligned with social justice—and should be viewed as inseparable from the project of politically centering care and securing its just distribution. Perhaps such radical transformations are best conceived in terms of possibility. This thought only occurred to me recently, in a conversation with students on the last day of “Radical Care and Social Transformation,”9 a class that centered on many of these issues. As a way of harvesting what we had learned together, I asked the students to take a few minutes to freewrite on the question “what is radical care.”10 In the ensuing conversation, these young people profoundly committed to social justice and aware of the structural violence of our world, helped me realize that the meaning of radical care might actually be bound up with the uncertainty of its realization. Perhaps, in the words of Pratt student and artist Moon Dang, 9 I designed this course for the Social Sciences and Cultural Studies Department at Pratt Institute and taught it in spring 2022 and spring 2023. 10 Several of these responses form the epigraph to this Introduction. 14 radical care is both “a lifelong dedication” and the “knowing that you may not even see the fruits of your labor and the structural changes in your lifetime.” The meaning and reality of radical care are perhaps defined in such open-ended questioning and commitment—a work of grief as much as joy, a militant no as much as a generative yes, an embrace of failure concomitant with “organizing for the inevitability of a better world” (Dang). IV. Political and Theoretical Contexts For both political and methodological reasons, I want to situate this writing in relation to the feminist legacies I engage with below, as well as give some immediate political context for my work on care. Autonomist feminism has deeply informed my own politics, and I consider myself heir to its legacy. I have experienced both the revolutionary possibilities as well as the political dilemmas of this tradition from the inside, and feel responsible for, and accountable to, it. For the past decade and a half, I have been part of feminist, queer, and antiracist projects centered on militant social reproduction11 in Oakland, Mexico City, and New York City. Feminist organizing projects deployed within and against radical left movement spaces, for example, have played a crucial part in cultural shifts in these communities, which were shockingly misogynistic even 15 years ago, and have drawn from the organizing strategies and theory of thinkers like Silvia Federici, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Margaret Prescod, and Selma James. Most essentially, I view my work as connected to the tradition of witches and whores that this tradition uplifts, pays homage to, and actively supports in both theory and practice. Likewise, while I am not a socialist, my graduate studies and friendship with Cinzia Arruzza—a crucial organizer of the international feminist strike and a leading voice in the socialist tradition of social reproduction theory, have deeply informed my work. While I disagree 11 Zhivka Valiavicharska and I, to our knowledge, first used the term ‘militant social reproduction’ and later ‘militant care’ in a 2015 piece of the same name, and afterwards, in the Care Cadre project I discuss below. 15 with Sue Ferguson that this strike was an essentially socialist endeavor, it is true that its New York, and US, contingents were overwhelmingly influenced by socialist feminist perspectives and organizing strategies. My own work organizing for this strike, and the political alliances it made possible, have had a transformative role on the perspectives developed here, as have my friendships and long-standing political discussions with thinkers in this tradition, some of whom I engage below. My engagement with autonomist feminist theories of social reproduction in Mexico, Chile and Argentina stems from these political contexts. My first introduction to this legacy of social reproduction feminism was in a reading group on Autonomia facilitated by Raquel Gutiérrez in 2010, while I was living in Mexico City. I returned to Gutierrez’s work, and the work of political collaborators such as Susana Draper and Veronica Gago, while organizing for the international feminist strike in 2017. Cinzia Arruzza and I discuss the leadership of these thinkers—and the Ni Una Menos collective in particular—in the recent evolution of militant feminist organizing and theoretical production on the terrain of social reproduction (“The Politics of Social Reproduction”). This international organizing and cross pollination provided context for Cristina Vega, Raquel Martínez-Buján and Myriam Paredes’s incredible edited volume Cuidado, comunidad y común: Experiencias cooperativas en el sostenimiento de la vida (Care, community and the commons: Cooperative experiences in the maintenance of life)12, and Gutiérrez’s Horizontes comunitario-populares: Producción de lo común más allá de las políticas estado-céntricas (Popular and communitarian horizons: producing the commons beyond state- 12 Unless otherwise noted, all translations from Spanish are my own. 16 centric politics) both of which I intended to write about at length in the final chapters,13 and which significantly inform my perspectives on social reproduction below. It is equally important to point to the limits of my thinking in relation to these Latin American lineages of social reproduction theory, as well as the intersectional feminist approaches that deeply inform the arguments I make below. Intersectionality is a legacy of Black feminism that pays particular attention to the lived experiences of those impacted by multiple, interlocking oppressions. Patricia Hill Collins, for example, contends that intersectionality is a critical social theory grounded in the experience, knowledge, and self-definition of Black women (Collins Black Feminist Thought).14 I have accordingly attempted to position this work at the margins of intersectional theory and the decolonial perspectives of many Latin American social reproduction theorists— especially since I often address difficult and intimate realities of oppression I have not experienced as a white US citizen. For example, my argument below is that the epistemic and political paradigm shifts inaugurated by intersectional feminists are essential for understanding and transforming care. I also claim that intersectional approaches to centering lived experience in theory creation and political activism provide key methodological modeling for ethical and political considerations of care. My success in doing so hinges on my ability to center the work and experiences of those at the frontlines of these struggles without re-inscribing the contradictions I am attempting to elaborate and address. This poses a real danger beyond what I 13 Due to the time limitations of this writing, I was not able to write the final chapter on radical care, which was to draw heavily on these works and put them in conversation with transformative justice traditions in the US. 14 While intersectionality has been problematically appropriated and misused in many academic contexts (Collins Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory, Hopkins) it has also been utilized by marginalized communities in respectful and expansive ways. For example, Eli Clare and the Sins Invalid collective draw upon intersectional theory to analyze how white and middle class perspectives were inadvertently centered in discourses and organizing strategies of disability rights, and call on intersectional perspectives in centering the most marginalized voices in the radical organizing praxis of disability justice. 17 can decipher with my individual good intentions, since we cannot simply will oppression out of our selves or relations or assume that intent or attention alone will facilitate transparency in caring relations. My ethical and political aim is thus to heed Maria Lugones’ guidance and strive to “imbue” the social positioning—and selves—I bring to this work with the ambiguity that historically informs them (189-190). My work on radical care work is also deeply informed by modalities of politicized somatics and transformative justice. I have studied and been in community with practitioners and teachers of the Institute for the Study of Somatic Sex Education, a radical healing modality grounded in queer and sex-worker activism, for the past six years. I am currently finishing my final project—which involves building curriculum on counter-normative, embodied, and erotic ethical education—under the mentorship of Corinne Diachuck and Kai Cheng Thom. My work developing trauma-informed, consent-based, ethical practices and peer support structures aligned with values and practices of transformative justice with and for this institute has been crucial to the embodied and transformative perspectives on care I develop here. Finally, the theoretical framework I develop below has roots in my experiences organizing with a collective devoted to radical care. My thesis concerning the non-transparency of care and resultant need for collective and embodied approaches to its transformation originated in the beauty and failures of a project on radical care, which we lovingly and ironically termed the ‘Care Cadre.’ Many of the insights presented here were generated out of conversations, inspired by collective practice, and forged in response to the possibilities and limits of this project that I was an integral part of, and cared very deeply about. This collective was an attempt to collectively theorize, build, and politicize structures of community care in anarchist communities in NYC and the SF Bay Area in the aftermath of incidents of sexual 18 violence. There were crossovers with transformative justice frameworks in its orientation to survivor centeredness and peer support, collective skill-building, anti-carceral approach, and political orientation to care—although we rarely used the language of transformative justice to describe it. Both the power and the failure of this collective imbue and motivate my argument here. The seemingly inevitable ways it fell apart along the very cleavages that brought us together, despite the presence of incredible skill and much good will, speaks to the contradictory realities of care, the problems they pose for organizing practice, and the level of skill and attunement needed to hold and confront them. The problems and possibilities that came out of this project have both guided and motivated this work on care and allowed me to belong to this inquiry. V. Organization of Chapters My first chapter critically engages care ethics from the perspective of the ethical contradictions of care. Given the ways that exploitative and extractive social relations are normalized, naturalized, and mystified by moral economies of care themselves, I argue that we cannot simply construe care as an ethical and political good—or the violent devaluation of the work of care and those who perform or rely upon it as simply deviations from this good. Insofar as caring practices and relations are shaped by structural violence even in their most intimate dimensions, grounding the ethics and politics of care in naturalized understandings of care is insufficient. Posing a deep critique of liberal individualistic approaches, care ethics disrupts the privatization of care, moves the agency of ethics from individual rational agents to relational ontology and praxis, and sheds light on the essential need for moral and political education to care. However, its reliance on what I term ‘naturalistic/naturalized epistemologies of care’ precludes a true 19 politicization of care, and thus ultimately runs counter to the very feminist politics of experience that inform this tradition. Globally and locally, social organizations and divisions of caring labor express and reproduce racialized, colonial, and class—as well as gender—oppressions. Intersectional feminist authors have focused on the intersectional violence at play in caring practices and relations, showing that i.) the ideological and material devaluation of caring labor and those who perform cannot be understood through single issue frames, and ii.) this devaluation is not incidental but structural to systems and institutions predicated on inequality and exploitation. My second chapter elaborates the challenges these insights pose to the naturalistic conceptions of care presented in the prior chapter, claiming that the elements of care naturalized by care ethics15 are themselves implicated in structures of violence that generate contradictions in caring practices—even and precisely at intimate levels. If caring relations are not only capable of perpetuating structural harms at the most intimate levels, but of doing so even in attempts to transform these conditions of harm, this has implications for how we collectively conceive of, and generate, politically transformative caring practices. My third chapter critically engages Marxist feminist social reproduction theory from the perspective of the social and material contradictions of caring labor. In both autonomist and socialist strains of social reproduction theory, materialist feminists have pointed to a crisis of care defined by a contradiction between capital’s drive to accumulation and extraction on the one hand, and the ever more thinly stretched capacities for daily and intergenerational social reproduction on the other. However, the intimate and ethical contradictions presented in the prior chapters pose deep problems to viewing care solely through the lens of labor. While they have 15 E.g., attention (responsiveness, empathy, other-directedness, etc.) 20 theorized these structural contradictions of care in terms of the exploitation and extraction essential to contemporary racial capitalism and international divisions of caring labor, both traditions of social reproduction theory have largely failed to attend to the essential role of affect and intimacy in the politics of social reproduction—both in the sense of the violence of care in crisis as well as care’s transformative possibilities. As with ethical formations that naturalize caring relations shaped by and reproductive of intersectional violence, feminist theories of social reproduction are stymied if they remain beholden to socioeconomic understandings of class and labor politics built upon the denial of care and reproductive labor as political realities and sites of social struggle. My fourth and final chapter points to the need for radical ethical formations on the terrain of social reproduction that are attentive to the intimate contradictions and possibilities specific to care. I begin this chapter by briefly framing autonomist and socialist feminist approaches to the crisis of care, which they each see as defined by the structural contradictions of contemporary capitalism. Building on the arguments of the prior chapter, I then claim that the labor-centric ethical paradigms developed by both traditions foreclose serious engagement with the crisis conditions they themselves outline, particularly when it comes to the paradigmatically reproductive labors of care and sex themselves. In the final section, I advance the thesis that the ‘affective labor debates’ through which Marxist feminists have attempted to address their own historical shortcomings around care in fact point back to the limits of the labor paradigm itself. In this sense, this chapter mirrors the argumentative structure of Chapter Two, in which I claimed that care ethicists’ naturalistic ethics limited their ability to politically address the multiple and intersecting oppressions at play in many caring relations. Here I elaborate on how the labor-centric paradigms of autonomist feminism and SRT have undermined these traditions’ 21 ability to contend with the ethical dilemmas and possibilities specific to social reproduction. Moreover, valorizing care in multiple locations of struggle reveals that radical politics of care involve more than rendering necessary services and collectivizing the privatized domains of care. I argue we must also work, in struggle, to qualitatively transform modes of care rooted in domination and subordination—often in ways that run counter to state and NGO logics—and attempt to show how affective and embodied dimensions of care are essential elements of social reproduction, pointing to “the revolutionary transformations, both psychic and ethical, that are demanded of us” (Cornell and Seely 17). Addressing care politically and ethically entails not only attending to the struggle at the heart of care, but to the care at the heart of struggle. The critique of care presented in my dissertation thus points not only to the violence socially and materially embedded in caring practices and relations, but to the generative political and ethical possibilities of radical care demonstrated by marginalized communities of struggle past and present. However, it also points to the political problem posed by the fact that our very capacities for affective and relational engagement can be differentially shaped vis a vis multiple and intersecting axes of oppression. I conclude by pointing to traditions of transformative justice and politicized somatics, as exemplary modalities offering resources and insights for practically, intimately, and politically addressing the often-tragic dilemmas of learning to care otherwise in a violent world. Radical care is, of necessity, a collective endeavor, and should be viewed as conditioned upon, as well as a condition of, sustainable and transformational social movements. These traditions, grounded in the work of marginalized people within diverse social movement spaces, offer concrete skills that integrate ethical, affective, and political education to care with organizing for systemic change. 22 The question of how to collectively care for each other and ourselves in the shadows of structural violence is an open and living one. While it is crucial to value care and place it at the center of moral and political thinking, addressing conditions of endemic structural and intimate violence also requires sustained and collective efforts to transform embodied patterns of relational harm and develop new caring sensibilities as integral components of radical and liberatory social change. This opens a final, perhaps perennially open-ended, question: namely, how to bring care into the structure of theory itself.16 This question too lies at the heart of this work, and is a horizon towards which it only manages to gesture. 16 The structure of this question is inspired by Maria Lugones’s call to imbue “plurality in the very structure of a theory” (Perigrinajes, 174-175). 23 Chapter One: How Can a Radical Ethics of Care be Possible? 17 17 I use the singular ‘a’ here and in the title of my third chapter to present the quasi-transcendental structure of my argument, which claims that care is both ethical and political all the way down. However, the idea that there could be a radical ethics of care and a radical politics of social reproduction is antithetical to the culturally and historically specific realities of care—as well as the social emergence of radical caring practices and relations, which are fundamentally plural and responsive to the needs of the communities who articulate them. 24 I. Introduction: Contradictions in The Ethics of Care We each live inside the contradictions of care in multiple and often conflicting ways. They form the social and material substance of our desires, our attachments, and the ways our intimate labors and our selves are exploited and made invisible or enact this violence on others. We thus cannot attend to care’s contradictions as external relations, as if they were simply forced on us from the outside by nefarious forces rather than at the same time constituting our most intimate bonds and private longings. Nor can we view or address them as ambiguities or ambivalences intrinsic or natural to care, lest we strip care of its very politics—the historical contingencies by which it is structurally devalued and exploited, as well as the historical ways in which communities have fostered care as an element of their survival and resistance. While the second half of this dissertation speaks to these concerns by articulating a politics of social reproduction that centers the qualitative, ethical, transformation of caring practices and relations, the present chapters do so through a critical discussion of care ethics in light of intersectional analysis and politics. My understanding of radical care differs from care ethics as it has been developed by feminist philosophers in that I claim that we must situate the politics of care in contradictory social and material conditions of life-making rather than naturalistic or universal understandings of care as a value. My argument in this chapter is that care ethical appeals to ostensibly intuitive dimensions of care as the basis of the ethics and politics of care ultimately amount to a naturalization of care. This is problematic insofar as it posits the violence socially embedded in caring relations to be a moral aberration external to—rather than an essential component of— oppressive social forms, institutions, and relations. Alternatively, such naturalization risks construing the contradictions of care as forms of ambivalence internal to practices and relations 25 of caring as such. Both positions limit our diagnoses of the political and ethical problems posed by care’s integral relation to structural violence, and our capacities for imagining and cultivating care’s positive, transformational role in movements for social change. The arguments of this chapter and the next rely on problematizing what I term the naturalistic/naturalized epistemologies that care ethicists hold to be the basis of care’s moral value. This tradition largely shares a consensus regarding not only the moral value of care as such, but the idea that this moral value derives from intuitive caring capacities such as attention, other-directedness, responsiveness, and receptivity. Because these intuitive dispositions or motivational attitudes are fundamental to care, they are taken by most care ethicists to be naturalistically given moral goods. In the following pages I problematize this basic position, arguing that the paradigmatic concept of caring attention is itself socially embedded and thus a political site of contestation and struggle. In other words, I use the cumbersome language of naturalistic/naturalized care epistemologies because of what I see as the potentially dangerous equivocation between care ethicists’ naturalistic derivation of ethics and a naturalization of the oppressive norms and relations that shape and distribute our capacities for care. This tendency within care ethics runs counter to the very commitments through which this tradition has set itself apart: its relational ontology, pluralist and situated ethics, orientation to affective education, and ultimately the very feminist politics that inform its approach. Joan Tronto deepens this care ethical approach with her political argument for the ethics of care. In calling for a more caring society, Tronto re-configures traditional boundaries of moral and political thought by centering the political as well as ethical value of care as a species activity. I articulate my argument in conversation with Tronto because her move to bring care from the margins to the center of politics remains grounded in such naturalistically derived 26 dimensions of care, and thus still relies on an abstract and apolitical notion of care. While Tronto brings care into view as a constituent force of politics, she fails to engage the always already political realities of caring practices and dispositions themselves. Before embarking on my argument, it is important to situate it in terms of the claims of this dissertation, and thus flesh out what I understand to be the problem that care’s contradictions pose to the ethics of care. Care is an essential condition of human life and meaning. From the midwifing of new life, to nurturing the young, the work of sex, and the tending of death, trauma, disability, and physical and mental illness, care is the social, material, and emotional tie that binds humans together and enables our survival and potential flourishing. In this general sense, then, it is indeed necessary to ethically and politically value care, and to place care at the center of political theory and action. But precisely insofar as it bears the burden of establishing and sustaining social bonds and is thus a necessary condition of life and world making, care must be understood as socially and materially constituted. Care is not outside of the social: this is a crucial feminist point. As I have argued in the introduction to this dissertation, this means that caring practices and relations not only constitute life, but are at the same time constitutively shaped by, and can also reproduce, forms of violence that are anathema to it. The specifically ethical contradiction that this chapter begins with arises from the tension presented by the need to value care as an essential condition and component of life and meaning, and at the same time to politically analyze and oppose the ways in which care is shaped by and reproduces violent social forms and relations, both structurally and intimately. This ethical contradiction is laid bare when we consider that, insofar as ideologies of care18 serve an essential 18 What Emma Dowling terms “Ideologies of Caring” (85) mystify the power relations that shape and attenuate caring relations. “Care is deeply enmeshed within power relations, but these often disappear behind what kind of caring, and by whom, is considered normal.” Ideologies of care naturalize, normalize, invisibize and individualize unequal social organizations and divisions of caring labor that determine who receives and gives care. For Dowling, 27 role in maintaining structural and intimate violence, care precisely appears as a naturalized ethic in cultural and social life. Caring practices and relations are essential conditions of life that span cultural, intimate, and cognitive dimensions, and therefore involve modes of knowing, perceiving, and relating that are highly subtle and skilled, and are also culturally and historically specific. At the same time, this life sustaining capacity is structurally devalued.19 The systemic exploitation and extraction of the care performed by marginalized individuals and groups of people forms a fundamental condition and component of multiple forms of oppression. Crucially for my argument here is the fact that this devaluation and harnessing of care depends upon naturalizing and mystifying the exploitation of those who perform underpaid or free caring labor, normalizing the institutional neglect of and violence towards those without access to caring resources and infrastructures,20 and moralizing the subjugation of those who are, in the words of Evelyn Nakano Glenn, forced to care (2012). Upholding care as a value without attending to the conditions of care’s devaluation risks reproducing the material and ideological conditions of racialized, gendered, and colonial divisions of caring labor, and thus the moral justifications for exploitative and oppressive relations of care that rest upon racialized, colonial and/or gendered characteristics. In the next chapter I elaborate on his problem in conversation with intersectional these ideologies include how women have been “subordinated within the nuclear family (and elsewhere), performing housework and care work – the “‘labours of love’ that [are] mystified as a natural female vocation.” They also include colonial and paternalistic assumptions about culture “in which migrant workers are designated as especially suitable carers,” as well as ableist narratives of deservingness critiqued by “mental health and disability rights movements who have been vocal about the needs, wishes and desires of care recipients, fighting the stigmatization of disability, as well as demanding adequate care.” 19 I discuss the interlocking racialized, international, and gendered dimensions of this devaluing and deskilling of care labor at length in the following chapter. 20 Police and prison abolitionist calls to defund the police illustrate this point, exemplified in the rallying call made by BLM organizers to invest in “care not cops” in handling issues such as mental health crises, domestic violence and substance dependency which can be exacerbated by conditions of poverty and structural racism. See e.g., https://www.8toabolition.com/invest-in-care-not-cops. Disability Justice and Disability Rights organizers offer crucial perspectives on the institutional violence and neglect faced not only by those who perform care labor, but also those whose living depends on it. For example, disabled individuals are much more likely to face intimate partner and sexual violence, due to social isolation and lack of available services and community infrastructures. 28 feminist thinkers, pointing to how apparently intuitive elements of care are themselves shaped by and reproduce the interlocking oppressions embedded in social organizations of care. Upholding these dimensions of care as naturalistically derived and universally accessible goods also obscures the deeply political caring labor that so often sustains the survival and struggles of marginalized communities. The aim of the present chapter is to highlight the feminist revolution in ethics presented by care ethicists, and to show how valuing naturalistic/naturalized epistemologies of care as the foundation of this ethics runs counter to these feminist aims. The tradition of philosophical care ethics is right to center the transformative dimensions of care: its role, for example, in ethical education, or the value of relational skills such as empathy and caring attention in fostering an ethos of recognition and understanding. But this tradition does not go far enough in critiquing how these qualities—their forced hypertrophy in some and enabled atrophy in others, their violent extraction as well as their sometimes-cynical deployment—are equally instrumental in maintaining conditions of structural violence. Joan Tronto and Bernice Fischer’s famous definition of care is paradigmatic of both these transformative and problematic dimensions of care ethics: “On the most general level we suggest that caring be viewed as a species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, our selves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life sustaining web” (Moral Boundaries 103). We can see why this definition is so commonly cited; it is very helpful in its clarity and scope. It also summarizes many care ethical concerns in that: i.) it defines care as an essential, life generating activity; ii.) it moves from this fact of the matter to care as a robust moral value; and iii.) it develops an ethics and politics stemming from the feminized skills and practices of caring. 29 I want to be clear that my argument follows care ethicists’ call to value care and those who perform it—indeed, I believe that politically, ethically, and materially valuing care the labor and relations of caregivers is an essential component of social transformation and a condition of planetary survival. However, this definition, which is precisely intended to be broad enough to encompass the political as well as ethical dimensions of care, elides the very specifications of good care that care ethicists are after. Tronto and Fischer are right that care is an essential, if not the essential, condition of life and world making, and are also right to value care and in so doing to demand a paradigm shift in the location and nature of political and moral philosophy. But insofar as it is inextricably embedded in social life and its reproduction, naturalistically valuing care as a species activity hinders this sort of critical and transformational perspective. As I argue in the second half of this chapter and the next, valuing care in the ways that Tronto, Held, and Kittay call for requires challenging its structural devaluation and the conditions that produced it. My claim is that this means attending to the oppressions at the root of social organizations and divisions of caring labor as well as the differential impacts they can have on the very caring dispositions that care ethicists see as the naturalistic source of good care as such. In Forced to Care: Coercion and Caregiving in America, Nakano Glenn outlines what she terms the “material and ideological underpinnings of the social organization of care” in the US context.21 She terms these material and ideological dimensions of care coercive because they have forced women, and especially poor, racialized, and migrant women, into the work of care. 21 “The social organization of care has been rooted in diverse forms of coercion that have induced women to assume responsibility for caring for family members and that have tracked poor, racial minority, and immigrant women into positions entailing caring for others. The forms of coercion have varied in degree, directness, and explicitness but nonetheless have served to constrain and direct women's choices; the net consequence of restricted choice has been to keep caring labor "cheap," that is, free (in the case of family care labor) or low waged (in the case of paid care labor)” (5). 30 Crucially, this involves forms of moralization that contribute to, and obscure, the harm caused by these unjust distributions and social organizations of care: In the United States the social organization of care has been characterized by reliance on the private household, feminization and racialization of care, devaluation of care work and care workers, and abnegation of community and state responsibility for caring. The persistence of these characteristics, despite (or perhaps because of) the frequent lip service given to the spiritual and moral qualities of caregiving, is rooted in fundamental philosophical principles, social structures, and cultural practices… (6, emphasis mine). These moral dimensions of obligation are an especially insidious form of coercion in that they politically and economically cement the degrading feminization and racialization of care precisely by naturalizing and privatizing it: by valuing caregiving as a virtuous obligation while simultaneously socially and materially devaluing this work as well as those who perform it. It is difficult to account for this coercive normativity with an ethics that values care based on intuitive moral distinctions or an ideal of relational transparency (what Kittay terms a “transparent self”). These naturalistic presuppositions also exist in uneasy relation to care ethics’ feminist legacy and inheritance, in particular the politics of experience and relation at the core of its methodological innovations. But morally valuing and politicizing the lived and relational intimacies of care has proven a difficult line to walk. While they nearly universally root their ethics in the political philosophy of the Women’s Liberation Movement (and many were activists themselves), they often fall on the conservative side of the dilemma—defending maternal care with exquisite and nuanced detail, for example, yet rarely revisiting feminist critiques of the social forms that continue to mystify and devalue it. As Frigga Haug puts it in a critique of Carol Gilligan that also applies to care ethics more generally: “what is being suggested is that the problem of morals—and their consequences—can be resolved in a simple change of values 31 themselves, instead of by transforming the practices which determine the meaning of what is or is not ethical itself” (42). II. The Value of Care: Care Ethics’ Feminist Critique of Moral Philosophy In this section, I discuss care ethics as a feminist ethics grounded in the experience of relation and unpack the work of care ethicists in both critiquing the Western canon of moral philosophy and expanding feminist insights about the nature and location of ethical engagement. In doing so, I draw out the transformative and critical dimensions of this body of work, the crucial role of affective and relational experience to its analysis and methods and point to the resultant paradigm shift this tradition poses to understandings of the subject, ontology, and methodologies of traditional philosophical ethics. However, in the following sections I also argue that to take these feminist claims seriously, care ethics cannot begin from an understanding of care as a naturalistically or universally derived norm but rather as a location of political constitution, transformation, and struggle. While I ultimately do offer a political critique of care ethics, it is important to keep the problem as we have developed it in view. Namely, that despite, perhaps because of, the structural devaluation and systemic exploitation, extraction and invisibilization of the labor of care and those who perform it, viewing care as a naturalized moral good is deeply socially and culturally engrained.22 This is not to downplay the care ethical achievement of bringing care to the center of moral thinking, but rather to affirm what many care ethicists point to as an obvious fact: care is indeed already an, if not the, essential human value and site of ethical formation. Thus, while I bring up the problems with this naturalized approach through a discussion of care 22 Given its centrality and necessity to social life on the one hand, and its structural privatization and devaluation on the other, the dearth of moral and political theorizing regarding care is both shocking and not at all surprising. 32 ethics in particular, I am also aiming my critique at broader social tendencies to not only naturalize and invisibilize the work of care, but in doing so, to uncritically value it. Care ethics has roots in feminist insights about the political import of lived experience (Held 23). I follow Bubek’s claim that in both its critical and generative capacities care ethics is an essentially collective and ongoing feminist research project.23 Its founding insights regarding the need to value and center the feminized experiences marginalized by dominant ethical narratives, as well as the need for collective critique and ethical engagement in addressing this problem, are methodological achievements deeply rooted in feminist politics. In these respects, care ethics resonates with the intersectional feminist perspectives I discuss in the next chapter. While care ethics tends to rely on a generalized (and thus often implicitly white and middle class) conception of women, and intersectional feminism seeks to center the experiences of multiply marginalized people, both traditions are rooted in experiences and methods— "subjugated knowledges” (Collins, Black Feminist Thought 9)—that fundamentally question dominant normative and political understanding. The feminist achievement regarding the moral and political importance of lived experience structures even many of the more conservative approaches to care ethics. In a Different Voice, Carol Gilligan’s presentation of “a new way of thinking that begins with the premise that we live not in separation but in relationship” (“Letter to Readers”) offered a radical alternative to the abstract rules and principles of Western moral theory. Rather, Gilligan’s “interest lies in the interaction of experience and thought, in different voices and the dialogues to 23 “The ethic of care is best understood as an ongoing collective research project which, based on Gilligan's classic research presented in her book In a Different Voice, is aimed at working out the form and content of the ethic of care, what concepts, considerations, values, and virtues would be characteristic of it, and how it relates to traditional moral theory” (11). Note that offers a rare materialist account to account for the systemic exploitation of unpaid care labor while still endorsing the care ethical tradition (11-12). 33 which they give rise, in the way we listen to ourselves and to others, in the stories we tell about our lives” (Different Voice 2). In her critique of the observational bias of Lawrence Kohlberg’s theories of moral development, which pose a suspiciously Kantian model of universal ethical principles and autonomous moral judgment as the highest moral achievement, Gilligan recognizes and schematizes a different moral voice grounded in historically and socially feminized values of care, empathy, connectedness and relation. Importantly, this is a socially embedded theory: her critique of the implicit masculinity of Western moral norms and valuation of implicitly feminized ones empirically emerged from her discussions of moral experience with hundreds of women and girls. It is right, as many have done, to call attention to the largely upper middle class, white and traditionally educated perspectives of Gilligan’s subjects24 (and thus arguably her reversion to the same sorts of implicit bias she critiques in Kohlberg). But even given these flaws, it is important to note the paradigm shift in ethics that Gilligan inaugurated by grounding her moral psychology in lived experiences of care and relation. Her feminist ethics are evinced not simply in the attention she pays to the voices of women, but in how she highlights and schematizes feminized experiences25 of lived, embodied care as a foundation and critical anchor of moral thought and action. Thus, when she criticizes the moral theory of Kohlberg for the observational bias towards masculinized experiences, she does so through the different sense of ethical value that emerges in experiences of relation. In doing so, she offers both a positive view of ethical life and a critique of dominant moral thought and action. In her discussion of gender differences in childhood conflict resolution, for example, Gilligan explains how the value that girls placed on 24 See Joan Tronto’s critique of Gilligan’s construal of care ethics as ideologically privileging a white and middleclass standpoint (Moral Boundaries 77-81). And Patricia Hill Collins (Black Feminist Throught 200, 6). 25 I choose to read Gilligan generously on the issue of gender essentialism, following from her claim to be attending to these issues not according to gender as such, but to theme. 34 the continuity of relations vs. the continuity of the game forms a site of education to sensitivity and responsiveness rather than rule following and competitive achievement (8-11). In highlighting the moral development of the responsibility and relationality involved in feminized caring and connection versus rights and rules, Gilligan thus elaborates not only a different moral voice, but a different notion of what ethics is and should be. The feminist insight into the moral value of feminized experiences of caregiving on the one hand, and the critique of abstract, individualistic, and implicitly masculine ethical norms on the other inform the relational commitments and social ontology of the care ethical tradition. Women’s gendered social positions and ways of navigating the world often inform the ethics they uphold. This of course is a painful situation not easily teased apart from gender divisions of labor and their attendant humiliations and degradations. It is thus no coincidence that nearly every account of care ethics also begins with a genealogy explicitly linking this philosophical tradition to insights and struggles of the women’s liberation movement.26 This self-conception is directly related to the prior point: care ethics can be seen as an attempt to flesh out the ethical substance of the feminist claim to the primacy of lived experience. As Virginia Held states: “[t]he feminist validation of women’s experience has had important consequences in ethics. It has led to a fundamental critique of the moral theories that were (and to a large extent still are) dominant and to the development of alternative feminist approaches to morality” (Ethics of Care 23). Beginning from a validation of experience poses deep challenges to moral systems based upon autonomous decision-making agents engaged in rational disinterested calculation (which, Held notes, is common to both Kantian and Utilitarian 26 Michael Slote is an important exception. Slote does not claim to be a feminist but calls for ‘human’ morality grounded in Western sentimentalist philosophical tradition. This papers over of the deeply feminist nature of the paradigmatic and methodological shifts in ethics that are the subject of this chapter, as well as the self-consciously feminist roots of this tradition. 35 approaches to morality and justice and even many accounts of the cultivation of individual virtue). In opposition to these theories, she claims that receiving and giving care is the ur-ethical experience. Indeed, it is this “truly universal experience of care” that makes it the “most basic and most comprehensive value” (3, my emphasis). Held lays out several elements that help to flesh out care ethics as a feminist moral theory.27 Taken together, the following elements of the ethics of care also illustrate her claim that care is best understood as both a value and a practice: a practice insofar as responding to the needs of others in sustained ways is work, and a value insofar as caring practices involve not only motivational orientation toward human others, but reflective engagement on the adequacy of caring practices to their needs. While the details are contested,28 some understanding of this inseparability of the normative and practical dimensions of care is common to many care ethical approaches. My aim in reprising these elements of care ethics that Held presents is not only to outline care ethicists’ feminist development of ethics in opposition to the philosophical canon, but ultimately to show how they point beyond this tradition. That is, I want to show that centering care in feminist ways not only re-frames the subject, location, and agency of ethics, but necessitates feminist politics: a point that I develop in conversation with the work of Tronto in the following section. For Held, the ethics of care begins from the dependency needs of concrete human others. Indeed, for Stephanie Collins the claim “that dependency relationships generate responsibilities” constitutes the slogan and criterion uniting diverse care ethical perspectives (Core of Care Ethics 27 I have not followed the exact order of Held’s presentation and have combined her discussion of abstract moral reasoning and care ethics’s critique of liberal individualism. See Held, pgs 9-15. 28 Tronto, for example, deemphasizes this motivational dimension and focuses on care as a practice and a disposition, placing much more emphasis on its laboring elements. Held has been critiqued (rightly in my opinion) for deemphasizing the labor of care and thus taking a problematic view on some forms of paid caring labor as inadequate to her criteria of care as a value. 36 2). Held and Tronto also focus on the particularity of these demands that others place on us and to which ethical responsiveness thus attends. This focus on dependency also forms the hinge of Kittay’s feminist dependency critique of equality which elaborates how “a conception of society viewed as an association of equals masks inevitable dependencies” (Love’s Labor xi). For Kittay, insofar as liberal theories of justice focus on independence as the criterion of equality and moral decision, they do not contend with the need to care for dependents as a foundational element of social life, and thus preclude true social justice. As the theories Kittay, Held, Tronto, Gilligan and others illuminate, centering on the skills and capacities involved in meeting the needs of dependent and interdependent others deeply problematizes conceptions of moral judgment grounded in rational and disengaged moral calculation and action. The claim here is not only that our relation to dependency is constitutive of ethics, but that human social life as such is grounded in the experience of responding to and competently meeting needs (Tronto). In the first instance, care is taken as the inaugural attentive and enduring response to these individual human needs both in and beyond intimate settings. Centering dependency requires a paradigm shift in moral understanding by asking into the relational conditions of moral engagement and agency. The second feature of the ethics of care that Held draws attention to is the essential role that emotions play moral decision making, when seen from the relational point of view of care. Competently practicing the ethics of care requires affective ethical education: “such emotions as sympathy, empathy, sensitivity and responsiveness [as well as anger] are seen as the kind of moral emotions that need to be cultivated not only to help in the implementation of the dictates of reason but to better ascertain what morality recommends” (10). Both valuing and cultivating affective competency is also central to Nel Noddings’ more conservative approach to care ethics which I discuss below. For Noddings, our ability to cultivate 37 an ethical ideal of care is grounded in a universal sense of natural caring. Nurturing this ideal, however, requires ethical and emotional education. Both Noddings and Held emphasize care’s motivational as well as practical dimensions—both speak of good care as a capacity to attend and attune to (to be engrossed with, in Noddings’ language) the needs of concrete others in emotional as well as material ways.29 According to Held, care ethics also launches a feminist critique of the public/private divide upon which many understanding of political and moral philosophy implicitly or explicitly depend. Valuing care and relation as essential to and formative of ethical and political life challenges masculinist ideas about the private, natural, and apolitical nature of domestic and intimate life and the public, disembodied, and rational nature of politics, policy, and law.30 As Tronto also notes, critiquing this divide requires more than morally upholding so-called ‘women’s work.’ Ethically valuing care, rather, involves a critique of how the socially necessary labor performed by women has, within bourgeois Western culture, been socially relegated to the private and natural: a patriarchal and capitalist maneuver that feminist insight has long reframed as a political reality and call to social transformation. The politics of care from a care ethical perspective is also deeply indebted to this feminist insight regarding the proper domain of the political, which not only questions the private/public divide but draws attention to the historically and socially embedded nature of care as a site of political contestation and agency. Finally, Held draws attention to how care ethics shifts the agency and location of moral and political action, problematizing the autonomous liberal individual of social contract theory 29 I return to this point below, but it is important to note that while Held actively refuses to naturalize care in the sense of an ahistorical, private affair, Noddings conception of a feminine moral education is based on a very similar view of returning to an ur-ethical universal memory of being cared for that Held espouses. 30 While I do not discuss them here, this point and others speak to care ethical debates about the value of care relation to justice, and whether and how care should be construed as mutually constitutive with, ontologically prior to, opposed, or simply in false dichotomy with justice and liberal thought more broadly. Held herself sees care as the more fundamental category but argues for a “meshing” of care and justice. 38 and abstract moral reasoning. Against the disinterested “moral point of view” (Tronto) Held claims that the ethics of care begins from and develops the perspective of caring relations themselves. For Held, the values of care are exemplified in such caring relations, not in individual decisions or judgments. Since care is a relational endeavor concerned with the needs of particular human beings, care ethics eschews impartiality as the criterion of morality. This point is exemplified in Kittay’s embedded and relational concept of doulia. For Kittay, doulia is a public ethic that hinges on a social and political understanding of care. It points to the fact that successful care is never simply an individual or dyadic relation but hinges upon broader social networks of support (Love’s Labor 68-73). Based on the role of the doula, or assistant to the birthing parent, the notion of doulia presents the social need to care for both dependents and caregivers, and to thus understand care as a social and moral good located not in an exchange relation between free and equal individuals but in linked and nested sets of caring relations in which the needs and agency of both dependents and caretakers are centered rather than marginalized. This not only takes care out of the private domain but presents these webs of relations as a primary location of moral know-how and political action. Placing such a socially embedded and relational notion at the heart of moral theory fundamentally de-centers, if not calls into question, the very concept of the self-authenticating individual endowed with rational decision-making capacities. Moral understanding does not primarily sprout from the detached mind of a liberal individual making free choices: it is nurtured and developed in and through meeting the needs of dependent and interdependent others, fortifying the material and social context of caring relations, and dignifying the embodied work of those who perform caring labor as well as the lives of those who depend on it. 39 Affective and embedded relational engagement is crucial to the method and practice of care ethics as I am presenting it here. To center caring relations as a key location of moral understanding is to call for new and different forms of theorizing and action, located in relational understandings of human personhood and agency. Recent attempts to rationally schematize and justify care ethics, evinced in the work of Stephanie Collins and Michael Slote in particular, seem to miss the profundity of these changes. As noted above, Collins aims to consolidate care ethics under the slogan that caring relations generate dependencies. Her aim in doing so is to justify care ethics as a normative theory by specifying and synthesizing its claims with the tools of analytic philosophy. This synthesis of the aims and scope of care ethics takes place under the egis of decision theory: her aim is to outline the caring attitudes and decisional calculations that can be said to have the right relation to the needs of concrete human others. As I discuss at length below, Slote too presents a sweeping argument for care ethics as a superior moral theory, unified and systematized through the intuitive moral distinctions involved in empathic caring for others. For Slote, a person’s actions are wrong if they act from a deficiency of caring motivation. This criterion forms the basis for what he understands to be a comprehensive morality grounded in Western sentimentalist philosophy, and a compelling alternative to Kantian theories of justice. Slote and Collins both attempt to schematize and justify care ethics as a robust moral theory. However, the notion of dependency as a principle executed through individual action or empathy as a criterion grounding morality as such differ dramatically from Held’s own comprehensive presentation of care ethics as a moral philosophy, outlined in the features of care ethics described above. But this impulse towards rational justification wholly misses how profound a critique care ethics levies against this kind of moral judgment. For example, Slote closely relies on Noddings’ concept of engrossment to support his argument for empathy as a 40 moral criterion but doesn’t discuss why she thought such caring attention was incompatible with moral criteria as such. For Noddings, care ethics begins from a heightening of moral perception and sensitivity not a return to moral judgements. Insofar as care is developed from within relational commitments, morally theorizing it resists such systemization. This is not to say that care ethics is categorically against normative theory or its implications: many care ethicists view care normatively under certain lights,31 and carve out crucial roles for abstract moral thinking especially when it comes to questions of justice. But there is a reason care ethicists developed a relational ontology and situated feminist ethos rather than the tools provided by Western moral philosophy to engage with the realities of care.32 The care ethical tradition offers a practical theory of ethical engagement from the perspective of relationship rather than individual deliberation and rational criteria. In situating ethics in caring relations rather than detached moral calculation, the ethics of care folds affect and intersubjective attunement into the very fabric of moral thinking and action. This is an essential point that a return to discussions of moral criteria and rational decision making elide if not miss altogether. As Tronto notes, the ethics of care is not about developing another abstract “moral point of view” or a “first principle of social virtue:” “After we have recognized the complexities of care as a practice, and how completely care is implicated in structures of power in society, it will become clear that a metaethical position that starts from the standpoint of the ‘moral point of view’ is incapable of making the kinds of judgments necessary for care” (Moral 31 Held states on this point: “I see the ethics of care from as fully a normative view as any other ethic. It addresses questions about whether and how and why we ought to engage in activities of care, questions about how such activities should be conducted and structured, and questions about the meanings of care and caring. It especially evaluates relations of care” (46). 32 In her discussion (and re-working) of Tronto’s famous definition, Maria Puig de la Ballacasa puts this point beautifully: “…the ‘ethics’ in an ethics of care cannot be about a realm of normative moral obligations but rather about thick, impure, involvement in a world where the question of how to care needs to be posed. That is, it makes of ethics a hands-on, ongoing process of re-creation of “as well as possible” relations and therefore one that requires a speculative opening about what a possible involves” (6). 41 Boundaries 126). Held specifically critiques Slote on this point, arguing that his focus on an “agent-based virtue ethics of caring… misses the centrality of caring relations for an ethic of care” (51, my emphasis). For Held, care is a social relation rather than an individual disposition, and the values of care are thus exemplified in caring relations rather than individual states (41). While perhaps right in relation to its letter, attempts such as Slote’s and Collins’s to schematize or rationally justify its claims based on individual decision-making capacities miss the spirit of care ethics presented in its relational ontology and affect laden ethos, and thus the also miss depth of critique it poses to moral philosophy. It is arguably Held’s methodological grounding of moral theory in the perspective and experience of caring relations themselves that poses the most radical critique to the ontological and methodological individualism and abstract calculations of the Western philosophical canon. In ethically valorizing the feminized labor and relations of care, this tradition explicitly and implicitly elaborates and builds upon the feminist dictum regarding the political and social nature of the so-called personal and private dimensions of human life and world making. This brings us back to a central claim of this chapter and the next: namely, that a feminist politics of experience is an essential component of the development, as well as the theory and method, of care ethics. It is this feminist lineage that has allowed it to so profoundly problematize culturally masculinist and individualistic notions of the ethical person, the social locations to which ethics are bound, and the methods by which moral deliberation and engagement are construed and developed. Theorizing and valuing care from the inside—from the experience of giving and receiving care—is also what lends this tradition its moral, and political, weight. III. The Politics of Care: Care Ethical Perspectives 42 Care ethics poses a radical critique of the subject, ontology, and method of traditional philosophical ethics. Building on the insights outlined above regarding the roots of this tradition in feminist praxis, I now want to turn to some key components of care ethical understandings of the politics of care. In doing so, my aim is to present a critique of how these political developments remain beholden to the very abstract notions of agency and relation that this tradition ethically calls into question. My argument here is that ethically situating care requires a thoroughly political understanding of care. Care is not only ethical but political all the way down, and this includes the intuitive elements of caring that care ethicists by and large uncritically valorize. Insofar as it has been socially constituted within relations of structural and intimate violence, simply valuing care as it has been so constituted does not reach the root of the problem. I articulate this point in conversation with Joan Tronto’s paradigmatically political argument for an ethics of care. While Tronto brings care into view as a constituent force of politics, and indeed offers a political argument for the ethics of care, she fails to see the always already political realities of caring practices and dispositions themselves: an omission that marks even the most radical care ethical positions. While I critique the political tradition of care ethics on the grounds that even the more radical thinkers in this tradition ultimately naturalize and universalize care, I am also building on important analyses that have been elaborated in the collective sense outlined above. As Kittay points out, care is itself a social and political value and the question of who performs the labor of care is a social and political question. “Questions of who takes on the responsibility of care, who does hands-on care, who sees to it that caring is done and is done well, and who provides support for the relationship of care and for both parties to the caring relationship—these are social and political questions. They are questions of social responsibility and political will” (Love’s Labor 43 1). Held likewise examines social and political questions in light of the values of care and offers suggestions for the transformation of society based on this analysis (37). Much of what is lacking in the political theory of care comes from the fact that we are in many ways still working in the dark, on however belabored territory.33 As with the historical dearth of theory concerning the ethical registers of care, the relative lack of theory concerning the basic political realities of care points to (perhaps shocking, but not surprising) ideological predilections of dominant political theories, or deeper still to the degradation of care and reproductive work essential to heteropatriarchal, racial capitalist, social reproduction.34 Tronto asks the question outright: given its central and essential role in social and material life, “why is care not a central category of social analysis?” (Moral Boundaries 112). She uses this mode of questioning as a basis of her critique of the power relations and norms that have excluded care from political analysis. Yet in some sense, political analysis has been a component of care ethics since its inception. Many care ethicists generate a politics of care from their ethical observations, moving from a conception of ethics to a politics of care. Ruddick for example offers an early example of a politics of peace grounded in maternal care, and Gilligan overtly critiques the gendered dominations that have led to masculinist biases in moral psychology. There have also been developments in the theory, from the primacy given to dyadic, maternal caring to theorizing care in broader political and social registers. Daniel Engster helpfully summarizes this general move from personal, intimate relations to a social and political perspective on care: 33 Recent years have seen a potent explosion of discourse on care as political concept, however. This has been provoked by the context of the COVID pandemic, and, in the US, the 2020 uprisings for Black Lives and attendant popularization of frameworks of prison and police abolitionism, which often speak to the need to center the politics of care in the process of building alternative social infrastructures for dealing with violence and its social conditions. This work is self-consciously part of this collective endeavor to center care as a political concept and practice. 34 The third and fourth chapters of this dissertation address these social reproductive contradictions at length. 44 Most basically, personal approaches to caring fail to take into account the web of social relationships in which any particular caring relationship necessarily exists (Kittay 1999). Since individuals can usually only care effectively for others if provided some sort of support or accommodation by others, theories that focus narrowly on personal caring relations fail to recognize the important role that social institutions and policies can play in fostering good caring relations (6-7). In moving from personal, dyadic and maternal understandings of care—which, it must be noted, are to a large extent located in Western, heteronormative notions of the nuclear family—to an understanding of care in its social and political context, the discourse of care ethics has also become more skilled at centering race, class, nationality, sexuality and ability, as well as gender, in its understandings of the complex situatedness of care and its moral and political value. However, even the nuanced and socially conscious perspectives offered by Held and Kittay ultimately derive their political critique from problematically equalized or universalized notions of caring. For Held, as noted above, a robust moral theory of care ethics is grounded in what she understands to be the universal experience of care. This argument forms the justification for her claim that we must center care in social relations and political institutions: what she terms the “meshing” of care and justice. Kittay’s dependency critique of liberal theories of justice presents an alternative to liberal theories of equality, grounded in the understanding that we are all ‘some mother’s child’ (Love’s Labor). Indeed, this equalizing maxim forms the basic assumption through which her concept of doulia is expressed and justified.35 Thus while both Held and 35 Kittay offers a corrective to this position in response to Rosemary Tong’s critiques of this equalizing gesture. “Tong directs us to the terrible irony that those who have been most responsible for doing society’s dependency work come to be the least likely to receive good care when they themselves require care. In Love’s Labor I try to promote a notion I call doulia, the public responsibility to provide support for the caregiver so that the caregiver can give care without depleting herself and her resources. I speak of the aphorism that might characterize the triadic concept of reciprocity embedded here: that what goes around comes around. But the aphorism seems sadly wrong— at least in our world. What’s worse, it is precisely because of their caregiving labor that the women about whom Tong speaks are poor and unable to purchase the care they require as they age” (“Love’s Labor Revisited” 242) 45 Kittay theorize care in social and political registers and point to the need for political reforms that center more just distributions of care, they both base this analysis on the assumption of a universal experience of care that sidesteps, if not obscures, deep critical analysis of the structural and systemic oppressions that deny people basic access to care, infuse caring relations with abuse, and exploit and extract the labor of care workers. Tronto takes the political analysis of care a step further than prior theories by offering an explicitly political argument for the ethics of care. Importantly, her theory rests upon a critique of the power relations that occlude care as a moral and political reality. Her argument rests on the fact that care is an essential element of human life that is also systemically devalued (Moral Boundaries 158). This means that centering care politically not only requires critiquing the structural relations and political norms that have led to this devaluation but will itself “lead to a profound rethinking of moral and political life” (111). In claiming that the lenses through which moral and political life have been delimited and understood exclude questions of care, she makes a deep methodological move not only against abstract and rule-based morality but towards the need to center care as the basis for the political achievement of a good society (172). Like Held and Kittay, Tronto self-consciously places her intervention within feminist history and praxis as well as political theory. The dual needs to both view care in the political context that devalues it, and to politically value care, form the impetus for her re-construal of the moral boundaries that she claims preclude a genuine ethics and politics of care. A central claim of her Moral Boundaries is that “in order to take morality seriously… we have to understand [moral arguments] in a political context” (3). This insight drives her political view of care and her re-construal of the moral boundaries that she claims preclude caring politics. Not only are morals political, but valuing care requires reevaluating morals in a way that politically and 46 ethically centers an integral concept of care (101). However, rather than resort to an essentialized ‘women’s morality’ traditionally associated with feminized norms, she claims that upholding the value of these norms requires re-construing the limits and boundary demarcating moral and political thought: centering care requires troubling the boundaries separating morality from its political and personal contexts, the public from the private sphere, and indeed morality and politics themselves. For Tronto, the analytic and practical framing of moral and political philosophy has constitutively excluded questions of care (96). Understanding and valuing care politically and ethically thus requires us to re-draw these boundaries in a way that puts care at the center of moral and social life. According to Stephanie Collins, care ethics eschews the distinction between politics and morality uberhaupt: “Building on the feminist insight that the ‘personal is political’, care ethicists tend to believe experiences in our individual ethical lives must inform the principles that guide our political institutions, and that the nature of our political institutions condition possibilities within our individual ethical lives” (Core of Care Ethics 6). Tronto’s claim is more critical and transformative: rather than merely upholding the norms of intimate life and bringing them into conversation with questions of public and political policy, she asks the quasi-transcendental question, “how might an ethic of care become possible,” which implies a critique of the boundary between the ethical and the political that express relations of power such as those that constrain care to the private sphere or recreate paternalistic and domineering tendencies in the allocating of caring services (Moral Boundaries 175). This analysis has implications not only for political theory but for care ethics itself. Tronto’s argument is finally that “only if we understand care as a political idea will we be able to change its status and the status of those who do caring work in our culture” (158). For Tronto, 47 understanding care as a political idea rests on problematizing what she terms ‘morality first’ accounts of care’s social and political value. It is not enough to simply import an unmediated notion of care into political life: ultimately the ethics of care itself “remains incomplete without a political theory of care” (155). Tronto is explicit in her critique of Noddings on this point, who she, following others, views to have a dyadic, sentimentalized, and anti-procedural36 account of care that refuses institutional and structural analysis. Ultimately, viewing the morality of care as given prior to its political and social context is incompatible with a genuine critique and of social structures and norms. And ultimately re-inscribes the very divisions between the private and public, the intimate and structural, and the rational and emotional that care ethics is intent upon dismantling. Tronto’s aim is to place the value of care front and center in political policy and theory, while also addressing the social inequalities and power imbalances manifest in caring relations. Meeting both aims requires viewing care ethics through a thoroughly political lens: hence Tronto’s “political argument for an ethics of care” (the subtitle of Moral Boundaries). Tronto finally calls for a more caring society based on re-drawn moral boundaries grounded in the political and moral value of care as an integral species activity. “To recognize the value of care,” she claims, ultimately “calls into question the structure of values in our society” (180). Insofar as care is not a secondary and parochial concern but central to, and constitutive of, human life, we are obligated to take a critical stance on existing norms and practices, and ultimately to implement the value of care at the center of social and political institutions. 36 I have an interesting point of contact with Noddings on this issue: while I agree that her analysis is deeply problematic when it comes to political issues, I also have developed an anti-procedural critique of liberal conceptions of care. Interestingly, while she does not put it in its needed political context, in its attention to the embedded relations of care surrounding both survivor and the person who has caused harm, Noddings approach to intimate partner violence is not unlike the forms of transformative justice that I view as an alternative to legalistic and procedural approaches to reforming care. 48 This is true, but only half the picture. For Tronto, we must change the context in which we think about care, but we do not have to change care itself: “in order to think about care differently” we must simply “situate it differently as an integral moral and political concept” (124). For Tronto, it is ultimately moral boundaries and their social and political settings that preserve privilege and oppression, not the practices and dispositions of care itself. This means that despite her intent to provide a political theory of care that moves away from the dyadic and sentimentalized notions offered by “morality first” notions of caring politics, Tronto ultimately rests on an uncritical and ahistorical acceptance of care as a value—for her specifically, the moral qualities of attentiveness, responsibility, competence, responsiveness in meeting others’ needs and the integrity of good care (127-136). She claims that “Because the practice of care is also a political idea, [her account does] not face the problem of trying to import a moral concept into a political order.” Rather, she contends, “the practice of care describes the qualities necessary for democratic citizens to live together well in a pluralistic society.” (161-162). But Tronto’s construal of the disposition and practice of good care as a political ideal still abstracts care from social relations that constitutively devalue and exploit it. While she explicitly draws attention to questions of power and difference in caring relations, and indeed to how “care is raced, gendered, classed” (112), she does not question how practices of care themselves often reproduce or invisibilize the very power imbalances she intends to address. Despite her compelling claims to the contrary, her call to move a holistically conceived notion of good care from the margins to the center of politics thus still relies on an abstract and apolitical notion of care.37 37 Tronto is right in making the following nuanced claim: “As a practice embedded in social life, care obviously will be shaped by other practices in social life as well. In a culture that privatizes domestic relations in order to control women’s power, we are not surprised that care is privatized and gendered. Our inability to think of care in other terms is not a failure of care but a constraint in the social context in which caring practices occur in our society” 49 While Tronto brings care into view as a constituent force of politics, and in doing so also draws attention to the constitutive inequalities reproduced in the boundaries that exclude care from political and moral life, she fails to see the always already political realities of caring practices and dispositions themselves. My intent is not to dispute Tronto and other care ethicists’ claim that care is an essential condition of life and world making, or her move to politically value care and in so doing demand a paradigm shift in the location and nature of political and moral philosophy. Rather, my claim is that care is inextricably embedded in and reproductive of the constitutive inequalities of social life, which means that we also must account for the political nature of the very forms of attention, empathy, responsiveness, receptivity, and other directedness that the discourse of care ethics holds as foundational to its understandings of both the ethical and political value of care. Even in her critique of placing “morality first” in the politics of care, Tronto ultimately relies on naturalistic capacities for good care as foundational for her valuation of care as a political ideal. Her politics of care thus ultimately relies on naturalizing dimensions of care that are themselves structured by violence, and which are also capable of healing it. To return to this crucial point, the very feminist politics that care ethics draws upon and richly elaborates demand political orientations to those layers of experience and social practice excluded by dominant understandings of the political. The same goes for care: the epistemologies, practices and dispositions of care are not naturalistically or universally given but rather socially and materially constituted—in both dominant hegemonic modes, and in feminist and other forms of struggle. To say, as I am here positing, that an ethics of care demands a politics of care is to claim that the devaluation, exploitation, extraction, and abuse that occurs in and through caring (154). However, while oppression is not a failure of care itself, care is deeply shaped by oppression: a claim that I develop further in the next chapter. 50 practices and relations is not incidental but essential to the reproduction of the power relations, antagonisms, and contradictions endemic to societies systemically structured by violence. While the histories and present realities of structural violence are diverse and irreducible (though often at the same time deeply intersectional), the reproduction of these systems nonetheless depends in each case on devaluing and exploiting care. This means not only that care is political, but that it ideologically appears as a natural morality. This is to flip the script of care ethics, but in a way that I believe is consistent with its most radical and visionary impulses. Beginning from this understanding, which in many ways quite simply follows from feminist politics of personal and intimate experience, presents the issue in a clearer light by locating the ethics of care on this already political territory. Tronto is steadfast in her insistence that care is definitively not a master’s tool (226). I contend that it can be, and also a revolutionary one. Elena Buch helpfully elaborates this doubleness of care with her concept of generative labor. For Buch this concept helps illuminate “how care can simultaneously produce forms of morality, independent persons, and social inequality. This concept highlights two aspects of social life: first, that the everyday practices that make and sustain life—both social and biological—are necessarily entwined with the makings of political economy. In this sense, these practices are labor. Second, these forms of labor determine which and how different lives matter around the world; they generate both lives and social difference in the process” (12). To say that care is a naturalized rather than a naturalistically or universally given ethic is to account for this complexity: the profound and painful contradictions by which care as the labor which generates life at the same time is both produced by and reproduces social differences grounded in inequality. Noting the generativity of caring labor also roots it in possibilities for change and survival: just as it can generate violence 51 and deepen inequality, care can and does also generate forms of ethical and political meaning that confront and transform them. IV. Naturalistic/Naturalized Epistemologies of Care: Getting the Problem into View Contrary to the feminist political commitments and relational social ontology upheld by most thinkers in this tradition, the care ethical move of grounding the ethics and politics of care in a naturalistically and/or universally construed notion of good care relies on a problematic abstraction of care from its material and social conditions. In the next chapter I develop this point in relation to Kittay’s notion of a transparent self, but at this point in the argument I also want to note the compelling pull of this approach. If correct, a transparent concept of good care grounded in intuitive moral distinctions would provide real insight into which interpersonal elements of caring relations, institutions, and social practices we should value and learn to embody, and which contribute to furthering harm and marginalization. On one level, I agree with this approach: it is crucially important, politically, and interpersonally, for privileged individuals to learn the skills of intuitive and affective response, and for people who are socially compelled to perform caring labor to learn to feel and embody, as well as be given the space to enforce, the limits and boundaries of their caring capacities. However, attention to the contradictions of care reveals that even (and precisely) the relational attitudes and dispositions taken as normative in both broader cultural narratives and academic theorizations of care can themselves normalize violence and inequality and further harm. This politically implicates even the intuitive dimensions of care that care ethicists have taken as paradigmatic and foundational for articulating an ethics and politics of care: caring attention, attunement, empathy, responsiveness, other-directedness and the like. 52 My aim in this final section is to wrap up the claims of this chapter through an analysis of these naturalistic/naturalized epistemologies of care. My claim is that the analytic and moral frames of care ethics foreclose political analysis of the contradictions of caring engrained in these relational matrices and dispositions. I use the double formulation of “naturalistic/naturalized” to point to this level of contradiction: namely, that elements of care that appear to be natural and universal are themselves naturalized practices that are socially constituted and mystified as such. If we simply and unequivocally value these dimensions of care, we can only view the violence embedded and reproduced in and through them as pathological deviations from a norm of good care, or, alternatively, as ambivalences internal to it. This limits our perspectives on caring politics in troubling ways. The issue I see is rather how to critique and transform these deeply naturalized dimensions of intimacy and relation, insofar as they are themselves locations in which violence as well as healing are socially engrained and become normative. Put simply, I want to present the social and political problem as well as horizon posed by forms of caring attention in the context of structural violence.38 The ideological and material devaluation of caring labor and those who perform it is not incidental but structural to social and institutional forms predicated on inequality and exploitation, and this shows up in our embodied relational practices in deep and intransigent ways. Kate Manne, for example, discusses the difficulty of confronting misogyny, or the “self-masking” (Manne 281) enforcement of patriarchy, precisely because it relies on and preserves gendered norms of nurture, economies of giving and taking, and emotional labor and support through invisiblized yet extreme threats of violence and erasure against women and gender non-conforming people who don’t comply. As I 38 Here I merely point to this problem, which I develop at length in subsequent chapters. 53 discuss at length in the next chapter, women of color have long pointed to the violence reproduced in racialized as well as gender divisions of caring labor that are rooted in histories of slavery and colonization. These are urgent questions that point to both structural and intimate violence. For example, the social reproduction of contemporary racial capitalism is dependent on the intersectional violence contained in what have come to be understood as international care chains. The labor performed by migrant women of color from the Global South is necessary to the functioning of contemporary capitalist reproduction and neocolonial, extractive international relations. This is a form of structural violence, but like all structural violence it is intimately experienced in people’s lives—in this case, the exploitation, isolation, dislocation, and abuse women often face in the domestic spaces of predominantly white, middle class, homes in the Global North. These issues are not solved by simply pointing to the need for more or better caring attention on the part either those who are forced to care or those who are socially and materially incentivized not to, or even simply pointing to the inherent value of this labor, though this is of course necessary.39 To claim, as care ethicists do, that the social, moral, and epistemic value of care lies in its intuitive dimensions or dispositional attitudes elides the deeply rooted social and political problems presented by care’s at once intimate and structural relation to violence. Noddings’ work is paradigmatic here. Her phenomenology of care asks how to meet another morally through the realm of feeling and affective response. For Noddings, we must understand and develop care from the inside: by “heightening” the moral perception and sensitivity that for her is 39 As I address at length in another writing, merely procedural accounts developed by liberal theories also prove inadequate to these at once intimate and structural concerns. Insofar as procedures are formulaic and abstract and themselves enacted through carceral and other broken social institutions, they are rarely adequate to facilitate transformation at structural or intimate levels (“Conditions of Radical Care”). 54 the ground and horizon of ethicality as such. We nurture this capacity by cultivating what she calls an “ethical ideal” of care, the origin of which lies in “natural caring:” an instinctual “love or natural inclination.” The ethical ideal of care is an attitude developed through memories of (natural) caring and being cared for that she, like Held, claims are universally experienced. Her ethic of caring is phenomenologically rooted in such “feelings, attitudes and memories” that are “natural and accessible to all human beings” (Caring 27-28). Noddings’ ethics hinges on this capacity to recreate or maintain our most intimate memories of care (104): “[a]n ethic of caring has its source in human natural caring, and it seeks the maintenance of that caring” (108). While universally accessible, the ethical ideal originates in specific memories of caring: and is thus situational and non-universalizable (5), a guideline negotiated by specific people in specific situations. An example will reveal the troubling implications of Noddings’ account, and the problems it poses to naturalistic epistemologies of care. Providing what she understands to be an instance of the complex situatedness of ethical caring, Noddings presents a dilemma faced by an avatar, Ms. A. The context is the Black Liberation movement of the late 60s, and a conversation with a Black classmate, Jim, whose frustrations have led him to call for more militant action. In reflecting on her position in relation to this struggle, Ms. A admits to herself that if it came down to violent confrontation, she would choose the side of her racist family and protect them. Noddings phenomenologically outlines Ms. A’s pained deliberations at great length(109-113). Indeed, she presents them as an example of the situated complexity of care, and the effort needed to avoid self-deception. This is a crucial point in her argument insofar as it shows how one might navigate care in the absence of objective moral criteria: it is an example of the honest assessment 55 that goes into maintaining the ethical ideal, which, in this case, she relates as a choice on the part of Ms. A to focus her political efforts on preventing the escalation of violence. Noddings does not provide the resources to critique the directionality of Ms. A’s empathy, her ethical assessments, or her potential political actions. The example is itself very strange, given that nobody is dragging Ms. A to the barricades, and we can imagine many other ways that she could confront her family’s racism and support civil rights and Black liberation. One’s ability to care ethically seems to have little to do with power dynamics, or how one’s own relational dispositions might re-entrench them—or with the historical origin of one’s ethical ideal, which, in the case of Ms. A was nurtured in a racist, though ostensibly caring, family. Noddings presents Ms. A as attentive and sympathetic to both Jim and her family: in her presentation Ms. A is skilled in navigating the complexity, situatedness, and ultimately the limitations of caring. Ms. A’s ostensibly caring attention is itself implicated in the problem. Her attunements and sympathies themselves block critical reflection on the realities of structural racism and open her up to paranoid musings and potentially worse.40 Noddings offers little more to think through the ethical and political problems her example poses: how to critique social structures and shift sympathies, cultivate antiracist ethical ideals, or center the ethicality of political struggle itself—or how these might make someone a more ethical carer. Most of the care ethicists surveyed in this chapter would be disturbed by this example. As I noted above, many have critiqued Noddings for her inability to account for these structural and institutional layers of the social or their impacts on care. Confronted with the example, they would likely argue that Ms. A’s response is precisely not attentive and responsive to her classmate, the broader political context of white supremacy, or her positionality as a white 40 Note that in her fantasy it is Jim who incites the violence! This projection is a part of her deliberation. 56 woman within it. But their own understandings of the ethics of care, and specifically the naturalistic/naturalized epistemologies of care that form the basis of their conceptions of good care, do not ultimately offer critical resources to address such contradictions in caring practices and relations. They too are limited when it comes to the racism baked into in Ms. A’s caring attention itself. The relational dispositions from which they derive the value of care offer little more than Noddings herself when it comes to addressing these problems. Addressing contradictions such as this—here, how Ms’ A’s caring attitude itself reproduces racist sympathies and potentially racist political action—seems to me to be an essential concern of caring ethics and politics. Insofar as they can themselves reproduce structural and intimate violence, simply valuing attitudes and dispositions such as attention, other-directedness, responsiveness, and receptivity does not provide avenues for fostering radical care. Besides its awkwardly cloaked racism and pearl clutching sentimentality, the problem I see posed in this example is how to politically highlight the social embeddedness of care in order to interrogate and transform its attentive and relational elements, precisely as components of political consciousness raising and struggle. Noddings exemplifies the deeply naturalistic tendencies of the care ethical tradition, as well as the problems this poses for political accounts of care aligned with social justice. While they differ in the precise elements, nearly all care ethicists outline specific features, dispositions or attitudes that they imagine to constitute good care, and nearly all ground and justify their political accounts of care on the basis of these intuitive moral capacities.41 As I discussed above 41 As I outlined above, there is debate about the role that the motivational elements of care in particular play in its social and moral value. Tronto, for example, critiques Held on this point, noting how her emphasis on self-reflective motivation abstracts care from its laboring dimensions and even excludes some care work from Held’s definition of care. Held, in contrast, critiques Tronto’s broad definition of care for its overemphasis on labor: she claims that it includes many dimensions of social life that cannot properly be said to be caring. Relatedly, Kittay’s disability perspective also outlines elements of dependency rather than relational autonomy and interdependency that adds crucial dimensions to care ethical perspectives. 57 at length, even Tronto’s thoroughly political account grounds care’s value in such elements, which for her constitute care as a species activity. But if these dimensions of care are naturalistically given and good, then they can only be conceived as paradigmatically outside of or beyond the very social relations of domination at stake. In such a framework, caring practices and relations that contain abusive elements, are fundamentally exploitative, or, as in the example above, contain and reproduce sympathies with oppressive relations—can only be viewed as pathological forms of care that deviate from the norm of good care, or complexities inherent to it. Presenting caring dispositions and practices as inherently good and naturalistically given renders any violence contained and reproduced in them as a moral aberration or intrinsic ambiguity rather than a constituent component of the social and political reality of care. This means that grounding an ethics of care in intuitive attitudes or dispositions overlooks and even disallows politically situated understandings of care. My claim here is that rather than mere deviations from a norm of good care, what appear as ‘pathologies’ of care must often themselves be understood to be normative. Rita Segato powerfully speaks to this point, revealing so-called pathologies to be adaptations to, or performative instantiations of, the world as it is that reify and reproduce its relations.42 This point is powerfully noted in her thesis of the rapist as moralist (Contra-Pedagogias 37). Without understanding how rape and rape cultures are not pathological deviations but rather normative instantiations of what Segato terms the patriarchal mandate of masculinity, we fail to see the depth of the problem and thus the scope of what is demanded by feminist praxis. A similar point could be made about so-called pathologies of care, which are often themselves normative dimensions of patriarchal, white supremacist and other structural oppressions. For example, the 42 Psychopathic tendencies, for example, are normative to contemporary coloniality and capitalist patriarchy (Contra-Pedagogias de la Crueldad 5). 58 extreme and nuanced attentiveness and attunement that is required in caring for abusive partners, domestic employers, or, in the case of many disabled individuals, in navigating relations with abusive caregivers, is foundational to both the cohesiveness and the violence of many caring relations. To pathologize violence (or forms of adaptation to it) as somehow deviant is, ironically, to naturalize and normalize its structural nature and the harm it perpetuates. Relatedly, I want to distinguish my argument from discussions of the ambivalences of care. Ruddick, for example, poignantly relates the struggles of a young mother confronting her screaming and inconsolable infant, and how she must contend with her radical ambivalence— including feelings of rage, helplessness, despair, and hatred—in the face of such a harrowing responsibility to a life dependent on her care (Maternal Thinking 66-67). For Ruddick, we cannot understand the complexity of preservative mothering love without taking such ambivalence into account.43 This is a deeply important point that has been taken up in recent calls, during the pandemic, to center the mental health of parents and take a more nuanced approach to the range of emotions that caregiving inevitably entails, especially under conditions of crisis and institutional neglect. The recent work of The Care Collective brings these ambivalences of care into political view, a point which it will be useful to quote at length: The very concept ‘care ’overflows with paradoxes and ambivalence. Indeed, the distinctions between caring for, caring about, and caring with – which feminist scholars such as Tronto have developed – are useful, but do not account for the conflicting emotions that are inevitably part of different forms of care. Compared with similar complex, emotive terms such as courage, love or anger, the notion of care is rarely given due respect or attention… For instance, hands-on caring, however rewarding, also put us in contact with what may be the most daunting, even at times the most seemingly repellent or shameful, aspects of people’s mortal, embodied selves. It is perhaps reassuring for many to pretend that those who perform the jobs that most disgust us, perhaps 43 As Hil Malatino notes, such preservative mothering is not particularly gendered even for Ruddick—Malatino powerfully notes that such ‘mothering’ forms of preservative love are a component of many forms of queer and trans care outside of and against heternormative familial structures and normative gender roles (Trans Care 67). 59 literally cleaning up our own or another’s excrement, do so because ‘that is all they are good for’. This is another reason why caring has been traditionally relegated to the domain of women, servants or others deemed inferior, while simultaneously serving to reinforce the notion of that inferiority – precisely because they are thought to be more suited to handling ‘abject ’flesh, the sign of our inescapable corporeal existence and hence of our mortality… Both positive and negative emotions inevitably entwine with both our care practices and our very capacities to care. It is because of the complexity and profound challenges of care, as capacity and practice, that we must provide and ensure the necessary social infrastructure that enables us to care for others, both proximate and distant. By this we mean, for example, ample resources and time. Parents and other carers facing the pressures of today’s job markets routinely find they barely have time to provide for the essential needs of their dependants, let alone to pay heed to the situation of others in the outside world. Both more time and adequate material resources are essential to ground and facilitate mutually fulfilling and imaginative practices of care, from the domestic to the planetary level – and to foster the overall well-being of all creatures, human and non-human (The Care Manifesto 28-29) This beautiful passage captures the politics of caring emotions in their material and social contexts and motivates the authors’ claim that “[a] caring politics must grasp both this interdependence and the ambivalence and anxiety it inevitably generates” (30). It also points to the need to support and develop material resources and social infrastructures that can support the full complexity of care. While related to and certainly supportive of this aim, my claim here is different. Ambivalence is a complexity of caring to which caring politics must attend, but we must also acknowledge the social and material contradictions that constitute care’s political reality. While this is a deeper conversation that I will pick up in my discussion of affect in Chapter Three, I imagine that care ethicists, and The Care Collective, are right in their analysis: conflicting emotions in caring relations, while historically situated and informed, are likely best understood as an inescapable dimension of caring relations as such. While ambivalence as an affective state 60 can certainly reflect and be exacerbated by structural violence and oppression, it is ultimately a complex emotion (or emotional complex) internal to the very experience of care. Accounting for ambivalence is crucial to a politically nuanced and de-romanticized notion of care, but the concept of ambivalence cannot alone bring the social and political complexity of care into view.44 Conflating the ambivalences of care with its social and material contradictions ultimately reduces both concepts, as well as their relation to each other in the lived complexity of care. Rooting caring politics in intuitive dimensions of care ultimately prevents us from viewing care as anything but an ethical ideal. This limits our view on the violence socially embedded in care, presenting it as either a pathological deviation from care on the one hand, or an ambivalence internal to it on the other. If caring politics are understood to hinge upon otherdirected, attuned, and responsive caring attention as such, then examples such as that of Ms. A seem outside the realm of politics—an instance of her moral aberration or ambivalence—and thus distant from political deliberation and social change. Both options thus offer little help in interrogating care’s role either in reproducing violence or in politically altering oppressive social relations. Taking a radical view of care in the context of structural violence requires contending with the ways that this violence appears not only in social organizations of care, but also in its most intimate expressions. It also presents the need to reflect on why and how care already does tend to appear as a naturalized ethic within dominant cultural and social forms.45 Within Western 44 Of course, ambivalence can be exacerbated by structural violence and neglect, as witnessed in the bone deep burnout of mothers during the pandemic. 45 This perspective also offers a way beyond debates that have plagued care ethics since its inception. The problem of how to uphold feminized norms of care in the context of the structural oppression of women has largely been construed in discourses of feminist ethics as a problem of gender essentialism: in valuing care, do we risk reifying the very gender relations we intend to critique and transform? If care is a naturalized ethic so bound up with sexism, how can it form the basis of a progressive or radical ethics? Allison Jaggar, for example, poses the problem as such: “if women indeed show more concern for so-called personal relations… this is less likely to be the consequence of some innate predisposition than to be the result of women’s culturally assignment confinement to and/or 61 cultures as they stand, valuing and sentimentalizing care is the flip side of its degradation and devaluation. Care precisely is already valued, but in ways that often reflect and reproduce racialized, gendered, ableist and colonial logics and relations. Crucially, this contradiction shows up in forms of affect, attention, receptivity, and attunement as well as in social forms and institutions. As I have maintained from the beginning of this chapter, this is not to devalue the socially necessary, deeply skilled, and meaningful labor of care. My aim is the opposite. But, in light of the ethical contradictions of care, dignifying and celebrating care and those who perform it requires more than valuing its apparently intuitive dimensions. Taking what I have termed naturalistic/naturalized epistemologies of care to be the basis of caring politics limits our perspectives on the problems and possibilities of caring politics. To question our unmediated access to such dimensions of care is not to take a nihilistic stance, but to present the problem in a clearer light. V. Conclusion: Caring Attention—Ethical Given or Situated Praxis? The concept of attention has been broadly theorized by care ethicists, many of whom have used Simone Weil’s understanding of the concept to buttress their accounts.46 Discussing Weil, Tronto notes that the capacity for attention is exemplary of care in that it is other-directed and “crucial for any genuinely human interaction” (Moral Boundaries 128). Noddings and Ruddick also use responsibility for the one area of life and their relative exclusion from the other” (85). One takeaway from my analysis here is that addressing this problem requires moving beyond a framework that either values or dismisses care due to its imbrication with essentialized notions of gender. If we can see that care is both an essential element of life and thriving that should be tended, valued, and transformed and at the same time a naturalized ethic that reifies and mystifies relations of violence such as gender relations, this helps to illuminate an albeit difficult path away from debates around the role of essentialized gender norms in the ethical valuation of care. 46 Following Weil, care ethicists have posed a direct link between attention, empathy, and moral education. As Tronto points out, Weil claimed that attention should be the basis—the motivation and goal—of education. I will not discuss education until the final chapter of this book, but for now I want to hold onto this claim that attention is directly linked to questions of ethical education to care, and thus the question of how to teach and learn care under conditions of structural insensibility to care on the part of institutions and individuals. But at this point in my argument, I turn to the question of caring attention because it helps to illuminate where care ethicists go wrong in their understandings and praxes of caring. 62 Weil’s understanding of attention to draw out the phenomenology of other-directedness (Caring 203) and practices of attentive love (Maternal Thinking 120). Both Noddings and Ruddick contend that, as other-directed, such caring attention cannot be fantasy or projection. Speaking of motherhood in particular, Ruddick points to the difficulty in to keeping “one’s attention fixed to the real situation:” the goal in caring attention is thus to “let otherness be,” and let “difference emerge without searching for comforting commonalities” (122). This is a beautiful image, but one that Weil’s own thought illuminatingly complicates. For Weil, it is precisely the capacity to be with, indeed, to embody and express, contradiction that grants attention its transformative value. “We are beings with the faculty of knowing, willing and loving, and as soon as we turn our attention towards the objects of knowledge, will and love, we receive evidence that there is not one which is not impossible… Consciousness of this impossibility forces us to long continually to grasp what cannot be grasped in all that we desire, know and will” (Gravity and Grace 96). In attempting to shape our faculties in accordance with reality, we precisely realize that “contradiction is the criterion of the real” (98, my emphasis). Itself an instance of such contradiction, attention is born when we allow ourselves to be rent by what we are attending to. For Weil this contradictory capacity is the ground and condition of ethical action: “All true good carries with it conditions which are contradictory and as a consequence is impossible. He who keeps his attention really fixed on this impossibility and acts will do what is good” (98). While Weil understands contradiction as metaphysical, and for us here it is social and material, we can follow her in imagining that attention becomes capable of moral worth in its capacity to attend to living contradiction—in its capacity for knowledge, desire, love, and will— and be present to seemingly impossible complexity. Applying this insight, we might say that 63 caring attention becomes ethical not by assuming its inherent value or the well-executed motives of the carer but in its capacity to hold, to attend or bear witness to, the contradictions of caring under conditions in which this may be difficult if not impossible. Perhaps even more crucial than the role of contradiction in Weil’s notion of attention is how she conceives of its moral value and educative function as arising not from existing norms, dispositions, or attitudes, but from a shift in perception that transforms them. Attention invokes a kind of passivity: rather than the inherent capacity of a transparent self, attention involves a shift in sensibility, in which we are fundamentally altered in relation to the person or situation to which we attend. This seems to be the very thing that letting otherness be and allowing difference to emerge requires—always in relation to the dangers of fantasy and projection inevitable in the social complexities of caring. Conceived in this way, the ethical stakes of attention are revealed in its capacity to hold and attend to the complexity of what is, rather than presupposed in caring dispositions themselves. In Weil’s own writings this is conceived as a process of being undone and changed by the impossible demands of the world, and it is thus not an achievement we can finally claim. Most care ethicists would agree that becoming a good carer is a life’s work—hence the central role of ethical and affective education in many care ethical writings. However, if we do not have unmediated access to experiences or understandings of good care prior to violence, and thus no access to naturalistic sources of caring attention, then radically caring in, and caring for, a world in crisis proves a much more difficult, and indeed transformative, task. Hil Malatno’s theory of trans care offers a more generative and transformative approach that roots of caring ethics in ongoing, collective. praxis rather than a naturalized or abstract capacity for attention. Malatino’s account of trans care differs from the theories of care outlined 64 above in that it is not given but prefigurative, and attentive to the specificity of trans lives and needs. In one sense, trans care comprises non-hierarchical, bottom up, forms of communization and mutual-aid—what Dean Spade terms “social justice infrastructures”—that strive to meet needs and distribute resources in response to state and NGO failures, and often in defiance of their logics. But it also describes a collective and relational ethos, an “infrapolitical ethics of care,” guided by and productive of what Amy Marvin terms “trans ethical wisdom” (Trans Care 43). Malatino points to how these multivalent practices empower trans communities to shift the terrain of care ethics and care labor away from the white, cis, gender-normative presuppositions that often permeate even the most radical literatures on care. And yet, he is equally attentive to the harms that normative care can leave in its wake—the role that abuses, denials, and coercions of care play in the “overwhelming negative affect” (43) of a transphobic world. Malatino’s presentation of this both/and of trans care—as both a reparative response to the ruptures, harms and withdrawals of care that trans people disproportionately face, and an instance of the transformative power of learning to care otherwise. Trans people are disproportionately affected by structural violence and its intimate impacts, and often do not have recourse to the paternalistic care of the state or the parochial care of the cis-het, Western, family form. But trans care webs do not only attend to these wounds. They also pose radical alternatives to normative models of care. There are no dyads or hierarchies in a web because it extends horizontally in many directions with no beginning, end, or center; likewise, resilient networks of queer and trans care and mutual aid run counter to exploitative and extractive logics of care economies in both the ‘private’ and ‘public’ sphere. The “resonant traumas” that bind many trans carers together may bear the imprint of care denied or refused. But relating through such resonant traumas also nurtures alternative forms of 65 solidarity and interdependency—changing the shape of care, and the subjects who give and receive it. The alternative forms of care and kinship developed in queer and trans communities are neither normative nor given. Of course, this poses its own dangers: insofar as care, like gender, is embodied and performed within a matrix of recognition and response. Like all forms of care, “trans care can all too easily reproduce hierarchies of attention, aid, and deservingness.” This means that “[a]ny care praxis worth enacting must be attentive to such tendencies to reproduce injustice. This applies to forms of emotional support just as much as it does to forms of financial support” (69). Citing the work of Maria Puig de la Ballacasa, Malatino argues that care is never abstract, “but only ever manifested in practice.” This means that “practices of care are always part of an emergent ethos” (40-41, my emphasis). “They are not a priori universal, they do not define a moral, or social, or even natural ‘nature’: they become necessary to the maintaining and flourishing of a relation through the process of ongoing relating.” As an ethos, an assemblage of practices, trans care disrupts the moral and material structures—the intricate regulations of intimacy and desire, the lines dividing public and private—that correspond with normative conceptions of gender as a “natural attitude” (37-38). Trans care reveals that, like gender itself, care is not a natural or universal good, but a form of embodied emergence, brushing up against the ineffable (56) as well as the dead weight of the past. Malatino clarifies that a, perhaps the primary aim of his book is to “think about what care actually looks like in trans lives. This means decentering the family and beginning, instead, from the many-gendered, radically inventive, and really, really, exhausted weavers of our webs of care” (6-7). The question of who is doing this weaving, and how, is what he is speaking about when he discusses ‘transing care.’ Malatino notes that the “secret power” of the care web lies in 66 what Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha terms a “crip femme” reworking of the anarchocommunist mutual-aid dictum (and Marxist slogan) “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need” (Piepzna-Samarasinha, Care Work, cited in Malatino, 2). Discussing the concept of the care web from a disability justice and QTBIPOC perspective, PiepznaSamarasinha asks what it would mean “to shift our ideas of access and care… from an individual choice, an unfortunate cost of having an unfortunate body, to a collective responsibility that’s maybe even deeply joyful?” (Care Work 33). Like Piepzna-Samarasinha, Malatino emphasizes these simultaneously joyful dimensions of collective access and collective care, and the physical, existential, and emotional toll shouldered by those with both caring abilities and care needs. Piepzna-Samarasinha and Malatino both cite the STAR House as a historical, if mythologized, example: “the house started by Black and Brown trans femme sex worker revolutionaries Marsha P. Johnson and Silvia Rivera, with the rent paid by hustling and street sex work, as a safe space for trans people of color and street trans people to be free, be with each other, and share hormones and other supplies for healing and gender affirmation” (34).The ethical practices undergirding resilient care web will honor such brilliant caring skills—skills that are so systemically devalued in racialized, gender and international divisions of caring labor—as well as mitigate against the realities of oppression that result in unjust distributions of care labor and access in the first place. In this sense, fostering resilient networks of care requires not only redistributing resources, but uprooting engrained expectations about who receives access to care, and who shoulders its physical and emotional burdens. The term ‘transing care’ has a critical component too: it “also means grappling with the fact that the forms of family and kinship that are invoked in much of the feminist literature on care labor and care ethics are steeped in forms of domesticity and intimacy that are both White 67 and Eurocentered, grounded in the colonial/modern gender system (Lugones, 2007).” Malatino clarifies this tension between normative and trans care through a discussion of a syllabus on queer and trans care that he put together with Aren Aizura. In constructing the syllabus, the two of them were “forced to grapple with the failure of dominant articulations of care work and care ethics to do justice to the complexities of care labor trans subjects both need and undertake” (42). By “decentering the domestic,” Malatino and Aizura found that “[t]he terrain of what constitutes care shifts radically…For queer and trans subjects, this is often less about exporting the feminized values of care associated with the White, bourgeois home to the public sphere than it is about seeking ways to make the multivalent and necessary care hustle that structures so many of our lives more sustainable, especially as we’re often actively engaged in inventing or piecing together the units—domestic, familial, intimate—that are just assumed a priori in much literature on care labor and care ethics” (43). The process of transing care is immanent and anti-utopian in the deepest and most material sense. Trans care webs coalesce around holes in the fabric of normative care, meeting needs that go unmet within existing care structures. But a further argument is implicit in Malatino’s book: that, in mending the gaps and withdrawals of existing care structures, trans carers also reveal the harmful nature—the fatal contradictions and flaws—of these care structures themselves. In this light, it appears that it was perhaps never possible, or desirable, to quantify care in a logic of exchange, or universalize it as a moral value. That, from this perspective, feminist aspirations to achieve quantifiably equalized care might be seen as reproducing the very neoliberal logics they oppose (45). Or that care ethical moves to export socially constituted values of care as a private, family affair into the public sphere (42) seem eerily reminiscent of the very moral a priorisms that care ethicists universally dispute. 68 Insofar as they often do not, and cannot, rely on given norms and institutions of care, queer and trans forms of collective care and mutual-aid require the ongoing cultivation of a situated ethos—what Caffyn Jesse terms an ‘ethics for outlaws’ that is living, embodied, and counternormative—rather than “naturalizing a set of values from [women’s] labor, then extrapolating and exploring the deprioritization of these values in the public sphere” (Trans Care 42). Such care, in Ballacasa’s words, “remains ambivalent in its significance and social ontology.”47 Caring attention in this light would not be a given capacity from which we can generate norms48 but an ongoing inquiry and practice, “The question, then, is not ‘how can we care more? ’but instead to ask what happens to our work when we pay attention to moments where the question of ‘how to care? ’is insistent but not easily answerable” (Atkinson-Graham et al. 2015, cited in Ballacasa, 7). Care is a necessary and essential component of human life. As such, it is deeply structured by social relations and their embedded inequalities. To speak of care, and the ethics of care, as a naturalistically derived value or set of dispositions is to resort to the very sort of abstract moral theorizing care ethicists for decades have shown to be incompatible with our living experiences and relations of care. If, as care ethicists maintain, there is no abstract care, we cannot abstract care from social relations or the harms they contain and perpetuate. 47 Bellacasa opens her book with these powerful words, that resonate deeply with the questions and concerns I raise here: “Care, caring, carer. Burdened words, contested words. And yet so common in everyday life, as if care was evident, beyond particular expertise or knowledge. Most of us need care, feel care, are cared for, or encounter care, in one way or another. Care is omnipresent, even through the effects of its absence. Like a longing emanating from the troubles of neglect, it passes within, across, throughout things. Its lack undoes, allows unraveling. To care can feel good; it can also feel awful. It can do good; it can oppress. Its essential character to humans and countless living beings makes it all the most susceptible to convey control. But what is care? Is it an affection? A moral obligation? Work? A burden? A joy? Something we can learn or practice? Something we just do? Care means all these things and different things to different people, in different situations. So while ways of caring can be identified, researched, and understood concretely and empirically, care remains ambivalent in significance and ontology” (1). 48 “The question, then, is not ‘how can we care more? ’but instead to ask what happens to our work when we pay attention to moments where the question of ‘how to care? ’is insistent but not easily answerable” (Atkinson-Graham et al. 2015, cited in Ballacasa, 7). 69 The very feminist politics that care ethics draws upon and richly elaborates demands a political orientation to those layers of experience and social practice excluded by dominant understandings of the political. To grasp the personal as political means that the so-called personal domain is already a political site of contestation and struggle. If care, like the domestic sphere to which it has been ideologically and materially confined, is already political to its core, then we cannot at the same time ground the ethics and politics of care in a form of natural or universalized care that lies prior to or beyond political articulation. Hierarchies and dominations are reproduced in social organizations and practices of care for deep political reasons, which render them contested sites of struggle that demand, and resist, critique and transformation. Care’s most intimate and apparently given dimensions are already politically constituted—in dominant modes but also in myriad forms of resistance. Contending with the gendered, as well as racist, colonial, ableist and hetero- and cis-normative dominations characteristic of how care is socially organized and practiced is a question of political articulation and struggle. Just as essentially, the collective and often politicized forms of care articulated by marginalized communities reveal care to be a site of refuge, praxis, and political and ethical education indispensable to radical politics. If, as I am claiming, the power dynamics of an oppressive society live on in our very epistemologies of care—that is, if social contradiction can be embedded in our very capacities for affective attention and intuitive response—this presents deep political problems and possibilities. In the next chapter I present these concerns in relation to interlocking oppressions contained and reproduced in social organizations and divisions of caring labor, and the ways that intersectional feminists have mobilized care politically and ethically in response to this violence. For now, I want to end with two observations. First: I hope I have been convincing in my claim 70 that what care ethicists conceive of as care’s natural or universally accessible dimensions do not escape or even ground the politics of care but are themselves politically contested, and generative, sites of meaning-making and praxis. This means that, rather than ethical givens, what I have termed naturalistic/naturalizing epistemologies of care are sites of contradiction, struggle, and transformation. My second and final point is a note on method and concerns how to think about transforming these modes of relational engagement in alignment with social justice. A crucial insight of care ethics bears repeating in confronting the magnitude of this question: namely that the ethics of care cannot be grasped through an appeal to abstract norms, but are cultivated from inside embodied, relational, and, I would add, ultimately collective, experiences. However, insofar as this intimate and affective transformation is itself political, it must also be conceived and enacted as an integral component of broader social movements and political change. While it revolutionizes ethics from the perspective of care, and even calls for radically restructuring society based on caring politics, the care ethical tradition has not fully attended to the role of structural violence in shaping caring practices and relations. I believe this is because this tradition roots the ethics and politics of care in an apolitical conception of care. In the remaining chapters, my aim will be to present the stakes of this point, which I hope I have now earned: namely, that the elements of care naturalized by care ethics are themselves implicated in structures of violence that generate contradictions in caring practices—even and precisely at these intimate levels. 71 Chapter Two: There is No Universal Care: Interlocking Oppressions and the Politics of Experience in Intersectional Theories of Care 72 I. Introduction: Caring Through Difference? We cannot view care as outside of or beyond violence or struggle. At the same time, people’s creative, life-giving caring capacities exceed the violence to which care is structurally and intimately bound and lie at the root of emergent and historical political practices and imaginaries. Ethically speaking, this contradictory nature of care under conditions of systemic violence means that we do not have recourse to naturalistic understandings of care as a value. Radical care ethics are made possible not through given caring dispositions, but in relation to the politics of care: both in a negative sense (in terms of the structural oppressions within which it is socially embedded) as well as positively (in terms of its transformative, indeed revolutionary, role in social struggles). Far from nullifying the ethics of care, this political view on care exposes its necessity and weight. In the previous chapter my intention was to motivate the ethical problems posed by the contradictions of care, arguing that rooting care’s ethical value in naturalistically conceived dispositions or a universal experience of care presents the violence socially embedded and reproduced in care as either a pathological deviation from genuinely caring relations, or a form of ambivalence inherent to them. This precisely risks naturalizing historically specific forms of violence and their effects on intimate and communal life and depoliticizing care’s role in both maintaining the status quo and fostering alternative ways of living and relating. The aim of the present chapter is to show how theoretical and political insights developed by intersectional and women of color philosophers regarding the interlocking nature of oppressions—and the inadequacy of existing political categories and practices to this reality—challenge these naturalistic assumptions, and indeed bring care into view in ways more in keeping with the revolution in ethics that care ethicists call for. This chapter suggests that naturalistically 73 construing care as an ethical good sidesteps the constitutive intersectional violence at play in many existing social structures and norms, and the impact of this violence on the intimacies of caring relations themselves. It also occludes the transformative caring ethics and politics at play in the ways that communities foster conditions more amenable to their collective survival and flourishing. Ethically and politically speaking, care is where the intimate and the structural meet. In hetero-patriarchal, white supremacist, settler colonial, and ableist societies, care is socially organized in ways that can render care one-sided and extractive and/or neglect the needs of those who depend upon it. These inequalities trace distinct forms of oppression (as well as forms of paid and unpaid exploitation) that are, at the same time, deeply interconnected in both structural divisions of caring labor and in people’s lived experiences of giving and receiving care. Yet, care’s political and ethical salience is equally evident in practices and networks of care and nurturance developed by oppressed people, which not only provide refuge from this violence but often foment resistance against it and autonomous living beyond it. A premise of this chapter, which I develop in the first section, is that social organizations and divisions of this caring labor49 express and reproduce gender, racialized, colonial, ableist and class oppressions on both macro and micro scales. The ideological and material devaluation and exploitation of caring labor and those who perform it, as well as the systemic neglect of those most in need of care, are not incidental but structural to the maintenance of violent institutions and social relations. Dynamics of racial capitalist exploitation, for example, perpetuate and compound multiple, and intersecting, forms of oppression through what have come to be known 49 According to Evelyn Nakano Glenn, “The social organization of care has been rooted in diverse forms of coercion that have…tracked poor, racial minority, and immigrant women into positions entailing caring for others” (Forced to Care 5). 74 as international care chains.50 Capitalist accumulation depends upon reproductive labor to support ever more endangered life conditions. Maximizing profit requires externalizing this labor, and in doing so, exploiting it as fully as possible: naturalizing it as a female vocation or coercing, stealing, or paying extremely little for it. And it is not a coincidence that many migrant women of color from the Global South—who often work in isolation and without basic labor and citizenship protections in households continents away from their own—are currently doing this sort of labor. I also want to clarify my claim that inequality and violence are reproduced not only through social institutions and divisions of caring labor, but through intersubjective patterns of attention and response that take place on intimate and emotional registers. This is a tender topic, but one that I believe touches the heart of care. Attending to this level of social shaping and wounding can be deeply uncomfortable and requires culturally and community specific holding containers and modalities for interrogating power—a point that I return to in the subsequent chapters and conclusion of this dissertation. In pointing to this terrain of intimate contradiction and struggle, my aim is not to make a universalizing or generalizing claim about people’s experiences. My intent, rather, is to point to how experiences of care or lack thereof shape the very contours of our sensory worlds and embodied relations to others. In this sense, my argument follows care ethical insights about the specific and relational nature of care, which, in its intimate pains and joys, can only be known from the inside. Such specificities include the skills and virtuosities of care, but also the personal and collective resistance strategies, protective mechanisms and deflections, and strategies of endurance that people develop in the face of 50 See Rhacel Salazar Parreñas’s study of the the global migration of Filipino domestic workers for a thorough and careful account of both the structural violence at play in international care chains (the lack of labor and citizenship protections, the harsh exploitations of this unregulated market, migration fees, and risks of abuse, dislocation and isolation), as well as the agency and private desires the women she interviews bring to this work. 75 intimate coercion, exploitation, and neglect—as well as the alternative political economies, kinship networks, nurturance practices and liberatory values that individuals and communities manifest in their cultures and practices of care. Another premise of this chapter concerns the crucial differences, as well as relations, between paid and unpaid forms of care and social reproductive labor. Drawing on the extensive feminist debates on the subject, I understand these distinctions in terms of the broad categories of: i.) caring services subsidized by the state (e.g. welfare services, public health care); ii.) caring services in the private market economy (e.g. privately employed nurses aids and elder care workers); iii.) unpaid domestic labor that contributes to household and community reproduction (e.g. the ‘housewife,’ but also broader, often female, kinship networks); and iv.) paid care labor that is de-regulated and hyper-exploited in private, domestic economies (e.g. paid domestic laborers and nannies). I follow theorists who center the intersecting oppressions reproduced in these social organizations and divisions of caring labor. Black feminists51 have long pointed to the vast differences between unpaid and paid domestic labor, and the extreme forms of exploitation and abuse, historically rooted in slavery and segregation, involved in the latter. Evelyn Nakano Glenn points to how white feminist assumptions about the universal gendering of reproductive labor obscure these “differences across race, ethnic, and class groups in women's relationship to that labor” (“From Servitude” 2). She points to the continuities between the “servitude” of paid domestic labor and the racialized divisions of labor evident in commodified service economies, where women of color continue to disproportionately occupy lower paid, “deskilled,” positions (“From Servitude” 3). 51 See for example Hazel Carby (1982), Audre Lorde (1979, 1980), Angela Davis (1983, 1972). 76 Political and ethical articulations of care must attend to such interlocking oppressions and social hierarchies at play in political economies of care, as well as the specific forms of agency and organization fostered by care workers and recipients. In this sense, I follow those who have critiqued the care ethical tendency to value bio-familial care over commodified caring services— a move which discounts the intensive forms of emotional and bodily labor performed by exploited care workers, the role of paid care work in buttressing the ostensibly private home, and the historical and actual non-primacy of the nuclear family in many people’s lives. Together, these assumptions support and motivate my claim that care is not outside of or beyond violence and political transformation. The flip side of this is that the harms reproduced in caring structures and relations are not intrinsic to care as such but features of social relations and norms that both moralize and devalue it along multiple and intersecting axes of oppression. “Dangers” such as paternalism and parochialism52 thus should not be construed as pathologies inherent to care, but as examples of historically specific harms corresponding, in large part, to contemporary social forms and institutions: e.g., cultural, and familial chauvinism in the case of parochial care, and, in the case of paternalistic care, the individualizing narratives of responsibilization and deservingness at play in the allocation of ever dwindling assistance. Elana Buch draws attention to how Western ideals of independence are bolstered, in structural ways, through extractive and exploitative networks of interdependence.53 The apparent independence of some is upheld through the entrenched and systemic exploitation of the care 52 For Joan Tronto, parochial care is a “way to excuse the inattention of the privileged” (Moral Boundaries 146) and paternalistic care is care “in which care givers assume that they know better than care receivers what those care receivers need” (“Creating Caring Institutions” 161). 53 Buch presents the intimate stakes of this problem through her portrait of Maria Arrelano, a Puerto Rican eldercare worker. Maria’s care labor is deeply skilled: she seamlessly creates worlds of sense, meaning and embodiment that enable more privileged, aging women to maintain a sense of independence. She takes pride in her work and is very good at it. However, when prompted to speak to these deep skills involved in her caring labor, Maria spoke primarily about the skill needed to shield the recipients from the impacts of her own exploited position and its painful costs for her and her family (Buch 1-11). 77 labor of others: a relation which often traces lines of race, class, and nationality, in addition to gender. Such inequalities vis a vis care and reproductive labor are a central point of conflict between feminized people and have been definitive of feminist history and theory—as Audre Lorde famously pointed out when she asked of white academic feminists in 1979:54 “if white american feminist theory need not deal with the differences between us, and the resulting difference in our oppressions, then how do you deal with the fact that the women who clean your houses and tend your children while you attend conferences on feminist theory are, for the most part, poor women and women of Color?” (112). Lorde’s provocation poses a problem for care ethicists, many of whom place attention to difference at the very heart of care. Care ethics is built on the idea that, at its most elemental, care simply is the ability to consistently meet another in their alterity and need. Paradigmatic care ethical concepts such as empathy and engrossment with the other (both of which I discuss at length below) are grounded in, and work to develop, this core assumption. Yet the (often disavowed) societal expectations around care remain that poor, migrant and/or women of color will skillfully perform the labor of care, more privileged individuals will be skillfully cared for, and this power imbalance will be naturalized through care’s devaluation and deskilling on the one hand, and the sentimentalized moralizing of care on the other. It is helpful to recall Dowling’s notion of ideologies of care (Care Crisis 85), which mystify power relations and justify unequal social organizations and divisions of caring labor. While Dowling doesn’t mention this specifically, ideologies of care are particularly insidious when they serve to naturalize and normalize forms of oppression that are intersectional in nature.55 54 “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House” was presented in “The Personal Is Political” panel at the NYU conference on Simone de Beauvior’s The Second Sex in 1979. 55 Premilla Nadasan, for example, points to the simultaneously racist and sexist stereotypes that were historically utilized in reference to Black women's coerced domestic labor. This ideology of care served a distinct purpose: the 78 The first half of this chapter reconstructs arguments from Kimberle Crenshaw, Patricia Hill Collins, the Combahee River Collective, bell hooks and Nakano Glenn regarding the intersecting oppressions historically and presently manifest in social organizations and divisions of caring labor. In the second half, I claim that these arguments trouble our ability to generate ethics from affective and embodied dispositions of care alone. To call upon Lorde’s riddling metaphor, we cannot dismantle a culture built on the exploitation and devaluation of care with the tools used to build it. Although I hesitate to draw upon an idea so frequently applied and misused, I think it is helpful for situating these problems and possibilities of care. Lorde herself was specific about the role of intimate relational patterns and attitudes in maintaining the dominant order, as well as fostering new and more life affirming ways of living. For Lorde, “old blueprints of expectation and response” (123) serve as master’s tools when they normalize violence and prevent genuine mutuality and nurturance across differences. Given how profoundly social organizations and divisions of caring labor trace social inequalities, I believe that we can take many existing norms and practices of care as paradigmatic instances of how such oppressive blueprints can live in our attachments and sensibilities. Such patterns of expectation and response are expressed—as she points out—in who cares for the children of whom during academic conferences, but also in unconscious and somatically engrained expectations about who should, or will, be disproportionately responsive to the needs of others, and who’s needs should, or will, be disproportionately responded to or neglected. Because care’s imbrication with structural violence runs so deep, such patterns can show up even image of “a content and loyal household worker who nurtured and protected white children” was cynically invoked to both normalize a coercive and exploitative relation of care that descended from the institution of slavery, while attempting to mask and neutralize that history and present “a fictionalized tale of stable race relations” (Household Workers Unite 17). “The mammy figured prominently in advertising, the arts, and literature at the beginning of the twentieth century, as white northerners and southerners attempted to put the divisiveness and resentment of the Civil War behind them and mask contemporary racial violence. The black mammy issued from a fictionalized tale of stable race relations marked by mutual dependence and familial love” (16-17). 79 in earnest attempts to confront them. And yet, for the same reason, transforming embodied practices of attention and response—forging new caring sensibilities and “new patterns of relating across difference” (123)—is a political task of urgent proportions. II. Intersectional Perspectives on Care Intersectional interventions into the nature of oppression pose deep challenges to the ethics of care. On the one hand, they show that interconnected forms of structural violence play a determining role in the fact that many women of color are, and have historically been, forced into deeply exploitative forms of caring labor, and that social organizations and divisions of caring labor both mirror and reproduce this violence. This means that, far from universal and universally accessible, the experience of care so central to care ethical theorizing is shaped in complex and differential ways at the intersections of power.56 These differences trace axes of structural oppression, yet they are also evident in the differential relations people have to the intimate coercions and exploitation at play in many forms of caring labor. On the other hand, those who are coerced into exploitative caregiving or systemically denied care are frequently the fiercest negotiators of caring politics, and transformative practices of care play a vital role in how marginalized communities foster conditions more amenable to their collective survival and flourishing. My claim, developed in the next section, is that naturalistic approaches to care are inadequate to the politics of care in both this positive and negative sense. In this section, I discuss some implications of intersectional feminist thinking for the ethics and politics of care, 56 The violence embedded in social organizations and divisions of care also differentially and unequally affects people who depend on care. Disability justice theorists and organizers in particular shed light on the intersectional harms that affect disabled people of color and poor disabled people in particular, who are systemically exposed to abuse in caring relations, and are more likely to be exposed to and stay in abusive relationships due to lack of access to care. While I do not adequately address this form of structural harm here, it is essential to a full picture of how not only those caring, but also those cared for, can be harmed by structural violences reproduced in caring practices and relations. See e.g. Sins Invalid, 2019; Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha 2018. 80 focusing on the intersections of race, gender, class, and nationality at play in some of the most essentially caring dimensions of reproductive labor. As a concept and practice that has exploded in the past three decades, there are multiple and divergent perspectives on what it means to locate intersectional thought in its specific contexts and modes of application. Kathryn Sophia Belle notes the importance of historically, analytically, and politically situating the concepts and modes of thinking that women of color have developed to address their experiences. This is not an abstract ethics of citation but an ethos intrinsic to intersectional theorizing as such.57 As Collins theorizes at length, women of color’s knowledge has been systemically subjugated and suppressed. Belle points to how Black feminist concepts in particular—e.g., the notion of interlocking oppressions, identity politics, and indeed intersectionality itself—are routinely “misused, taken out of context, misappropriated, and/or depoliticized” (“Interlocking” 171). A respect for context is thus crucial to comprehending this critical lineage of thought. It is also a way of mitigating against the ways in which the work of women of color has been appropriated and abused58—cynically by the Right as well as casually and opportunistically by the individualistic, competitive norms of academic knowledge production. For Belle, situating the different theoretical frameworks developed by marginalized groups is also a condition for coalition building between them. 57 A commitment to a collective ethos is a common refrain in intersectional scholarship. Belle cites Spillers: “What I was trying to do when I wrote that essay many years ago was to find a vocabulary that would make it possible, and not all by myself, to make a contribution to a larger project” (167). Ange Marie Hancock also places community ethics at the center of intersectional theorizing, and views her own intersectional scholarship as informed by an “ethic of literary stewardship” charged with fostering intersectionality as a collective literacy. Speaking of her accountability to this community she states:“ This notion of an interpretive community being entrusted with the care of such a precious and complicated phenomenon like intersectionality is the best way of describing my current intellectual position. If we think of a steward as someone entrusted with caring for valuables that she does not herself own, then my role is to not only disavow ownership of intersectionality, but to remember that while I am permitted to use it, I must do so ethically, which entails producing projects that hopefully leave intersectionality scholars better equipped to engage in knowledge production projects in intersectionality studies” (23). 58 She points to the misappropriations of Black feminist concepts in particular: the notion of “identity politics” first developed by Barbara Smith, Beverley Smith, and Demita Fraizer in the Combahee River Collective Statement, as well as the notion of intersectionality first coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw. 81 Patricia Hill Collins, who, alongside Crenshaw, is largely cited as ‘coining’ the term, situates the concept in the specific standpoint of US Black women and their oppositional practices of knowledge making and political engagement. In Intersectionality: An Intellectual History, Ange Marie Hancock presents intersectionality in a broader social and international context, while also accounting for the central role of US Black feminist thinkers and organizers in its development. To account for its specific genesis, and pay tribute to the essential contributions of other women of color in the US, Global South, and internationally in theorizing the impact of multiple oppressions and struggles against them, Hancock supplements her analysis with the term intersectionality-like thinking. Hancock’s language is helpful in situating my discussion of the intersectionality of care below, particularly my citation of both explicitly intersectional thinkers as well as theorists whose insights on care are better understood as ‘intersectionality-like.’ Below I frame my discussions of the violence as well as the politicization of care with discussions of Crenshaw and Collins—both of whom are widely cited as seminal intersectional thinkers—and also with the explicitly intersectional approaches of thinkers such as Belle, Deva Woodly, and Alicia Garza, and also rely heavily on the work of Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Angela Davis, and Saidiya Hartman, who do not always work from an explicitly intersectional framework, but whose analyses deepen understandings of care from the perspective of multiple oppressions and/or practices of resistance against them. My aims in doing so are to foreground i.) the interlocking oppressions undergirding social organizations and divisions of caring labor; ii.) the irreducibility of the oppressions involved in care to single issue frames, especially gender, and iii.) the inadequacy of naturalistic/naturalized epistemologies of care to the intimate and relational violence perpetuated in caring relations. 82 For Kimberlé Crenshaw, who coined the term,59 intersectionality speaks “against the tendency to treat race and gender as mutually exclusive categories of analytics and experience” (“Demarginalizing” 139). In her analysis of various social locations and discourses including discrimination law, conceptions of sexual violence, and pop cultural representations of race and gender, she interrogates how a focus on gender and race as socially and discursively discrete, “single axis” categories limits both analytic and practical orientations to institutional racism and sexism. To focus on the “most privileged group members” (here, Black men and white women) “marginalizes those who are multiply-burdened and obscures claims that cannot be understood as resulting from discrete sources of discrimination.” In centering the “multidimensionality” of Black women’s experiences, Crenshaw’s work inaugurates a paradigm shift in thinking about the nature of oppression itself60—revealing it to be a “much more complex phenomenon” than single issue frames can bring into view. Crenshaw’s move to center Black women, and the irreducibility of their life experiences to single-axis frames, is thus at once political, methodological, and critical.61 As Alicia Garza explains, “intersectionality is a way to understand how power operates. It is also a way to ensure that no one, as Crenshaw states, gets left behind. It is a way of understanding both how and why people have been left behind, and it offers a road map for change by making visible those who are 59 Collins echoes a common sentiment in intersectional discourse when she critiques this idea of individual “coining”: “This origin story inserts intersectionality into a familiar colonial narrative that positions Crenshaw as the intrepid explorer who, because she discovers virgin territory, gets naming rights” (Intersectionality 121). This is certainly not a critique of Crenshaw herself, but the ways in which intersectionality, as a critical epistemology and social practice rooted in collective intellectual labor of Black women, has been framed by and for individualizing Western academic norms. 60 Crenshaw states that she centers Black women “in order to contrast the multidimensionality of Black women's experience with the single-axis analysis that distorts these experiences. Not only will this juxtaposition reveal how Black women are theoretically erased, it will also illustrate how this framework imports its own theoretical limitations that undermine efforts to broaden feminist and antiracist analyses. With Black women as the starting point, it becomes more apparent how dominant conceptions of discrimination condition us to think about subordination as disadvantage occurring along a single categorical axis” (“Demarginalizing,” 139-140). 61 Crenshaw’s own categorization includes “structural intersectionality,” “political intersectionality” and “Representational intersectionality.” See also Belle, 173. 83 currently invisible” (292). Insofar as power does not operate through discrete, single-axis categories, understanding it requires deepening and revising conceptions of how social inequalities are reproduced. It also requires listening to how people experience the impact of multiple, simultaneous, oppressions on their lives, as well as drawing attention to the specific ways that these compounding impacts have been invisibilized, marginalized, ignored.62 In offering what the Combahee River Collective (CRC) members termed an integrated analysis of the experiences of Black women confronting multiple, interlocking oppressions, Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality distinctly opposes the kind of externalized, additive thinking it is often accused of. It is helpful to quote her at some length on this issue: I argue that Black women are sometimes excluded from feminist theory and antiracist policy discourse because both are predicated on a discrete set of experiences that often does not accurately reflect the interaction of race and gender. These problems of exclusion cannot be solved simply by including Black women within an already established analytical structure. Because the intersectional experience is greater than the sum of racism and sexism, any analysis that does not take intersectionality into account cannot sufficiently address the particular manner in which Black women are subordinated. Thus, for feminist theory and antiracist policy discourse to embrace the experiences and concerns of Black women, the entire framework that has been used as a basis for translating "women's experience" or "the Black experience” into concrete policy demands must be rethought and recast (“Demarginalizing” 140, my emphasis). As Belle notes, Crenshaw is precisely “not presenting an additive analysis of identity and oppression” but showing how the “very meanings of racism and sexism need to be expanded” (Belle 172). Belle quotes Crenshaw on this point: “because women of color experience racism in ways that are not always the same as those experienced by men of color and sexism in ways that are not always parallel to experiences of white women, antiracism and feminism are limited, 62 This concern to center Black women’s lives and experiences also motivated Crenshaw’s founding of the “Say Her Name” campaign. 84 even on their own terms” (“Mapping the Margins” 1252). Crenshaw’s conception of intersectionality as a method of thinking and political engagement is not a mathematical, external calculus or a form of ‘oppression olympics.’ Rather, she proposes the development of new categories, methods of thinking, and organizing strategies adequate to the complex realities of oppression in the world and in people’s lives. Crenshaw’s vision of intersectionality deepens and expands existing categories and epistemic practices to better understand and work towards dismantling structural oppression. The lived experience of multiply marginalized people is front and center to her method of critiquing these operations of power. In an illuminating passage, Crenshaw invokes Sojourner Truth’s paradigm shifting address at the Women’s Rights conference in Akron Ohio in 1851, during which “white male hecklers, invoking stereotypical images of ‘womanhood,’ argued that women were too frail and delicate to take on the responsibilities of political activity.” And yet, “when Sojourner Truth rose to speak, many white women urged that she be silenced, fearing that she would divert attention from women's suffrage to emancipation. Truth, once permitted to speak, recounted the horrors of slavery, and its impact on Black women.” Crenshaw notes that by speaking to the specific violence she endured as an enslaved Black woman, Truth’s oratory also deeply undercut the narrative of female subordination in general. But acknowledging the weight and power of her words and their implications for political practice equally required that white suffragettes contended with their own racism: Truth’s personal challenge to the coherence of the cult of true womanhood was useful only to the extent that white women were willing to reject the racist attempts to rationalize the contradictionthat because Black women were something less than real women, their experiences had no bearing on true womanhood. Thus, this 19th-century Black feminist challenged not only patriarchy, but she also challenged white feminists…to relinquish their vestedness in whiteness (153-154). 85 Positing race and gender as mutually exclusive categories marginalizes women of color, and is also inadequate to articulating the full dimensions of racism and gender violence in general.63 However, for Crenshaw, the intersectional shift in perspective is not just about gaining a clearer understanding of oppression—it is also a call for empowerment and social change. Like the CRC and many other Black feminist and intersectional theorists, Crenshaw conceives of identity not simply as a result of oppression, but also as a site of collective historical experience and politicized agency. As Barbara and Beverly Smith and Demita Frazier articulated in their seminal Combahee River Collective Statement over ten years prior to Crenshaw (a text which is largely viewed to be the first written account of the much maligned and misunderstood concept of “identity politics”)64 the fact that multiple forms of oppression were “interlocking” in their experience and social positions required an “integrated analysis.” As they clarify, this integrated analysis allowed them to speak to forms of violence that were both gendered and racialized, such as the white supremacist use of rape as a weapon of political terror. But this integrated perspective was also at play in the CRC’s expansive liberatory vision, which they rooted in the particularity of their experience and “healthy self-love.”65 For Crenshaw, too, appreciating the 63 Davis emphasizes that: “behind this concept of intersectionality is a rich history of struggle”: “there were those of us who by virtue of our experience, not so much by virtue of academic analysis, recognized that we had to figure out a way to bring these issues together. They weren’t separate in our bodies but also they weren’t separate in terms of struggles” (Freedom is a Constant Struggle 19). 64 According to Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, “The CRC made two key observations in their use of “identity politics.” The first was that oppression on the basis of identity—whether it was racial, gender, class, or sexual orientation identity—was a source of political radicalization. Black women were not radicalizing over abstract issues of doctrine; they were radicalizing because of the ways that their multiple identities opened them up to overlapping oppression and exploitation… But “identity politics” was not just about who you were; it was also about what you could do to confront the oppression you were facing. Or, as Black women had argued within the broader feminist “movement: “the personal is political.” This slogan was not just about “lifestyle” issues, as it came to be popularly understood, rather it was initially about how the experiences within the lives of Black women shaped their political outlook” (Taylor, 15-17). Garza also speaks to radical and political scope of the term: “…identity politics is the radical notion that your worldview is shaped by your experiences and history and that those experiences will vary in relationship to the power a group or an individual has in the economy, society, or democracy” (Garza 2020, 377-8) 65 “We realize that the liberation of all oppressed peoples necessitates the destruction of all the political-economic systems of capitalism and imperialism as well as patriarchy” (CRC Statement, Re-printed in Taylor 2017). 86 differences across and within group categories—of gender, race, class, nationality, and immigration status—specifies and deepens the possibilities of empowerment and coalition. “Through an awareness of intersectionality, we can better acknowledge and ground the differences among us and negotiate the means by which these differences will find expression in constructing group politics” (“Mapping the Margins” 1299). These paradigm shifts—regarding the need to center the experiences of those most marginalized in society, the inadequacies of single-issue frames, the integrated perspectives needed to confront structural oppressions, and the role of lived experience in theory creation— are particularly relevant to the ethical and political analysis of care. First and foremost because the oppressions endemic to social organizations and divisions of caring labor are intersectional: they affect migrant women, poor women, and women of color in specific ways that cannot be reduced to gender, racial, colonial or class oppression alone. However, as noted above, intersectionality involves methodological, epistemic, and political shifts. Viewing care through an intersectional lens thus also helps clarify the nature and impact of these inequalities on people’s lived experiences: shedding light on the complexity and nuance of both the violence inflicted upon, and the forms of knowledge and political agency generated by, those who are socially designated as carers as well as those systemically denied care. Again and again, women of color have drawn attention to the vast differences in experience and life conditions between different feminized experiences of caring labor: differences, for example, between those who have been societally pushed or coerced into severely underpaid reproductive and caring labor, and those whose caring role, while often exploitative, isolating, and demeaning, is largely limited to their own families and communities. Indeed, racialized, and international divisions of caring and reproductive labor are indicative of 87 growing divides between women. As Premilla Nadasen notes,66 such disparities in experiences of care work have animated the feminist movement since at least the 1970s, and distributions of caring labor track growing material disparities among women based on race, class, nationality, and immigration status. Black, Latina, post- and decolonial feminists have consistently pointed to the roots of these racialized and international divisions of caring and reproductive labor in histories of slavery and colonialism, as well as the ongoing social reproduction of racial capitalism. They have launched deep critiques of white, Western feminists unwilling to acknowledge and resist these realities, including their historical and actual complicities in the sexual violence, emotional and material exploitation, and isolation of women of color performing poorly paid—or unpaid, in the historical case of enslaved women—domestic and caring labor, often in their very households. As Evelyn Nakano Glenn points out in her powerful 1992 essay “From Servitude to Service Work: Historical Continuities in the Racial Division of Paid Reproductive Labor,” women’s relation to caring and reproductive labor is anything but universal. As she notes, “[t]he gendered organization of reproduction is widely recognized. Less obvious, but equally characteristic, is its racial construction: historically, racial-ethnic women have been assigned a distinct place in the organization of reproductive labor” (6). Glenn outlines the unique forms of coercion and exploitation faced by African American, Chicana, and Japanese American compelled into domestic work, as well as the direct and intimate relationship between their racialized subordination and the elevated status of the white, middle class, women who employing them. She traces draws connections between this direct and obvious offloading of reproductive labor and the racialized divisions that see women of color disproportionately 66 Nadasen spoke to this issue during her acceptance of the inaugural Ann Snitow prize on December 15, 2020. https://barnard.edu/news/professor-premilla-nadasen-awarded-inaugural-ann-snitow-prize 88 performing deskilled, low paying, precarious, forms of care and service work in public and service economies as well. In drawing attention to these continuities, Glenn highlights how divisions of labor such as those between registered nurses and nurses’ aides reflect and sediment these racial hierarchies between white women and women of color. She also points to how white women’s complicity with this racialized division not only oppresses women of color but contributes to ongoing gendered hierarchies that funnel white men into the ranks of doctors and surgeons (23-29). While Nakano Glenn’s focus in this piece is on the racial divisions of reproductive labor, her work here and elsewhere also speaks to the complex ways in which gender and race (and class and nationality) combine in the oppression and exploitation specific to paid caring labor. In a more recent interview, she notes how racial and international divisions of caring labor further entrench the gendering of care: the bourgeois working woman relieved to pass the burden of care onto an underpaid immigrant women sediments her own role as head of household reproduction and thus the private and feminized nature of care (Gender Policy Report). Meanwhile, the labor of caring for the children and households left behind by migrant women is not generally picked up by men but left to women in the extended family or the paid labor of even poorer women. This means that the continued feminization of reproduction itself cannot be understood or addressed without attention to racial and international divisions of reproductive labor, nor can dynamics of race and nation entrenched in international care chains be grasped apart from care’s intransigent gendering. Nakano Glenn’s analysis sheds light on the intersectional dimensions of these material and political economies of reproductive labor, but she also speaks to the intersecting oppressions undergirding moral economies regarding who gives and who benefits from such labor, and the 89 naturalized subservience expected from those who perform it. The deskilling of reproductive labor forms a crucial link between these material and ideological registers. Racialization is reproduced in services such as elder care and nursing through this mechanism of deskilling: “…the division between ‘skilled’ and ‘unskilled’ jobs is exactly where the racial division typically falls” (“From Servitude 37). At the same time, systemic exploitation is naturalized and mystified through racist ideologies of care. Thus, while different histories of racial and colonial domination come into play in different ways with different groups of feminized care workers, the racial stereotypes surrounding who is suited for reproductive work speak to a common logic. “Whatever the specific context of the racial characterizations, it defined the proper place of these groups as in service: they belonged there, just as it was the dominant group’s place to be served” (14). This racialized de-skilling is especially evident in the labor of care in particular: What exactly is the nature of the reproductive labor that these largely minority and supposedly unskilled aids and assistants perform? They do most of the day-to-day, face-to-face work of caring for the ill and disabled…There is much “dirty” work, such as cleaning up incontinent patients. Yet there is another, unacknowledged, mental and emotional dimension to the work: listening to the remembrances of elderly patients…comforting frightened patients about to undergo surgery, and providing the only human contact some patients get. This caring work is largely invisible, and the skills required to do it are not recognized as real skills (30). This is a crucial point: the most devalued and deskilled dimensions of reproductive labor—that is, many of the skills most associated with care itself—are racialized in systemic ways.67 Patricia 67 Nakano Glenn compellingly presents the need to take interlocking oppressions into account in discussions of social reproduction. While this is not immediately relevant to my argument here, she moreover points to how attention to reproductive and caring labor deepens intersectional analysis. Racialized divisions of reproductive labor and the racialized deskilling of care are key instances demonstrating the nature and effects of interlocking oppressions in people’s lives, and the sorts of burdens they place on multiply marginalized people. Since multiple oppressions are so thoroughly embedded in the social organization of reproduction, a focus on these divisions of caring and reproductive labor provides a concrete instance of the need to move beyond additive models of race and gender (3, 30). 90 Hill Collins makes a similar point: despite changes in the racialization of private paid domestic work (which is now largely performed by migrant women in the US), their disproportionate representation in service and caring economies means that “U.S. Black women still do a remarkable share of the emotional nurturing and cleaning up after other people, often for lower pay” (Black Feminist Thought 40). As Nakano Glenn points out, care is seen as 'priceless' and is one of the most poorly paid forms of labor—these points are not at odds (“The Feminization of Carework”). As I noted in the previous chapter, the structural devaluation of this labor is rationalized and normalized through moralized notions of care as private, natural, and instinctual. These ideologies of care cast a long shadow in dominant moral imaginaries. The intimate and nurturing dimensions of care—which largely map onto the modes of other-directedness, empathy, and caring attention valued by care ethicists—-are both exploited and sentimentalized as a ‘labor of love’ in specifically intersectional ways. These deskilled skills of care involve deep and nuanced forms of emotional and bodily intimacy, and some of the most painful and insidious forms of coercion and exploitation faced by multiply marginalized caregivers (as well as underserved recipients of care) occur at these intimate registers. As Arlie Hochschild famously elaborates in her study of flight attendants, such emotional labor can impact the selfhood and inner experience of those performing it: over time, the ‘deep acting’ involved in maintaining an eternally caring and attentive disposition can blur the boundaries between one’s own desires and feelings and the demands of the job (89-90). At the same time, the most exploited care workers are often isolated, dislocated from community sometimes by entire continents and for decades on end, and/or lack the protections of even the most basic labor laws (Parreñas 19-20). These are conditions highly conducive to abuse, 91 coercion and particularly insidious forms of emotional and physical manipulation and exploitation (17). Not only the ‘dirty work’ of care, but also many of its deepest—and most moralized— intimacies are systemically relegated to the most marginalized people in society, predominantly women of color. This presents urgent political and ethical questions. It is obviously right to value and uplift the incredibly nuanced and intensive skills of care, especially since they are systemically deskilled and devalued in racist and misogynistic ways. However, insofar as caring relations are so thoroughly shaped by interlocking and enmeshed oppressions, we must also contend with the structural and intimate violence of care, the relentless moralisms that ultimately justify this violence, and the effects of both on the lived experiences of caregivers and recipients. Care is political in its differential allocation along multiple and intersecting axes of oppression, and in the intimate coercions and moralizing ideologies at play in who gives and receives care. Just as crucially though, care is political in that transformative practices of care play a vital role in how marginalized communities sustain themselves under these conditions, mobilize forms of resistance against them, and nurture possibilities of living otherwise. Abstracting care from its contradictory realities also limits our perspectives on these positive, generative forms of caring politics. I want to be clear that I mean this in a political, not moral, sense: romanticizing the role of care in people’s struggles to survive brutal forms of oppression risks re-instantiating the contradiction. By the ‘positive’ and transformative role of care I thus refer to how the very people systemically denied care or coerced into caring labor have often cultivated historically specific, often collective, skills and sensibilities that support the spiritual and physical survival of their communities and even forge alternative possibilities for living, in however marginal and threatened ways, beyond oppressive logics. Just as we cannot 92 ignore the violence of care, we cannot practice radical care or honor its histories without also considering the way that people’s practices of care exceed and counteract this violence. Angela Davis’s seminal “Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves” provides a powerful example of the historical role of insurgent caring and social reproductive work in the life and struggles of oppressed peoples. Highlighting the centrality of Black women’s reproductive labor to the survival, resistance, and marronage of enslaved Black people in the US, Davis points to how, in the face of American slavery’s intensive and focused violence against the family life and kinship structures of Black people, Black women performed the necessary, and deeply political, work of nurturing constantly threatened and violated intimate and community bonds. The domestic life of enslaved people was terrorized by constant threats of violence, but it was the only domain with any degree of material and physical separation from the enslaver, and so formed a key location for resistance to take root. As Hortense Spillers also notes, the brutal leveling of enslaved men and women subjected to forced labor put Black women in a very different position to reproductive labor and its gendering. Combined with the relative autonomy of the domestic sphere, this placed Black women in a unique political position, which they utilized to foster forms of refuge and indeed insurgency. “As the center of domestic life, the only life at all removed from the arena of exploitation, and thus as an important source of survival, the black woman could play a pivotal role in nurturing the thrust towards freedom” (96). Black women mobilized their reproductive labor—labor that was exploited and violated in the most barbaric ways by the institution of slavery—to shape and engender forms of harbor and resistance that ultimately abolished it. Black women have maintained continuous lineages of resistant and insurgent care and alternative kinship at community, individual and movement levels, which have played an 93 instrumental role in sustaining and developing Black liberation struggles. Their practices of care are crucial survival strategies, but as Hazel Carby points out, they should not be seen as “simple adaptive mechanisms.” Rather, they are a crucial fount of autonomous “cultures of resistance” that “can lead to new forms of struggle, new goals” (“White Women Listen 52). As Lorde points out in her polemic at The Second Sex conference, the “mutuality between women… systems of shared support” and “interdependence” she had experienced and taken part in as a Black lesbian formed a critical alternative to the “patriarchal model of nurturance” (111) which construes care and community as a burden rather than as a condition of liberation and themselves liberatory (112). In “Homeplace: A Site of Resistance” bell hooks celebrates the spaces of refuge, dignity, and freedom that Black women cultivated in homes, schools, and other centers of Black cultural life even as they navigated racist oppression and poverty. She claims that “contemporary black struggle must honor this history of services just as it must critique the sexist definition of service as women’s “natural” role (383-384). Like Lorde and Carby, she contends that the domestic spaces that Black women cultivated can in no way be reduced to a sexist division of labor or contained by a white supremacist normative and social order. Rather, the “construction of a homeplace, however fragile and tenuous… has a radical political dimension:” passing on a “sense of shared history” and sustaining a “community of resistance” at multiple levels, including globally (384). “Failure to recognize the realm of choice, and the remarkable revisioning of both woman’s role and the idea of “home” that black women consciously exercised in practice obscures the political commitment to racial uplift, to eradicating racism, which was the philosophical core of dedication to community and home” (384-385). Homeplace, hooks contends, is a historically rooted and self-consciously political space that redefines gendered norms of care, enabling Black communities to “gain lost perspective 94 [and] give life new meaning” (389). Black women have practiced radical care in more traditionally political spheres as well. And they have been instrumental in forming the alternative movement practices whose contemporary legacies include the politics of care that Deva Woodly places at the heart of the political philosophy guiding the Movement for Black Lives. The revolutionary legacy of transformative justice is another example of radical care, elaborating elaborated political strategy and practices of community accountability for addressing sexual and domestic violence outside the state.68 Healing justice, a Southern Black tradition devoted to “building long-term infrastructure for collective care and safety for our people outside carceral strategies” (Healing Justice Lineages 7) also consciously roots itself in a long history of struggle. In the introduction to their recent edited volume on the topic, Cara Paige and Erica Woodland imagine healing justice as “a call and response to [their] ancestors who survived colonialism, slavery, and attempted genocide, healed, and transmitted a radical legacy for collective care and safety” (1). These are only a few well known and contemporary examples. And of course, other communities enduring long-term oppression have developed their own lineages of radical care praxis. These legacies of freedom and struggle, like the forms of oppression they resist, are obscured when we conceive of care as an unambiguous moral good rooted in naturalized practices and dispositions. Indeed, the legacies of violence and liberation carried on through relations and practices of care reveal that these dispositions and norms are themselves contested sites of struggle, and of ethical and political transformation. III. Engrossment and Empathy: Contradictory Manifestations of Care 68 I discuss the tradition of transformative justice at more length in my Conclusion. 95 As Davis and Nakano Glenn elucidate, historically unique forms of both oppression and agency have shaped economies of care in ways that are irreducible to hegemonic, single axis understandings of power and resistance. With the intersectionality of care now in view, my aim in this section is to make good on my promise, made in the previous chapter, to elaborate on how caring attention itself can be shaped by violence—and thus how it can and does involve harmful patterns of fantasy and projection. I frame this discussion through a critique of engrossment and empathy, arguing that these apparently unproblematic orientations toward ethical caring also point to how ‘old blueprints of expectation and response’ can equally shape our dispositions towards others and their needs. The intersectional violence present in societal divisions of caring labor produces contradictions at the heart of care. This is perhaps most immediately present in the cruel fact that the burden of caring for a broken society is often borne by those most oppressed by it. Garza relates the impact of this societal expectation: “As Black women, we are expected to take care of people, and the racialized patriarchy demands that we care for you before we care for ourselves” (294). In Lorde’s sense, this is a racist and sexist pattern of expectation, and expected response. As I argued above, ethically centering care requires politically addressing the roots of such patterns and how to change them, not only structurally, but in habits of attention and response through which care is given and received. However, in pointing to these relational patterns, I want to avoid a deterministic and reductionist approach: people react to, embody, and resist oppressive relations in complex, nuanced, and situated ways. Indeed, my claim is that insofar as they are shaped by both structural violence and people’s individual and collective agency, these relational dispositions are a crucial location of political struggle. 96 bell hooks’s famous concept of ‘eating the other’ offers an example of how forms of relational identification can take the shape of social inequalities. To eat the other is to obfuscate difference, in the mind of the dominant group, by rendering it a fetish or fantasy. With this concept, hooks interrogates how white Americans’ unexamined desire to identify with people of color and their cultures can re-inscribe racist dynamics. Importantly, hooks is an avowed multiculturalist, and believes that cross-cultural dialogue is a necessary component of radical social change. But this remains “an unrealized political possibility” (367) insofar as the commodification and pleasurable consumption of racialized otherness in mainstream ‘multiculturalism’ both mystifies and perpetuates the erasures and complicities of racial capitalism. For hooks, true relation across racial differences depends upon recognizing structural conditions of racism: only the “[m]utual recognition of racism, its impact both on those who are dominated and those who dominate… makes possible an encounter between races that is not based on denial and fantasy. For it is the ever present reality of racist domination, of white supremacy, that renders problematic the desire of white people to have contact with the Other” (371). Crucially, this extractive consumption is “… projected as a force that can disrupt and subvert the will to dominate” (370, my emphasis). Eating the other is a form of projective identification, a destructive and one-sided fantasy, that, despite intentions to the contrary, further engrains and mystifies patterns of dominance. It can thus be conceived as an instance of another famous concept: that of arrogant perception,69 69 In Frye’s conception, arrogant perception is a deep structure of the male gaze, the subtle and coercive ways its domination uses and exploits its female others. This perception is often presented as loving attention: hence the centrality of a kind of cognitive empathy to emotional abuse and coercive control. In Maria Lugones’s treatment, it continues to be a violent displacement that narcissistically re-centers the self in its ostensive relations to others, this time reinstating the primacy and domination of the white and colonial gaze, particularly in feminist relations. While she has a complex relation to intersectional theorizing, Lugones illuminates how structures of attention and relation reproduce intersectional violence in feminist spaces. She critiques white US feminists for the ‘boomerang’ perception (Spelman) by which they (we) are so apt at re-centering themselves and their needs and arrogantly 97 what Maryln Frye terms the “arrogation of someone else’s substance for one’s own projects” (145). Arrogant perception describes the phenomenological shaping of perception by entitlement and domination. Perception is key here: as theorized by Frye and Lugones, arrogant perception is a deep structure of the male, white, and colonial gaze. It justifies and normalizes the use of one person by another, yet it often operates unconsciously and in fiercely defensive ways: selfdeception and mystification lie at its heart. In her application of the concept to white feminist academics’ fraught attempts to relate to women of color, Mariana Ortega illustrates this selfobfuscating duplicity of the arrogant perceiver. What Ortega terms the ‘loving knowing ignorance’ of white feminists is precisely compatible with good intent: the loving feminist desires knowledge of and relationship with women of color, “while at the same time using women of color to [her] own ends” (61). Caring dispositions themselves take on such contours of power, often in unconscious and deeply embodied, affective, ways. It is a telling feature of contemporary Western societies that the entitled use of another so often presents itself as appreciation or even care. Equally if not more troubling is what Garza points out in the passage sited above: the fact that—in some inverse relation—the most intensely embodied and affective elements of caring attention are routinely expected from those who are most oppressed in these societies. The assumption, whether latent or manifest, that marginalized people will not only attend to but anticipate the needs of those more privileged can differentially shape people’s caring sensibilities—the embodied and affective dispositions through which people become extremely attuned to others’ needs, or the equally embodied entitlements through which they become insensible to the needs of others, and the disproportionate care they receive. Caregiving under coercive or abusive terms perceiving women of color in feminist theory and organizing spaces, avoiding the learning and humbling necessary to notice women of color in their differences as well as racist parts of themselves (Lugones 181-185). 98 can hijack one’s nervous system, heightening one’s sensitivity to fickle and/or potentially dangerous others, while continually having one’s needs anticipated and catered to can dull capacities for attuned and mutual relating and render one’s attempts at caregiving prone to the sorts of projective distortions at play in eating the other. Persistent denials of care too can shape a person’s embodied responses to others and strategies for meeting needs. Though always negotiated in singular and complex ways, such imbalances in caring relations are axial, indeed normative, to the functioning of the social order. The skills and dispositional attitudes—the embodied patterns of expectation and response—at play in caring relations (including, importantly, the forms of dissimulation and subterfuge oppressed people often utilize when interfacing with oppressor groups) involve complex adaptations to, and subversions of, dynamic interplays of power. This is not an additive calculus, but a general observation about how social inequalities can operate in people’s lives and shape their lived experiences, and the ways people adapt to and/or resist these imbalances of power. To draw out the implications of this observation for the ethics and politics of care, I now turn to a critical interrogation of what Nel Noddings and Michael Slote term the “engrossment” of ethical care. I dwell on this concept because it phenomenologically fleshes out the notion of caring attention that I discussed in the last chapter. As such, it illustrates the dangers of naturalizing, universalizing, and uncritically valuing caring dispositions that are, rather, shaped at the intersections of multiple forms of oppression, and strategies of resistance against them. In her original formulation of the concept, Noddings conceives of engrossment as an attitude of caring presence defined by a motivational displacement of one’s self onto another. “Caring involves stepping out of one's own personal frame of reference into the other's. When we care, we consider the other's point of view, his objective needs, and what he expects of us. 99 Our attention, our mental engrossment is on the cared-for, not on ourselves” (Caring 24). As with her notion of the ethical ideal of care, the motivational attitude of engrossment is contextspecific and responsive to particular others. Nevertheless, for Noddings, engrossment is an essential component of care: “At bottom, all caring involves engrossment” (17).70 Slote develops this concept in his theory of empathy as a criterion of moral judgment. For Slote, empathic caring for others, based on intuitive moral distinctions, constitutes a general criterion of right and wrong: actions are wrong insofar as they demonstrate a deficiency of such caring attention. As discussed above, Slote claims that this criterion of empathy is sufficient not only to unify care ethical claims, but also to warrant care ethics as a superior and encompassing model for moral decision making, which can replace liberal justice models of rational choice making individuals. For Slote, engrossment is an essential component of empathic identification and thus of his encompassing moral and political theory. Discussing his adaptation of the concept from the work of Noddings (who, as he points out, wants to distinguish the activity of empathy with the passivity of engrossment), Slote defines engrossment as follows: “Noddings says that caring involves a ‘displacement’ of ordinary self-interest into unselfish concern for another person, and in Caring she also holds that someone who cares for another not only focuses on a particular individual, but is engrossed in that other person” (12). Both Noddings and Slote understand engrossment to be an essential component of care and elaborate it as a way of phenomenologically deepening care ethical accounts of caring attention, thus enriching what it means to ethically enact and morally teach care. Engrossment is 70 While Noddings points to the need for what she terms empathic accuracy (205), she erases this as a problem through recourse to normative ideals of care and maternal caregiving. She states: “…I have put great emphasis on attention. The capacity for attention grows along with the ethical ideal. As we are cared-for and learn to care for others, we become more and more capable of asking the question, What are you going through?, and, through the answers to that question, of constructing an accurate picture of what the other feels.” We will recall that Noddings’s ethical ideal is grounded in one’s situated experience of ‘natural’ caring. 100 a component of natural or intuitive caring, but as a situated skill it can be deepened and elaborated (for Noddings, in relation to the ethical ideal). I agree that such empathic skill building is utterly indispensable to caring ethics and politics: indeed, my entire argument rests on this assumption that caring skills can be learned and transformed. Ethical and political education to care plays a vital role in countering oppression and teaching caring skills to those who have never had to learn them is a crucial component of uprooting the injustices of racism and misogyny. However, such education does not occur in a vacuum: questions of who develops capacities for engrossment, and how these skills are expressed, are socially and culturally inflected in ways that Noddings and Slote, with their unequivocal valuation of this naturalized epistemology, cannot account for. For some, the skills of attunement and other directedness are hyper-developed as a means of survival, and violently extracted and exploited. Many caregivers also utilize these honed capacities to navigate power dynamics, or even render themselves inscrutable to the oppressor’s gaze. Others are much less practiced in engrossment in the sense of genuine attunement to the needs of others—and yet they may very well think they are or be perceived as such by others: even utilizing skills of cognitive empathy in abusive and manipulative ways. I imagine that something like engrossment—in the sense of attunement and attentiveness to the needs of concrete human others—is a fundamental component of caring attention. But this ‘is’ does not immediately imply an ‘ought.’ The intimacies of engrossment are themselves socially and historically inflected and thus fraught with dynamics of power—the self-deception and mystification at the heart of arrogant perception, for example, render transparency and mutuality in caring relations exceedingly difficult. Indeed, the very notion that displacing one’s self onto another can be conceived as straightforwardly good presupposes that such caring occurs 101 under conditions in which equal, freely entered relations between consenting and autonomous individuals are normative and socially given.71 In other words, even though the theory of engrossment is explicitly non-contractarian (Caring 150), conceiving of engrossed caring as a moral ideal implicitly relies on liberal assumptions about selfhood, agency, and a freely entered social contract. I.e., felicitous engrossment with another seems conditional on the possibility of transparent access to their needs and one’s own intentions and thus presupposes a baseline of social equality, autonomous agency, and good will. Conceiving of engrossment as an ethical good—avoiding what we might term the transference problem of engrossment—requires something like the ideal theoretical abstractions undergirding social contract theory. This of course runs counter to the foundational assumptions of the care ethical tradition regarding the ontological and ethical priority of (inter)dependency and resultant critiques of liberal notions of voluntary association, contract equality and individual autonomy. The assumption that motivational attitude like engrossment can form a model for ethical care sidesteps complex psychosocial realities like intergenerational trauma and structural violence, and the genuine ethical and political problems they pose. Trauma theorists for example maintain that even relatively minor pattens of neglect, abuse, mis-attunement, and projection on the part of our caretakers in early childhood can play a formative role in the styles of attachment we bring to our relationships for the rest of our lives (Mate, Vanderkolk). The problem deepens when we bring structural violence into view. It is perhaps not surprising that many Holocaust survivors displayed significant signs of trauma, but the fact that these effects were found to be 71 Many care ethicists, including Kittay, take dependency to be the guiding imperative of care. However, as I discuss below, her understanding of transparency, even as a regulative ideal, is grounded in the notion of care as a transparent moral good—which implicitly relies on the notions of liberal equality and contract that she explicitly critiques. 102 also present in their children is a problem of deep moral and political import (Dashort et. al.). This and other studies suggest that the effects of acute and ongoing historical trauma and oppression linger in the neurophysiology of trauma survivors and their descendants in ways that scientific inquiry is only barely beginning to recognize and understand.72 Findings in neuroscience and epigenetics point to the physiological dimensions of this intergenerational transmission of trauma, but other, more socially-rooted, thinkers as diverse as transformative justice practitioners, medical doctors, and relational psychoanalysts point to how patterns of traumatic response are also relationally transmitted by traumatized caregivers. For example, renowned trauma theorist and MD Gabor Mate relates the impact of his mother’s narrow escape from Nazi persecution during his infancy on his own attachment styles and struggles with addiction and ADHD. One wonders how this history might continue to impact the descendants of those who perpetrated this violence as well. For Noddings and Slote, engrossment phenomenologically describes some of the deepest intimacies of care. But far from ahistorical goods, these intimacies can also constitute the nexus through which historical trauma is transmitted or coercive exploitation is reproduced.73 72 See for example the recent outpouring of work on the ‘weathering’ impacts of racism on Black women’s pregnancy outcomes. 73 As I discussed above, these factors, combined with live-in employment and the intensive emotional and embodied nature of the work itself, puts migrant care workers at particular risk of abuse, coercion, dislocation, and isolation. The documentary Chain of Love presents an intimate picture of the coercion and harm inflicted through what have come to be called international care chains. In one portrait, the filmmakers feature a live-in Filipina au pair and her white, upper middle class, Dutch employer, whose doctor husband is notably out of the picture. The interviews quickly reveal the au pair to be a deeply engrossed, attuned carer. According to her employer, she is skilled at displacing her attention onto the needs of the family: she cares for the four small children as if they were her own and can be trusted with the most intimate dimensions of household reproduction. But, as the Dutch woman goes on to explain, the excellence of her care goes deeper than this. The au pair is an adept carer because she knows to stay out of family affairs; she cooks the dinner but does not ask or expect to be part of the sociality of eating it. In other words, in the eyes of her employer, the au pair is a good carer because she disappears behind her engrossment. Her capacities for attunement and other directedness are ostensibly what make her an idealized, model, carer. But her skills are only valued in theory: in practice they are deeply exploited and extracted. Not only does she take on the deeply personal, deeply emotional, and embodied labor of working for another person’s family, in isolation, and dislocated from her own, the au pair is expected to reduce her relational interactions to this care. This intimate and extraordinarily exploited labor is the source of the “freedom” and “flexibility” of her employer, who, it should be noted, thinks this is simply a great arrangement for both of them. 103 Abstracting caring capacities from these social and historical conditions becomes even more troubling when we bring questions of ideology and mystification back into view, and consider how dynamics such as those that hooks names with her concept of eating the other so often do involve powerful forces of fantasy and projection that cover over deep histories of erasure, extraction, exploitation. Engrossed caring can nurture and morally educate, but it can equally be coerced and coercive. From within the intimate experiences of care, it can be hard to know the difference. Structural violence impacts people’s lived experiences, intimate relations, and dispositional attunements to the world and others in ways that are not always apparent, especially to those in positions of power and privilege. This non-transparency of care poses deep political and ethical problems that can rarely be solved through individual intention alone. To illustrate this point, I want to turn to a historical critique of empathy presented by Saidiya Hartman. The example I discuss comes from her Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery and Self-Making in Nineteenth Century America, a text which charts, in stark and intimate detail, the “quotidian” terror that was routinized in daily life during this era of slavery and its immediate aftermath. Her examination of these routine cruelties, and the processes through which they were normalized, sheds unwavering light on the disavowed connections between liberal ideals of freedom and consent and the realities of subjugation and coercion—bringing attention to the impact of white supremacist violence not only on the public life and institutional practice of this culture, but on private experiences of selfhood and relation. Hartman’s critical gaze lands on the troubling ambiguities of white empathy during this time, which she illustrates through a discussion of the Letters on American Slavery composed by white abolitionist John Rankin. She questions the purpose and “complicated, unsettling and 104 disturbing” effect of a particular instance, where Rankin describes an imaginative identification with the position of an enslaved person, writing himself and his family into a fantasy of enslavement in an attempt to illustrate its moral harms. For Hartman, the “difficulty and slipperiness” of Rankin’s empathy, his “projection of self onto another in order to better understand the other… confounds Rankin’s efforts to identify with the enslaved because in making the slave’s suffering his own, Rankin begins to feel for himself rather than for those whom this exercise in imagination presumably is designed to reach” (Scenes of Subjection 1718). Importantly, Rankin’s exercise was an attempt to mobilize empathy as a tool of abolitionist political and moral education. His aim was to elicit care for the plight of enslaved people, first from his slave owning brother to whom his letters were addressed, and then, with their publication, from white Americans more broadly. But Hartman reveals how this endeavor was “complicated… by the fact that it cannot be extricated from the economy of chattel slavery with which it is at odds” (21). Rankin’s “facile intimacy” belies his display of solidarity, for it also reenacts the erasure and complicity his sentiments were intended to mitigate. His gesture fails to relate to the other as other, or bear witness to their pain. Even if that was his intent, his care remains thick with the institutionalized violence he was attempting to use it to dismantle. Despite his abolitionist intentions, his empathy retained the relational contours of the white supremacy he dedicated his life to overcoming. In this sense, Rankin’s display of empathy was a contradictory manifestation of care. Hartman’s discussion of Rankin has more than historical relevance. In the context of the above discussion, it demonstrates the dangers of positively valuing apparently natural attitudes of care and provides a stark example of how emotional patterns of caring attention and response— 105 especially on the part of those in the position of oppressor—can reproduce deeply harmful dynamics, even in attempts at repair. However, elsewhere Hartman makes clear that her penetrating critique of the relational imprints of violence is ultimately in service of those whose autonomous, insurgent, intimacies and desires were, and are, irreducible to it. This is most evident in her discussion of Black women’s “coerced and freely given” care, which she locates at the center (“the belly”) of the world (“The Belly of the World” 171). She notes that what Black women were forced to endure as caretakers of their enslavers and oppressors exceeds available political categories. Yet so do the freedoms they cultivated and harbored—the alternative economies of nurturance, intimate imaginaries, and ways of living otherwise they made possible with their “brilliant and formidable labor of care.” Most crucially, these “forms of care, intimacy, and sustenance exploited by racial capitalism… are not reducible to or exhausted by it” (171). The quality of Hartman’s caring attention itself reveals something profound about the transformations at stake in learning to care in radical ways, and what this might ask of us and our living. She has spent years in the archive and on the streets, following vanishing yet indelible traces of the intimate lives and desires of individuals who the historical record only represents through the violence done to them. The historical counter-narrative that she weaves is itself a “beautiful experiment” in caring otherwise. In her attention to the vast unknowns of their living, she hones new ethical and political sensibilities perhaps capable of meeting these others at the limits of knowing and touching possibilities of their living which have not yet found a home in this world. It seems, in reading her work, that she feels these histories and people, accompanies them, and brings them into the circle of her care, while also letting them shape what that care is and can be. 106 Capacities for caring attention cannot be taken for granted or presupposed in societies riven by violence. Prentis Hemphill, “a leading practitioner of somatics and healing justice” in the Movement for Black Lives, defines oppression as “the requirement that you hold another’s center at the cost of your own” (Cited in Woodly, 49). In the tradition of politicized somatics Hemphill is drawing upon, one’s center refers to their ability to stay present, open, and in relation to others and the world (Haines). Care becomes oppressive when some peoples’ ability to feel safe and held in the world comes at the expense of others’ ability to do so. For somatics practitioners, such inequality inevitably affects the embodied shape and emotional range of those in such a relation. And yet, from a somatic perspective, shapes change and emotions can be held, expanded, and made more conscious. We can learn capacities for care and transform our ways of being in relation and community. IV. The Ethics of Care in Political Context The care we give and receive literally shapes us: our ability to have and hold boundaries, our understandings of where we end and the other begins, our somatic and emotional regulation or lack thereof, our capacity to know what we desire and reach for it. And yet, this social fabric is interwoven with intersectional violence. While necessary to robust and transformative political articulations of care, ethical concepts alone fail to speak to this level of complexity. In this section I return to several threads from the first two chapters of this dissertation through a discussion of the ethics and politics of care developed by both Patricia Hill Collins and Deva Woodly. Collins and Woodly present the ethics of care as an integral component of intersectional political praxis. Viewed in this light, the ethics of care appear more as an emergent property born of collective knowledge, structural critique, and a politics of lived experience than a naturalistically rooted value and practice. This discussion will also provide context for the 107 conceptions of intimate politics and embodied ethics I discuss in the next chapters, in conversation with social reproduction theorists. Collins discusses the situated and relational nature of both hegemonic and “subjugated” knowledges. The systemic subordination of Black women and their knowledge validation processes has meant that not only their experiences, but also their methodological and critical innovations, have been constitutively excluded from dominant knowledge production. In ethically responding to intersecting oppressions and centering the experiences of Black women in validating knowledge claims, her conception of Black feminist thought provides many examples of what care-knowing looks like in practice. Woodly, in her articulation of the political philosophy of The Movement for Black Lives (which she terms Radical Black Feminist Pragmatism, or RBFP) explicitly develops a Black feminist and intersectional ‘margin to center’ ethics, which she defines as “[r]easoning about justice from the evidence of the lived experience of those at the margins or exterior rather than from an abstract ideal” (Reckoning 50). In centering the experiences of the most marginalized—both African Americans in the US, as well as more marginalized members within BLM organizing spaces—this ethic is rooted in the Black feminist and intersectional assertion that the realities of interlocking oppressions place ethical demands on knowledge making and political practices. Both understanding and justice require attention and care to the impact of oppression on those most harmed by it. Both Woodly and Collins depart from care ethics insofar as they view the epistemic and ethical value of care to arise not from caring practices or dispositions themselves, but from the collective and political endeavor of struggling for social justice. In her articulations of intersectionality as a critical social theory, Collins centers the experience of Black women and develops political praxis, knowledge, and ethics from a Black feminist standpoint, or empowered 108 and collective self-definition. For Collins, these epistemic, ethical, and political concerns are inseparable: she claims that Black feminist thought is a political achievement grounded in legacies of struggle and intellectual labor (what she terms a dialectic of activism and thinking) by Black women intellectuals. In a paradigmatic example, Collins thus opposes Black feminist thought to positivism as a way of validating knowledge. In asking, simply, “is it objectively true or false?” positivist methods of validating truth distance the subject and object of knowledge, separate emotions from research, preclude statements of value or ethics, and privilege individual winners of adversarial debate (Black Feminist Thought 255). Such an approach to knowledge validation is inadequate to the task of understanding intersecting oppressions or engaging in struggles against them. The complex lived realities of oppression cannot simply be quantified, isolated from experience, disinterestedly analyzed, or captured through victories of competitive argument. By critically opposing such “objective generalizations” (255), Collins claims that “the existence of a self-defined Black women’s standpoint using Black feminist epistemology calls into question the content of what currently passes as truth and simultaneously challenges the process of arriving at that truth” (271). In contradiction to positivist, and other “eurocentric” methods of validating knowledge, Black feminist epistemology articulates the following criteria of knowledge, rooted in the lived experience and material reality of Black women (256): 1. Lived experience as a criterion of meaning; 2. The use of dialogue; 3. The ethics of caring and 4. The ethic of personal accountability. Together, these standards elaborate the nature of the dialectic of thought and engaged, collective practice so central to her thinking. Collins claims that, particularly for people confronting oppression, lived experience matters: it is the “cutting edge” dividing abstract knowing from wisdom (257). Like Crenshaw, 109 Collins invokes Sojourner Truth’s truth claims as an example of the power of lived experience as a criterion of meaning: “By invoking examples from her own life to symbolize new meanings, Truth deconstructed the prevailing notions of woman” (258). Moreover, this criterion of meaning helps to elaborate the relational connections—the shared experiences as well as differences— between Black women. The use of dialogue, the second component of Black feminist epistemic method, is thus connected to the first. This emphasis on dialogue has roots in African and African American oral traditions and spiritual, political, and linguistic practices that presuppose and serve to elaborate relationships between a hearer and a speaker as an essential condition of meaning (260-62). These two features of Black feminist epistemology in particular help to illuminate a collective perspective on truth.74 Articulating experiences and dialogic methods from a Black feminist standpoint offers points of contact with other partial, situated forms of knowledge: such coalitions together allow for a more total, and more subtle, image of what is and what can be. Crucially for my argument here, Collins presents the ethics of care, as well as an ethic of personal accountability, as the remaining constitutive features of Black feminist epistemology. In the ethics of both care and personal accountability “Neither emotion nor ethics is subordinated to reason. Instead, emotion, ethics and reason are used as interconnected, essential components in assessing knowledge claims” (266). Her understanding of the ethics of care includes an emphasis on individual uniqueness and expressiveness, the appropriateness of emotions in deliberating truth and ethical courses of action, and the importance of empathy in the process of 74 For Collins, the situated theory and praxis developed by Black feminists also allows for coalition and a broader and more articulated perspective on truth: “Although it is tempting to claim that Black women are more oppressed than everyone else and therefore have the best standpoint from which to understand the mechanisms, processes, and effects of oppression, this is not the case. Instead, those ideas that are validated as true by African-American women, African-American men, Latina lesbians, Asian-American women, Puerto Rican men and other groups with distinctive standpoints, with each group using the epistemological approaches growing up from its unique standpoint, become the most “objective” truths” (270). 110 understanding. These largely resonate with the features of care ethics presented by Held and others: specifically, the focus on the particularity of the other, the role of emotions in ethical reasoning, and the emphasis on affective ethical education in fostering more responsiveness to the needs of others. Conversely, the ethic of personal accountability requires that one be accountable to their own knowledge claims, and that such accountability have bearing on how we assess the claims of knowers in general. Collins notes that detaching knowledge claims from such embedded accountability can serve as a tool of oppression by posing human suffering in cold and quantitative terms, or the claims of interested historical actors in neutral ones. The act of making knowledge claims, as well as assessing the validity of claims made by others, requires situating these claims in their social and historical conditions as well as one’s own lived experience. These latter, ethical, criteria of knowledge work together in that they condition the validity of truth on its claimants’ capacity to be responsive and responsible to human others and the concrete conditions of their lives (265-66). Taken together, these four criteria lead to an alternative conception of knowledge and the process of attaining it: “In this alternative epistemology, values lie at the heart of the knowledge validation process such that inquiry always has an ethical aim. Moreover, when these four dimensions become politicized and attached to a social justice project, they can form a framework for Black feminist thought and practice” (266). In naming these features of Black feminist thought, Collins claims that empathy, intuition, responsiveness, accountability, the recognition of individual uniqueness, and the development of collective wisdom and dialogue are all inseparable from intersectionality’s ongoing work of forging politicized and collective knowledge and practice. In other words, rather than deriving the ethics of care from naturalized caring capacities themselves, the ethics of care form an integral component of Black feminist 111 praxis, resourcing and helping to articulate its stance against oppression and for collective empowerment. Woodly is even more explicit about politically situating the ethics of care and provides a concrete and recent example of the power of, and need for, politicized care in fomenting radical social transformation. Indeed, she claims that the politics of care is the “most unique aspect” of the political philosophy of the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), a philosophy which she terms Radical Black Feminist Pragmatism (RBFP). This politics is rooted in the movement’s animating assertion that Black lives matter. Black people are hurting due to systemic racist oppression, “and that is reason enough to care” (92). Woodly juxtaposes this politics of care to feminist care ethics in particular: “…for those who adhere to RBFP, care is not only an ethic or a set of moral principles, it is also a politics.” While “this notion has deep affinity with the voluminous literature in feminist political theory” it differs from thinkers such as Tronto in that “people in the movement do not center care because of a commitment to the idea of democracy or the duty and value of citizenship… but because they matter to themselves and to one another” (91). For Woodly, the politics of care is not an ethical or political ideal, but an immediate pragmatic and ethical response to pain. Ethics play a central role in this political theory—specifically, in what Woodly terms its intersectional ‘margin to center’ and abolitionist ethics (which I discuss below). RBFP begins from the Black feminist commitment to “the immanent relevance of people’s lived experience, centering the experiences of those who are most impacted by systems of domination and oppression” (89). RBFP’s radical methodological and political approaches stem from this 112 commitment to lived experience, which, she emphasizes, “is a key tenet of the Black feminist intellectual tradition and has always animated the movement” (69).75 Woodly and Collins view the epistemic and ethical features of care to be inseparable components of responding to people’s concrete, situated, needs, and view this endeavor to be guided by and rooted in a political ethos and commitment to social justice. “A politics of care” does not begin from the universal ethical relevance of care or an affirmation of its general epistemic features but is generated as a response to a historical need: it “requires us to consider what harms society ought to account for and how we should reckon with the need for reparation” (Reckoning 88). For Woodly, “RBFP and its most unique element, the politics of care, demands that we attend to the conditions preventing flourishing in people’s lived experience” (207). This demand does not stem from a commitment to abstract principles—including care itself—but arises inductively, in a situated manner, as a response to people’s pain. At the same time, the movement’s commitment to care has generated a profoundly visionary, yet deeply practical, political imagination. It has put racial reckoning at the forefront of American life where it belongs, and brought perspectives such as police and prison abolition, politicized healing, and community care into the public domain in ways that were unthinkable before the revolutionary uprisings in response to the police murders of George Floyd and Brionna Taylor. Moreover, the movement models these radical changes, presenting them in their full complexity, yet also imbuing them with a sense of joy and purpose that renders them both actionable and irresistible. 75 Woodly cites Brittney Cooper: “Black women’s knowledge production has always been motivated by a sense of care for Black communities in a world where non- Black people did not find value in the lives and livelihoods of these communities” (Cooper cited in Woodly, 69). 113 Woodly outlines six values that underlie the politics of care articulated by the M4BL: oppression as social trauma, interdependence, accountability, unapologetic Blackness, a defense of Black joy, and abolition, restoration, and repair. Rather than presupposing a naturalistic or universal conception of care’s value, these values offer a critical lens on the systemic devaluation of Black lives in a white supremacist culture—and are also transformative in that they help orient collective action and inspire movement participants to live in accordance with their aspirations for justice and liberation. In both senses, Woodly claims that a commitment to healing justice informs and motivates these disparate values.76 The first value—that of oppression as social trauma—stems from a fundamental assumption of healing justice, which conceives of trauma as social. Trauma is an inevitable result of oppression: addressing it thus requires a collective and political approach to healing, and a healing approach to movement politics.77 Finding ways to collectively navigate the intergenerational, social, and personal complexities of this trauma is a component piece of the culture building and ongoing “experimentation…constitutive of the movement philosophy” (98). This politics of care has both critical and positive valences: oppression is political in its traumatic effects on marginalized groups, and in that healing from this trauma requires fostering interdependency in communities of struggle. This focus on interdependency as a value rests on a critique of the liberal individual as the primary social actor, and draws from disability justice accounts of “human beings as embodied and social” (101). Viewed through the lens of 76 Healing justice is a radical modality and political orientation to healing that has fundamentally informed the politics developed by BLM. It has connections to Black Southern healing traditions such as midwifery and herbalism, as well as traditions of disability justice, transformative justice, and politicized somatics. 77 Citing Iris Marion Young, Woodly claims that “[o]ppression’s harm includes but goes well beyond the unfair distribution of rights and wealth.” Its deep effects “keep people from becoming who they might be if not so constrained, because oppression limits people’s ability to increase their capabilities and expand their capacities through exploration, education and experiences” (95). 114 interdependency, healing from trauma and oppression is incomplete when understood on individual terms, and the process of organizing itself is conceived as fundamentally healing. Such collective practices, over time, allow individuals and groups to ‘show up’ differently and be empowered and accountable in relation to each other and to a sense of purpose and belonging. Organizers consciously practice embodying their commitments, adapting their shape or ‘posture’ in ways that are responsive to their values and goals, as well as the needs and expectations of interdependent others with whom they are organizing and building community. Such shifts are an “incredibly sophisticated and difficult line to walk” (104). They are sustained through practices that connect people not only to each other in the present, but to legacies of struggle in the past and radical possibilities for the future—connections which are often supported by spiritual and ritual practices. For Woodly, the politics of care are also sustained by forms of unapologetic Blackness, as well as refusal and animating joy. Unapologetic refusal of respectability politics—refusing to change one’s shape to fit and accommodate or gain acceptance in the eyes of the oppressor culture (107-108). And the joy and pleasure that she claims results from belonging in a web of interdependent relationships and feeling capable of radically altering the conditions of one’s existence. In this sense, collective and politicized emotional expression—of joy, and also grief and rage—becomes an integral and empowering component of the politics of care which empowers and nurtures the movement (111-115). The final value underlying the politics of care is an abolitionist ethics. “For people in movement, abolition is, at bottom, a politics of care. This is because, though contemporary abolitionists believe in the ultimate elimination of police and prisons, that aspiration is predicated on creating the material and social conditions in which most people do not harm others” (115). 115 Abolitionist organizers and transformative justice practitioners often point out that nobody enters violence by causing it: as Mia Mingus puts it: “no one is born knowing how to rape or torture– these are learned behaviors” (“Transformative Justice”). For Woodly, abolitionism is a politics of care that pragmatically orients to these conditions under which causing harm would no longer be an immediate way to deal with pain or meet survival needs. Few abolitionists would claim that abolition is purely, or even primarily, a negative or destructive endeavor. Rather, it involves what Angela Davis terms a “transformative process of decarceration:” a “constellation of alternative strategies and institutions” (Are Prisons Obsolete 107) through which fundamentally oppressive institutions and social relations are replaced, over time, by just and equitable ones. As I argue later in this dissertation, this orientation to transformative justice as a component piece of abolitionist politics involves developing emotional, logistical, and even spiritual resources through which both survivors and perpetrators of harm can find healing and repair outside of punitive and carceral logics. Both Woodly and Collins develop Black feminist forms of care ethics that respond in specific ways to the needs of African American communities and build upon legacies of Black liberation and struggle. In her later work however, Collins explicitly poses ethics as an open and urgent question.78 Yet if ethics are to play a component role in of intersectionality as a critical social theory, she claims, they will be political and emerge from praxis and social action as a way of knowing. 78 In response to its current moment of crisis and transition, Collins asks whether and how the ethical commitment to social justice should be seen to structure intersectionality as a critical social theory. This question is a constitutive critical horizon for Collins: “Rather than assuming that social justice is implicitly a part of intersectionality, the question of intersectionality’s ties to social justice constitutes an important and ongoing question for theorizing intersectionality itself” (Intersectionality 275). 116 Collins’ ambiguous position on ethics can be clarified through her reading of Simone de Beauvior’s Ethics of Ambiguity itself. She juxtaposes Beauvior’s ethics of freedom to those of the civil rights organizer Pauli Murray—who was Beauvior’s immediate contemporary and equally brilliant and precocious, but whose race, class position, and commitment to social organizing prevented her from reaching a position of parallel public prominence. For Beauvior, “there is an ethics only if there is a problem to solve” (Ethics of Ambiguity 18). Indeed, as Collins elaborates, her ethics of ambiguity presents ethics as an ongoing space of a problem, a continual process of failure and questioning whose only guide comes from the ambiguous claims of others, the world, and the commitment to freedom itself. However, as opposed to Murray, whose own ethics of freedom were firmly rooted in concrete social justice projects, Beauvior fails to fully inhabit this space of ethical questioning and transformation that she herself brings to light. Rather than “embracing the ambiguity” (and the embrace of ambiguity) she claims is constitutive of ethics itself, Beauvior’s commitment to abstract, voluntarist, notions of freedom throw her thinking back into the false dilemmas and contradictions she hoped to sidestep with her ethics of social action and recognition.79 I wonder whether the ethics of care, too, might be best understood as inhabiting the space of a problem—as a question who’s call and response are forged in relation to the possibility of social justice and our ongoing ability to respond (responsibility) even, and especially, in the face of our inevitable failures. Like Beauvior’s ethics of freedom, an ethics of care conceived through the lens of given norms is bound to reproduce contradictions. In opposition to this—and in many 79 A passage from her conclusion illustrates Beauvior’s own struggle to stay with, rather than “eliminate” the ambiguity constitutive of ethics itself: “Is this kind of ethics individualistic? Yes, if one means by that that it accords to the individual an absolute value and that it recognizes in him alone the power of laying his own existence…. But it is not solipsistic, since the individual is defined only by his relationship to the world and other individuals; he exists by transcending himself, and his freedom can be achieved only through the freedom of others” (156). 117 ways building on legacies of Murray and so many others—the intersectional theorists I have cited in this chapter understand the ethics of care to emerge through both political struggle and repair: in embracing the ambiguities, freedoms, and failures of learning to care otherwise in a violent world. V. Conclusion: New Caring Tools The devaluation, exploitation, and extraction of the caring labor of marginalized people is not a pathological deviation from an ideal of good care but an essential and fundamental condition of the world as it is. This is an impasse that cannot be fully addressed through recourse to abstract notions of care conceived as prior to or beyond violence, nor are political solutions to this deep social problem likely to emerge from hegemonic forms of ethics and politics. Hartman, in particular, brings these violent realities of care into stark and living relief. The cruel coercions and denials of care at the heart of racial capitalism, which continue to impact the lives of Black women. And the potential reach of racism into the very caring dispositions and empathic capacities of white America. Her critique illustrates that we cannot take motivational structures of care for granted from within ‘worlds of sense’ (Lugones) structured by violence and oppression. Moral economies of care both reflect and justify the social inequalities manifest in divisions of caring labor. This is not just an external, structural, fact, but affects our embodied and affective capacities for care. It is difficult to forge new caring tools. Confronting the contradictions of care and developing new caring sensibilities requires intimate and collective learning—learning how to cultivate new blueprints of expectation and response; to develop new capacities to attune, discern, respond, and refuse; to unearth hidden histories of care, and to hold, again and again, the 118 devastating ways our communities of care will almost inevitably reproduce the very sorts of harms they seek to remedy. And yet, as Weil so powerfully articulates, such transformations in attention and response lie at the heart of ethical engagement. In this light, we might supplement and clarify Tronto’s ‘how might an ethics of care be possible’ with Woodly’s “what is required for healing justice to be possible?’ This penetrates to the heart of what matters about care: and what is required if we are indeed to “maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible” (Moral Boundaries 103). Such reparative and generative forms of care will be found not in care as a “species activity” but in the material and sensible revolutions, large and small, that could enable healing and transformative justice to be possible in our social world and intimate relations. Tronto insists that care is definitively not a master’s tool (“Ethics of Care” 226). I believe that it can be—and also a revolutionary one. My argument has been that our ethical practices of care must adequate themselves to the violent contradictions, as well as the revolutionary possibilities, of care. This is an inevitably situated and complex affair. To once again recall a core care ethical insight, we can only know care from the inside. Learning to care radically is not an abstract ethics but a living and collective ethos: it involves changes that can only be grasped in living through them. Rather than a set of naturalized dispositions, we can think of emergent and historical forms of radical care as the development of new sensibilities, forms of awareness and attention—ways of reaching, to paraphrase Gloria Anzaldúa, through our own wounds and fractures to connect to others.80 80 “We are all wounded” Anzaldúa states, “but we can connect through the wound that’s alienated us from others. When the wound forms a cicatrix, the scar can become a bridge linking people split apart” (Light in the Dark 21). 119 Chapter Three: How Can a Radical Politics of Social Reproduction be Possible? 120 I. Introduction: Contradictions in the Labor of Care I recently attended a political meeting convoked to address the ongoing, intransigent, difficulty of organizing around the feminized labors of care. The announcement included the following lines: “We are interested in the chronic invisibilization, individualization, and institutionalization of this labor, and our ongoing challenges in communalizing care and reproduction within our homes, spaces, and movements. Why, after years of pandemic, and decades of organizing, are our bodies, illnesses, and expectations of a dignified and ethical life so difficult to address and collectivize around?” The following chapters address such political and ethical challenges, as well as opportunities, specific to caring and reproductive labor. Placing care at the center of moral and political life fundamentally alters how we think about both. Care ethicists, for their part, have radically re-visioned ethics—expanding feminist claims about the politics of lived experience into ethical life, and offering new visions of thinking and acting on the basis of care. They also make compelling political arguments for a more caring society, which were formerly inconceivable within Western discourses of political theory. At the same time, my argument has been that, by naturalizing historically constituted dispositions and relations of care—relations which lie at the heart of endemic intersectional violence—care ethicists run the risk of re-instantiating the liberal assumptions about selfhood, social life, and moral agency they so thoroughly critique, and thus once again risk overlooking the very different histories and experiences that condition people’s relationships to care, and indeed their capacities to give and receive it. I make an inverse claim about the equally prominent, and crucial, theories of care labor developed by US and European Marxist feminists81 in recent decades. Unlike many care 81 As Zhivka Valiavicharska and Brian Whitener note, social reproduction feminism has multiple lineages, many of them not Western or primarily Marxist: “While the idea of social reproduction is most often associated with the 121 ethicists, these feminist and queer theorists offer sustained critiques of the structural inequities at the root of social organizations and divisions of caring labor. However, their theories are clouded by a parallel, and equally tenacious, tendency to rely on the economistic and productivist logics they seek to overcome. This too has led to inadequacies in politically and ethically engaging the intimacies of violence, struggle, and healing specific to care and social reproduction as such. While care ethicists fail to address caring politics by reducing care to a naturalized moral good, Marxist feminist tendencies to reduce politics to labor and class shrouds the living ethical contradictions and possibilities of care. Marxist feminist literature from the 1970s, considerable work was done around that concept in a wide range of rather disparate bodies of work throughout the 1960s and 1970s. In addition to Marxist feminism, social reproduction became a main focus for Italian autonomists, anti-Stalinist socialist humanists in post-Stalinist Eastern Europe, ‘anti-humanist’ critics of orthodox Marxism such as Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault, in studies on slavery, race, and urban development, and in the work of postcolonial and Third-World feminists. In these bodies of work, social reproduction has acquired a wide array of meanings and has been put to many different uses. Some take the term to mean the material means of subsistence and survival, both immediate and infrastructural, from water and food to housing and health care. Others use the concept to underscore reproduction as a particular kind of labor involved in the regeneration and wellbeing of others, as in domestic, care, emotional, affective, and sex work, which have historically fallen mostly to women. More recent literature has focused on the commodification of reproductive labor and the global economies and transnational chains of domestic, care, and sex work. In these and other writings, the body has become an important focus: the body as a site of biological reproduction, the regulation of sexuality, and the reproduction of the gender binary. The reproductive and reproducible body figures as a kind of resource – a resource for labor but also for producing more bodies and lives, for workers. It becomes mobilized by population control projects and by medical and administrative technologies of regulation towards the reproduction of heteronormativity, of racial and class control, and towards social normalization projects” (“Repression and Resistance”). Cinzia Arruzza and I historically, socially, and geographically contextualize this concept as follows: “Social reproduction…is a primary condition of extraction and accumulation under capitalism, and struggles on its terrains are essential to political resistance against them. Under currently existing conditions, this work of reproducing life is gendered, racialized, and sexualized as well as deeply inflected by social and political trends in migration, the movement and ownership of natural resources, environmental decline and environmental racism, the social construction of ability and disability, state policies and repression, and at the same time, social forms of organizing care, desire, embodiment, collective and familial relations. Social reproduction spans as well as holds together these intimate and structural dimensions of life under conditions of crisis, and under conditions of struggle. The concept of social reproduction emerges from multiple political and theoretical lineages. These include Workerist Italian feminism, Western European, US and Canadian socialist and Marxist feminisms, autonomous and indigenous political currents in Latin America, Eastern European and postcolonial considerations of the socialist transformation of everyday life, and anarchist formations in the US, Europe, and Latin America. More recently, reflections and analyses centered on social reproduction are deeply influencing the current global tide of anticapitalist feminist movements, particularly the international feminist strikes movement, which has joined together countries as diverse as Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, and Poland. Social reproduction analyses have in turn been informed by the new feminist movement’s practical experience and political elaboration.” (“The Politics of Social Reproduction” 2-3). 122 To recall the overall positioning of this dissertation, the feminist philosophies of care that have emerged over the last 4-5 decades have largely centered on the concepts of ethics and labor—which the traditions of care ethics and Marxist feminism have developed in distinct, often divergent, ways. Chapters One and Two have been concerned with elaborating why the naturalistic/naturalized assumptions of the care ethical paradigm fail to comprehend or address the contradictory realities of care under conditions of structural violence. Their unambiguous valorization of care, I have argued, obfuscates the constitutive violence of existing social structures and norms, its impact on the intimacies of caring relations, and ultimately the ways that communities mobilize alternative economies and practices of care towards healing and social change. I now turn to the labors and relations of care that Marxist feminists have theorized under the umbrella of social reproduction. Social reproduction refers to the labor, institutions, networks, infrastructures, etc., through which human life, social bonds, and—crucially for Marxist feminists—labor powers, are reproduced on a daily and intergenerational basis. Feminists have long stressed that reproductive labor is basic and fundamental to human life, and have also stressed the vast array of highly specific tasks it performs and needs it fulfills— feeding, cleaning, educating, tending, and “maintaining kin and community ties” (Glenn, “From Servitude” 1). Like moral philosophy’s shocking but perhaps not surprising excision of care from ethical life, the exclusion of these reproductive labors from political economy is ironic and telling, as they constitute the center and foundation of the oikos in any meaningful sense of the word. This labor of reproduction is “indispensable to society” (Fraser, “Crisis of Care?” 21) and it also involves the entire human bodymind and its capacities: it is manual and material, yes—but it is often also affective, intellectual, spiritual, erotic, biopolitical, and disciplinary. Capitalist 123 economies are unique in that they systemically deny this work as labor: it is thus often unpaid or grossly underpaid, is subjected to specifically cruel and coercive forms of exploitation and extraction, and is socially organized through gendered, racialized, and international divisions of labor and the normative ideologies that reinforce them. Care is an essential and irreducible component of this socially necessary, life-sustaining, yet systemically denied and invsibilized, labor of social reproduction. The previous chapters have argued that care ethicists have not adequately situated their ethics vis a vis the contradictory realities of care—the fact that care is already a naturalized ethic under conditions of structural violence, and thus ought not be unambiguously valorized as a universally normative good. Marxist feminists, in contrast, have quite clearly articulated certain structural contradictions shaping political and moral economies of care in such brutal ways. Capitalist accumulation and dispossession depend on reproductive labors, and at the same time rely on their gendered and racialized devaluation. As with the life and resources of the earth itself, it thus functions by stealing these labors, externalizing them as a natural (female, ethnic) vocation, or compensating them as cheaply as possible—potentially up to the point of its own systemic collapse.82 However, in a nearly logical reversal of care ethical approaches—which articulate care as a relational value while abstracting it from its social and material conditions—this materialist approach evacuates care and reproductive labor of their ethical and political specificity: the embodied, affectively laden, and intersubjective skills and sensibilities, as well as the antagonisms and struggles, particular to them. My argument in this chapter is that reducing the 82 I discuss Marxist feminist theories about these structural, social reproductive contradictions and resultant care crisis at length in the next chapter. 124 politics of social reproduction to the politics of labor, like limiting care to naturalized ethics, forecloses radical perspectives on the contradictions and possibilities of care. As Cinzia Arruzza and I show in the introduction to our co-edited Comparative Literature and Culture special issue on the politics of social reproduction,83 the two lineages of social reproduction feminism that I engage in this chapter are not as easily disentangled, nor their positions as divided, as they are often presented (and present themselves) in the literature, and indeed as I often present them here. Moreover, as Arruzza and I argue, these traditions—if they can be simplified as such—often compliment84 and offer crucial correctives to each other. As with care ethics, and indeed more so, I enter these debates from the inside. I am heir to, part of, and committed to these traditions. I hope this writing contributes to these developments, as well as to the coalitional and transformational ethos at the heart of both traditions. In Living a Feminist Life, Sarah Ahmed speaks to the vital, life-changing role of distinctly feminist ethical imaginaries and political praxes. Feminism is sensational for Ahmed: it is embodied and lived. Developing sensibilities and skills to name how we have been harmed by patriarchal violence, how others have been differently harmed, and where our own intersections locate us on the fraught terrain of feminist movement are all elements of what it means to live in this question, as is appreciating how patriarchal violence may have robbed us of a sense of 83 As we state there: “While our introduction highlights the multiplicity of methods and experiences presented by our contributors, we also offer a synthetic perspective on the politics of social reproduction grounded in both mass struggle and transformative practices of community care in the midst of crisis and possibility” (“Politics of Social Reproduction” 1). 84 E.g. in their respective strengths and orientations to “mass struggle and transformative practices of community care” (2) or on “mass struggle and coalition building between labor and reproductive struggle” on the one hand and “commoning, mutual aid and community care” (5) and “autonomous life-making from below and from the margins” (5. 2) on the other. These complement each other e.g. in thinking about “the relation between mass movements and prefigurative practices” or the “mutual articulation of mass struggle and solidarity building on the one hand, and the emergence of new forms of social association and subjectivities on the other” (5). 125 having a home in the world at all (7). And living a feminist life, for Ahmed, is also about asking what it means to build new feminist dwellings (1-2). These political questions of care exceed the moral economy of the liberal individual and his rational choices, but they also exceed the political-economic “master frame” of class and its corresponding politics of labor. Indeed, the difficulty of finding language and political forms appropriate to care speaks to the tenacity of moral and political philosophies that sever ethical life from social relations and historical context and attenuate the imaginaries of both. But it also speaks to the intransigence of care’s devaluation—and the depth at which it marks not only our epistemic frames of reference, but the affective and relational capacities we bring to these urgent questions. The task of uprooting care’s systemic devaluation from our material lives and relationships, as well as from our hearts and our minds, equally demands modes of political organizing, consciousness raising, ethical education, collective healing. Such (emotional, sensible, symbolic) transformations reside at what Drucilla Cornell terms the “imaginary domain” and Raquel Gutiérrez calls the “interior horizon of struggle.” Struggles on the terrain of social reproduction do, and must, include them. Cultivating such political sensibilities—and the dwelling places capable of harboring and nourishing them—is certainly possible in class and labor politics, but such intimate horizons of politicized experience and struggle at the same time exceed Marxist political imaginaries. Politics, of course, exceed labor and class. While it is crucial to understand and politically engage with care as labor, this does not entail that the politics of care should be reduced to the politics of labor. II. Critical and Methodological Considerations on Social Reproduction 126 Like the discourse of care ethics, the socialist and autonomist theories of social reproduction I discuss below have become prominent in care theory and offer some of the most detailed and sustained theories of care to emerge out of Western feminism in the past fifty years. Despite their differences, thinkers in these respective Marxist feminist traditions share a common concern with redressing systemic omission of care and reproductive labor from Leftist theory and practice. Politically valuing and centering this invisibilized material and emotional labor, they argue that social reproduction is an essential and foundational economic and political reality on which capital depends and must at the same time disavow.85 Demystifying capitalism’s reliance on brutally extracted and exploited reproductive labor, they claim, reveals these labors to be the beating heart of capitalist sociality, and thus also of the social relations and struggles that might transcend it. In what follows, I largely bracket the economic,86 and focus on the political, dimensions of these theories of social reproduction.87 That is, I focus on feminist arguments and organizing strategies that strive to reclaim, center, understand, and reconstitute the material and social relations, infrastructures, institutions, social forms, formal and informal networks, and intimate bonds that constitute social reproduction as a fundamental dimension of life-making— and to understand this as a necessary component and condition of anti-capitalist organizing. The rich legacies of Marxist feminist social reproduction theory I discuss below have been developed in conversation with diverse feminist, antiracist, and anti-colonial intellectual traditions and organizing strategies. While she has long been critical of certain aspects of this 85 “Without it there could be no culture, no economy, no political organization” (Fraser 21). The economic lens of social reproduction largely focuses on questions of whether reproductive labor itself produces value. This question, at the heart of the infamous domestic labor debates, is outside the scope of my expertise. However, I will venture my opinion that current discussions concerning theoretical bone of contention might fruitfully be couched as a political disagreement between socialist and autonomist politics. 87 For recent work on the economic elements of social reproduction, see for example Veronica Gago and Luci Cavallero’s notion of feminist economics “that is able to redefine, based on the bodies and territories in conflict, labor and exploitation, communal and feminized modes of doing and resisting, and popular innovation in moments of crisis” (Gago and Cavallero 2). 86 127 tradition, Angela Davis, for example, discusses how its insights regarding the reproduction of intimate, ‘private’ life have deepened understandings of how and why the personal is political. Connecting this insight to her own abolitionist organizing, she states that “the retributive impulses of the state are inscribed in our very emotional responses… the political reproduces itself through the personal. This is a feminist insight—a Marxist-inflected feminist insight… regarding the reproduction of the relations that enable something like the prison industrial complex” (Freedom is a Constant Struggle 106). As I discuss below, such solidarities, coalitions, and cross-pollination—as well as divergencies—have been key to the development of social reproduction frameworks since their inception, and the future of this tradition depends on nurturing these coalitional legacies. Articulating the essential and foundational role of reproductive labor to both capitalistic social life and anti-capitalist struggles was, and is, a crucial and revolutionary move. At the same time, I claim that this revolutionary impulse on the part of Western Marxist feminists was, and is, also hindered by persistent overextensions of class and labor paradigms. As with care ethicists’ tendencies to rely on the kinds of moral abstraction they claim are incompatible with an ethics of care, the Marxist feminists’ arguments I engage with tend, in the last instance, to reproduce the productivist and economistic logics they themselves find deeply incompatible with the politics of social reproduction. This part of my argument is not original. Nor is it intended to dismiss the power of these arguments.88 My contribution to these debates lies in what I understand to be the 88 To be clear: the labor struggles of reproductive workers like sex- and care workers are essential and must be supported—not only as an act of working-class solidarity, but because their campaigns exemplify the truly inclusive and diverse class politics needed for our contemporary moment. But labor and class are not the only perspectives that those engaged in social reproductive struggles have brought to bear on the political movements and analyses of our times—migrants, sex workers, domestic laborers, trans people, indigenous people, peasants, disabled people, and others have brought diverse, often intersectional, lenses to bear on the violence of social reproduction and the political possibilities unleashed when we collectively reclaim and transform the social and material conditions of our lives. These perspectives are equally essential when thinking about radical politics and ethics of care in the context of social reproduction. 128 ethical takeaways of centering the intimate, caring, dimensions of paid and unpaid reproductive labor—and the implications this has for social reproduction politics. Drucilla Cornell and Seyla Benhabib pointed to the limits of the labor paradigm when it comes to feminist, and particularly caring, politics over thirty years ago, noting that, in expanding Marxist notions of labor to include its reproductive dimensions, Marxist feminists also ran the risk of reducing the intersubjective life-making activities involved in care and nurturance to Marxist imaginaries of labor and its emancipation that are inadequate to their unique ethico-political registers. To quote them at some length: Whereas orthodox Marxist theory had confined itself to an analysis of productive activity and production relations, the task of feminists would now be to enlarge these concepts to include reproductive activities and relations of reproduction. Of course, there were misgivings about the use of the term "reproduction" in this context, since Marx himself had used it to mean the cyclical continuity and persistence of production over time. The more fundamental question which could have been raised however, was omitted: is the concept of production, which is based on the model of an active subject transforming, making and shaping an object given to it, at all adequate for comprehending activities like childbearing and rearing, care of the sick and the elderly? Can nurture, care and the socialization of children be understood in the light of a subject-object model when they are activities which are so thoroughly intersubjective? The concept of reproduction does not challenge the primacy of production within Marxism but subsumes typically female activities under the model of work, narrowly understood as the producing and formation of an object” (Feminism as Critique 2). This is not entirely fair, since social reproduction theorists have long sought to center the elements of life-making that dominant political-economic theorists so often constitutively dismissed as ‘merely’ cultural or personal, and have been instrumental in actively drawing out and politicizing reproductive labor and relations.89 But their points about the limits of labor when 89 This is especially true of recent theorizing on queer social reproduction and family abolition, and recent theorizing coming out of Latin America, which I discuss in my conclusion. 129 it comes to the agencies, relationality, and forms of subjectivation specific to the feminized domains of care and nurturance remain pertinent to contemporary debates. The framework of social reproduction I engage with below was first developed in the early 70s by autonomist feminists in the Wages for Housework Campaign in iconic pamphlets such as Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James’s “The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community” and, ten years later, by Socialist feminist Lise Vogel in Marxism and The Oppression of Women: Toward a Unitary Theory. For their part, early proponents of Wages for Housework (WfH) viewed their work as a response to the parallel inadequacies of traditional Marxism and radical feminism to account for the constitutive relation between gender oppression and capitalist exploitation. In opposition to these positions, they elaborated a critical stance on domestic labor as a social practice that linked gender domination and the exploitation dictated by capitalist accumulation. If capitalist immiseration depends on extracting the greatest amount of living labor possible from the worker, then who was responsible for keeping this worker alive, fed, emotionally tended, and fucked—and ensuring that a new generation of workers was available to exploit once his living labor had expired? What labor, they asked, was responsible for reproducing productive labor—i.e., reproducing the worker—on both a daily and intergenerational basis. And what mechanisms were in place to exploit and extract this labor, and mystify its social origin? The answer, they contended, was to be found in the gender divisions of labor and family forms foundational to capitalist sociality but ideologically and materially demarcated from it— the caretaking, cooking, cleaning, and general organization of daily life, often, but not exclusively, taking place within the ostensibly private home. They argued that this meant that, far from a safe-haven, the Western nuclear family—and the private ‘romances’ of love, sex, and 130 intimacy that go with it—is as coercive and extractive, as bound up with contradiction and struggle, as the factory, the mine, or the fields. The gendered labor of reproduction and the heterosexual bonds dictating its distribution, they claimed, were not a personal service, natural vocation, or an act of selfless love, but labor. As Federici’s epic slogan has it: “They call it love. We call it unwaged work” (“Wages Against Housework” 1). A decade later, Lise Vogel offered another paradigmatic argument, which has recently inspired a wave of socialist discussion on social reproduction. Like autonomist feminists, Vogel claimed that the question of women’s oppression under capitalism remains underdeveloped in Marxist thinking. But, whereas autonomist thinkers like Federici, Mies, and Fortunati were often scathing in their critiques of Marxism and explicit in their use of specifically feminist insights and methods, Vogel’s aim was to build from Marx by providing a unitary theory of gender oppression and capitalist exploitation. Against socialist feminist tendencies that posed gender and capital as ‘dual systems’ with separate logics and relations of exploitation, as well as autonomist conceptions of reproductive labor as value productive, her position differentiated reproductive labor from productive labor—claiming the latter reproduces use values rather than commodities for exchange—while holding that both constitute essential components of capitalist sociality as such. Moreover, she claims, the differentiations, as well as essential relation, between these domains constitutes a crucial site of contradiction and tension within capitalism. In conceiving of capitalism in this way, she relies upon Marx’s own critical categories and attempts to reconstruct, at the level of theory, “a socio material foundation” (Ferguson and McNally xxii) for understanding women’s oppression and thus for an expanded understanding of anti-capitalist critique inclusive of the capitalist family form itself. 131 Marx himself roots his critique of capitalism in the materialist supposition that the labor and relations through which human beings meet their needs90 are ontologically foundational, yet at the same time historically conditioned by the modes of production through which the means of producing life are appropriated and socially organized—and the specific forms of class inequality and antagonism that result. The capitalist mode of production is, of course, particularly cruel in this regard. Driven not by the spirit of enterprise but an imperative of maximal exploitation made possible by the even more horrific thefts and appropriations of slavery and settler colonialism, it dispossesses the masses of all means of survival but their dwindling capacity to labor, and nothing to lose but their chains. For Marx, crucially, this violent logic is also self-obfuscating: mystified by the leveling economy of exchange with its hollow, ironic freedoms as well as the alienations dividing workers from the fruits of their labors, from each other, and from their common humanity and struggle. Dispelling this mystification, and revealing the fundamental class antagonism it obscures, are thus two crucial and interrelated aims of Marx’s critical project. Whereas traditional Marxism roots its critique of political economy in the perspective of labor and its exploitation at the point of production, autonomist feminists took a much more expansive view of capitalism and the conditions of its overcoming, rooted in a critique of the home and family as much as the assembly line and factory floor. On their account, unwaged housework performed by proletarian women was labor necessary for the waged worker’s daily and generational reproduction. This labor circumscribed an entire regime of social and economic exclusion and domination, which formed not only the necessary condition of capitalist production, but also of a historical articulation of gendered violence corresponding to it. As 90 For Marx, meeting social need is a matter of survival, yet human needs are also social and historical—a productive tension which lies at the heart of much of his thinking and critique. 132 Zhivka Valiavicharska points out, they not only made “visible the structural links between patriarchal social orders and capitalist exploitation” but “showed that the history of workingclass struggle had effectively mirrored and reproduced patriarchal subjugation and patriarchal gender norms under capitalism” (“Social Reproduction in the Making” 2). Insofar as it is naturalized as a “female vocation,” the mystifications—and exploitations—of this labor are even deeper, and crueler, than those of the wage relation. Vogel, for her part, opposes autonomists with her claim that women are oppressed not by domestic labor per se but by women’s structural relation to the intergenerational replacement of labor power under capitalism. However, her point plays a similar critical and methodological role in her argument. By locating the roots of women’s oppression in their role within a family form geared towards the reproduction of labor power as well as the relation of this family form to capitalism, she hoped to illuminate a more precise critique of capitalist sociality, the nature of the violence it inflicts, and ultimately the conditions of its overcoming. With the concept of social reproduction, Marxist feminists developed and critiqued Marx’s understanding of capitalism as a mode of production, and with it, his core concepts of labor and class struggle, while also historicizing second wave essentialisms and biological determinisms regarding gender domination and the family form. They thus radicalized the Marxist anti-capitalist project, as well as the class and labor politics it outlines, by showing that unrecognized—largely unpaid or acutely underpaid—labors of reproduction are essential to capitalist accumulation, and therefore a crucial site of political struggle and social transformation. This understanding of the central role that reproductive labor played in both capitalist production and gendered oppression revolutionized understandings of both: bringing 133 class struggle to the kitchen and the sheets,91 and revealing the reconstitution of gender and the family to be essential components, and conditions, of its success. III. Autonomist and Socialist Perspectives on Reproductive Labor By including and centering the invisibilized labors of care and reproduction, both autonomist and socialist traditions of social reproduction theory radically expand Marxist conceptions of the category of labor, as well as the politics of labor and class struggle. However, while their theories and organizing strategies are both centered on reproductive and caring labor, their approaches to these questions are filtered through their respective politics. In this section, I discuss the axial role that the category of labor plays in their respective positions. I also highlight the radical, and often overlooked, interventions of queer and Black feminist social reproduction theorists which fundamentally shaped these debates. A crucial difference between autonomist and socialist Marxist feminist traditions lies in how they understand the relationship between reproductive labor and capitalist production. Many feminists in the former school cut their political teeth in the Italian workerist movement and were influenced by the autonomist, grassroots politics of the Johnson-Forest Tendency in the US and Caribbean. Fundamental to their argument is the contention that the labor of the proletarian housewife—but also unwaged work in general, including the often-criminalized economies and community networks of those without access to the wage—is itself productive, that is, essential and integral to the capitalistic valorization of value. This argument grew out of the workerist imaginary of the social factory (Federici, quoted in Toupin 267), which viewed social and cultural life as increasingly subsumed by capitalist imperatives—rendering all life a terrain of political struggle and potential reclamation. The claim that reproductive labor produces value 91 See for example Federici’s “Counter Planning From the Kitchen” and “Why Sexuality is Work” 134 deepens this operaist politicization of all spheres of life including the economy itself, and autonomist feminist calls to bring political consciousness and organizing to daily life in many ways builds upon the prefigurative, grassroots, organizing tactics developed by workerists and other autonomist movements,92 while at the same time posing major challenges to the theory and practice (and especially the intransigent anti-feminism) of operaists and their heirs.93 The socialist feminist argument that reproductive labor is not productive of value in this strict sense should also be situated in relation to its political lineage. Drawing on socialist conceptions of articulation that imagine a dialectical and strategic relationship between political forms—e.g. the party (Mohandesi, 2020)—on the one hand, and the economy on the other, they claim that reproductive labor must be situated in relationship to, rather than conflated with, economically productive labor. Understanding reproductive labor as a use value that is capitalistically organized to reproduce labor power as a commodity, but which is not directly productive of value itself, they claim, critically situates their analysis vis a vis the fundamental tensions and fault lines between these spheres of capitalistic life. This Marxian move offers a corrective to economism and vangardism, while providing a theoretical foundation for political formations capable of building and strategically mobilizing mass power. III a. Autonomist Perspectives The WfH Campaign was a key, and early, contribution of autonomist feminists, and utilized the bottom-up organizing and global network building between local, militant struggles characteristic of other autonomist movements. In demanding a wage for domestic labor, the WfH 92 In an anonymous piece written by WfH organizers for The Activist in 1974, the authors define the social factory as such: “modern capitalist society is a factory—a social factory—the whole of which functions to reproduce capital in an ever expanding form” (“The Social Factory,” 38). The authors argue that women’s unwaged labor constituted a major part of the social factory. 93 See my discussion of Federici’s critique of Hardt and Negri in the following chapter. 135 movement offered an alternative to radical feminist and revolutionary Marxist views regarding the nature of gender violence and class struggle, respectively—as well as the organizing practices needed to confront them. Its aspirations were international94 and coalitional—and organizers sought from the beginning to form political alliances with others working on the terrain of social reproduction—in particular, sex workers and welfare activists. Galvanized by the insight that largely unpaid domestic labor was an essential condition of capitalist accumulation, activists such as Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Selma James, Silvia Federici, and Margaret Prescod began demanding a wage for this work, and organizing internationally on this basis. For its protagonists, this was a revolutionary and transformative demand. Transformative in the sense that the political perspective, solidarities, relationships, and power gained through the process of organizing for this demand were at least as important as winning it. And revolutionary in that capitalism and the capitalist state depend upon unpaid reproductive labor and thus could not withstand the pressure of paying for it. Against its detractors from the women’s liberation movement and Marxist organizers alike, the aim of the WfH movement was not to entrench the role of the housewife or the bourgeois family form,95 but to break the isolation they engender, and in doing so systemically and directly attack the capitalistically organized gender violence at their root. Rather than simply a means to a political end, the demand of wages for housework was a militant stance and rallying cry for grassroots organizers intent upon reconstituting social reproduction and building solidarities between others organizing on this terrain. In Federici’s 94 Even after the split of the original International Feminist Collective (IFC) many former members continued this internationalist work, including through the International Wages for Housework Campaign and the “Global Women’s Strike” network James launched in 2000 (https://globalwomenstrike.net/) 95 Maria Mies in particular spends much time developing this argument about the nuclear family as a bourgeois phenomenon, claiming that “…capitalism did not, as Engels and Marx believed, destroy the family; on the contrary, with the help of the state and its police, it created the family first among the propertied classes, later in the working class, and with it the housewife as a social category” (“Patriarchy and Accumulation” 103-104). 136 words, this perspective aimed at “revolutionizing—in the process of struggling for it—all our family and social relations” (“Wages Against Housework” 1-2). In an ironic rejoinder to the traditional Left, Dalla Costa and James thus begin their pamphlet by relocating the “women question”—shorthand for the Marxist96 dismissal of feminism as a subsidiary concern that would wither away, much like the state, in the process of proletarian struggle—in “the entire “female role” as it has been created by the capitalist division of labor” (“The Power of Women” 40). This stance flips the Marxist script, insofar as it claims that this “female role” is an essential condition of capitalist accumulation and dispossession, and thus that any class perspective that does not account for it will be fatally flawed. In a move that would prove deeply problematic, they claim this “role” is paradigmatically encapsulated in the position and labors of the working-class housewife.97 According to the Marxist feminist proponents of wages for housework, capitalism not only “created the modern family and the housewife’s role in it” (40) but concealed their true nature as a source of capital accumulation—indeed, the “very pillar of the capitalist organization of work” (49). As Federici notes in sweeping propagandistic tone: housework is “the most subtle and mystified form of violence that capital has ever perpetrated against any segment of the working class” (“Wages Against Housework,” 2). Capital’s mystification of the violence, exploitation, and stultifying isolation particular to this labor are even more insidious than the wage relation precisely because it appears as “a personal service outside capital” (“The Power of Women,” 44)—a natural vocation “coming from the depth of our female character” (“Wages 96 We should not forget that militant Marxist men of the New Left were especially hostile to feminism. See Mies and Toupin. 97 Even in this early period autonomist feminists did, however, make connections between domestic work and unwaged work in general, and linked its contemporary forms to histories of settler colonialism, witch hunts, and the institution of slavery. 137 Against Housework,” 2)—and thus not as work at all. Like waged labor, this work is not a choice, really. But unlike waged labor, however consuming, there is no clocking off from this role: because it is naturalized and performed in isolation, it also never ends (“The Power of Women,” 45). To perform it well, one must not only submit to the ‘myth of female incapacity,’ but identify with these ‘labors of love’ as one’s innermost desire and highest aspirations. As Federici brilliantly describes, this intensive training of body, heart and mind involves mystifications that damage a person’s lived experiences and sense of identity beyond even the cynical equality and consent of waged work. The “combination of physical, emotional, and sexual services” that make this work so intensively difficult are also, cruelly, what render it invisible as work (“Wages Against Housework” 3). Moreover, these expectations are contradictory and impossible to meet: one cannot be a sex goddess and a doting wife and mother. And, since they are characterized as nature and not a form of work, these impossible demands come to shape one’s deepest sense of self and personal meaning. Not only does sacrifice become the housewife’s highest duty and the man’s pleasure the barometer of her own but performing them well requires wholly identifying with one’s responsibility to please. An inability or refusal to meet these impossible demands can only be seen as a personal failing: “if you don’t like it, it is your problem, your failure, your guilt, your abnormality” (3). This makes it difficult to know and experience desire and agency as one’s own at all. As Federici painfully puts it in “Why Sexuality is Work,” the “[d]uty to please is so built into our sexuality that we have learned to get pleasure out of giving pleasure” (24). At the same time, the “need to give and receive love is turned against us as a work duty” (“Wages Against Housework,” 6). The “impossibility to see where our work begins and ends” is at the same time the impossibility of deciphering “where our work ends and our desires begin” (6). Moreover, to 138 the extent that men themselves are exploited and emasculated by capital, enduring abuse becomes an integral part of the job. Tending to the man’s ego when it is broken by the boss, managing and appeasing his rage, and submitting to his sexual aggression are cruel hazards baked into domestic work. All of this points to a deep politics of care and sex: to reclaim them as their own, women must break their isolation and unite with others in struggle. For the proponents of wages for housework, the struggle for a wage—for material and emotional autonomy—was thus also a struggle to collectively reclaim and reconstitute the terrain of social reproduction as a place where one’s own agency and desire might find a name and a home. From the beginning of the movement, the WfH campaign brought attention to the sexual and emotional politics of social reproduction. Sex, like care, is a condition of social reproduction: like care, it is work. Divorced from social context, calls for sexual liberation further mystify and intensify this work (Federici “Why Sexuality is Work” 25). Indeed, heterosexuality itself is “part of the discipline of work.” This is bad for queer people, but also for heterosexuals: capital “raises heterosexuality to a religion,” yet forecloses the possibility of genuine heterosexual intimacy (47). While I claim below that these ideas remain underdeveloped, and ultimately reduce emotional and embodied dimensions of care to labor, they represent a crucial advance over much Marxist and mainstream feminist politics of the time, and the narrowly circumscribed economistic and essentialized categories they were forced into.98 Indeed, as Dalla Costa puts it, “domestic labor is not essentially ‘feminine work’” any more than drudgery of the assembly line is “masculine” (48). While this denaturalization of gender norms and politicization of domestic labor were crucial developments, the singular focus on the housewife and her unpaid domestic labors, as 98 See Capper and Austin 449, and Sarah Jaffe 2018 139 well as the political perspective they developed from it, proved deeply problematic, and were rightly critiqued by Black feminists. Federici’s contention that the housewife is the only perspective from a feminist viewpoint or Dalla Costa’s claim that this role is the determinant for all other women under capitalism (40) universalizes a historical and relatively privileged position, effectively excluding the perspectives of women who’s experiences of domestic labor were at least as informed by racism and/or colonial violence as gender and class. As I discuss below, Hazel Carby contends that universalized notions of domestic labor, reproduction, and the family prove not only inadequate but “contradictory when applied to the lives and experiences of black women” (“White Women Listen” 46, my emphasis), and Angela Davis wryly notes that “[i]n the United States, women of color, especially Black women, have been receiving wages for housework for untold decades” (Women, Race, and Class 237). These racial divisions of paid domestic labor, and the positive role the Black family has often played in fostering resistant, alternative, forms of social reproduction (Carby) paint a very different picture of social reproduction and the politics of its transformation. I return to these critiques below. At the same time, during and especially after the mid-70s heyday of the WfH campaign, autonomists continued to develop their theory of reproductive labor, most notably in conversation with anti-racist, decolonial, and sex worker activists. From its inception, the campaign was influenced by the domestic workers movement in the US, the Johnson-Forest Tendency (James was married to CLR James, and a political collaborator throughout his life), and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers in Detroit (S. Jaffe). As I discuss at length in the next chapter, Federici has long made connections between the various and ongoing forms of dispossession upon which the exploitation of labor depends, drawing connections between the European witch hunts, the vicious theft of indigenous lands, and the ongoing dispossession at 140 play in practices as diverse as predatory structural adjustment policies and the corporate extraction and enclosure of knowledge commons. In her 1986 Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale Maria Mies also speaks to the “underground connections” between sexual and international divisions of labor under capitalism. Developing an integrative perspective on the interconnected processes of ‘housewifization’ and colonization, she claims that “[w]ithout the ongoing exploitation of external colonies - formerly as direct colonies, today within the new international division of labour- the establishment of the ‘internal colony’ that is, a nuclear family and a woman maintained by a male ‘breadwinner,’ would not have been possible” (110). While both Mies and Federici at times make sweeping historical claims that are difficult to substantiate,99 their theories have been immensely influential and have laid crucial groundwork for meaningful solidarity, coalition, and an internationalist ethos amongst many anti-capitalist feminist movements worldwide. Their observation that the labor, economies, and relations of reproduction are sites not only of exploitation, but ongoing dispossession, has provided crucial theoretical groundwork for connecting decolonial and feminist struggles, for example. These revolutionary and coalitional aspects of autonomist feminism have been most successfully, and radically, developed by Black, queer, and sex-working theorists and organizers within the movement. Starting in the mid-70s, Black Women for Wages for Housework (BWfWfH), Wages Due Lesbians (WDL), and the US PROStitutes (US PROS) Collective took the WfH campaign in radical new directions. As Capper and Austin note in their brilliant article on BWfWfH and Wages Due Lesbians, activists with these campaigns deeply interrogated the narrow focus on the unpaid, heterosexual, housewife, but continued to develop an autonomist 99 Interestingly, Chandra Mohanty describes Mies’s work on lace-makers of Narsapur, India, as a notable example of a Western feminist who did not reproduce the “discursive colonialism” of much work by Western women on the Global South at the time (“Under Western Eyes” 344-45) 141 politics of reproductive labor. Rather than a new overarching class perspective, Capper and Austin note that “[a]utonomy…was activated as an organizational tactic to mobilize across and beyond existing racial, gender, sexual, and class configurations while recognizing the irreducible differences between reproductive laborers” (449). Co-founded by Margaret Prescod and Wilmette Brown, BWfWfH was especially prominent in developing such coalitional strategies—initiating, for example, the collaborations with Black sex workers from which PROS began (Prescod 2021) and working with welfare rights organizers like Beulah Sanders in the “Coalition of Grassroots Women” (Prescod 2018). BWfWfH was thus pivotal in the early and ongoing support of sex worker autonomy and the decriminalization of sex work—a rare move indeed for feminists in the 1970s and 80s, as well as working alongside members of the National Welfare Rights Organization to re-frame welfare as a wage (Prescod 2018) and make policy demands on this basis. Bringing their experiences organizing with domestic workers, the Black Panther Party, and for reproductive justice, Prescod and Brown deepened and radicalized the WfH framework (Prescod 2021, S. Jaffe) by connecting it to Black women’s experiences and struggles. Capper and Austin note the impact this had on the theory and politics of reproductive labor in particular: In the activist and intellectual production of BWfWfH, however, black women’s housework is positioned in a nonidentical, and at times antagonistic, relation to the labors of the (white) housewife. Drawing on the history of slavery and its afterlives as the basis for its analysis, the group emphasized the racialized “divisions of labor” between white and black women, and especially the labors black women had historically performed for white women, in ways that interrupted (but did not render impossible) alliances over the conditions of reproductive work (Brown 1976a: 5). At the same time, the group’s approach to “housework” as an analytic was aimed at overwhelming this category from the inside in order to unbraid the moralistic, and ultimately ideological, distinctions between the work of the housewife and other reproductive workers (such as the mother on welfare, the paid domestic, and the sex worker) (451). 142 The perspectives and solidarities developed by BWfWfH problematized the role of the housewife as the paradigmatic position of the exploited reproductive laborer while retaining the radical critique of the family forms, sexual norms, and gendered and racialized divisions of labor at the root of capitalist accumulation and dispossession. Crucially, this was not without its realworld tensions. Illuminating a contested chapter in this history that is rarely discussed in the literature, Prescod claims that it was “a split on race”100 that led to the breakdown of the IFC, and the development of different contingents of the movement.101 Unlike many radical and mainstream feminists, the WfH campaign stood in solidarity with sex workers and organized for decriminalization—calling attention to the relation between unpaid domestic work and paid sex work and establishing long term coalitions, campaigns, and social centers with autonomous groups such as the US PROStitutes (US PROS) Collective,102 the ECP (English Collective of Prostitutes), and C.O.Y.O.T.E.. In her brilliant “Hookers in the House of the Lord”—written at the request of ECP members who needed to remain anonymous—James chronicles the 12-day sex worker occupation of a London church in 1982, as well as the sustained decriminalization and anti-police brutality campaigns surrounding it. “By this action” she claims, “we were demanding that Local Authorities and society at large stand by 100 Federici denies that race was behind the split: “But after four years, the international network splintered. The New York committee, among others, dissolved after a falling-out with James and Prescod, who claim that the priorities of Black Women for Wages for Housework were ignored; Federici denies this, and claims the group’s issue was with James” (Kisner, “The Lockdown”) 101 “Soon after BWWFH was founded, there were problems with the New York WFH Committee, which was white. They accused us of being ‘too pushy,’ disagreed with our focus on mothers who were on welfare, and refused to work with us…The WFH groups in England, Canada, and the US stood strongly with us, defending Black women’s right to autonomy, making sure that we had the support and resources we needed to carry out our campaigning. The New York Committee dissolved. Mariarosa Dalla Costa, who led the WFH groups in Italy, told Selma that we Black women were ‘presumptuous,’ and the international, which was coordinated from London, broke relations with Italy” (Prescod, Kindle ed.) 102 From the PROS website: “The US PROStitutes Collective (US PROS) is a multiracial network of women who work or have worked in different areas of the sex industry. Founded in 1982, US PROS campaigns for the decriminalization of prostitution and for justice, protection and resources so that no woman, young person or man is forced into prostitution through poverty or violence.” (https://uspros.net/) 143 prostitutes in their conflict with the police. This is the choice we had been asking feminists to make since we were formed in 1975” (110). The political perspective on reproductive labor developed by autonomist feminists amounted to a new conception of labor itself. They articulated this stance by not only calling attention to the unpaid domestic labor of the housewife, but by building coalitions between reproductive laborers, and drawing connections between the capitalist exploitation of reproductive labor on the one hand, and land theft, slavery, and the destruction of the natural world on the other. By applying a Marxist, materialist, approach to reproductive labor they rebuffed the biological essentialisms and determinism baked into many second wave notions of gender and the family. But they equally critiqued the prevailing Marxism of the time—and the Marxist concept of labor—through a resolutely feminist lens. Mies, for example, claims to develop a new theory of labor rooted in feminism and anticolonial politics, and is deeply critical of the “additive” approach of socialist feminists attempting “to fit the new feminist critique and rebellion into the existing theoretical body of Marxism” (12). Indeed, she claims that the “naturalizing process” through which Marxist tradition, including Engels, asserted an ahistorical, essentialist, account of biological reproduction—and ultimately of reproductive labor and the family—is antithetical to a feminist politics of reproductive labor: “This distinction between 'natural' (that is, ahistorical) processes related to the 'production of human beings or procreation', and historical processes related to the development of the means of production and labour is essentially responsible for the fact that within Marxist theory a historical materialist conception of women and their labour is not possible” (50).103 Even Fortunati (who’s book, The Arcane of Reproduction, is often neglected 103 Like Federici, Mies outlines the role of the witch hunts in this process of housewifization. “The witch hunt had not only the direct disciplinary effect of controlling women's sexual and reproductive behaviour, but also the effect 144 due to her esoteric value theoretical perspective) argues that Marxist categories alone are insufficient—and that the critique of capitalist social reproduction must include feminist critical methods (9).104 But the greatest impact of autonomist feminism has arguably been in the vision of autonomous forms of life-making and “commoning” it makes possible. Calling for the destruction of the “entire female role” ideologically attached to reproductive labor, autonomist feminists challenged the capitalist organization of work traditionally conceived, and also of intimacy, love, sex, and emotions. Pointing to the transformative visions of autonomist Black feminists and lesbians, Capper and Austin note: “The insights of BWfWfH and WDL toward an articulation of a queer commons reside in their twinned understanding of reproduction as a terrain of collective maintenance and insurrection, or what Stefano Harney and Fred Moten (2013: 76) term ‘militant preservation.’” These “twinned conceptions”—their “autonomous nonheteronormative mode of social reproduction” on the one hand and “insurgent mode of common world-building” on the other—were indeed part of the same struggle (450). III b. Socialist Perspectives The socialist tradition of social reproduction theory developed over the past forty years in the US and Canada—recently designated under the acronym ‘SRT’ (social reproduction theory)—has also centered on a critique of the capitalist organization of reproductive labor. Unlike autonomists however, these feminists explicitly develop and apply Marxist categories to the terrain of social reproduction105—specifically his concept of labor. In the following pages, I of establishing the superiority of male productivity over female productivity. These two processes are closely connected.” (Patriarchy and Accumulation 70). 104 Fortunati, like James, centers sex work and sex worker solidarity in her theory. For reconstructions of her work see Maya Gonzales’s important articles. 105 Primarily the categories of Capital Volume I, but also an expansive notion of labor power rooted in Marx’s early work. 145 focus on several, interconnected, claims that follow from their Marxian feminist, labor-centered, analysis. First, SRT distinguishes itself from other Marxist feminist and socialist traditions through its commitment to an expansive conception of labor: as Tithi Bhattacharya puts it: “[t]he fundamental insight of SRT is, simply put, that human labor is at the heart of creating or reproducing society as a whole” (2). Second, SRT is committed to a theory of differentiated labors, which Kade Doyle Griffiths and others claim gives this tradition a critical edge over the autonomist view of labor as value productive and enables it to engage in nuanced ways with social reproductive labor in the public sphere—and the labor struggles of teachers, nurses, and other essential, often underpaid, workers. Combined, these analytic commitments reveal points of connections between diverse labor struggles on the one hand, and struggles over infrastructures, resources, and housing on the other. Finally, I discuss how these positions on reproductive labor answer Vogel’s call for a unitary theory of gender oppression and capitalist exploitation. Most powerfully articulated by Cinzia Arruzza, this unitary perspective provides the theoretical underpinning of SRT’s expanded definition of class, which centers axes of oppression such as race, gender, ability, and sexuality—and has proven especially useful for articulating coalitional mass movements, such as the international feminist strikes movement of recent years. Lise Vogel’s 1983 Marxism and the Oppression of Women argues for a theory of social reproduction rooted in Marxist historical materialism. Intervening in the ‘domestic labor debates’ of the late 60s-early 80s, Vogel opposes both the ‘dual systems’ approach initiated by Heidi Hartman and Maxine Molyneux in the late 1970’s and taken up by many socialist feminists, and the influential unified positions developed separately by Iris Marion Young (1981) and the WfH campaign—which she claims are rooted in an ahistorical notion of gendered labor. Instead, she 146 sets out to provide a theoretical justification for a unitary theory that accounts for the oppression of women by applying Marx’s own categories and critical method to the analysis of social reproduction. Importantly, Vogel does not claim to explain or empirically elaborate all aspects of women’s oppression under capitalism. Rather, she aims to “establish a socio material foundation” for understanding this oppression (Ferguson and McNally xxii). In other words, like Marx’s own critique, which begins from the mystified abstractions of bourgeois political economy in order to then elaborate a robust, critical picture of capitalist production, Vogel claims to provide a theoretical basis for understanding how the relation between reproductive and productive work has led to a systemic devaluation of this work, and thus to women’s structural subordination. As McNally and Ferguson elaborate in their introduction to the 2014 reprint of Marxism and the Oppression of Women—itself as an important inaugural moment for SRT—Vogel’s intent was to lay a historically specific, non-functionalist, and thoroughly Marxian, groundwork for a unitary critique of capitalist exploitation and gender oppression. Unlike radical feminists, Vogel argues that reproductive labor is not inherently gendered or oppressive but becomes so historically through specifically capitalist family structures ensuring the ‘generational replacement’ of labor power. For Vogel and autonomists alike, reproductive labor is socially necessary labor that is essential to the maintenance and continuation of the capitalist mode of production (158). Contra autonomists’ claims that this labor was itself value productive however, Vogel contends that the differentiation between reproductive and productive is what has proven so harmful to women. Her aim in the book is to outline the specific contradictions that follow from this complex relation between reproductive and productive labor, as well as their implications for women’s liberation. 147 Vogel makes particular use of Marx’s materialist concept of labor—and his labor theory of value—in the theoretical groundwork she puts forth in Marxism and the Oppression of Women. Marx’s claim that capital’s extraction of surplus value is what defines labor as productive, she contends, allows us to analyze the difference, as well as the relation, between the domains of production and reproduction. Vogel’s readers have since developed this claim into one of the key theoretical contributions of SRT.106 Doyle Griffiths elaborates on this reasoning, explaining that it enables us to “see social reproductive work as that which both necessarily, and in its concrete historical form, potentiates labor-power as a commodity” (“What is Valuable” 4). In her 2017 edited volume, Tithi Bhattacharya summarizes this position as follows: “Social reproduction theorists perceive the relation between labor dispensed to produce commodities and labor dispensed to produce people as part of the systemic totality of capitalism. The framework thus seeks to make visible labor and work that are analytically hidden by classical economists and politically denied by policy makers” (2). Importantly for our purposes, Bhattacharya and others claim that this commitment to Marx’s category of labor enables SRT to form a sophisticated perspective on reproductive labor—and care107 in particular. By insisting on the difference, indeed contradiction, between “people producing,” reproductive labors and the imperatives of capitalist production, SRT also sheds light on their relation—and thus on the relation between oppression and exploitation under capitalism as well. In other words, they argue, it allows us to understand the oppressive divisions of caring labor that must be in place for capital to generate profit at the expense of life. 106 SRT, Bhattacharya claims, “is unique in the sense that it theorizes the relationship between the market and extramarket relations rather than simply gesturing toward their distinction” (“Introduction,” 14). 107 Bhattacharya defines care, or “social care” as “the corpus of social relations involving regeneration—birth, death, social communication, and so on…” (9) 148 Doyle Griffiths helpfully explains this theory of differentiated labors, its reliance on Marx’s labor theory of value, and its distinction from autonomist feminist theories of reproductive labor. To quote him at some length: This perspective is rooted in a classical conception of value as surplus-value extraction through waged work and rejects the assertion that unwaged social reproductive labor is value-producing (Ferguson). By paying close attention to labor-power as profit’s source, Marxian SRT nevertheless offers a path to retaining the strategic centrality of reproductive labor with respect to profit. While Federici and other Autonomist feminists use Marxist terminology for their own purposes, their project is based on the assumption that Marx’s writings systematically overlook processes of reproduction, and productivity, beyond the factory. Building on Lise Vogel’s Marxism and the Oppression of Women, Marxian SRT instead expands Marx’s own account of social reproductive labor as a necessary precondition for surplus value (“What is Valuable” 3). For Doyle Griffiths and others working in this tradition, it is this differentiated, historically specific, account of labor that gives SRT its critical power, and allows it to make nuanced connections between diverse labor struggles within and outside of formal labor markets and the wage. By illuminating the differences and relations between waged, productive labor, unpaid reproductive labor, commodified and poorly paid reproductive labor, etc., SRT can chart and oppose the crisis conditions of capitalist social reproduction and the increasing precaritization of life and labor they engender (Doyle Griffiths, 3, 10).108 Its theory of differentiated labors also allows SRT to politically elaborate solidarities between these different forms of labor, and also between labor struggles and fights over resources, housing, and social reproduction more broadly. 108 “Marxian SRT’s close attention to the distinctions among the categories of productive and reproductive, valueproducing and unproductive, and unwaged and waged labor is best suited to an analysis of the causes and consequences of renewed class struggle arising from social reproductive crisis. This is because it allows us to meaningfully distinguish between the dynamics and scales of the feminization of work.” 149 Bhattacharya thus claims that “SRT is a methodology to explore labor and labor power under capitalism and is best suited to offer a rich and variegated map of capital as a social relation” (3). Sue Ferguson further clarifies this methodological commitment to labor in her book Women and Work: Feminism, Labor, and Social Reproduction. Also building on Vogel, she insists on the theoretical and political value of clarifying the differences, and relations, between the value-generating exploitation of productive labor, and the devaluation and naturalization of unpaid, and underpaid, social reproductive labor. “In grasping the necessary but contradictory relationship between production and reproduction,” she claims, SRT also illuminates the systemic relation between women’s oppression and capitalist exploitation (Pluto Press Blog). Namely, that the structural invisibilization and degradation of reproductive work is a fundamental condition of both. For Ferguson, a “central innovation” of SRT is thus “the theorization of feminist struggle as an anticapitalist struggle, a class struggle” (5). This understanding that “feminist and worker struggles are two different parts of the same class struggle” (5)109 is echoed in the work of Arruzza, Fraser, Bhattacharya, Aaron Jaffe, and others as well.110 SRT’s defense of a ‘unitary theory’ of class exploitation and various forms of social oppression follows from these methodological claims about labor and its specific and contradictory organization under capitalism. According to its proponents, by expanding Marx’s theory of labor into capitalist reproduction, SRT provides a theoretical explanation of the relation between capitalist exploitation and gender oppression—which in turn allows for an expansive yet articulated notion of class, and class struggle, as well. Arruzza’s widely read and celebrated 109 Below I point to the telling semantic priority of class evinced in these statements, and its tension with SRT’s commitment to center oppression and offer an expansive conception of social reproduction. 110 See e.g. Arruzza, Bhattacharya and Fraser; A. Jaffe, 2020. 150 “Remarks on Gender”111 set the tone for this conversation—answering Vogel’s 1983 call with a revitalized, nuanced defense of a unified theory of gender oppression and capitalist exploitation—grounded in an expanded conception of social reproduction. According to Arruzza, social reproduction describes the emotional and sexual maintenance of relations, the material provision of care and material sustenance, as well as the institutional and social structures in which these practices are embedded, all of which sustains life on a daily and intergenerational basis—it designates “the physical, emotional, and mental labor necessary for the production of the population,” and thus points to how this labor is organized on a micro and macro level. This expanded framework of social reproduction, Arruzza contends, has the advantage of moving beyond domestic labor: The concept of social reproduction, then, allows us to locate more precisely the mobile and porous quality of the walls of the home: in other words, the relation between, on the one hand, domestic life within the home, and the phenomena of commodification, the sexualization of the division of labor, and the policies of the welfare-state on the other. Social reproduction also enables us to more effectively analyze phenomena like the relation between the commodification of care-work and its “racialization” by repressive migration policies, such as those that aim to lower the costs of immigrant labor and force them to accept slave-like working conditions (“Remarks on Gender”). By providing clarity on these institutions and social forms organizing non-productive, human, relations, the concept of social reproduction reveals capitalism as far more than merely a mode of production. As an epistemic and political framework of analysis, it enables a much deeper and nuanced understanding of capitalism as an “articulated and contradictory totality of relations of exploitation, domination, and alienation”112—and thus enriches and specifies the “Marxian 111 It should be noted that the influence of this piece spread beyond specifically socialist radical Left circles, influencing theorizations of communization that are more rooted in autonomist, anarchist, and anti-state communist thinkers such as Chris Chen and Maya Gonzales. 112 As Bhattacharya also notes: “SRT treats questions of oppression (gender, race, sexuality) in distinctly nonfunctionalist ways precisely because oppression is theorized as structurally relational to, and hence shaped by, 151 critique of capitalism” (my emphasis) as well. The lens of social reproduction thus grants Marxist feminism the political and epistemic clarity to move beyond the determinism, functionalism and reductionism of past and present Marxisms—as well as the politically problematic and fragmented logics of ‘indifferent capitalism’ or ‘dual’ (or multiple) systems theory. “Viewing them through the lens of social reproduction,” rather, shows that the relation between oppression and class is both historically contingent and essentially conditioned by capitalist imperatives.113 With this piece, Arruzza sought to “reopen[] the crucial debate about how we should conceptualize the structural relationship between gender oppression and capitalism” (“Remarks on Gender”). In the intervening years, feminist organizers have utilized this updated approach to expand the politics of social reproduction and reveal avenues of connection between antioppression and labor struggles. Bhattarcharya and others have argued that this represents a crucial development of social reproduction theory—moving it beyond the critique of private, family, life that limited the politics and analysis of prior social reproduction theory. SRT’s focus on the differentiated and internally contradictory relation between production and social reproduction allows for an articulated yet expansive conception of class politics and indeed of politics in general: illuminating, for example how “every battle for healthcare, water, housing” contains a seed for antisystemic struggles (Pluto Press Blog).114 capitalist production rather than on the margins of analysis or as add-ons to a deeper and more vital economic process” (“Mapping Social Reproduction Theory” 3). 113 Arruzza’s move to provide a non-deterministic, theoretical foundation for a unitary theory, which explains key aspects of oppression under capitalism without thereby reducing historical contingency and struggle, is a major advancement of Vogel’s key methodological move. Vogel explains her own reasoning as follows: “While women's oppression in class-societies is experienced at many levels, it rests, ultimately, on these material foundations. The specific working out of this oppression is a subject for historical, not theoretical, investigation” (117). This insight on the relation between Arruzza’s unitary theory and Vogel’s own comes out of conversations with Arruzza over the course of her advising. 114 See also Doyle Griffiths who claims that “SRT implies distinct but overlapping visions for class struggle and politics as a whole.” 152 SRT is perhaps most powerful in this expanded definition of class and differentiated yet integrated account of mass struggle. These contributions are highlighted in texts like Fraser, Arruzza and Bhattacharya’s Feminism for the 99%—a manifesto rooted in insights of SRT that celebrates, and attempts to further ignite, the recent wave of broad based, international, and anticapitalist feminist struggle. Deeply influenced by the praxis and theoretical innovations coming out of the international feminist strikes movement, which has been led both intellectually and politically by the work of collectives such as Ni Una Menos in Argentina, Fraser, Arruzza and Bhattacharya claim that the perspective of social reproduction radically re-situates the meaning of the strike and instigates a “new kind of politics.” By “broadening the very idea of what counts as “labor;” “making visible the indispensable role played by gendered, unpaid work in capitalist society,” and revealing the connection between ostensibly private, unpaid, reproduction and waged work, it has been instrumental in overcoming intransigent divides between identity and class politics as well (8-9).115 Like the autonomist demand for a wage, this changes the locations and methodologies of traditional labor politics. The feminist strike both responds to social reproductive crises and reveals new horizons for political action and coalitional politics: articulating broad based feminist resistance to mass femicide, for example, while also bringing together previously divided labor sectors in mass assemblies and fostering forms of political cooperation all but inconceivable within prior paradigms of feminism and class struggle. IV. The Limits of the Labor Paradigm 115 This is a crucial insight with multiple lineages politically and theoretically—drawing upon the organizing strategies and theoretical insights of various communities including the Zapatistas and precarious workers movements like the piqueteros in Argentina. 153 Having laid out the concept of labor and its centrality to these two lineages of social reproduction theory in some detail, I want to return to my broader argument about Marxist feminists’ slippery overextensions of class and labor politics, and the troubled picture of social reproduction politics that emerge from them. While I am critical of their naturalization of care, I believe care ethicists are right that the labor and relations of care are irreducibly ethical. Dispositions and attunements of care—its intersubjective, affective, sensible dimensions—are the relational, neuro-biological116 incubators of cultural life and meaning. Emotional and embodied patterns of attention and response—the holding and nurturance, but also the refusal, neglect, or abuse—transmitted through caring relations quite literally stitch the contours of self and relation that make up the psychosocial fabric of society. Both intensely particular and broadly social and cultural, they convey the felt sense of safety and belonging, or danger and indignity, through which we experience ourselves, each other, and the world. I have gone to great lengths to argue that these life-making, relational, and essentially components of care are also irreducibly political. Not only social organizations and divisions of caring labor, but also these experiential capacities, dispositions, and norms of care constitute the life-making heart of social reproduction. For pain is not the only inheritance 116 My claim is that such “neuro-biological” components of affective relationship and nervous system attunement are ethical, as well as historical and social. I distinguish this position from the naturalism I critique in care ethics through the teachings of politicized somatics and transformative justice. Kai Cheng Thom, for example, draws on Stephen Porges’s understanding of the “social engagement” branch of the nervous system and the “Window of Tolerance” or what Caffyn Jesse terms “Neural Learning Zone” in which the nervous system is engaged and adaptive to stress but not to an extent that it perceives as dangerous, i.e. that triggers a “Fight, Flight, Freeze, Appease” response. Thom adopts this model in her somatic approach to transformative justice: re-naming it a “Window of Transformation” in which we can learn to engage in generative conflict without spinning out into habitual reaction patterns. The point that I am making here is that these somatic, even biological, dimensions of care and attunement are embedded in social contexts (including personal and intergenerational trauma) and, as such, can and be engaged and expanded through practice—here practices of community accountability and conflict. This allows us to slowly build the sorts of capacities so many of us lack around staying present, open, and connected during high-intensity moments of crisis or conflict. Note that this point is yet another perspective on my argument in the previous chapters regarding the always already political nature of caring dispositions themselves. 154 passed on through the intimate portals of care. They are also what nurture imaginaries capable, in the works of Drucilla Cornell, of sharing the “secret of joy across generations” (236).117 To reduce these dimension of social reproduction politics to labor, even in an expanded sense of the word, is as one-sided and limiting as reducing them to an unambiguous moral good. Insofar as care is an essential component of social reproduction and the politics of its transformation, so too are these relational and intimate components of care. In the remainder of this chapter, I motivate these concerns about the over-extension of Marxist class and labor politics and underdevelopment of these political valences of social reproduction vis a vis the surprisingly dismissive treatment of intersectional theory on the part of thinkers in the SRT tradition, as well as longstanding critiques of autonomists on the part of feminists of color. Pluto Press’s description of Bhattacharya’s 2017 edited volume is indicative of the former concern—claiming, without further explanation or context, that SRT’s perspectives on the relation between gender, race, and capitalist exploitation present “a more sophisticated alternative to intersectionality.”118 This common refrain—expressed with more or less nuance across the work of Ferguson, McNally, Jaffe, Arruzza, Bhattacharya and others—is rooted in SRT’s Marxist commitments, and specifically its methodological and political commitment to theorizing capitalist social relations as an articulated totality. To recall this argument in broad strokes, the claim is that, by showing how capital socially organizes not only productive but reproductive labor, SRT reveals the logic unifying capitalist accumulation and historically specific forms of oppression, while avoiding recourse to the reductionism, determinism, or economism of vulgar Marxism. In Arruzza’s words, the lens of social reproduction thus “allows us to identify the organizing logic of these intersections without for this reason excluding the role 117 118 Cornell herself cites Alice Walker’s Possessing the Secret of Joy (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992). https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745399881/social-reproduction-theory/ 155 played by struggle, and the existence of contingent phenomena and practices in general” (“Remarks on Gender”). SRT’s expanded Marxian perspective, Arruzza and others claim, sheds light on the internal relations undergirding capitalism as a contradictory social totality yet hidden from plain view by its fragmenting and alienating social conditions. This nuanced and non-reductive stance on the logic of capital is what its proponents claim grants SRT its special ability to outline the structural relation between class exploitation and various forms of social oppression. By showing that class and oppression are not “purely accidental and contingent intersections” (“Remarks on Gender”), and providing a unified critique of both, they also provide a theoretical groundwork for the broad based, coalitional, politics I discussed above. In this view, various forms of oppression—e.g., racist, misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic, xenophobic or ableist oppressions—are contingent historical and social phenomena and thus, like class struggle itself, are not reducible to the logic of exploitation at the heart of capitalist accumulation. But nor, Arruzza and others claim, should they be theorized as autonomous structures with their own inherent logics (Arruzza, 2014). Finally, proponents of SRT argue, the lens of social reproduction—and the picture of a capitalism as an articulated social totality it brings into view—allows us to see that capitalism itself cannot be conceived apart from its integral relation to oppression: e.g. the gendered, racialized, and colonial relations through which reproductive labor is devalued and distributed, or the heteronormative family forms and sexual regimes through which it is regulated and disciplined. SRT is motivated by a genuine commitment to center oppression and forge connections between labor struggles and social justice movements. It aims to provide a non-reductive unitary analysis of class exploitation and oppression under capitalism, and thus a theoretical foothold for 156 political platforms that systemically link, and confront, injustices of all kinds. However, this promise is thwarted by a fundamental equivocation through which it extends not only explanatory but political primacy to the Marxist project, and thereby limits its own contributions to genuinely diverse political struggles on the terrain of social reproduction. On the one hand, SRT’s theoretical justification for an expanded notion of capitalist sociality, and thus class struggle, is meant to be just that: a general, abstract, account that points to the internal logic of capital unifying the historically contingent, diverse, and contradictory phenomena that together comprise the violent conditions of our lives. On the other, however, this theoretical move does consistently belie a de facto politics: one of class and labor. While it aims to center oppression and anti-oppression struggles, the capitalist class relation remains the ‘master-frame” (Fraser) for SRT’s unitary theory—from here it is hard to ignore the subtle and overt slippages through which class and labor become the implicit referent119 not only for theory, but for politics more broadly. While she and others in the SRT tradition are clear that their definition of politics are not encompassed by class,120 even Arruzza—whose philosophical rigor and political wisdom inform her pathbreaking contributions to the theory of social reproduction and international feminist organizing efforts on the terrain of social reproduction—succumbs to this tendency. Calling to expand the solidarities that made the international feminist strike in 2017 so remarkable, she states: “[t]he concrete experience of the women’s strike, as well as the social reproduction theory that inspired some of its organizers, made the question of whether class struggle should take priority over ‘identity-based’ struggles …not only obsolete but 119 I borrow the term “implicit referent” from Chandra Talpade Mohanty, who uses it to describe a fundamental component of the “discursive colonialism” through which Western feminists render women of the so-called third world into a monolithic “archetypal victim” whose oppression and political agency alike become legible only through reference to their own (Mohanty). 120 See e.g. Arruzza’s 2020 preface to Jaffe’s Social Reproduction Theory, Doyle Griffiths, and Ferguson. 157 ultimately misleading.” (“From Social Reproduction” 195). While she understands class in a distinctly non-economistic lens, encompassing subject positions, experiences, and labors extending far beyond those of traditional labor politics,121 this semantic shift nonetheless suggests that class is her unifying lens at a concrete and political, not merely a general and analytical, level: for example, “…movements such as Black Lives Matter, the migrants ’strikes, and the mobilizations against the wall at the border with Mexico; and the near-spontaneous mobilizations against the Muslim Ban” can, she argues, be read as “various forms that class struggle is currently taking, forms that potentially empower each other and can create the conditions for organizing work stoppages in the workplace” (194).122 For proponents of SRT, capitalist sociality is incredibly complex, and reproduced through practices and relations of oppression that are both integral and irreducible to exploitative productive relations. However, precisely insofar as it is an articulated totality, they claim, capitalist sociality does have a heart—the ruthless pursuit of accumulation, or, in Marx’s language, the ‘valorization of value.’123 In “Remarks on Gender” Arruzza uses this metaphor of the heart to clarify how an orientation to social reproduction can avoid reductionism and economism while nonetheless retaining the central insights of Marx’s theory and method. Jaffe 121 “Class struggle” she contends, “should not be conflated with labor struggle in the workplace: class struggle takes many forms” (“From Social Reproduction” 194). 122 The concluding lines of Arruzza’s chapter in Bhattacharya’s volume are illustrative of her complex position: “…it is necessary to show the internal relations between various forms of oppression and to combine the differences these oppressions generate in a more encompassing critique of capitalist social relations. In this process, each political subjectivation based on a specific oppression can provide us with new insights on the various ways capitalism, racism, and sexism affect our lives” (196). 123 By the valorization of value, Marx refers to the exploitative, yet self-obscuring, wage relation at the heart of capitalist production. The concept of value, when contextualized as an expression of the self-obscuring process by which labor is maximally exploited, thus not only allows us to understand the systemic exploitation and dispossession essential to the wage relation under capitalism, but also reveals classless society to be the condition of overcoming this immiseration. Value is both a descriptive and an essentially political category insofar as it describes the movement of capital as a whole and in its specificity, and also points to the internal limits of capitalist production and thus the political possibility of its destruction. It is an abstraction of the ruthlessly exploitative social process of accumulation. 158 explains the crucial contribution Arruzza makes with this metaphor, which illuminates both “the necessity as well as the limits of appreciating the valorizing “heart” of capitalism” (Social Reproduction Theory 124). It clarifies, he contends, how the SRT position can attend to social oppression while retaining its Marxist commitment to seeing “the class relation that enables valorization as the social institution that forms the violently beating heart of any capitalist society” (81). To quote Arruzza in full, capitalism is a mode of production and a system of social relations, with an identifiable logic: according to Marx, it is a process of the valorization of value. Certainly, to have identified this process as the driving force or motor of capitalism does not say everything that needs to be said about capitalism: this would be analogous to thinking that the explanation of the anatomy of the heart and its functions would suffice to explain the whole anatomy of the human body. Capitalism is an ensemble of complex processes and relations. However, understanding what its heart is and how it works is a fundamental analytic necessity (“Remarks on Gender”) I want to dwell for a moment with this metaphor, since it cuts to the heart, so to speak, of the problem as I see it as well. Arruzza and Jaffe both note that, as an organic totality, the body involves many vital processes and relations. Indeed, the heart itself is one among other essential organ systems. We can assume, for example, that the lungs, brain, kidneys, and liver, each play distinct and irreducible, yet fundamentally interrelated, roles in the life of the body as a whole. However, we can also assume that understanding the body’s conditions of both sickness and health, and promoting the latter, requires the ability to shift perspectives—depending on the symptoms at hand. So, in this sense, the valorization of value is likely the heart of capitalism as a mode of production fueled by the systemic and brutal exploitation of labor and ever-increasing class inequality. This knowledge is a crucial lever of labor and class politics. However, this claim about the logic of valorization at the heart of capitalism as “a mode of production and a system of social relations” does not justify Arruzza’s subsequent claims about capitalism qua political 159 life, or the analytic necessity of identifying accumulation as the heart unifying the totality of these “complex processes and relations.” While the ‘heart’ is a meaningful human metaphor, it is only that. It does not justify privileging one vital—or toxic—system over others. And when it comes to the living body itself, there simply is no underlying reference point or logic unifying these complex, interrelated, processes. Similarly with social reproduction: identifying capitalist accumulation as the unifying vantage for social reproduction politics, even at a high level of abstraction, is ultimately akin to saying that the physical heart can and should form the reference for understanding the body and remedying a diversity of its ills. This is particularly relevant when other factors—in the examples of BLM or migrant struggles cited above, systemically racist, or neocolonial state violence—are more salient or urgent factors in a given struggle. While it is crucial to clarify the multifaceted histories and relations that connect various forms of institutionalized violence and struggles against them, insisting on the analytic priority of one such perspective over others, even at a high level of abstraction, threatens to flatten the lived complexities of oppression and resistance, and hinder the horizontal solidarities and plurality of skills needed to develop diverse and coalitional political movements. To reiterate, I am not contesting Arruzza and Jaffe’s claims about capital’s valorization imperative or even the idea of a unitary theory as such (a point on which I am agnostic). What I am contesting is their move to characterize capitalism as political life and thus to cast labor and class as the implicit or explicit reference points for political theory and practice. To extend these points to my larger argument: while it is crucial to recognize care as labor and organize around the dire need for labor rights and protections for care workers and other reproductive laborers, it 160 does not follow that the politics of care or social reproduction should be encompassed within, or understood primarily with reference to, the politics of class and labor. The problems with this tendency to privilege class as the implicit referent for politics become evident in SRT’s approach to intersectional theories, which are frequently cited in the literature as instances of a theoretical and practical failure to account for this unifying logic at the heart of various oppressions. Bhattacharya, for example, claims that “intersectionality theory shows us a world where race, gender, and other oppressions ‘intersect,’ thereby producing a reality that is latticed—a sum total of different parts” (17)—in other words, an additive approach to multiple oppressions. But this accusation overlooks the foundational epistemic and political moves of many intersectional theorists. As I discussed at length in the previous chapter, Crenshaw and others join a long lineage of Black feminist thought in confronting the limits of such additive approaches.124 To name just a few prominent examples: the Combahee River Collective’s ‘integrated analysis’ in the face of ‘interlocking oppressions;’ Crenshaw’s discussions of the inadequacy of discrimination law—which offered protections against sexism and racism, but not their combined and compounded effects in the discrimination faced by women of color; and Collins’s ‘matrix of oppressions,’ which Jaffe and McNally both approvingly cite, all distinctly oppose the external, merely additive, approach to multiple oppressions espoused in the single-issue frames of women’s liberation, Black liberation, and Socialism. 124 It is true that Crenshaw’s spatial metaphor of the ‘intersection’—by definition, a crossroads between discrete axes or ‘streets’—has been a topic of debate in intersectional discourse (Belle). As I discuss above, however, intersectionality represented a paradigm shift away from external approaches to the ‘single issue frames’ (Crenshaw) or ‘parallelisms’ (Carby) developed by white feminists, Black nationalists, Marxists, and lesbian separatists whose prioritization of race, gender, class, and/or sexuality proved politically damaging and inadequate to the inextricability of multiple oppressions in their lived experiences and in the world. 161 It is thus somewhat puzzling that thinkers in the SRT tradition so frequently levy this accusation of additive (or even, in the case of McNally, “neo-Newtonian”) thinking against intersectional theory.125 Moreover, taken on their own terms, these arguments still do not clarify the alternative they pose to the ostensive additivism of intersectional theory: namely why class should be regarded as the reference point, or heart, of critical understanding and the social totality alike. “Without centering class relations,” Jaffe contends, “social theory could recognize many systems, social structures, physical infrastructures, and forms of social oppression, but we would not be seeing that these oppressions are situated as parts of the constitution and social reproduction of capitalist societies” (Social Reproduction Theory, 89). But unless we presuppose the very Marxist framework Jaffe is attempting to justify, SRT’s superior ability to unify diverse forms of social violence and explain the “causes of social violence” remains opaque. What, in other words, does granting the analytic primacy of class enable us to see, beyond this very assertion? (Namely, that valorization is the unifying heart of capitalism, therefore the 125 Many intersectional thinkers develop a pluralistic and situated approach to both theory formation and political action. SRT’s opposition to this pluralism, combined with intersectionality’s sometimes-thin treatment of class, seems to be one plausible explanation for this stance. Jaffe, for example, claims to offer a “generous” reading of intersectionality, which he nonetheless claims lacks an account of “the causes of social violence.” He states: “I will make the case that, despite intersectionality’s strengths, SRT does a better job of explaining the causes of social violence. I consider SRT to be best suited to tackling the interwoven nature of oppressions in capitalist societies, as SRT highlights the essential role class plays in these oppressions. To make this argument, I want to develop a generous reconstruction of some anti-capitalist potentials that stem from the best of intersectionality” (71). He subsequently turns to Hill Collins’s concept of the matrix of oppressions, which he claims does point to the interconnections between oppressive institutions and social practices. He concludes, however, by offering SRT as a “better” approach, able to make clear sense of this mesh of oppressive relations by pointing to class relations as the cause and underlying logic organizing capitalistic societies (89). It is difficult to understand, from this claim and elsewhere, why a unitary lens is necessary to explain the roots of social violence, or why class and labor power should form this unifying reference point. Similarly, McNally claims that intersectional theory is “haunted” by an “ontological atomism” or even “social Newtoninanism” i.e., “the idea that there are independently constituted relations of oppression that, in some circumstances, crisscross each other” (96). Against this approach, he poses a notion of social reproduction theory informed by a Marxist-Hegelian understanding of an articulated totality that he claims offers a better model of relationality for theorizing social differences. Here too it is surprising that he doesn’t mention the core insights of many intersectional theories regarding the inextricablity or ‘enmeshment’ (Lugones) of oppressions in people’s lived experiences, and in the world. 162 exploitation of labor (i.e., the class relation that generates value) provides a unifying frame and causal explanation of social violence.) Again, I am not contesting Marx’s critique of value, the indispensability of class as a political category, or the need for labor struggle—but asking why understanding and confronting the complex and interrelated forms of violence structuring our world should be thought of as contingent on centering class in particular. Because similar arguments could be made about the violence of colonial, white supremacist, cis-heteropatriarchal, and/or ableist societies—which are, of course, often also capitalist societies, and vice versa—without thereby claiming a logical or political primacy for any one of them. The political as such exceeds any one of these frameworks, including class and labor, and including capitalism itself. SRT’s insistence on the analytic and/or political primacy of class truncates its perspectives on the ethical and political stakes of social reproduction and limits its ability to center oppression. This is true not only in a critical, but also a transformational sense. Collins, for example, roots her notion of intersectionality as a critical social theory in the experiences of Black women and their collective self-definition and empowerment in the face of multiple systemic oppressions. Her notion of a Black feminist standpoint is exemplary of the ways in which intersectional theorists articulate new agencies, wisdom, and ways of reproducing social life and community. As I discussed above, Collins includes ethics—and particularly an ethics of care and accountability—as components of Black feminist thought and action. She also elaborates on the political dialectics of oppression and activism, theory, and practice, that clarify, motivate, and empower Black feminist theory and practice. 163 Black feminist critiques of autonomist conceptions of domestic labor—crystallized by Angela Davis in 1971 and a decade later by Hazel Carby126—also reveal ethical and political stakes of social reproduction beyond the lens of labor.127 Davis for example draws attention to the ideology of the housewife and its damaging psychological and material effects not only on housewives, but on Black, poor, and immigrant women, who who’s ability to reproduce their own families meant undergoing even deeper, more intensive, racialized exploitations and divisions of paid domestic labor (Women, Race, and Class 229).128 She notes the structural and systemic degradation of such labor and the different, yet profound, impacts this had on women for whom the normative notions of female ‘dependency’ so central to the bourgeois ideals of nuclear family were never an option—indeed, as I discussed last chapter, bourgeois white women’s willingness and financial ability to foist the most unpleasant domestic labors onto women of color and poor women was a primary social and material condition of such ‘dependency’ As Davis notes, “Women of color—and especially Black women—have been receiving wages for housework for untold decades,” and certainly did not find anything liberating about it (237). From their perspective, Davis contends, we can comprehend that depth and scope of the social reproductive contradictions of capitalism, and thus the social and psychological harms inflicted through the capitalist privatization of the home itself. By centering the experiences and social position of the multiply marginalized domestic workers who shoulder 126 See also Spillers 1987, hooks, Hartman 2016. As Zhivka Valiavicharska points out, “The work of Claudia Jones, and later, the work of Angela Davis, Hazel Carby, Hortense Spillers, Jacqueline Jones, Dorothy Roberts, and others traced genealogies of social reproduction written from Black women’s historical standpoint, from slavery to the racist politics of the welfare regimes, revealing a very different historical picture and political terrain (Jones 1949; Davis 1981, 1983, 1998 [1971]. They showed that the ‘home,’ the ‘family,’ domestic and care work, and other forms of social-reproductive labor had acquired different political meanings and social value in communities surviving slavery, racist oppression and violence, and various regimes of racial and social control” (“Social Reproduction in the Making” 2-3) 128 Ferguson notes that “Contrary to Davis’ critique of the campaign, James made racialized paid domestic work central to the UK Wages for Housework Committee political activism from the beginning” (Women and Work 109). 127 164 its deepest contradictions, we expand and deepen our political and ethical perspectives— revealing, ultimately, the need to abolish not only the position of the housewife, but “housework as the private responsibility of individual women” (243). Since the publication of “The Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves” from her incarceration in 1971, Davis has expanded and deepened the lens of social reproduction. As I discussed in the previous chapter, she has called attention to the normative and structural role played by social imaginaries of domesticity and divisions of caring labor in maintaining a white supremacist, patriarchal, and capitalist social order. By centering Black and other marginalized women’s experiences, and unearthing their insurgent, even abolitionist, traditions of struggle on this terrain, she also takes this work in new and transformative directions. Hazel Carby also calls attention to how notions of reproduction and the family that center solely on the gendered and class-based exploitation of unpaid domestic and care labor have constitutively excluded the experiences of women of color—proving not only inadequate but “contradictory when applied to the lives and experiences of black women” (46, my emphasis). The sole focus on unpaid reproductive labor, for example, obscures the experiences of those doing racialized, paid, domestic work, and thus the nature of the exploitation at the heart of divisions of caring labor themselves. Since paid domestic workers are “providing for the reproduction of black labour in their own domestic sphere, simultaneously ensuring the reproduction of white labour power in the ‘white household,’” the concept of unpaid domestic labor alone “is unable to explain exactly what the relations are that need to be revealed:” I.e., the positions of the unpaid housewife presents a partial and incomplete picture of the relation between capitalist production and social reproduction itself, and thus also a limited vision of struggles against it. We must also ask about “how the black women’s role in… a domestic labor 165 force affects the construction of ideologies of black female sexuality… and how this role relates to the black woman’s struggle for control over her own sexuality” (48). Likewise, like Davis, she problematizes white feminist imaginaries of female dependency, which obscure the experiences and labors of those who have often quite literally provided its material support, reproducing the lives of others at the expense of their own. Like Davis, Carby points to how Marxist feminist (and radical feminist) notions of domestic labor, the family, and reproduction marginalized women of color and were limited in their capacity to provide critical and emancipatory feminist perspectives. She also points to the role of alternative kinship and family structures, as well as non-biological cultural networks, in nurturing revolutionary values, cultural belonging, and political resistance in migrant communities and communities of color.129 While she does not deny that “the family can be a source of oppression,” (46) she also de-centers the “isolated position of white women in the Western nuclear family structure” (51), and points to how the “black family has functioned as a prime source of resistance to oppression” (46). From the historical terrors of colonialism and slavery to contemporary state violence, the destruction of Black and indigenous kinship structures (which often did not contain the entrenched sexism of the capitalist nuclear family) has played an essential role in institutionalized racism (51). And yet, female led support structures and kinship networks have been essential to survival and resistance against these forms of oppression. While it is “important not to romanticize the existence of such female support networks,” she highlights their key role in the development of “survival strategies” and “cultures of resistance.” These are “not simple adaptive mechanisms; they embody important alternative ways of organizing production and reproduction and value systems critical of the oppressor” (52, 129 These positions align with many queer and trans theories of care and social reproduction as well. See e.g. Malatino, 2020; Spade, 2020, Marvin, 2018. 166 my emphasis). Autonomist feminists’ failure to recognize the distinct and autonomous ‘herstories’ of women of color—and the alternative modalities of social reproduction they have already made possible—limits both the concrete solidarities and the visionary imagination needed to re-claim and re-constitute ethics and politics on this terrain. V. Conclusion: Traditions of Economism and Productivism While perhaps most revelatory of that tragicomic animus revolutionaries save for those ideologically closest to them, the fiery accusations between autonomist and socialist feminists also illuminate their respective blind spots when it comes to the caring dimensions of social reproduction. For their part, contemporary autonomist dismissals of SRT as a resurgent form of ‘Marxology’ (Federici “Social Reproduction Theory”) echo accusations going back to the 70s, when autonomists claimed that socialist feminists wanted above all to ‘save their Marx,’ ultimately at the expense of the distinct and irreducible revolutionary insights of feminist and other struggles.130 Alessandra Mezzandri, for example, claims that SRT’s focus on care labor as “connected yet distinct to those of capital and value-generation” (“On the Value of Social Reproduction,” 33) re-centers waged exploitation and fails to consider the informalized laboring conditions of most of the world’s population—maintaining a Western-centric and ultimately economistic perspective, and sidelining the productive labors of the “majority world” working in underground and service economies. Socialist feminist quips against autonomists’ utopian prefigurations void of political analysis are equally harsh and historically overdetermined. Proponents of SRT claim that autonomists fail to theorize the complex mediations at play in differentiated labors, and the varying degrees of subsumption at the level of private experience 130 Mies for example critiqued the “additive labeling approach”—“the tendency to fit the new feminist critique and rebellion into the existing theoretical body of Marxism” (12)—on the part of socialist feminists in the 1970’s and 80’s. 167 that together comprise capitalism as a complex totality, and thus, ironically, resort to productivist and essentialist perspectives on gendered labor and its transformation.131 Of course, productivism and economism are precisely the specters haunting the specific Marxist traditions that autonomist and socialist feminist traditions, respectively, sought to escape. Rooted in Italian workerism, autonomists sought to expand the critique of capitalism, and by extension the scope of communist transformation, well beyond the point of production. Pointing to domestic and other reproductive labor as itself productive, they thought, could bring feminist and anti-capitalist struggle and transformation into all spheres of life. Their focus, in the years since, on forms of commoning that can immediately reclaim, transform, and politicize the realms of social reproduction stem from this anti-productivist vision. However, their socialist critics are correct in pointing to problematic overextensions and blurriness characterizing their analysis of these myriad labors. This is evident in early work by Fortunati, for example, who reduces nearly all aspects of domestic and family life132 to capitalist production,133 and in tendencies on the part of Federici and Mies to make de-historicized, blanket statements about the ‘commoning’ practices of communities leading struggles over land and resources. This ambivalence vis a vis the socially and historically contested nature of reproductive labor is also troublingly present in the trans-exclusivity implicit, if not overt, in some of Federici’s recent work. Cory Knudson, speaking to this point, notes that while her earlier work “is audacious, 131 This dehistoricizing, they claim, poses a false picture of totally subsumed capitalistic social relations that can only be addressed through utopian prefigurations and alternate ways of living, and thus sidelines the intricacies and ongoing work of mass struggle itself. 132 Fortunati claims that the separation between reproduction and production is itself a mystification upon which capitalist exploitation depends. For her, reproductive labor is ‘indirectly mediated’ wage labor, and that posing it as non-productive is exactly the condition for the extreme exploitation of this work. From this she extrapolates, for example, that family relations thus only appear to be interpersonal, but are actually capitalist ones (The Arcane of Reproduction, 129). 133 I owe this insight about Fortunati, and autonomists more broadly, to Cinzia Arruzza, who pointed it out in personal conversations. 168 rigorous, and wildly compelling in its unrelenting demolition of what we have been conditioned to think of as “natural,” particularly when it comes to women and women’s body-politics,” her recent work recants on this, claiming “feminism has gone too far in its de-naturalization of the concept and resorting to highly troubling remarks about what she terms a ““body-remake movement”134 (“Beyond the Periphery of the Skin”). From the SRT perspective, the disavowed productivism behind the autonomist tendency to see reproductive labor as either wholly subsumed by or wholly outside of production overdetermines the logic of production these feminists seek to critique, and evades the complex political work involved in collectively struggling against capitalism (Ferguson, Women and Work 133).135 While this accusation doesn’t account for the nuanced coalitional and international politics at the heart of autonomist feminism, socialist critiques of their undifferentiated notions of capitalistic subsumption on the one hand, and de-historicized notions of commoning on the other are often valid. These binaristic approaches to oppression and political agency alike muddy autonomists’ approaches to struggle and collective agency and thus sidestep the truly politicizing sorts of care, commoning, and “insurgent social reproduction” (Armstrong) that define struggles on this terrain. For example, trans and queer efforts to reclaim and redistribute medical resources and care by cultivating chosen family, social networks, and non-hierarchal infrastructures for material and emotional support can be thought of as forms of politicized commoning which 134 As Knudson points out, what Federici includes in this term“ rang[es from plastic surgery to surrogacy and gender reassignment”—posing sweeping parallels between wildly divergent issues and experiences that she claims betray an uncritical“dependence on [the medical institution] that has a long history of cooperation with capital and the state "'(4) quoted in Knudson 2020. 135 Ferguson notes that this move “dissolves women’s oppression into the economic logic of capitalist accumulation and dispossession:” overdeterminintg it “according to its overriding drive to create value” (Women and Work 104). While Ferguson is at times reductive in her critique of ostensibly ahistorical notions of gender division of labor espoused by autonomists (“Women and the Subversion of the Community,” for example, is an overt critique of capitalist divisions of reproductive labor), she is right to critique this approach to social reproduction as either wholly subsumed by or outside of capital. I discuss this at length in the next chapter. See also Doyle Griffiths and Aaron Jaffe. 169 strive, in practice, to de-naturalize care and reproductive labor and re-constitute more livable social norms and gendered embodiments for all. Likewise, the success of the SRT project hinges on developing explicitly noneconomistic understandings of class and labor politics that not only theoretically explain, but politically center, oppression. Yet autonomists are right in that SRT’s attempt to build from and apply Marx’s economic categories to reproduction risks re-centering labor politics and thus reproducing the very forms of economism it seeks to overcome. Jaffe, for example, claims that SRT can hold onto class as the “hard logical core” of contemporary social life “without being narrowly economistic” because “[o]ppressions conjoined with exploitation, and not ‘just identities,’ inform what SRT can mean by class” (Social Reproduction Theory 89). To put the scare-quotes surrounding “identity”136 to the side for a moment, what Jaffe means is that, by systematically linking oppression and class, SRT can “offer a materialist history of social relations, one that recognizes the changing dynamics that condition all the possibilities to work” (24). While Jaffe’s notion of ‘economy’ is expansive, and rooted in the early Marx’s notion of freedom and an explicit appropriation of his broad, historical materialist, understanding of labor power,137 it is still the economic relation between capitalist and waged worker138 that lies at the heart of his critique, and thus, in proper Marxist fashion, adumbrates both the forms of resistance 136 While it is common knowledge, it remains crucial to remember that it was the Combahee River Collective who initially coined this term, so routinely dismissed not only by the Right but also by the socialist Left. The CRC calls upon an identity politics rooted in their own social experience, and a “healthy self-love” as well as a love for community. 137 Jaffe quotes Marx’s definition: “the aggregate of those mental and physical capabilities existing in a human being which he (sic) exercises whenever he produces a use value of any description” (30) 138 Jaffe spends significant time addressing a diversity of radical movements and intellectual traditions but nearly always with reference to the economic relation definitive of class. Paradigmatic statements on this include: “Since trans men and women, intersex, and non-binary people have compounding and different challenges at work, different forms of gender oppression must be considered parts of working-class experience” (113); “Gender therefore forms an inseparable part of one’s working-class experience and living personality. As a Marxist theory, SRT can promote emancipation from the violence of gender as part of one’s class experiences and includes in its strategic view the need to organize around different forms of gendered class disempowerment” (114). 170 needed to overcome it, as well as the socialist horizon beyond it—a world, according to Jaffe, defined by free and differentiated labor powers. What then are we to make of the autonomous and distinct organizing strategies and perspectives developed in the context of other revolutionary movements (feminist, disability justice, antiracist, decolonial, queer, and trans movements, for example)—especially those which run counter to those of Marxism, or which affirm the political relevance or centrality of experiences, identities, and revolutionary horizons that are wholly irreducible to work, or labor politics, no matter how broadly conceived? Jaffe intends to further Marx’s critique of capital by pointing to the diminishment of human life and capacities at the heart of its ‘valorizing logic.’ But his own position becomes viciously circular to the extent that he fails to apprehend the diversity of struggles and tactics or the political salience of domains of life and models of organizing practice beyond the lens of labor.139 His socialist horizon of free and differentiated labors offers a wonderful political vision but is limited by the specter of economism to the extent that it leaves little for the autonomy and value of distinct social movements and political visions. Another example of queer and trans social reproduction will help illustrate this point (see footnote 60). While Jaffe pays homage to a queer and trans inclusive politics of social reproduction, his discussion is marked by its continual reference to SRT and its class and labor politics—this may simply be a result of the framing of the book (which is about labor) but I wonder to what extent he considers queer organizing praxis beyond the scope of labor to be political at all. 139 Again, Arruzza’s elegant and nuanced understanding of class is illustrative here. In her preface to Jaffe’s book, she notes that in his treatment SRT “allows us to develop a non-economic reductionist view of class as a central agent for the struggle for freedom, a view that – as Jaffe stresses – takes forms of lived experience inflected and constrained by various kinds of oppression to be constitutive features of what counts as class, rather than external add-ons to an abstract and economist notion of class” (Arruzza, xii). To perhaps belabor the point, this is a rich and crucial definition of class. But it is still class that is apparently the ultimate determinant and reference point for political formation, knowledge, and agency: although the “novel and solidarizing” approaches of multiply oppressed people “foster radical potential” (Jaffe, 9) they are seldom mentioned without reference to their class character. 171 For example, Malatino presents trans and queer care webs are an interesting case in point insofar as he presents them as multi-faceted, singular, intersectional, and responsive to a particular community’s needs. Sustaining such threatened networks of mutual aid and emotional sustenance requires truly learning to value the care skills so systemically devalued by the over culture. This network of care is explicitly political in that it works to center and mitigate against the realities of oppression which result in unjust distributions of care labor and access in the first place, as well as to uproot engrained expectations about who receives access to care, and who shoulders its physical and emotional burdens. In this sense, such generative caring labor is equally what Malatino terms an “infrapolitical ethics of care” (Trans Care, 43)—it brings local and non-generalizable forms of communing (and perhaps undercommoning (Harney and Moten)) into play, which would be diminished or reduced if understood primarily with reference to Capital or even the early Marx. Anti-capitalist feminist demands for a social reproductive wage and organization of social reproduction strikes are crucial, new, and transformational forms of political articulation. However, the life-making ethics and politics of social reproduction at stake, for example, in the care webs and forms of mutual-aid mobilized by various marginalized communities often involve forms of embodied and intimate praxis whose political meaning may not be best understood with reference to labor politics, even in this expanded sense. In the following chapter, I elaborate on why and how the labor centric ethical perspectives developed by Marxist feminist theorists of social reproduction have proven inadequate to the contradictions and possibilities of care at the heart of social reproduction. 172 Chapter Four: The Ethics of Social Reproduction: Affect, Embodiment, and the Politics of Life-making 173 I. Introduction: Care in Crisis In their epically titled article of the same name, Drucilla Cornell and Stephen Seely claim— contra the sexually coercive arguments of a Central Committee member in Cornell’s socialist organization in the early 1970’s—that there is, indeed, “nothing revolutionary about a blow job.” This disturbingly banal anecdote of Leftist culture serves as a launching point for their expansive, haunting, ultimately joyful, attempt to place political spirituality and erotic transformation at the center of revolutionary politics. Cornell and Seely begin the article with this example for a reason. The very fact that this militant leader could not only openly express, but politically justify, such sexual entitlement points to the ethical need to transform how power imbues the most intimate dimensions of life (1-2, 12). What would it have taken for this man, or even his many comrades (who Cornell publicly addressed in a revolutionary statement of her own) to comprehend the need for such ethical change, let alone its relevance for revolutionary politics? In presenting this anecdote, Cornell and Seely also problematize what they see as queer theory’s own nihilistic turn away from revolutionary politics—and even collusion with the cynical and “antisocial” thesis of the revolutionary blow job. Their aim in making this connection is to “return queer theory to revolutionary possibility” (3)—the “radical reconfiguration of bodies and pleasures” (12) that is its inheritance. These two examples point to what Cornell and Seely see as a larger disavowal, on the part of the Left, from the promise of revolutionary politics. Cornell and Seely’s text is an urgent call to return to these the transformational legacies and radical imaginaries and bring them to bear on the urgent moral and political crises of our times. I begin this chapter with Cornell and Seely’s injunction because of a similar problem in the Marxist feminist traditions I am addressing here, and need to return to the “radical reconfiguration” of intimacy and power, 174 feeling and relation, that forms a crucial piece of its militant history and promise.140 As Cornell herself pointed out decades ago, the narrow focus on reproductive labor is part of the problem, insofar as it threatens to once again sideline care as a distinct and irreducible dimension of social and cultural life-making (Cornell and Benhabib). If reproductive labor is merely the disavowed ‘other’ and condition of waged labor, it is unclear how we might engage in ethics and politics particular to reproduction itself. This makes it difficult to articulate distinctively feminist, queer, antiracist, decolonial or other approaches to ethics and politics on the terrain of social reproduction. It also marginalizes the webs of interdependency that do exist—the “new patterns of relating across difference” (123)—which Lorde argues are foundational for any meaningful and transformative feminist praxis. In the last chapter I argued that the politics of social reproduction cannot be reduced to labor politics. I now turn to my ethical argument. I begin this chapter by briefly framing autonomist and socialist feminist approaches to the crisis of care, which they each see as defined by the structural contradictions of contemporary capitalism. Building on the arguments of the prior chapter, I then claim that the labor-centric ethical paradigms developed by both traditions foreclose serious engagement with the crisis conditions they themselves outline: particularly when it comes to the paradigmatically reproductive labors of care and sex themselves. In the final section, I advance the thesis that the ‘affective labor debates’ through which Marxist feminists have attempted to address their own historical shortcomings around care in fact point back to the limits of the labor paradigm itself. In this sense, this chapter mirrors the argumentative structure of Chapter Two, in which I claimed that care ethicists’ naturalistic ethics limited their ability to politically address the multiple and intersecting oppressions at play in 140 The vast majority of the Marxist feminists I cite identify the need, in the words of Arruzza, Bhattacharya and Fraser, for such “profound, far reaching social transformation” (15). 175 many caring relations. Here I elaborate on how the labor-centric paradigms of autonomist feminism and SRT have undermined these traditions’ ability to contend with the ethical dilemmas and possibilities presented by social reproduction in crisis. The COVID era has brought what feminist political scholars have long termed a ‘care crisis’ into harsh and unrelenting relief.141 If it was somehow still permissible to miss the political stakes of this crisis in the “before times”—the dire and systemic strains on caring relations, the multiplying and widening gaps in care, the inequality on display in who is expected to fill them and who’s needs fall through the cracks, the high stakes culture wars over which social forms, norms, and institutions of care will replace those on the brink of collapse—it is clear that window has closed. While social reproduction feminists were among the first to note the systemic nature of this crisis, their ethical imaginaries have not evolved to meet the demands of its complex and contradictory realities. On the one hand, as sex workers and care workers have long made abundantly clear, reproductive labor, whether paid or unpaid, is work. On the other, the forms of subjectivation, as well as “new ethical arrangements” of “bodies and pleasures”142 (Cornell and Seely 2) that delineate care and sex as reproductive activities often remain in excess of the category of labor. While their positions on exploitation (socialists) and 141 Emma Dowling beautifully outlines this crisis: “Deprived of the means, time and capacity to care for ourselves and one another, we struggle to maintain not only physical but also mental health, straining to hold on to a sense of self-esteem in the face of multiple pressures. A crisis of care means that more and more people are unable to do these things or to get the help they need. A crisis of care also means that those who provide care to others are unable to do so satisfactorily and under dignified conditions. To speak of a crisis of care is to speak of the changes to the material conditions for the provision of care – whether within households and families, in communities, by public or social services or through the market, private corporations and agencies. To speak of a crisis of care is to point to the growing gap between care needs and the resources made available to meet them. To speak of a crisis of care is also to look closely and critically at the kinds of ideological assumptions about human nature that inform not only policies, but also dominant economic theories. In an unequal world, no crisis affects everyone equally. To speak of crisis is thus to ask the question, a crisis for whom? It means to highlight class and inequality in the way the crisis is experienced, and in the way that care is organised to entrench division and pit us against one another. It means asking: who is cared for and who is not?” (Dowling 16-17). 142 Cornell and Seely cite Foucault in this passage, and indeed draw upon Foucault’s own ethical concern with revolutionary ethical transformations of this sort (which they illustrate through his engagement with the Iranian revolution) in order to trace a counter-narrative of queer revolutionary ethics and politics through Foucault himself. 176 ongoing extraction and accumulation (autonomists) are crucial for understanding the structural and material forces driving the care crisis, their omission of these elements of lived experience and struggle limits their visions for social change as well.143 The care crisis is not an abstract phenomenon—it is helplessness, resentment, dread, and despair in the face of preventable pain and death. The suffocating impossibility of adequately caring and being cared for is multifaceted and marks countless lives, but its most cruel contradictions are borne by those at the end of the chain.144 We do indeed need structural analyses of the capitalist imperatives to exploit and extract reproductive labor that are stretching social reproduction to the point of collapse—and why and how this impossible burden comes to be overwhelmingly shouldered by poor women of color. But it is just as dangerous to take the ethics out of this structural crisis as it is to view care as an apolitical ethics. Like the normative presuppositions of care ethicists, this structural focus145 occludes both the ways that violence shapes and ruptures people’s relationships and capacities to care as well as the agencies they mobilize against it. My call for an ethics of social reproduction is thus not a return to moralism, but a materialist point about how the deeply held norms and affective investments of care reflect and reinforce the unjust conditions of our world—and how revolutionary values and “different ways of living-together” (Seely and Cornell, 18) can enhance our capacity to change them. Living in a world that guarantees care to 143 Put simply, socialists call for wage reforms and welfare programs that promote more caring services and their just distribution, and autonomists for grassroots practices of commoning and communization. 144 Those imprisoned or deported, as well as those who continue to hold families and communities together in their absence (see Nadine Naber, Souzan Naser, and Johnaé Strong, “Radical Mothering for Abolitionist Futures PostCOVID-19”), those without homes, or for whom ‘home ’is a prison or a death sentence; the care workers who labor without protections; the parents who’s children are snatched from their own beds or at the border, and of course the children left in the wake. 145 Ferguson and Arruzza do stress the experiential dimensions of labor and thus complicate this structural focus. See e.g. Ferguson, Arruzza. 177 so very few (Hedva),146 in which care is devalued and coerced under the banner of love, shapes the nature, experience, and meaning of care itself. To paraphrase Mariame Kaba,147 both structural and qualitative changes are needed if we are to address intransigent societal problems like the care crisis. Socialist and autonomist feminist calls to better distribute caring labor, or reclaim the commons (respectively) are necessary, but not sufficient, to this task. II. Structural Contradictions of Care: Marxist Feminist Perspectives on the Care Crisis Nancy Fraser most succinctly expresses the SRT line on the care crisis. Like other feminist theorists of social reproduction, Fraser claims that the labor of reproduction is essential to the social organization and reproduction of capitalist life, yet, in both its waged and unwaged guises, has been marginalized and devalued along gendered and racialized lines.148 Like the ecological, political, and economic crises of our times, Fraser contends that social reproduction is defined by a “‘social contradiction” inherent in the deep structure of capitalist society” (“Crisis of Care?” 24). In order to generate profit from waged, productive labor, capital depends upon reproductive labor to nourish, educate, care for, workers. Maximizing profit in the productive sphere depends upon naturalizing and externalizing this work and indeed the entire reproductive sphere— 146 In Joanna Hedva’s words, “[w]hen being sick is an abhorrence to the norm, it allows us to conceive of care and support in the same way” (“Sick Woman Theory” 10). 147 She notes: “First, when we set about trying to transform society, we must remember that we ourselves will also need to transform. Our imagination of what a different world can be is limited. We are deeply entangled in the very systems we are organizing to change. White supremacy, misogyny, ableism, classism, homophobia, and transphobia exist everywhere. We have all so thoroughly internalized these logics of oppression that if oppression were to end tomorrow, we would be likely to reproduce previous structures…Second, we must imagine and experiment with new collective structures that enable us to take more principled action, such as embracing collective responsibility to resolve conflicts…Third, we must simultaneously engage in strategies that reduce contact between people and the criminal legal system. …Fourth, as scholar and activist Ruth Wilson Gilmore notes, building a different world requires that we not only change how we address harm, but that we change everything…Changing everything might sound daunting, but it also means there are many places to start, infinite opportunities to collaborate, and endless imaginative interventions and experiments to create.” 148 Like other feminists in the socialist, SRT line, she claims that the particular “social contradiction” that defines social reproduction in our post-fordist moment of austerity and finance capital is not straightforwardly an economic crisis. Rather, it lies “at the border that simultaneously separates and connects production and reproduction. Neither intra-economic nor intradomestic, it is a contradiction between those two constitutive elements of capitalist society” (24). 178 feminizing it, segregating it from production, and devaluing it as such. Capital is thus dependent on reproductive labor, yet at the same time, and as such, disavows and degrades it. (24). As Fraser aptly puts it: “Destroying its own conditions of possibility, capital’s accumulation dynamic effectively eats its own tail” (24). Fraser claims that the ‘crisis of care’ is something of misnomer an “acute expression” of capital’s crisis tendency in its contemporary, financial, mode. Care is a breaking point in the contradiction between the drive to increase capitalist exploitation and extraction and the need to reproduce the basic conditions of social life and subject formation. Defined by global, escalating, and enmeshed economic, political, and environmental crises that render life conditions ever more precarious—this financial regime of capitalism stretches social reproduction, and indeed reproductive labor itself to the breaking point. With public services and institutions (welfare services, education, healthcare, parental leave, the family wage, etc.) gutted, and women “recruited into the paid workforce,” capital’s globalized, neoliberal regime is ever more dependent on private reproductive labors. By “externalizing care work onto families and communities while diminishing their capacity to perform it,” this regime instigates “a new, dualized organization of social reproduction, commodified for those who can pay for it and privatized for those who cannot” (32). This further devalues and segments reproduction, and immiserates reproductive workers, while at the same time exacerbating crisis conditions. “Far from filling the care gap” such ‘solutions’ merely “displace it—from richer to poorer families, from the Global North to the Global South” (34).149 149 In her very recent work, Fraser seems to tone this argument down, and is not as explicit in refusing the language of care itself. See Chapter 3 of Cannibal Capitalism How Our System Is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet—and What We Can Do about It. New York: Verso Books, 2022. 179 Fraser demarcates this crisis tendency from what she characterizes as the vaguely neoliberal and individualizing language of a care crisis precisely in order to name the structural ways that capitalist accumulation “free-rides” off social reproductive labors. Fraser’s intention, in this sense, is to place reproductive labor at the rightful center of material and political life by pointing to the systemic rather than accidental nature of the care crisis (Bhattacharya 12). Rather than an isolated or random occurrence, this “so-called crisis of care” is, she claims, rooted in a fundamental “social-reproductive contradiction of capitalism” (22, my emphasis). While she is right to point to the structural roots of social reproductive contradictions, Fraser’s omission of care from this crisis is somewhat telling. Fraser rejects what she understands to be the individualizing perspective of care, but her extreme turn in the opposite direction—to a periodized analysis of capitalism’s accumulation imperative—speaks to a parallel problem, and indeed to a larger tension in her work. Melinda Cooper speaks to this tension in her discussion of Fraser’s axial distinction between redistribution and recognition, which, considering her recriminations against second wave feminism—and, we should add, queer and anti-racist movements (“Crisis of Care?” 33-34))—for “having colluded with neoliberalism” puts her in unlikely company on the Marxist left (Family Values 12). Frasers’s preference for economic solutions (and aversion to ‘cultural’ ones, I would add) helps make sense of her at times surprisingly conservative stance on the family wage—which contradicts her longstanding emancipatory perspective towards gender relations. Fraser’s sharp turn away from care, and towards the economic imperatives of capital, are marked by a similar allegiance. These allegiances, combined with her cordoning off of structural analysis from the living fabric of care and life-making itself, inhibits her perspective of this crisis or its potential overcoming. With her “politics of economic security,” Cooper notes, Fraser 180 “seeks to imagine an improved family wage that would in the first instance recognize and valorize women’s reproductive labor and perhaps ultimately disrupt the gendered division of labor itself” (Family Values 12). Cooper’s critique lines up with with Fraser’s (somewhat speculative) discussions of a “Universal Caregiver Model,” which she claims might present an alternative to the family wage through a model in which “all jobs would be designed for workers who are caregivers, too” (Fortunes of Feminism 134). With this position Fraser intends to critique the sexist ‘family values’ (Cooper) normatively baked into the Fordist notions of the family wage. She also intends this universal caregiver model to imagine more just divisions of the care burden across race, class, and national borders. But this wholly economic solution offers no politics of care—let alone sexual politics (Cooper)—through which such shifts in gender relations might be made possible, or even imaginable.150 Autonomist lineages of social reproduction feminism offer parallel, if also somewhat limited, approaches to the care crisis. Here I juxtapose Federici’s thoughts on the topic to Fraser’s. Like Fraser, Federici argues that capitalism fosters a permanent crisis in social reproduction (“The Reproduction of Labor Power” 14), but she diverges in that she approaches this structural contradiction from the perspective of capitalist dispossession rather than accumulation. This focus on ongoing dispossession as a key component of capitalist social 150 While they are more sensitive to these nuances, the model of universal care developed by the “Care Collective” (Andreas Chatzidakis, Jamie Hakim, Jo Littler, Catherine Rottenberg, and Lynne Segalcall) illustrates the problem at a deeper level. In their Care Manifesto, collective members call for a “politics that puts care at the centre of life.” Their understanding of care is rich and expansive, and includes affective, material, social, and ecological dimensions: care, for them, is “a social capacity and activity involving the nurturing of all that is necessary for the welfare and flourishing of life” (11). Their universal care model follows from this definition of ‘genuine care,’ making interdependency and collective responsibility the keynote of social relations at all levels. While this does add depth for a universal caregiver model, their definition of care is wholly positive, and offers only procedural solutions—e.g. a better distribution of the services and burdens of care, and access to education—to what they too understand to be the systemic and structural devaluation of care. Like Tronto, they thus point to the value of care and the need for a more caring society that recognizes it. But, like Tronto, they too lack an analysis of the need to ethically and politically transform of the caring dispositions, norms, and capacities fostered under such violently unjust conditions. 181 reproduction is a key autonomist contribution, and has been developed in conversation with indigenous, autonomist, popular, and feminist movements in Latin America and served as a crucial touchstone connecting feminist and decolonial thought and practice. Most famously popularized in Federici’s Caliban and the Witch (2004), this perspective radically extends Marx’s notion of ‘primitive accumulation’ by pointing to capital’s ongoing imperative to extract and enclose land, labor, and the conditions of life-making—as well as the depth and scope of this theft, and its impact on the material and social, as well as emotional and psychic life of oppressed people. Federici argues that the enclosure of European women’s autonomous forms of lifemaking and material survival, and dispossession of their forms of knowledge and healing practice, played a crucial role in the consolidation of capitalist wage labor and industrial production. Her materialist focus on women’s labors and bodies, and indeed gender itself, departs from Marx’s focus on commodity production and the “waged proletariat” as well as what she understands to be his progressivist, developmental view of human history (Caliban 12-13). The body is central to her account. But as Knudson notes, at least in this work, Federici’s notion of the body is essentially political: for women, she claims, it is “the primary ground of exploitation and resistance” (16). Like Mies, she also points to the structural relation between this ‘housewifization’ of European women and the brutal thefts of land and bodily autonomy involved in the transatlantic slave trade and settler colonial expansion. While problematic at times in their generality, Federici and Mies’s arguments about the centrality and impact of colonialism, slavery, and the witch hunts in consolidating the moral and political economy of capitalism is a crucial theoretical and political development—pointing to the connection between these brutal, repressive, forms of violence on the one hand, and the subjectivizing, disciplinary 182 forms of power that exist alongside it, ‘enclosing’ not only material commons and land, but desires, collective forms of knowledge and wisdom, intimate relationships, and indeed capacities for love and care. The autonomist theory of ongoing dispossession offers an additional perspective on the crisis of care, which autonomist thinkers also often construe as a “crisis of the commons.” Reproductive labor, and the sphere of social reproduction more generally, is a primary site of dispossession. Federici’s work converges with Fraser, in that they both point to the reproductive crises and contradiction intrinsic to capitalist social reproduction. But whereas Fraser focus on capital’s accumulation imperative in the valorization of value, Federici sees this care crisis in light of the contradictions generated by ongoing dispossession. They also converge on pointing to the historical and present links that this perspective of social reproduction reveals—between capitalist, colonial, white supremacist, and misogynistic institutions and social form—and Federici points as well to examples like austerity regimes such as the structural adjustment policies and predatory debt that trap women in international care chains. Like Fraser’s incisive analysis of the exploitation specific to the ‘dualized’ caring economy characteristic of capital’s financial era, Federici illuminates the extreme impact of contemporary extraction regimes: the “tremendous social cost” to the communities migrant care workers leave behind in their countries of origin for example (17), and indeed the entire“ world regions marked for near zero reproduction” (14). Capital’s encroachment into the most intimate spheres of life is not limited to those most impacted by the care crisis, however. Alva Gotby’s recent work on ‘emotional reproduction’ illuminates and expands on these points. “Emotional reproduction” for Gotby, “names the ways in which we depend not only on physical acts of care, such as cooking or cleaning, but also the 183 feeling of being cared for.” Having one’s needs met in this way can be double-edged however, particularly under the caring scarcity of contemporary reproductive regimes: “[r]eproduction under capitalism assumes emotional investment in this society.” Moreover, “[it] is through normative forms of care that we come to form attachments to society as it is and learn to desire the reproduction of the world as we know it” (Gotby, my emphasis). Autonomists have long pointed to the moral and emotional economies absorbing capital’s externalized reproductive burdens: from the loneliness and isolation, loss of sexual and psychic agency, and the humiliations of uni-directional care to the “anguish” that the so-called “globalization of care” causes for migrant women (“Reproduction of Labor Power” 17), or the fear and despair of those—migrant people, incarcerated, houseless, mentally ill—systemically deprived access to social care. Like sexual norms, these normative burdens and distributions of care shape our most intimate desires and relations: subjectivizing us as properly caring subjects, or as properly expectant of care. These are difficult bonds to transform, and to break.151 Unfortunately, for all that she offered to these debates, Federici’s response to the care crisis, like Fraser’s, largely remains within the scope of the problems she raises. III. The Ethics of Labor: Two Perspectives The political and economic crisis of care is equally a moral crisis: a fracturing and reconsolidation of what it means to belong in, and to, a shared world. Cornell and Steelly’s call for a renewed revolutionary ethos is in large part motivated by this crisis: a widespread and “legitimate fear of ethical collapse”—a fear of “…the disintegration of anything like a shared ethical world—including ethical forms of caring for ourselves and for others” (119). This fear, 151 Federici ends “Why Sexuality is Work” with the following words, which recall feminist consciousness raising groups: “Indeed, it has taken a lot of struggle and a leap of power on our side to finally begin to admit that nothing was happening” (27). 184 they claim, is shared across the political spectrum, and lies at the root of many of the terrifying forms of reaction consolidating in the face of the escalating and interwoven crises that Fraser points to. Indeed, as Gotby points out, the normative forms of care through which we strive for a modicum of emotional safety in a frightening world also teach us to desire and find comfort in this world as it is. It is a grave mistake, indeed a moral failure, to isolate these ethical dimensions of social reproduction from the social and political ones that Marxist feminists have so astutely outlined. Several social reproduction theorists have indeed articulated ethical frames for thinking about care and social reproductive crisis. But insofar as they are rooted in the labor-centric politics I discussed in the prior chapter, their respective ethical perspectives do not, indeed cannot, properly address the social reproductive contradictions and possibilities they claim define the care crisis. While these critiques can be extended to these schools of thought more broadly, I develop my argument in conversation with the work of Federici and Aaron Jaffe—two thinkers who have developed these ethical perspectives the furthest. Federici contextualizes her ethics in relation to capital’s ongoing subsumption of social reproduction and calls for forms of commoning and collectivization that both reclaim and transform reproductive labors and relations. However, indigenous, and other marginalized women’s labors often form the normative ideal for such ethical transformations—a move which de-historicizes and reifies ostensibly non-subsumed subsistence economies and labors. Jaffe on the other hand approaches ethics through a Marxian, critical approach, which understands labor as “the first premise of all human history,” but also resurrects and deepens the early, humanist, Marx’s premise that labor powers—the productive, life-making activity that forms the flesh and blood of this history—are limited and debilitated by capitalist accumulation. This critical 185 perspective, he claims, presents labor power itself as the “normative imperative” grounding SRT’s political philosophy. However, by subsuming ethics under the category of labor, he reduces social transformation to the very categories of political economy he seeks to critique. Both Federici and Jaffe articulate their ethics through the Marxist category of labor power. But whereas Jaffe understands labor power as itself ethically normative, Federici’s position is largely negative: for her this “abstraction” (labor power) defines the conditions we must overcome. While sympathetic to the feminist criticisms launched by the likes of Benhabib and Cornell—who claimed that characterizing feminized labors in these Marxist terms robs them of their specificity as life-making activities which produce living human beings and relations— Federici defends her use of this category against them (“The Reproduction of Labor-Power” 8). On the one hand, she continues to do so precisely to draw attention to reproductive labor’s unfree nature under capitalism: “To the extent that directly or indirectly it is exchanged for a wage, reproductive work is, at all points, subjected to the conditions imposed on it by the capitalist organization and relations of production” (8). At the same time, she, like Jaffe, contends that it offers a critical perspective: attending to the “duality” and “contradiction inherent in reproductive labor” as both life-making and exploited is politically empowering and disruptive. Understanding the tensions and antagonisms inherent to this labor can aid us in deepening and expanding feminist struggles against these unlivable conditions, motivate us to cultivate more life-affirming forms of kinship and community, and illuminate potential nodes of solidarity with others struggling for the social and material re-organization of society (8-9). As Ferguson points out, Federici is “careful not to endorse just any cooperative venture” but “elaborates upon and qualifies the concept of a revolutionary commons” (Women and Work 131). However, when it comes to outlining the ethical dimensions of this collectivization and 186 antagonism, her discussion takes on some of the dualistic implications that socialist feminists have accused her of.152 On the one hand, as Ferguson and Doyle-Griffiths note, she often does not differentiate between various kinds of reproductive labors (and, for them, between productive and reproductive labor, although I continue in my agnosticism on this distinction). In doing so, she, like other autonomists, over-extends the Marxist concept of ‘subsumption’—which they understand as an ironically productivist instinct to simplify and overdetermine capital’s sway over social and life and relations. But, as Ferguson and Doyle-Griffiths point out, this logic of subsumption implies that resistance to capital must come from “outside” it. While they do not mention her recent work, this stance is also evident in Federici’s radical differentiation of capitalist social reproduction from the ostensibly non-subsumed, subsistence labor of women and others working outside formal economies, who she imagines “are not yet disconnected from the life economy by their work” (“Reproduction of Labor Power” 1) Federici intends to center the unwaged, subsistence, labor of women in the Global South as the disavowed “underpinning of the world economy,” which Marxist theorists ignore at the peril of their revolutionary project (2). However, her arguments become problematic insofar as she re-asserts a duality between the non-subsumed reproductive activities of those who “serve life not commodity production” (1) and subsumed reproductive labor. This move places such ‘life-economies’ at the normative heart of social reproduction, but also outside, or beyond, the contradiction, struggle, and perhaps even coalition, pointed to above. 152 As I mentioned above, some of these accusations, like those autonomists level against SRT, tend towards strawmanning—for example, the insistence that Federici and other autonomists rely on an ahistorical notion of gender divisions of labor when they clearly do not, and the persistent claim that they remain beholden to the concept of domestic labor when they have spent decades engaging in anticolonial, sex worker, and other struggles on the terrain of social reproduction. 187 Federici clearly thinks that ethics emerges in relation to the antagonisms and possibilities of social reproductive struggles: it is only through the “re-appropriation and re-collectivization” (20) “the ‘commoning’ of the material means of reproduction”—that “collective interest and mutual bonds are created” (Re-enchanting the World, 108). The alternative economies through which indigenous, migrant, and land-based communities have managed, against great odds, to defend their land, resources, and communal forms of life from extreme forms of capitalist dispossession and enclosure form a guide for such revolutionary activity. Those engaged in such struggles have, she claims, cultivated alternative, and deeply ethical, forms of life-making at the margins—forms of collective responsibility and care that must be politically recognized, centered, and materially supported. The ‘commons’ cultivated through forms of mutual aid, land reclamation, community access, resource and knowledge sharing, infrastructure building, communal cooking and healthcare, etc., are not just material. They offer glimpses into what it means to transform reproduction “from a stifling, discriminating activity into the most liberating and creative ground of experimentation in human relations” (“Reproduction of Labor-Power” 19-20). Such “revolutionary commons” are politically transformative and instigate a profound shift in ethical life. These two tasks seem mutually-reinforcing in much of Federici’s work: “cooperative forms of reproduction are so important” because “they pave the way for a world where care for others can become a creative task rather than a burden… [and] also break down the isolation that characterizes the process of our reproduction, creating those solidarity bonds without which our life is an affective desert and we have no social power” (Re-enchanting the World 184-85). By subverting capitalism’s individualization of desires and needs (184) we can also change the “quality” of our relationships to self and others. Such forms of cooperation and 188 struggle concretely engender new forms of collective self-determination, and their “consciousness raising effects” also bring forth new ethical horizons: requiring us to “take a stand and define one’s principles of social and ethical behavior” (3). Our ethics are clarified and dignified in the process of collectively reclaiming and re-organizing reproduction. But such emergent ethics are also what motivate and inspire the struggle for collective freedom. But the dualism that socialists note in Federici’s concept of reproductive labor bleeds into her ethics too, and this blurs the lines of antagonism and solidarity she intends to bring into relief. On the one hand, Federici has been an instrumental force in naming the structural forces shaping social reproduction politics—including biological reproduction, which she claims, like feminized labor more broadly, is a historical and social rather than natural phenomenon (23)153—and also in supporting an astonishing, and global, array of social reproductive struggles.154 Unlike many Marxists, she does not shy away from the ethical dimensions of these questions, remaining at once trenchant in her critique of the insidious forms of naturalization, mystification, isolation, and sheer imperatives of survival that can inhibit revolutionary forms of commoning, and also careful and nuanced about the complexity and cultural specificity of care and reproductive work, as well as political agency (“Reproduction of Labor-Power” 16) However, at other points she seems to negate this radical position—presenting idealized notions of care and nurturance as given in the social organizations and values of subsistence economies. When discussing the reproductive activities of those she sees at the forefront of reproductive struggles globally, and whose ways of living and relating form the ultimate ethical 153 This tension in Federici’s work between a naturalized and ahistorical ideal of the commons and the commons as a product of struggle (Re-Enchanting the World 87) charts with Knudson’s critique of Federici’s recent, disturbingly TERF adjacent, discussions of gendered embodiment that I discussed in the previous chapter. 154 Anecdotally, I have witnessed her remain humbly and actively engaged in various organizations and struggles in both NYC and the Bay Area over the last decade and a half. 189 horizon of her politics, her historically mediated understanding of resistance and social transformation gives way to naturalized notions of care and the commons.155 By placing the reproductive activities of indigenous women and women in the Global South outside the subsuming logic of labor power, she also homogenizes these activities and places them outside history and thus struggle—unlike other social reproductive labors, they appear, by her lights, to remain untainted by capitalist forms of embodiment and relation. This is an unfortunate, colonially inflicted move that works against the solidarities she has forged over decades of organizing. By conceiving of reproductive labor as either wholly subsumed in the service of capital or an unmediated, directly life-sustaining activity outside of it—and reducing ethics to both—Federici distances her analysis from lived experiences and potential solidarities of those who toil to sustain this world, and who can thus collectively work to reclaim it. In posing a dichotomy between those areas of life subsumed by the dictates of capitalist production and those that somehow escape it, Federici’s labor-based ethics pose such questions in terms of an impossible dualism of productivism and naturalism that belies the visionary perspectives on structural and intimate transformations that have defined autonomist feminist approaches to the politics of social reproduction. To simply value the unwaged work of women underpinning the world economy, is to take them out of history and thus their own ethical agency and political struggles. And dichotomously opposing these labors to those that are subsumed by the capitalist form of labor power repeats the same logic in reverse, equally limiting the 155 This is specifically evident in her notion that subsistence labor is “not yet disconnected from the life economy” and serves “life not commodity production” (“The Reproduction of Labor Power” 1). In a broader sense, it is also evident, for example, when she juxtaposes Marx’s totalizing historical moves with her own, referring for example to “the power emerging from the communal organization of life of millions in Africa, Asia, Oceania, and the Americas” (Re-Enchanting the World 32), or in references to the “communal outlook, that valued cooperation group identity, and culture” she claims is common to Native American cultures (80). These points may be right on some level, but their level of generality, combined with the generality of their application to her claims the commons and collective life, nonetheless support my claim. 190 imaginaries we bring to the crisis conditions of care. In each case, ethics is isolated from reproductive labors and relations themselves—seemly possible only beyond the politics of social reproduction in its concrete and material existence, rather than integral to the sustained, multidimensional, learning required to reproduce life and struggle in alignment with new visions of justice and care. I now turn to Jaffe, who, from another angle, also subsumes ethics under existing categories of political economy without giving adequate attention to the actual complexities of caring relations or the shifts in perspective needed to center and transform them in political movements. Whereas Federici isolates the domain of ethics from labor power—which she understands as a capitalistic organization of labor—and thus places the possibility of ethics in idealized notions of subsistence economies and alternative reproductive relations, Jaffe insists on the critical and normative power of labor power itself. Jaffe’s approach too can be seen as an attempt to ethically address the social reproductive contradictions at the root of the crisis of care. In her foreword to his book, Arruzza defends and clarifies his reasons for doing so: like Federici, he aims to ethically elaborate the contradictions and fissures structural to capitalist social reproduction, and to root this ethics in the evaluative and critical perspectives that emerge from lived and collective experiences of struggle (Social Reproduction Theory x-xii). Jaffe is explicit in his intention to develop, and make explicit, the ethics implicit in SRT’s commitment to theorizing an internal relation between capitalist accumulation and structural forms of oppression, and thus ultimately between labor struggles and social justice movements (2-3). Drawing on the expansive vision of labor power he and others find in the early Marx, as well as the critical method of Marx’s Capital, he sets out to critically and ethically illuminate 191 SRT’s expansive and liberatory view on labor.156 The non-reductionistic lens of social reproduction enables both perspectives, he claims, while avoiding the pitfalls of orthodox Marxism. Labor power, following Marx, is simply the “human capacity to satisfy needs.” SRT expands what we mean by this both critically and generatively—by showing how the capitalistic organization of both productive and reproductive labor violently limits these human capacities, and pointing to an expanded, anti-oppressive, vision of class politics and socialist emancipation. Labor power, for Jaffe, both unifies SRT’s critique of oppression and exploitation, and illuminates its emancipatory horizon. The concept of labor power, he claims, can do this heavy lifting because of its simultaneously descriptive, critical, and normative value. As need-satisfying activities, labor powers form “the real basis of any social organization in the first place” (48). According to Marx, these needs are themselves historical and social: a fact that capitalism, as a mode of production geared to the systemic exploitation of labor power, radically profits off of, stunting both our capacities, and our ability to meet our own and each other’s needs, at both individual and societal levels. As opposed to a naturalistic account of human nature or a fragmented notion of oppression, Jaffe thinks that this view on labor power offers a historical materialist basis for critiquing and elaborating the core contradictions of capitalist production and social reproduction, as well as an emancipatory and ethical view to liberating human capacities and meeting human needs. As Arruzza notes, Jaffe’s book intervenes into the moral crisis acutely manifest in the dueling ethical visions of covid era US: the far-right individualist ethos “openly endorsing ableism and social Darwinism for the sake of “liberty” and of the “economy” on the one hand, and “the emergence and proliferation of forms and groups of mutual 156 He quotes, and follows, Bhattacharya on this point: “the fundamental insight of Social Reproduction Theory is, simply put, that human labor is at the heart of creating or reproducing society as a whole. The notion of labor is conceived here in the original sense in which Karl Marx meant it as ‘the first premise of all human history’” (“Introduction” 2). 192 aid and social reproduction from below” sustaining the historic BLM uprisings on the other (ixx). His ethical position, she claims, “addresses two key questions: first, why capitalism harms our living personality, hence what are the grounds of our anti-capitalist critique; and second, what is conducive to the flourishing of our individual powers and to the realization of our potentialities in such a way that others’ living personalities are also enhanced, based on the recognition that we are socially interdependent beings and not social monads” (xi). In his article on the same topic, Jaffe explains that his “normative commitment to labor power” moves beyond the “productivism, ableism, and narrow versions of workerism that are often leveled against left commitments to labor power” (“Social Reproduction Theory and the Form of Labor Power” 1). Rather, “Those drawing from a social reproduction analysis can hold that the plural nature of our powers, and the scope of their free development, is valuable in itself” (8). This full and plural development of our powers is what motivates his account of a free society. This normative commitment, he claims, also allows us to critique “the ways capitalist social relations produce and reproduce labor power… [in] highly disempowering ways” (9): which speaks to the first point Arruzza notes, namely, the specific harms of capitalism and thus the grounds of anti-capitalist critique. He develops his positive ethical position from this dual perspective: the intrinsic value of labor powers on the one hand, and the critique of their capitalist form on the other. The normative grounding offered by labor power “could then center our capacities as a key to unlocking further radical political commitments” (8). Through the lens of labor power, now expanded to include reproductive labor, the justification for a socialist society becomes clear: “freer social relations are just those through which labor powers and the social dynamics of their actualization would be transformed from circuits of exploitation and oppression to causes of their greatest possible freedom” (11). 193 Whereas Federici refuses the positive normative value of labor power, locating ethics wholly beyond it in forms of non- and anti-capitalist social reproduction, Jaffe draws on a Marxist critical methodology combined with a broad, humanistic conception of labor derived from the early Marx, to both critique the capitalist organization of labor and to illuminate a socialist horizon in which basic human needs are met, and we are free to express our diverse labor powers unencumbered by the truncating effects of capital’s accumulation imperative. However, Jaffe’s analysis does very little to illuminate the ethical problems and possibilities specific to social reproduction itself. Already the implicit referent for social reproduction politics, labor is now seen to encompass its normative vision as well. Rebranded as human capacity and power itself, it circumscribes not only critique but ethical transformation on this terrain. As with the labor politics I discussed in the last chapter, the problem lies not in Jaffe’s ethical commitment to labor, but in its overextension into terrains of life and struggle that it does little to illuminate and can even obscure. In other words, Jaffe provides a powerful, though limited ethics, and would likely provide a helpful normative basis in organizing for participatory union politics, for example. Or, like Fraser’s universal caregiver model, as the basis for economic reforms aiming at more just distributions of care. It becomes problematic however, when seen as uniquely capable of analyzing and critiquing a vast array157 of the experiences, relations, institutions, and infrastructures that comprise social reproduction. The problem deepens when it is conceived as the normative basis for unifying such diverse experiences. Again, labor power may indeed be a relevant ethical perspective in certain contexts. But it might illuminate very 157 Jaffe claims SRT is well suited to issues as diverse as analyzing “family structured care work in the contemporary context,” (4), critiquing gendered divisions of labor (4), and especially “unifying social movements and labor struggles together” (2). 194 little that is particular about, for example, the extra-economic oppressions defining a situation of intimate partner violence,158 or the compounding risk one faces when doing paid reproductive labor in criminalized, unregulated, or unprotected economies. It is even possible that viewing such instances through a labor-based normative frame might reduce the specific ethical problems they raise, and thus obscure the racist or misogynistic logics at play. These critical, and especially normative, limits are especially stark when it comes to care. The powers or capacities that Jaffe includes in his understanding of labor now seem expansive enough to encompass almost all human activity, feeling, or thought, but an expanded conception of human labor of itself does not clarify the ethical crises unfolding in the living hearts, minds, and relationships comprising social reproduction. Like Fraser and Federici, Jaffe’s critique of capital’s diminishment of labor powers can point to certain structural contradictions defining the care crisis but is limited in its capacity to address the extra- or infra- economic dimensions of oppression or struggle playing out in and through these divisions and distributions of caring labor. Why should labor unify our ethical understanding of issues as multifaceted as the social and institutional imperatives that distribute caring burdens along multiple and intersecting axes of oppression? Or on the deeply engrained entitlements and coercions that accompany structural inequalities in caring relations, or the intimate subjectivations that make transforming these psychosocial dimensions of life so difficult to even imagine? While Jaffe’s normative commitment to labor power might be powerfully illuminating, and inclusive, in certain contexts and at a high degree of abstraction, it could just as easily eclipse autonomous, liberatory, ethical transformation on the terrain of social reproduction when it does occur—such as in the insurgent 158 The same gaps in analyzing the specific dimensions of care also characterized autonomist perspectives on domestic labor (which reduced it to productive labor). I elaborate on this point below in my discussion of affective labor. 195 caring economies that sustained the most important uprisings this country has seen in half a century. By limiting the ethics of social reproduction to the Marxist concept of labor, Federici and Jaffe strip these dimensions of life-making of their specificity, and ultimately reiterate the social reproductive contradictions they seek to address. Reducing ethics to labor limits our understanding of the care crisis, but more importantly, it forecloses meaningful engagement with the diverse traditions of struggle and healing that have made radical transformations in reproductive relations not only possible but actual. IV. Moral and Material Economies of Reproduction Throughout this dissertation I have argued that affective economies and intimate distributions of care are formative in, and reflective of, how structural violence is woven into extractive, exploitative and oppressive social relations—and that we must therefore integrate these intimate dimensions of care (that is, the elements of life-making and relation specific to care itself) into the critical and transformative perspectives we develop to confront systemic harms. Neither care ethicists nor the Marxist feminists discussed in this, and the previous chapter have managed to get political purchase on how structural violence generates contradictions in caring relations on intimate as well as structural registers, nor do they ethically elaborate the sorts of transformations that may, indeed already do, confront, and heal these constitutive wounds of care. Care workers and sex workers are at the forefront of social reproductive struggles in our times and bring crucial knowledge and skills to these questions. I now turn to a discussion about what makes these paradigmatically reproductive labors ethically distinct from the normative perspectives discussed in the previous section. I center on analysis coming out of sex worker struggles to clarify some specific features of sex work as work, and at the same distinguish 196 elements of erotic reproduction from the category of labor. Focusing on the overlap and continuities between paid sex work and care work159 will also help to specify what I see as the uniquely ethical dimensions of care (and sex)—and thus of social reproduction more broadly— that remain un-subsumed by this category. The meaning and experience of care and sex work are shaped by contradictory and mystifying imperatives; they are overdetermined as much by the expectations of embodied and emotional intimacy160 that connect them as by the harshly punitive moral and criminal economies that divide them. The isolation of these labors in private dwellings, their devaluation and deskilling, and their removal, perhaps even more than manual labor, from intellectual labor in the cultural imaginary, are also key factors determining both their ethical specificity and their specificity as labors. Another ethically defining feature of caring and erotic labors161 is the key role they play in the affective and embodied transmission of culture—-a point I elaborate through Rosemary Hennessy’s concept of “affect cultures” and Sarah Ahmed’s notion of the cultural politics of emotion. Together, these compounding factors shoulder social reproductive workers— and sex workers in particular—with moral and economic burdens and expose them to moral and economic harms. Finally, the relative dearth of first-hand accounts written by and for sex workers (and care workers but to a slightly lesser degree) itself presents unique ethical problems.162 There are many reasons behind this silence and silencing: including stigma, precarity, the threat of deportation or arrest, the absence of a viable platform, and indeed the 159 On the specific labor struggles of care and domestic workers, see e.g. Nadasan, the work of the domestic worker’s alliance (https://www.domesticworkers.org/), the excellent Spanish documentary ¡Cuidado, Resbala! (https://www.serdomas.es/documental-cuidado-resbala/) and Chang. 160 I follow Parreñas and Borris (2010), as well as the militant feminist research collective Precarias a la Deriva, who strategically complicate the binary of sex work and care work with their concepts of ‘intimate labor’ and a continuum of care/attention/desire, respectively. 161 The term erotic labor was coined by writer and sex worker activist Thot Scholar. 162 This is especially acute when it comes to multiply marginalized sex workers, whose voices largely appear in academic or popular publications to support the arguments of those researching them. 197 sheer incomprehensibility of sex worker experiences to dominant moral and political narratives. The intransigence of the mother/whore divide is itself a reminder of the contradictions that mark even the most protected sites of reproduction. Adrienne Rich speaks of the “massacre” of possibility (13) that historically attends women’s socially sanctified role as mother. The cruel paradox through which one’s only possibility is that through which all others are foreclosed is passed on and “mutilates” the caring relation between parent and child (32) as well. Multiply marginalized maternal caretakers—including paid childcare workers—often shoulder contradictions beyond those of gender. For example, teaching one’s children to navigate, obey, overt, and/or resist the oppressor’s norms, to anticipate their desires and whims, sometimes at the risk of death. For those doing paid childcare, extreme and geographical separation from one’s own children is the condition required to materially care for them. Even conversations among the therapized few reveals that it is difficult for mothers to win. A mother must be selfless but not a martyr, must suckle but not suffocate. An attachment figure most present in her seamless meeting of need, and thus in her absence, she is often compelled to teach conformity to the norms and behaviors that have degraded her, or that degrade others. As Lugones famously relates about her relationship to her mother: “to love her was supposed to be of a piece with both my abusing her and with my being open to being abused” (Peregrinajes 201). And what about the contradictions encircling the counter-position? I am not a parent, but I have performed both paid childcare and sex work. I was surprised to discover what others have reflected too: namely, that the work shared a certain skill set, in particular its caring dimensions. I recall, for example, a benign working encounter with an awkward man. It was my first time working with him and he was not immediately forthcoming, so I knew very little about him. Towards the beginning of our session, seemingly out of nowhere, he asked me if I thought he 198 was interesting and special. In the role of provider, the answer was obvious and my performance automatic. Yes, I told him. He asked me to be specific: what was so special about him? I don’t remember my response to this question. I do remember it felt inadequate and feigned, yet after that he repeatedly, almost lovingly, pointed out how caring I was. Gwyneth Montenegro, a veteran sex worker, states that the most important thing to her clients was the “feeling of being needed and wanted.” Perhaps the cruelest contradiction of all is that despite, or perhaps because of, the social necessity and particular skill involved in meeting such intimate needs for those so entitled, sex workers themselves are criminalized and morally degraded—themselves treated as disposable and unneeded in the cultural imaginary, many literally left to die and often blamed for it (Troyan). As I discussed in the previous chapter, the Marxist feminist traditions I engage in this dissertation have a long legacy of sex worker solidarity. The ideas of both traditions have been influenced by, and influential in, sex worker organizing strategies and campaigns. Autonomist feminists have long stood in solidarity with sex workers and have organized for the decriminalization of sex work since the mid-1970’s—they were actively involved in and aligned with organizations such as C.O.Y.O.T.E., PROS, and the ECP, and also organized with sexworkers in broader campaigns around social reproductive justice and autonomy. Socialist organizers of the feminist strikes movement have centered sex worker rights and labor struggles in their political actions and platforms. In drawing connections between paid and unpaid reproductive labors of sex and care, as exploited forms of work, and forging solidarity between paid and unpaid reproductive workers, as well as workers across and between sex and care work economies, these coalitions have offered new understandings of work, labor struggles, and indeed feminist solidarity. 199 The global demand to recognize sex work as work, to decriminalize this work and grant it the same labor protections as other occupations, is not new. But the narratives of sex workers themselves are often drowned out by the pathologizing and victimizing frameworks of criminalization and the global ‘rescue industry’ (Smith and Mac 23-24). Even potential alliances are frequently clouded by the overdetermined legacies of the feminist sex wars—whose most vocal protagonists, as Carol Leigh has noted, rarely consulted sex workers themselves on the matter. As Molly Smith and Juno Mac discuss, sex workers become a “symbol” representing a stance in someone else’s struggle: “Stuck in the domain of sex and whether it is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ for women (and adamant that it could only be one or the other) it was all too easy for feminists to think of The Prostitute only in terms of what she represented to them” (24). This instrumentalized framing of sex work on the part of various political actors eclipses the experiences and struggles of sex workers themselves. Sex workers become stand-ins for cliched positions on political issues that pose a “simplified binary opposition” between e.g., “Happy Hookers” and “Exiled Women” (58). This further mystifies the structural conditions of criminalization and stigma (Grant, Playing the Whore 75-82) and their material effects on people’s lives (Playing the Whore 46). Dichotomies between trafficking victim in need of rescue vs empowered sex goddess who loves her work (and is thus not working at all) rarely reflect the complex and diverse perspectives of sex workers themselves. These weaponized cultural narratives also obscure the nature of this work itself—both its particularities as well as its commonalities with other labors and labor struggles. Leigh spoke these points when she coined the term ‘sex work’ in 1978—a term which explicitly “acknowledges the work we do rather than defines us by our status” (quoted in North). This push to see sex work as work, to gain rights and recognition as a labor 200 struggle, has led to a well-reasoned emphasis on the dimensions of this work that are legible and relatable to other workers. However, it is also distinct from waged labor, even in informal economies, in several key respects. As Melissa Gira Grant points out, “the stigma and violence faced by sex workers are far greater than sex work itself” (7). This is a crucial point. The criminalization of this work, its gendering and racialization, its often intimate and intensively corporeal nature, its stigmatization, the over-representation of undocumented people and trans people without access to formal labor markets, the fact that, like other reproductive labors, it is often relegated to private (or semi-private) spheres—legally and physically unprotected, hidden behind closed hotel room or car doors—all render sex workers structurally vulnerable. While assault by a client is of course one such danger, criminalization, police violence, secrecy, stigma, and lack of labor protections are the primary dangers that sex workers face. Struggling against these structural conditions has required far more than traditional workplace organizing. Indeed, the class and labor politics of sex work cannot be disentangled from its criminalization. As Grant points out, the decriminalization movement was initially focused not on labor rights but on the demand to end police violence (22). Patriarchal violence also converges with the state violence of criminalization, evinced in prolific anecdotal accounts attesting to harassment, rape, and sexual assault by police officers, and a widespread sentiment among sex workers that the police remain the greatest threat to their safety, and are not a trustworthy ally even in situations of immediate danger. Beyond its gendering—most clients are cis men, and sex workers are overwhelmingly cis women, trans women, and gay men— racialization, citizenship status, gender identity, and disability differentially condition workers’ experiences in the sex trade. Trans women, undocumented women, women of color, poor, and disabled sex workers are much more likely to be exposed to cycles of what Dean Spade terms 201 “administrative violence”—hyper-exposed to both intimate and state violence and harassment, incarceration, fines, evictions, and the loss of children.163 These moral, legal, and cultural forces converge into a formidable weapon of patriarchal and state violence.164 The structural dangers of criminalization are mutually reinforced by the normative order through which the figure of ‘The Prostitute’ becomes, in Federici’s words, the other “onto which men discharge their repressed violence” (“Why Sexuality is Work” 24). Grant argues that the criminalization that renders sex workers disposable and (legally and morally) punishable is, in fact, a key driver of male violence against women and gender non-conforming people more generally (239). In perhaps no other occupation is one’s person so reduced to one’s labors, or so morally condemned by them. Whether seen as depraved or as a victim, one is seen as this profession in a way that few intellectual or manual laborers could be. The moral and legal abjection of sex workers is a foundational tenet of rape culture. As Cassandra Troyan puts it, “The presumption that she is a whore is a metaphysical presumption: a presumption that underlies the system of reality in which she lives.” This presumption follows from, and justifies, the lie: “A whore cannot be raped, only used” (Freedom and Prostitution 33). If some women are whores by nature, it is a small step to assume they all are. And if you cannot rape someone defined as such, it is a small step to assume that virtually any autonomous sexuality on the part of a woman (whether in the form of desire or refusal) can, in Marlyn Frye’s 163 “In New York state…90% of prostitution-related arrests are of people of color. 1 Nationwide, 9 in 10 trans sex workers or trans people suspected of being sex workers report being harassed, attacked or assaulted by police.” Britta Love, in “Whores are Healers” https://www.petitmort.com/post/whores-are-healers 164 As Wilmette Brown notes, this serves a disciplinary function for women too: “part of the job of being a prostitute is to be used as a sign to other women of where the bottom is”—women who may be envious of her relative autonomy and ability to make money off of what so many otherwise do for free. An additional “part of the work of being a prostitute must also be living with not only the contempt but the envy of other women for having the little bit of money, the little bit of independence, they don’t have.” (“Money for Prostitutes is Money for Black Women”) 202 words, “be taken as proof that you wanted to be raped, and hence, of course, weren’t really raped at all” (“Oppression” 11). The instrumental role that criminalization and stigma play in reinforcing cultures of sexual violence and exploitation has been lost on many feminists. Early autonomist feminists were a notable exception—their early solidarity with sex workers and theoretical emphasis on sex work as a fundamental form of reproductive labor veered radically from the dogmas of both feminists and Marxists at the time and were formative in constituting the discourse and praxis around social reproduction more broadly. Wilmette Brown, Margaret Prescod, and the Black Women for Wages for Housework Campaign led many of these solidarity efforts and were instrumental in establishing P.R.O.S. in particular (Prescod “Introduction”). In doing so, they theorized and organized based on connections between sex worker struggles and other movements led by Black women, such as the welfare movement and tenants’ organizing, and drew connections as well between the criminalization of sex work and the exploitation of women’s reproductive labor more broadly. In a 1977 pamphlet entitled “Money for Prostitutes is Money for Black women,” Wilmette Brown announces BWfWfH’s endorsement of the national solidarity campaign: “AN ATTACK ON PROSTITUTES IS AN ATTACK ON ALL WOMEN.” She urges other Black women to do the same: “the struggles of prostitute women against police harassment on the streets, against fines and jails, against being declared ‘unfit mothers’ in the courts and having our children taken away… against not having any money to call our own, are struggles that we as Black women are forced to make” (1). She also points to the threat posed by sex workers’ relative freedom to racist and patriarchal institutions, and the disciplinary function of criminalization, which works against the autonomy not only of sex workers but of Black women, 203 indeed all women, by ensuring their reproductive labors remain free or cheap. Making connections between unpaid reproductive labor, the criminalized reproductive labor of sex workers, and the welfare struggles led by Black women is an empowering move for all, “as demanding money for our work becomes the rule, not the exception” (3). Chanelle Gallant’s recent words speak powerfully to these points: Sex workers control access to sexual labour and reproductive labour, and I think that one of the reasons sex workers face criminalization is because they disobey the cultural demand to provide free sexual, emotional, and reproductive labour. The penalization of sex workers is critical in the coercion of free sexual and reproductive labour from non-sex workers, which is why the punishment of sex workers is so visible. It provides this scare; a terrifying potential alternative should women refuse those terms and demand compensation or even recognition for sex as a form of labour (Quoted by Thot Scholar “99 Things to Know”). Federici also names connections between the stigmatization of paid sex work and the exploitation of unpaid sexual labors in “Why Sexuality is work,” as does James in “Hookers in the House of the Lord.”165 All these texts make clear that condemning or victimizing sex workers is an antifeminist move that directly hurts sex workers, and further naturalizes women’s unpaid sexual and emotional labors. For this reason, organizing alongside sex workers for decriminalization represents a major advancement for feminist struggle and solidarity. As Brown stated it in 1977: “when prostitutes win, all women win.” Sex work, like care work, is marked by contradictions that are structural and endemic to the social reproduction of an unjust world. Like the social reproductive contradictions of care, these too exceed the analysis of capital’s crisis conditions that Fraser, Federici, and others put 165 “The ECP has argued that there are many more financial considerations in our sexual relations than most of us are prepared to face or at least to articulate to others. This reluctance to admit the connection between sex and money in our own lives can express itself as a prejudice against prostitutes—whose job is to connect the two. This prejudice against the women who strip sex of some of its romantic mystique is then reinforced by their illegal status” (Sex, Race, and Class 111). 204 forward. Like care workers, sex workers must often develop a highly specialized, skilled, and hyper-attuned capacities of attention. These forms of attention are multi-modal: they are often intensely physical as well as emotionally and intellectually demanding. And, as with care work, one must adapt these honed capacities, in real time and seemingly without effort, to the specific desires and needs of the other person—both spoken and unspoken. Grant notes the affective nuance, the labor and skill, that goes into reading and mirroring the desires of a customer, yet also maintaining distance from one’s performance (86). This can be very difficult, and very emotionally and psychically taxing, work—especially when you figure in the deeply troubling and exacting taxonomies of body types and (often racialized) fetishes that dominate the aesthetic economy of the sex trade. The more successful one is at such fantasy fulfillment, the more one’s labor is disavowed as labor by clients. What Elizabeth Bernstein terms the “bounded authenticity”—“an authentic, yet bounded, interpersonal connection” —involved in various forms of commercialized sex work is deeply intimate, and it is also labor (“Sex Work for the Middle Classes” 1). Once again, this kind of intimacy shares many features of care work, in that it involves the capacity to attune to and reflect the desires and needs of the other, while seamlessly keeping one’s own hidden, often protected, from view.166 Cassandra Troyan and Maya Gonzales sardonically describe the skills employed by the Girlfriend who provides an ‘Experience’ for her client by “deploying her ‘inherent’ skills learned through a lifetime of compulsory heterosexuality” (“Heart of a Heartless World”). Like the reproductive labors of care, these fine-tuned skills and sensibilities are deeply 166 Elizabeth Buch discusses a similar phenomenon in how Maria Arellano, a home care worker who she interviews at length for her book, manages, in spite of poverty and brutal working conditions, to navigate the “moral demand for carers to set their own needs and feelings aside in order to sustain the lives of others.” Arrellano “used her emotional labor not only to please her clients, but to protect herself from their hollow concern. “You learn to swallow it, take care of it. Deal with it, give a little if you can. You don’t have to give a hundred percent, but you could show a hundred percent” (Inequalities of Aging 10-11) 205 affective and embodied. And, like caring labors, they can be coerced, extracted, and exploited— as well as mobilized in subversive and unpredictable ways.167 Sarah Ahmed provides a useful framework for conceptualizing the ambivalence characterizing such labors, as well as the affective elements of care and sex that exceed the category of labor. Emotions, for Ahmed, are not private or instinctual, but rather are essential components of social reproduction. Feelings “do not reside in subjects or objects but are produced as effects of [their] circulation.” At once social and material as well as deeply intimate, they constitute and express the very meaning and experience of the boundary of self and other, of a certain vision of ‘we’ and the role of the ‘I’ in relation to it. For Ahmed, “emotions work to shape the ‘surfaces ’of individual and collective bodies.” (Cultural Politics 1). They are at once the agent and the marker of corporeal boundaries and relational norms: “…it is through emotions, or how we respond to objects and others, that surfaces or boundaries are made: the ‘I’ and the ‘we’ are shaped by, and even take the shape of, contact with others” (10). Ahmed’s “cultural politics of emotion” provides a critique of their “psychologizing and privatization.” At the same time, she is also critical “of a model of social structure that neglects the emotional intensities, which allow such structures to be reified as forms of being” (12). Her analysis on the profound role of affect and embodiment in political life extends beyond the productive or reproductive labor of individuals: emotions shape and are shaped by social narratives, values, and norms in profound ways. Although her scope is broader—encompassing phenomena like political hate and fear, for example—her conception of emotions as a constitutive dimension of social institutions and structural violence brings the trans-personal yet 167 Given the ambivalence and contradiction of sex work as criminalized labor that can also provide relative autonomy, Grant describes her position as “sex ambivalent” rather than the binary terms of ‘sex positive’ or ‘sex negative.’ 206 deeply emotional dimensions of the care crisis into view, and the limits of a Marxist, laborbased, ethics in confronting it. Rosemary Hennessy’s concept of “affect-cultures” offers another powerful lens on the integral role that emotion, embodiment, and ethics play in the social reproduction of dominant and subversive cultures alike. Affect cultures, she contends, are “an integral part of the social relations and cultural forms through which needs are met… they permeate relationships and propel action. They also amplify perception and cognition and infuse knowledge” (Fires on the Border xviii). The concept emerges from Hennessy’s engagement with labor struggles in the Maquiladora factories on the US/Mexican border, and the intense affective transformations occurring through this organizing, largely led by women navigating fear and silencing as well as coming to collective voice and courage in confronting the extreme and imbricated violence of neoliberal exploitation, state repression, machista social norms, union complicity, and narcoterror. She defines affect culture as “the transmission of sensation and cognitive emotion through cultural practices.” Her inquiry is deeply ethical and emerged as she “came to realize that relatively little is known about the values that bind affect-culture to capital and that much is still to be learned about this dimension of social movement” (xiv, my emphasis). The materiality of affect culture is also foremost in her understanding, “and is inflected by the social relations through which needs are met and produced” (50). I concur with Hennessy that there is nothing immaterial about reproductive labors, or the values that bind affect-cultures to dominant and subversive social organizations alike.168 168 Immaterial labor, for Hardt and Negri, “creates immaterial products, such as knowledge, information, communication, a relationship, or an emotional response.” Affective labor, as opposed to immaterial intellectual or linguistic labor, “is labor that produces or manipulates affects such as a feeling of ease, well-being, satisfaction, excitement, or passion” (Multitude 108)—and forms the pinnacle of the “hierarchy of laboring forms” under postmodern, post-Fordist, ‘cognitive’ capitalism vehemently disagrees with this characterization: “‘immaterial” as a descriptor for caring and affective labor is a misnomer. Affects have a material force in that they are integral to 207 This concept of a collective affective culture emerging around socially and historically constituted needs enables a deeper understanding of how violent regimes of capital and state reproduce themselves in the minds and hearts of people, as well as the deep political and even spiritual formation and education that communities cultivate in their resistance to them.169 The labor struggles of sex workers and care workers are crucial, perhaps even definitive, of labor politics in our contemporary moment. But the material realities and lived experiences of these paradigmatic reproductive labors—whether paid or unpaid—are a crucial component of affectcultures and the cultural politics of emotion as well. As such, they irreducible to the ethics and politics of labor, or the class contradictions that Marxist feminists place at the heart of the care crisis. Questions of coercion and consent, for example, lie at the heart of sex worker politics, and present ethical and political challenges that, while fundamentally conditioned by economic imperatives, are not reducible to them. Advocate and theorist Thot Scholar offers a potent critique of how binaristic notions of choice and coercion in sex-work narratives continues to marginalize Black and low-income sex workers. Calling all sex work consensual or voluntary as a rule means that any negative interaction while sex working that is non-consensual will either be lumped into sex trafficking (which will probably involve state intervention and/or removal of or disregard for agency of the subject) or it will be written off as “stolen goods” or the perils of the job. This is a way that the language of “choice” is used against us. It becomes human social relations.” Moreover, “affects enter into exchange value as a component of domestic care that reproduces labor power for the market and does so for low wages or for free” (Fires 63). Federici also critiques this notion of the immateriality of reproductive labor. As an autonomist feminist in the same tradition of Hardt and Negri, she certainly has stakes in the debate. However, while she is correct about the intensity and complexity of reproductive labor, her situation of this labor as neither material nor immaterial, in the sense that it cannot be broken down and mechanized like other productive labors, is problematic for the same reasons that Held’s emphasis on the inadequacy of commodified caring labor: it reifies these labors and separates them from the social and material life she intends to critique and transform (“Reproduction of Labor Power” 16). 169 Apart from her concrete experiences organizing with Maquiladora workers, Hennessy cites many influences to her politically radical, queer and Historical Materialist understanding of affect culture, in contradistinction to more faddish academic flavors of affect theory: in particular she sites Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldua, Alexandra Kollontai, Wilhelm Reich, the Frankfurt School thinkers, as well as feminist practices of consciousness raising (3852). 208 more dangerous when you factor in rape culture and the politics of consent, and disingenuous when you factor in class. She goes on to explain that “consent is an ongoing process, and once you start saying things like ‘actual sex work is consensual’ you are wading into dangerous waters and running the risk of erasing a large demographic within the community” (“heauxthots”). These narratives are fundamentally structured by class and point to the need for labor protections. But dismantling the rape culture that makes consent such a fraught issue for sex workers—indeed for all people compelled to perform what Thot Scholar terms “erotic labor”—involves ethical and political critique and transformation in social reproductive relations that cannot be reduced to labor politics.170 Sex workers’ criminalized status, exclusion from labor protections and formal economies, and limited access to social services, have compelled them to rely on informal networks, forms of mutual aid, and knowledge sharing commons like “bad date lists” to survive. But these skills are not only negative. What Evie Vigil terms “whore wisdom” might also be understood as an instance of what Mattie Armstrong terms “insurgent social reproduction:” describing forms of sex worker autonomy, resilience, values, and community care. Vigil states, Sex workers already exist and work on the edges of capitalism. We come from and survive through resilient networks and lineages that have created shelter, infrastructure, and possibilities for our communities despite centuries of violence and criminalization. We are shape-shifters and we are care-givers. We are very familiar with the implications of sexual and cultural trauma on desire and empowered choice and voice. We experience and hold space for chronically repressed and complicated fantasies and we practice and negotiate dynamic consent on deep and…confrontational levels (“Beyond the Edge”). 170 See for example Alcoff, who argues that the “revolutionary social movement” represented by #metoo demands survivor centered approaches to epistemology, ethics, and politics. She calls for “new epistemologies of rape” rooted in the complexities of survivor’s own narratives, a “norming” of sexual practices attentive to the histories of antirape politics being used for racist and homophobic ends, as well as cultural transformation that enables new forms of sexual subjectivity and self-making and work against the structural inequalities and power relations that condition the possibility of something like enthusiastic consent. 209 The heightened sensibilities and resilient care webs that Vigil speaks of are often born of survival. They also hold invaluable teachings on how to care for each other outside the system and bring the life-affirming force of the erotic (Lorde) to embodied change. Sex worker advocate and political healer Britta Love speaks to these legacies in their article “Whores are Healers.” Their notion of healership does not reify sex workers or their agency in the binaristic terms that Smith and Mac, and Thot Scholar critique. Rather, their ethics of erotic labor points to an openended, emergent, and situated “reclamation” of power in relation to a community of other sex workers as well as “a refutation of a toxic, puritanical and patriarchal culture that denies the value and importance of pleasure, of sex, and of feminized labor” and “a celebration of the essential and valuable work we do.” The transformative ethics that Love outlines are not a romanticization of sex work nor an “appeal to respectability.” While founded on the material and social premise of labor rights—the notion that “the human and labor rights of sex workers are non-negotiable,” their ethical position is irreducible to Jaffe’s commitment to labor as a normative horizon or Federici’s ahistorical revolutionary commons. Rather, they build from this premise, outlining dimensions of this reproductive labor that exceed it. They state: When we see sex workers as healers, we move away from patriarchal understandings of sexuality and make more accessible the healing power of touch, intimacy, play and connection. We dissolve social shame imposed upon both sex workers and their clients.… We restore sex workers to their historical role as valuable space-holders and connectors and allow the healing capacity of sex work to be held more consciously and intentionally. We bridge the socially constructed dualisms of body and spirit, pleasure and healing, sacred and profane.… We open the doors to accessing the full power and potential of sex work, for sex workers and clients alike (including for sex workers and femmes to have more access as clients themselves) – and the full power and potential of sex for all (“Whores are Healers”). 210 Care and sex are both essential reproductive labors, and their mutual opposition and degradation is a foundational social, material, and normative premise of capitalism—and also of rape culture; the nuclear family form and the coercions of care and sex at its root; and the dehumanized othering of racialized, colonized, populations that Lugones terms the ‘modern/colonial gender system.’171 They are essential to the cultural reproduction of these violently normative ways of living, but also of living alternatives to them. Sex workers have long made such connections and shown that struggles for the decriminalization and labor rights of sex workers are connected to the projects of racial, gender, and economic justice. Legacies of sex-worker struggle are rooted in and call forth dimensions of psycho-social life and transformation—modes of healing, kinship, pleasure, commoning, and mutual aid—that have implications for how we understand social reproduction and its definitive contradictions and possibilities. In honing new sensibilities and affect-cultures, they present living critiques and alternatives at both institutional and intimate levels. To conceive of these qualitative transformations through the lens of labor is to flatten the ethical and political life of social reproduction—reducing it to the very categories that have excluded care and sex from the moral and political domain. For Love, labor rights are a basic and necessary premise and protection, but cannot encompass the longings, wisdom, skills, and desires—the “new and more possible meetings” (Lorde) that reproductive laborers have nurtured and made possible, even here and now. V. The Affective Labor Debates This section elaborates my argument against the over-extensions of labor into the specifically ethical dimensions of care and sex through an examination of the concept of affective labor. I 171 Thank you to Sandra Stephens for the insights on this concept and its relevance to my argument. 211 take Kathi Weeks and Johanna Oksala, respectively, as representatives of autonomist and socialist lineages of Marxist feminism. Both theorists turn to this concept as a way of elaborating on the specific harms of submitting intimate, caring, labors, to capitalist ends. While it does clarify certain dimensions of contemporary labor economies, the concept of affective labor should not be used as an occasion for yet another overextension of labor. My claim in this section is that, precisely insofar as it does clarify many of the exploitations and harms specific to reproduction, this concept also sheds light on ethical dimensions of care and sex that exceed the labor paradigm. While the concept of affect172 has been central to many recent academic debates, recent Marxist feminist debates on the topic center on the need to redress the omission of care and intimacy from prior theories of social reproduction—both in terms of its central role in reproducing capitalist sociality and desires, and in forging alternative models of social reproduction. This represents a crucial, and controversial, development in theories of social reproduction. Federici and Fraser, for example, both reject what we might term the ‘affective turn’ in feminist political theory. As I discussed above, Fraser does so to preserve the integrity of her structural, Marxist, analysis against the market moralism common to neoliberal refrains on the care crisis. Federici, for her part, contends that the concept of affective labor falsely divides the material and subjective dimensions of reproductive labor, and thus diminishes the latter’s 172 The concept of affect has many origins, some recent lineages include: critical engagements with New Left politics (Deleuze, and especially Guattari, Massumi); materialist feminist critiques of the social politics of latecapitalism (Hochschild, Berlant); psychology and attachment theory (Silvan), and the philosophical school of speculative realism (Puig de la Ballacasa). In each case, and from various historical and genealogical orientations, the term is a way to think of emotions beyond individual psychology—as constitutive elements of social, material, and cultural life that flow between and among individuals. The common experiences of “reading the room,” the feeling of things being “tense” etc. are ways of describing affect. Hennessy notes that the notions of affect so routinely dismissed by Leftist academics in particular were themselves mobilized as a critique of the “vacuity” of reigning political discourse. Whether and how it can stay true to this impulse remains an open question (Fires on the Border 37). 212 status as a feminist struggle concept (“The Reproduction of Labor Power” 9). Since affect represents only one component of reproductive labor, parsing these elements further mystifies this labor and limits alliances between reproductive workers. Weeks and Oksala, in contrast, insist on the centrality of affective labor to contemporary capitalist social reproduction, and point to the analytical and political gaps in Marxist feminist theories that fail to account for it. In doing so, they both rely heavily on Arlie Hochschild’s original theorization of emotional labor, presented in her 1983 masterpiece, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. In her research on flight attendants, Hochschild charts the commodification of emotions previously reserved for private intimate life, and the impact this has on service workers’ lived experiences of self and relation. Over time, the imperative to identify with a company image and indeed company feeling inevitably extends into a person’s experience of selfhood. Although she points to the subtle subversions used by workers to resist this subjectivization, her central aim is to chart the toll of the “deep acting,” “feeling management” and ultimately the “transmutation” that occurs when private emotional systems are subordinated to commercial use. Of course, the private labors of emotion are also harmful—Hochschild outlines, for example, the role of emotions in upholding gendered and racialized power structures, such as the requirement to enhance the status of others, the virtuosity of which, like housework, is measured by its invisibility. But she is most attentive to the uncharted tolls that commodification has on emotional life, and the forms of alienation specific to this labor. For Marx, famously, the industrial proletarian is alienated from his own labors, from other workers, from the product of his labors, and from his species being. But the estrangement of feelings is not limited to external relations and labors—it is not simply the upkeep of an outwardly facing, sunny, disposition 213 towards grinding, belligerent customers. For Hochschild, the commodification of emotion alienates the worker from her own self as well “…when deep and surface acting are forms of labor to be sold, and when private capacities for emotion and warmth are put to corporate uses, what happens to the way a person relates to her feelings or her face?” (89). The answer to this haunting question, she contends, is that this form of exploitation ultimately disrupts one’s sense of having a private self at all. Kathi Weeks situates Hochschild’s work, and the concept of affective labor, in terms of broader feminist attempts “to expand the category of labor to include more of its gendered forms.” Understanding how affective labor is “fundamental both to contemporary models of exploitation and to the possibility of their subversion” (“Life Within and Against Work” 233) has been crucial to advancing Marxist feminist thinking past the impasses of the domestic labor debates. While she notes Hochschild’s instrumental role in this feminist project, Weeks takes issue with the model of selfhood and agency that undergird her conception of alienated emotional labor. Hochschild points to the subjectivizing nature of this labor, and thus avoids romanticizing the private sphere of emotion management. But Weeks contends that her concept of alienation presupposes a private self, prior to its estrangement, and with it an ideal of a nonalienated, “unmanaged heart” (244, my emphasis)—a move that risks re-naturalizing the gendered logics dictating private life as the proper domain of feelings. Analogously, Weeks notes the early methodological and critical advancements put forth by autonomist theories of domestic labor.173 However, the framework posed by the domestic labor debates—the question, “[i]n short” of whether domestic labor was “properly inside or 173 While she critiques the WfH focus on domestic labor, Weeks draws upon and is situated within the autonomist theoretical lineage herself, and her critique of post-Fordist laboring practices also in many ways upholds Hardt and Negri’s concept of immaterial labor, and the merging of production and reproduction that it presupposes. 214 outside capitalist production” (235)—has not adapted well to post-Fordist transformations in laboring practices, nor to feminist politics. This is perhaps most evident in the omission of the affective dimensions of reproduction—the emotional dimensions of care, for example—from early concepts of reproductive labor, and thus from feminist critical intervention. In dichotomizing or conflating reproductive and productive labor, the various parties to these debates failed to grasp the gendered logics specific to affective and caring labor, and thus a crucial component of social reproduction and the politics of its transformation (236).174 Given these limitations, Weeks offers an expanded concept of social reproduction which includes, as Oksala puts it, all the “forms of social cooperation on which capitalist accumulation depends” (“Affective Labor” 287). This, she thinks, might open new vantages for immanent critique that resist the temptation to abstract subjectivity and labor from their material conditions and possibilities. Her position on affective labor, it follows, is meant to critique the increasingly harrowing ways that capital harnesses and exploits the affective, desirous, dimensions of lifemaking, and elaborate the antagonisms and forms of agency emerging on this contested terrain. Weeks’s position on affective labor is an extension and specification of her broader175 critique of the capitalist work ethic, and political call for strategically launching radical, antiwork demands through an immanent critique of the moralism and metaphysics of work. While she contends that life is increasingly mediated by post-Fordist work conditions, Weeks claims that we can also mobilize our living against its subjectivizing regimes. Continuing this line of thinking, we can assume that in the case of affective labor, organizing around such demands would involve qualitative shifts in our relationship to our lives and labors: as with work more 174 I agree with this assessment, both for autonomist strains of social reproduction theory and for socialist ones. Even such beloved slogans as “what they call love, we call unpaid work” find little development at the level of political practice and critique, especially in early theories. 175 She develops this critique primarily in The Problem with Work. 215 broadly, we should “insist that valuing it more highly and distributing it more equitably is not enough—the organization of unwaged reproductive labor and its relationship with waged work must be entirely rethought” (The Problem with Work 110). Applied to affective labor, such a situated and radical politics could involve, for example, an immanent feminist politics of desire—a collective, politicized subjectivity forged within and against the intensive demands and divisions of this labor. More than a struggle for valuing or re-distributing these labors, this affective politics of social reproduction would be a mobilizing of life against this regime of work and a “struggle for a different quality of experience” (“Life Within and Against Work” 347, my emphasis). Johanna Oksala also claims that affective labor is a necessary category and should be specified and elaborated by Marxist feminist analysis and practice. In particular, she claims that the forms of exploitation and commodification this concept describes have crucial normative stakes that must be clarified and attended to. The expanded reach and depths of commodification represented in global care chains, for example, demand feminist theories attentive to the differentiations between, and specificities of, the many and varied feminized labors that this category encompasses. Thus, rather than expanding the concept of social reproduction like Weeks does, she claims that these specifications of affective labor demand a more granular and specific approach. While she applauds Weeks’s poststructuralist approach to power and immanent critique, and supplementation of Marxist concepts with a Foucauldian “microphysics of power” (“Affective Labor” 281), she argues that “feminist politics needs theoretical distinctions within the category of affective labor that allow us to advance a normative—political and ethical—problematization of our current forms of work” (283). 216 Like Weeks, Oksala thus calls for developing the concept of affective—and specifically caring—labor, not through recourse to the separate spheres or reified labors of past feminist debates, but through immanent critique and political engagement. Prior categorizations are not up to the task: Marxist feminists must develop critical analysis adequate to the specific political economies of affective labors, as well as the intensive forms of exploitation and biopolitical regulation to which they are subjected. They must, for example, theoretically, politically, and ethically account for the material specificities involved in different kinds of affective labor: drawing analytical and normative distinctions, for example, between care work that is not commodified, care work that is commodified, and the productions of affects in persons and not in persons. This is where she finds points of contention with Weeks, who, by extending autonomist ideas about the productivity of reproductive labors and their capitalist subsumption to affective labors, Oksala contends, misses the ethical and political crux of the matter. Like Hardt and Negri’s amorphous and politically suspect notions176 of the ‘multitude’ and ‘immaterial’ labors, Weeks’s expanded politics of social reproduction obscures rather than clarifies the capitalist organization of life and labor. This is especially true in the case of affective labor, which “for ethical reasons lends itself poorly to commodification” (295). While Oksala does not explicitly align herself with SRT, her argument shares many of its assumptions—in particular, her stance on the non-productivity of many social reproductive and service economies, and argument that autonomist notions of immaterial labor fail to differentiate between different labors, and thus offer little traction for normative and political critique.177 Her 176 See note 167 above for Hardt and Negri’s definition of affective labor as it relates to these concepts, as well as Hennessy’s critique. 177 This is not an entirely fair characterization, as many autonomist feminists explicitly positioned themselves against the male workerist tradition, and are at least implicitly critical of Hardt and Negri, and especially the concept of immaterial labor—which Federici explicitly rejects as antifeminist. 217 critique of Weeks aligns with this position as well. On the one hand, Weeks’s concept of life— intended to expand social reproduction beyond the narrow frame of reproductive labor—results in the same amorphous, at once hyper- and de-politicized, revolutionary subjectivity that Hardt and Negri espoused. At the same time, like Ferguson, Arruzza, and others in the SRT tradition, Oksala claims that the autonomist position on capitalist subsumption reiterates the very productivist imaginary it intended to oppose—and views affective labor too as wholly mediated by the imperatives of capital. Thus, rather than a Foucauldian notion of productive power capable of accounting for many distinct discursive and institutional practices, Weeks’s notion of capitalistically mediated and socially productive affective labor—like the notion of the social factory itself—overextends the very logic of production she intends to interrogate, ironically leaving no outside, or only a pure outside, from which to launch critique (280, 287). This obscures the heterogenous and divergent normativities through which capitalism itself is socially organized and leaves little grounds for feminists to pose their own, alternative, values of “care, solidarity, and justice” (289). Care is at the center of Oksala’s critical and ethical perspective on affective labor. “While the feminist movement has had some success in socializing and ungendering reproduction, the biggest change by far in the conditions under which we reproduce has been the commodification and globalization of care work. The gendered nature of reproduction has not changed at all. Reproductive labor has only been redistributed to new female subjects—to poor, immigrant, and third-world women” (300). By merging these heterogenous labors into an undifferentiated notion of power or agency, the autonomists who first theorized the concept of affective labor have not helped to clarify this situation—and their feminist interlocutors, Weeks included, risk repeating these mistakes by advancing productivist notions of reproductive labor and an amorphous 218 conception of social reproduction more broadly. Feminist political projects and advocacy must instead find ways to interrupt the invisibilization and isolation of these heterogenous labors by rendering them visible and demanding respect for them. However, apart from rather open-ended calls for feminists to develop alternative values, make critical ethical distinctions around whether certain kinds of affective labor should be commodified at all, and organize to regulate markets accordingly, her own contributions to this project remain underdeveloped. While she does not explicitly critique the SRT tradition, or Oksala in particular, on these points as far as I am aware, we can extrapolate what Weeks might say in response to this critique from her broader work. As she does elsewhere, she would likely point to the limits of the socialist, and socialist feminist, political imaginary, and specifically its failure to incorporate the experiential and affective transformations that constitute a crucial historical legacy, and promise, of feminist politics. Discussing the feminist legacy of WfH, for example, she notes that “the feminists in the wages for housework movement rejected not only the capitalist but also the socialist remedies defended by other feminists at that time” (The Problem with Work 126). Rather than simply socializing reproduction, she claims, the autonomist feminist vision “mandates an interrogation of the basic structures and ethics that govern this work and the struggle for ways to make it, as it were, unproductive” (125). Like the socialist feminists who limit their political vision to economic reform, and indeed the socialist humanists who pose labor itself as a value178 (86), Oksala’s calls for the normative evaluation and market regulation of affective labors do not get to the qualitative transformation of values, indeed of psychosocial experience itself, that affective labor brings into view and indeed demands. In this light, the 178 Jaffe would be a primary example of this tradition. 219 normative assessments, and political interventions that she calls for run the risk of reifying the very social norms and relations Oksala intends to evaluate on feminist grounds. Some of these concerns play out in Oksala’s recent work on surrogacy, which provides a case study in the sorts of normative and theoretical distinctions she has in mind. The intensive, and specific, emotional, and bodily risks involved in physically gestating, and then relinquishing, a child, she claims, raise novel ethical and political problems, that ought not be subsumed under the Marxist notion of labor (“Feminism against Biocapitalism” 891). Surrogacy must rather be distinguished from labor—including commercial care and sex work—and subject to different ethical and political criteria. The difference between surrogacy and other affective and reproductive labors, and resultant need to treat it on a different normative and political register, hinges on her contention that surrogacy workers aren’t selling their labor but their bodies. Surrogacy, Oksala claims, is ruled by a logic of expropriation which she, unlike autonomist feminists, does not view on a continuum with exploitation, but, following Fraser, as sharply opposed to it. “Rather than being instances of gendered exploitation,” surrogacy—like the “prison labor, transnational sex trafficking, corporate land grabs, and foreclosures on predatory debt” that Fraser lists as contemporary examples—should instead “be viewed as gendered and racialized expropriation” (893). Given Oksala’s call for feminist analysis attentive to the intensive, embodied, and “capillary” function of power at play in various kinds of affective and caring labor, as well as her emphasis on making nuanced distinctions between them, it seems strange that she would choose to draw such a sharp line here. The problem deepens when we consider the content of Oksala’s normative stance itself, which she sums up as follows: “Feminists should” she claims, “demand not the institutionalization of surrogates’ status as care workers but rather the institutionalized 220 recognition that their status is significantly different from that of other care workers due to the specificity of their kinship tie to the child” (900). She specifies that she is calling on a denaturalized notion of kinship, which “emphasizes the everyday affective labor involved in forming and maintaining” these ties over genetic relations (898). But this is simply to restate the problem: why should biological reproduction constitute the line morally distinguishing surrogacy from the “everyday” affective and embodied labors of other reproductive labors? As a presumed example of the sorts of ethical distinctions and feminist political reforms Oksala has in mind, her discussion of surrogacy instead reveals its limits. By reiterating a moral hierarchy of biological reproduction over other affective and intimate labors, she fails to interrogate critically or ethically—indeed, appears to instantiate—the normative gendering of reproduction itself. This is not to contest Oksala’s claims about the ethical problems raised by surrogacy in its capitalist forms, or their irreducibility to the Marxist category of labor—this is, of course, precisely my point! But while I concur with her call for ethical differentiations within—and especially ethical demarcations from—the category of labor, I wonder about the deep connections between surrogacy and the reproductive labors of paid care work and sex work—as well as the racialized and neocolonial logics at play in who is compelled to perform them, and at what cost. Stripped of the normative baggage of biological reproduction, the elements of kinship that she describes seem to connect surrogacy to, rather than divide it from, commodified care and sex work.179 Care workers, for example, are also subject to intensive bodily coercions—at times physically confined in a closet-like room for years on end, subject to extreme regulation and surveillance, denied wages, and forced to comply with these things under threat of deportation. 179 It seems to me that surrogacy, like sex work, should be decriminalized, and, like care and sex work, should be granted the labor and citizenship protections historically denied it—though clearly such demands should come from surrogates themselves. Regardless, both politically and ethically, there seems to be as much uniting surrogates with other reproductive workers as dividing them. 221 Like surrogates, the deep and primary kinship bonds they form with the children they raise can be broken without warning. Even the extraction—the theft of affective and embodied life, and ultimately the disposability—that Oksala claims place surrogacy in an ethical class of its own, also characterize the laboring conditions of many care workers and sex workers. The ethical problems (e.g., the dangers to dignity and self-worth) as well as possibilities (e.g., the new forms of kinship) that Oksala claims set surrogacy apart, should rather be conceived in their kinship with the labors of care and sex—which of course does not mean denying the differences between them. This is the most crucial point for my own argument: namely, that the ethical dimensions of intimacy and embodiment—indeed kinship—that Oksala claims are unique to surrogacy also unite it with care and sex. Weeks on the other hand does point to the intimate “structures and ethics” that govern affective labor as crucial sites of political antagonism, and their qualitative transformation as a condition of genuine political change. She claims that this requires a multi-pronged approach: “Feminist antiwork critique would need to accomplish several things at once: to recognize unwaged domestic work as socially necessary labor, contest its inequitable distribution (the fact that gender, race, class, and nation affects who does more or less), and, at the same time, insist that valuing it more highly and distributing it more equitably is not enough—the organization of unwaged reproductive labor and its relationship with waged work must be entirely rethought” (The Problem With Work 110).180 As Federici points out, the question of how to do this—how, in other words, “to construct a feminist agenda and a feminist struggle that in the words of a contemporary feminist slogan ‘places life at the center’” remains an open question. (“Social Reproduction Theory” 57). 180 I am not aware of Weeks position on surrogacy, but Sophie Lewis relies on her work in making their family abolitionist argument for universal surrogacy, which assumes that surrogacy is a kind of work (Lewis). 222 However, despite her call to center and engage these caring dimensions of social reproduction, Weeks still frames the problem as one of anti-work. Like Federici’s own ethics, this forecloses rather than enriches this open ethical terrain. This cannot bring into view the kinds of ethical transformation beyond work—e.g., the family abolition or the transformations of social reproductive relations beyond wages and distribution—that she herself calls for. Like Jaffe’s socialist humanist work ethic, her anti-work ethic still conceives both the violence and the liberation of life-making primarily in terms of labor—or, what amounts to the same thing—its refusal. VI. Conclusion: The Erotics of Life-Making Care as an ethical norm becomes contradictory when it is abstracted from the social and material inequities at the heart of so many caring relations. The inverse, however, is true of a social reproduction politics devoid of an ethics of care. To reduce social reproduction to a Marxist idea of human ‘productive activity’ is not only to bypass the intimate caring and erotic dimensions of life-making and cultural reproduction that are unique and particular to it, but also the specific contradictions and possibilities that make political struggle on this terrain both meaningful and necessary. Feminists have recently sought to redress these omissions with the concept of affective labor, calling attention to the integral role of emotional and embodied labors in sustaining the moral and political economies of social reproduction. But re-inscribing the affective and embodied dimensions of care and sex—and the specific ethical problems and possibilities they raise—into the labor lens has led to further impasses in feminist imaginaries and practice. This is no surprise, given that the practical value of labor, like any moral or political concept, is defined by its limited scope. As I discussed above, labor is an essential and necessary touchstone for the 223 care workers and sex workers demanding that their work be recognized as such—and valued and protected accordingly. However, this does not mean that the value, and politics, of reproduction should be contained by this concept. The lens of social reproduction shows that the devaluation, exploitation, and extraction of care is structural to capitalist social life, and to the white supremacist, cisheteropatriarchal, colonial, and ableist violence from which it is inextricable. With its structural disavowal of the caring and erotic labors upon which it depends, the ‘life’ of capital is ruled by social death—cut off at the root by the very social forms and institutions needed to survive. This basic contradiction—between capitalist accumulation and dispossession on the one hand and the reproduction of life on the other—has been well named and theorized by Marxist feminists for decades. But the crisis of capital is just one crucial vantage on the multiple, interlocking, and escalating crises of our times. Climate catastrophe; political reaction; a colonially inflected migration crisis; escalating and state sanctioned racism, transphobia, and misogyny; mental health crises; mass incarceration; food and housing insecurity, and preventable deaths of disease and despair of epidemic proportions—to name only some—render the political, moral—indeed spiritual—questions of reproduction, and care, trenchant and complex. To return to Cornell and Seely’s provocation with which I began this chapter, we might ask what it means to care in ways more amenable to collective survival and freedom—to reclaim and transform the fundamental elements of social life and relationship, given these structural crisis conditions. Renewed visions for labor and class politics are part of the equation. But staying true to the coalitional and transformative visions of autonomist and socialist feminism requires acknowledging dimensions of oppression and struggle on the terrain of social reproduction that exceed Marxist political paradigms—that require acknowledging the autonomy 224 and irreducible diversity of liberation traditions. If there is a unified perspective on these diverse experiences, it will not be given in the logics of oppression or exploitation that divide us, but in the militant, and ethical, care needed to hold ourselves and each other through the present and coming crises—and to “unite and empower” (Lorde) our disparate strands of resistance on the side of life and struggle. My argument about the irreducibility of care, and thus social reproduction, to labor is not only negative. I also hope to gesture towards a shared horizon of struggle that Zapatista women have termed a struggle for life itself. A radically caring ethics, in this sense, might also be conceived as an erotics of life-making—not in the narrow limits of the dominant imaginary, but as a life-generating power to discern what matters, and what it means to live in accordance with it. Audre Lorde teaches us that, like care, the erotic must be felt, and shared, to be truly known. By aligning our living and relations with life, we become less tolerant of the violent conditions of our world, and more capable of undergoing the transformations required of us if we are to relate in new ways. Thus, the continental, indeed global, tide unleashed with the collective call of ‘Ni Una Menos’ in 2017 was indeed an act of refusal—a resounding and militant NO to a social system that rendered femicide not only possible but normative. But the “terrestrial, deep, ancient energy” unleashed through this collective refusal (Gutierrez,) was also one of care and desire: “vivas nos queremos,” and “nos mueve el deseo”—“we want ourselves alive” and “we are moved by desire”—were slogans that rang through plazas and around the world. The revolution, they said, was a sensible one: as Lorde attests, the desire to dominate, the will to use another, cannot survive such a radical shift in perception, in feeling and relation (59). Such revolutionary, and collective, shifts in corporeal and affective life are a crucial condition and horizon of struggle on the terrain of social reproduction. 225 According to the feminist collective Precarias a la Deriva,181 the care crisis is attendant upon disarticulating, and thus attenuating, human affective and intimate bonds. “Sex, care, and attention,” as bifurcated and dichotomized logics, are not given and natural “pre-existing objects, but rather historically determined social stratifications of affect, traditionally assigned to women” (“Very Careful Strike” 34). This “stratification,” they claim, “materializes” in a “chain” or “continuum” of sex-attention-care that “counterposes sex and care,” “disincarnates affective communication,” creates “new modalities of the sexual contract” and continues to “assign the tasks linked to this chain to women, but introducing new stratifications among them, linked, above all, to race/ethnicity and country of origin” (“Four Hypotheses” 1). These divisions and roles are subjectivizing and alter not only the form but the quality of human relationships. Naming the crisis as such is thus crucial to “a social transformation that would ally care with desire in a more just manner for each and all” (“Very Careful Strike” 37). We must see that care is at the heart of current political economy, but in order to claim its “transformative force” and “revolutionary potential” (42), we must also re-constellate the continuum of care-attention-desire through “new, more liberatory and cooperative forms of affect that place care at the center [of life] but without separating it from sex or communication” (“Four Hypotheses” 4). Re-valorizing and enhancing the “affective virtuosity” and “collective and corporeal knowledge” (“Very Careful Strike” 41) of care is necessary to tapping its “politically radical potential”—and a necessary component of genuine ethical and political change on the terrain of social reproduction. 181 Precarias a la Deriva, was a collective of precarious feminized and migrant workers coalescing in Spain in the early 2000s, whose militant research on both social reproduction and affective politics has been influential in the Latin American traditions of social reproduction politics I briefly discuss in my conclusion. Weeks cites them as an example of feminist work on care that “seeks to conceive care as a social phenomenon rather than an individual attribute, and to imagine the logic of care as an immanent ethical practice as opposed to moral imperative” (The Problem with Work, Chapter One, footnote 19). 226 Of course, to call for transformation on this level is to invite a host of new problems. How would it even be possible, we might ask, to collectively value such “affective virtuosity” when its systemic devaluation lies at the root of the social and material world as we know it? Or to generate political formations which draw out and re-sensitize this “ethical element that mediates every relation,” and whose “essential creative character is constitutive of life and the part of labor… that cannot be codified?” How do we re-constitute this ethical ground of care that “creates relationships” and that thus “opens the terrain of the thinkable and livable” as such? (40). It seems that the only way beyond the contradictions opened by these questions is through. But this riddled terrain is also the ground of an “old truth”182—with care too, to radically alter the structural conditions of our lives, we must equally embody “the revolutionary transformations, both psychic and ethical, that are demanded of us” (Cornell and Seely 17). 182 “The sexual crisis cannot be solved unless there is a radical reform of the human psyche, and unless man’s potential for loving is increased. And a basic transformation of the socio-economic relationships along communist lines is, essential if the psyche is to be re-formed. This is an “old truth” but there is no other way out.” (Kollontai 241). 227 Conclusion: Holding Contradiction 228 I. Opacity and Caring After This conclusion briefly addresses developments in radical care coming out of i.) the recent wave of militant feminist social reproduction theory and organizing practice in Latin America and ii.) police and prison abolitionism and practices of transformative justice and community accountability in the US, which were massively popularized during the historical BLM uprisings.183 I frame this discussion with the concepts of aftercare and opacity—two concepts that mark the temporal beginning and end of this writing, respectively, and were each presented to me by intimate collaborators whose attuned and generative reflection guided me through crucial junctures, revealed openings and limitations, and supported shifts in perspective that would otherwise remain foreclosed. I hope the container these concepts provide will lend some concretion to the transformations in care that I only gesture towards below. For Hil Malatino, aftercare is care that is necessary “to heal from transformative physical and emotional experiences.” In this sense, “[t]here are two linked definitions of aftercare… It is what needs to be provided in order to help a subject heal in the wake of massive upheaval and transformation, and it is what facilitates and supports emergence into a radically recalibrated experience of both bodymind and the world it encounters” (Trans Care 3). Used in the context of social and medical transitions of various sorts as well as BDSM play, aftercare describes a deep ontological and ethical tending that facilitates shifts in one’s reality or perception. In his own work, Malatino presents trans care as both a response and a prefiguration, an attention to both rupture and possibility particularly calibrated to the urgency of the present. His choice to begin his book on with this concept of an “after,” in this sense, seems to me a potent methodological 183 I intended to engage with these traditions at much greater length and depth in this dissertation, in addition to the counternormative ethical education being developed at the Institute for the Study of Somatic Sex Education, which I have also been part of developing for the past five years. 229 move, exemplifying the spiraling recursivity, the ruptures and repairs, of living and caring otherwise. “Care praxis is always within and beyond; forever prefigurative” (70): hence, the need for aftercare as an ongoing ethico-political response. Malatino’s definition of aftercare points to multiple registers of care—as a situated and embodied response, as a transformational praxis, as an active refusal of care as a given, a priori, norm or practice—without reducing or conflating them. But even this is not without dangers: care, like gender, is embodied and performed within a matrix of recognition and response that can harm as much as it can heal. Indeed, “trans care can all too easily reproduce hierarchies of attention, aid, and deservingness.” This means that “[a]ny care praxis worth enacting must be attentive to such tendencies to reproduce injustice. This applies to forms of emotional support just as much as it does to forms of financial support” (69). The how of this ongoing attention to injustice lies at the heart of his book and is a question it leaves open. Several years ago, my friend and collaborator Angelica Stathopoulos and I began a written correspondence on ethics and the erotic. A carefully orchestrated exchange of letters, we thought, might provide the opportunity to express dimensions of our work we were struggling to articulate through more direct and combative modes of address. The concept of aftercare became a touchstone for our dialogue. After several rounds of exchanging letters, Angelica writes: “We talked about it once before, and it has again been haunting me since your last letter: aftercare, or as you so perfectly put it: the caring after…The space you address me from as burdened by the contradiction you talk about, of things you don’t want to hold, and things that hold you.” Like Malatino, Angelica presents aftercare as a calibrated responsiveness to an acute experience of undoing, contradiction, even “decreation,” on the part of the lover, comrade, or friend—it is a “solace, a groundedness, a putting-back-together that we need after the rupture.” Cultivating a 230 ritual container of care can bring presence to patterns of trauma and transmute shame. Such caring always comes after, tending to the wounded attachments and unwanted desires that haunt our relating even as it remains beholden to and bound within them, holding open the possibility of healing and transformation. In our letters, Angelica and I were attempting to articulate a language and practice of radical relationship—something we each felt was necessary for the work we were doing but found to be incredibly difficult to realize. Through the acute attention of our writing and witnessing, something did begin to emerge. “When I read you,” they write in the same letter, “I feel as if you tell-me-from-the-inside. You capture something about me that isn't yet known to me. What my work is.” And, they continue, “If I could tell you something about your work, it would be about the caring after. Aftercare as an example of care that manifests the contradiction within care itself.” Reading Angelica’s letters also felt like encountering a close and secret truth—like they were speaking things inside of me I didn’t think I knew. They told me what my work is by showing me the caring after that is possible. Our letters ended. But, we realized, for a moment we found a relational method to bring voice to what we most needed, and wanted, to say. Learning to care radically in a violent world may be a kind of caring after—a continual caring in the wake of the wounds and contradictions within care itself that as such offers no guarantee of repair. But even in its inevitable failure, such caring can provide an opening and a ground for transformation. Because of course, aftercare is a kinky concept too. It equally holds us in the aftermath of our own ambivalent desires, secret humiliations, and deepest longings emergent and revealed through intense intimacy. It processes these things, allows them to breath in us, allows us to live in and with them with more choice, voice, and presence. As I wrote to 231 Angelica: “I think aftercare is the praxis, how we distinguish healing from re-traumatization.” Aftercare opens us to the wild possibility of play, to the secret chambers of our imaginary domain. And this opening of vulnerability, this willingness to be opened and shared, is equally what awakens the sensibilities capable of responding to these things. This space of rupture and repair, this bringing into play and tending to unknown fears and sometimes-crushing truths at the root of our being, is also the opening of desire, of pleasure, of change. As in the care webs Malatino describes, the weaving and reweaving of care also prefigures a beyond. But how do we learn to hold these contradictions, this deepest fear and deepest longing, which Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha so perfectly terms “the ghost of the need for care” (Care Work 33). How do we learn the difference between care that harms and care that heals, or to stay present to both the non-transparency of our own care, our own desire, and the radical alterity of the other? How do those who have never been held, who have been held down, who have held far too much, learn to hold and transmute these contradictions, or chart new, less traumatic paths through them? These questions lead to opacity—the opacity of our own care, the opacity of those we care for—which is the second concept framing this conclusion. It too became salient through the welcome observations of a close friend and collaborator, Sandra Stephens. Another dear friend and collaborator Ciclón Olivares, Sandra, and I had plans to spend the weekend together in the immediate aftermath of the life-changing good news of my soon-to-be employment. I was, however, nervous (to put it kindly) about the new, much condensed timeline for submitting this dissertation. Suddenly, shockingly, the fatal flaws of my argument were flashing up in searing relief, the finality of this deadline and unspeakably high stakes for my life crystallizing its contradictions like a dialectical image. Thankfully, Sandra and other calmly dispositioned friends 232 talked me down from this ledge. As I was leaving her home, she sent me off with Glissant’s Poetics of Relation, along with some wisdom imparted at her own defense. “What about the remainder?” a mentor had asked her, and she now asked me—reminding me of a point she had been making over the course of several years. Namely, that if my argument about the contradictions of care holds, then repeating them, instantiating them, and being unaware of doing so will be an unavoidable danger of my writing. How could I expect to be free from the reality at the heart of my own theory? Better to do as I say and become present to the gravity of this nontransparency of care with as much grace as possible. As Sandra taught me, Glissant places opacity is the condition of relation—and thus of ethical and political modes beyond the logics of dominance. The opaque, he claims, “is that which cannot be reduced, which is the most perennial guarantee of participation and confluence” (191). Yet I have also pointed to an opacity of care that is rooted in and fosters unequal power relations—on display, for example, in the chronic insensibility to care evident in those with the most guaranteed access to it—those “whose importance to society is everywhere recognized and made explicit by that society, whose importance and care dominates that society at the expense of everyone else,” as Joanna Hedva puts it (“Sick Woman Theory” 10). This insensibility is itself often weaponized—a socially-sanctioned entitlement shielding those so-guaranteed from the coercions and expropriations of care they engender.184 These two forms of opacity appear to be inversely related. On the one hand, Glissant’s non-subsumable opacity of relating through alterity, which he claims would constitute a “real foundation of Relation, in freedoms” (190). On the other, the opacity of one-sided, coercive care 184 At multiple points I give examples of the tragic contradictions that can become embodied in people’s nontransparent care—for example, in the case of someone surviving intimate partner violence who at least sometimes may cut themselves off from the abusive power imbalances they consistently navigate. 233 (willfully?) frozen in the shape of entitlement, closed off to the disproportionate attunement of others, and the ‘entitled’s’ own underdeveloped ability to notice and respond to their needs. Indeed, Glissant points to similar cynical uses of the norm of transparency, which—like the standard of deservingness the entitled person uses to rationalize their privilege and responsibilize and negatively judge others—is frequently called upon to justify and conceal relational imbalances. (189-190).185 If opacity—in the form of the non-reducibility of the other—is the condition of care, then we must also recognize this cynical opacity so often justified and maintained through ideals of relational transparency.186 We must learn to recognize this opacity of care in ourselves and in the institutions and social forms structuring our world, as failure to do so reduces the opacity of the other and forecloses possibilities of caring otherwise. What, then, are the forms of caring after through which we might learn to know and to navigate the difference between these opacities, and thus lay the “foundation of Relation,” which, Glissant claims, is the true horizon of freedom? II. For the Remainder: Or a Promissory Note in the Key of Feminist Economics As I outlined in my Introduction, I understand radical care in both a critical and a generative sense. My original intention was to highlight three local and specific instances of radical care, as a way of more fully elaborating on the expansive and generative possibilities of caring praxis that I pointed to in more limited ways throughout this dissertation (in my discussion of Woodly’s Radical Black Feminist Pragmatism and the politics of care in BLM, sex 185 “If we examine the process of “understanding” people and ideas from the perspective of Western thought, we discover that its basis is this condition of transparency. In order to understand and thus accept you, I have to measure your solidity with the ideal scale providing me with the ground to make comparisons and, perhaps, judgments. I have to reduce.” 186 I made a similar point in my critique of the transference of “engrossment” in Chapter 2. 234 worker practices of mutual-aid and community care, Black radical mothering, kinship structures, and practices of insurgent care, migrant support networks, and autonomist and socialist feminist coalition building, for example). What follows are sketches of the first two: militant feminist social reproduction theory coming out of Latin American autonomist traditions on the one hand, and practices of transformative justice developed through abolitionist organizing, woman of color anti-violence work, disability justice, youth work, healing justice, mad pride, and other radical social movement spaces in the US over the last 20 years on the other. I wholly removed the many (and exciting) pages I drafted on embodied and counternormative ethics in the queer, trans, and sex-worker led radical healing modality of Somatic Sex Education. All three show that radical, intimate, and structural transformations in caring relations are not only possible, but actual. They provide living examples of organizing praxis centered in the knowledge that care is what holds the world together and is therefore the foundation on which we can build it anew. I am committed to following through on these initial thoughts in both theory and practice. II a. Caring Commons and Luchas en Defensa de la Vida In a potent outpouring of incredibly important, largely untranslated writings, militant feminist theorists and organizers in Latin America—many of whom have been integral to the massive and transformational wave of feminist movements spreading across Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Mexico, Uruguay and elsewhere, and have inspired and led a moment of true feminist internationalism that, while brief, opened radical new horizons for the ethics and politics of social reproduction— have been shifting understandings about social reproduction in ways that are incredibly generative for this project. Rather than idealize or fetishize forms of collective care and survival or re-inscribe the politics of care in dominant modes, they claim we must begin from the caring dimensions of reproduction in their lived and embodied contradictions and possibilities. 235 Centering indigenous and autonomist conceptions of ‘life-making’ and ‘caring commons’ rather than labor as the horizon and terrain of social reproductive struggles, thinkers like Cristina Vega Solís, Susana Draper, Verónica Gago, and Raquel Gutiérrez orient their analysis to multiple and intersecting axes of social struggle and injustice. As such, they show how radical politics of care and social reproduction essentially involve transforming caring capacities and practices in and through movement building and autonomous organization. The framework of care and social reproduction outlined in the recent work of Cristina Vega Solís, Raquel Martinez Buján and Myriam Paredes Chauca’s edited volume Cuidado, comunidad y común: Experiencias cooperativas en el sostenimento de la vida is exemplary of such generative developments in the politics and theory of social reproduction, as well as in the politics, and ethics, of radical care. The book addresses the relation between care and social reproduction that, as I have mentioned, is under-theorized in other formations. Central to this project is locating struggles around community care in what the editors term “struggles in defense of life.” They claim that closely attending to the relation between care and reproduction, particularly in relation to collective care and practices of commoning and life-making, is essential to political understanding and formation around social reproduction. I want to draw out several general components of care in relation to social reproduction that the authors of this volume illuminate. First: we must begin from the caring dimensions of reproduction in their lived and embodied contradictions rather than idealize or fetishize forms of collective care and survival (23). For Veronica Gago, for example, it is not enough to idealize care and community care as either exploited or autonomous forms: rather, caring practices constitute ambiguous and contested political fields (campos).187 187 She discusses the infrastructures of care in migrant communities in this regard, as both sites of struggle and reclamation and of capitalist extraction. See Valiavicharska’s (2020) beautiful article “Social Reproduction in the 236 Second: formulating a theory “in which the reproductive question of care plays a key political role” (Gago 75, my translation) requires attending to the structural racialized and gender divides reproduced in caring practices and relations, but also, and as such, to care’s affective components and the ambiguities of subjectivity involved in reproducing these divides, as well as overcoming them (23). It is crucial, in this regard, to attend to people’s lived experiences of diversity. Indeed, this introduction of ambiguity and contradiction at both structural and intimate levels allows Gago and others in this tradition to engage in much more specific ways with the kinds of ambiguities Hennessy points to with her notion of affect cultures. In a move that is deeply influenced by Federici’s thinking, but moves beyond impasses burdening it, Gago counters the binary divisions that tend to pose (good) “autonomous” against (bad) “exploited” communities. Rather, she claims that community care and communal life are highly ambivalent. Centering various forms of life-making as well as caring infrastructures (e.g., migrant networks), she points to the struggles and contestations that become salient in different ways in different places and temporalities of social reproduction. At the same time, such nuanced and specific attention to struggle and transformation on the terrain of social reproduction allows for paradigmatic shifts in classic political economic theory and organizing praxis. The perspective of “feminist economics” offers an alternative, rooted in forms of feminist organizational praxis, which have emerged from but also radically altered the landscape of various interconnected loci of crisis. Through militant research and genealogy rooted in such “bodies and territories in struggle” Gago and Cavallero (2020) claim Making: Recentering the Margins, Expanding the Directions,” in which she discusses the social reproduction of migrant communities facing brutal immigration policies. Valiavicharska argues that the constant threat of deportation and attacks on their means of survival is a condition for funneling migrants into regimes of extreme exploitation and draws attention to the importance of learning from the “insurgent forms of social reproduction” (to adopt Amanda Armstrong’s phrase) that can be found in these communities’ modalities of survival, collective care and physical and emotional support. 237 that this alternative economics “is able to redefine labor and exploitation, communal and feminized modes of doing and resisting, and popular innovation in moments of crisis” (“10 Theses” 1). Finally, attending to care and life-making “from the most precarious positions” 188 obligates a transformative perspective on the conjuncture, and a transformative ethics (Gutiérrez, Cuidados 16). According to Susana Draper, for example, we must go beyond “simply recognizing and valorizing care” to “ask how to transform caring practices culturally and systemically” (“Tejer Cuidados” 174). A politics of care involves more than rendering necessary services and publicizing the privatized domain of care (174). It also calls for disarticulating care from modes of domination and “imagining alternative forms of institutionality and social relations,” (174). Draper is clear in pointing to the deep and crucial question of how to educate ourselves and our communities in such qualitative and transformational dimensions of care, as well as how difficult it is to translate such efforts to institutional or state levels. These open questions are at the heart of Gutiérrez’s notion of political organization and intimate struggle as well. Her theory of transformative and radical care does not begin with a normative or general concept of ethics, or of care. Nor does it naturalize or idealize the labors of care and reproduction (Gutiérrez). What Gago terms “cuidados como campo de disputa” (care as a contested field) (Cuidados 76, 86) can also be understood in term of Gutiérrez’s claim that such disputes are reproduced within the reproduction of life, and especially from the most precarious and threatened margins. And, similarly to Draper, Gutiérrez asks how we can shift our consciousness, affects, and experiences to facilitate the “communal strategies capable of effecting concrete transformations in the form of reproducing care” while at the same time 188 “desde los lugares más precarios” 238 organizing to center such contested fields of care—and their transformation—as a condition of life, and new forms of politics and ethical relation. As with Draper, she wants to protect the generative power and creativity involved in the direct politicization of social reproduction from state-centric politics—to resist their naturalization and subsumption into demands for state services for example, while also finding new ways of forming coalition with those who are organizing at those levels. Cultivating such forms of radical communal care is a non-generalizable, ongoing process which feminists in this tradition—following Zapatista women—call “luchas en defensa de la vida” and others call a politics of life-making.189 Such practices of care are ethical and political in that they seek to subvert, reclaim, and transform social reproduction according to the desires and possibilities of what Fred Moten and Stephano Harney terms the ‘under-commons.’ Rather than assume a transhistorical commons, such forms of insurgent social reproduction embody outlaw ethics (Caffyn Jesse) which strive, in common and with love, to look askance at domination and evade its encircling logics (Moten and Harney)—to thus instantiate living and transformative visions of justice and constitute new practices and relations of care.190 In this emergent and coalescing field of militant feminist social reproduction it is lifemaking not labor that constitutes the terrain and horizon for new forms of ethics and politics of 189 See e.g. Gutiérrez 2017, 2018; Gago 2020, Hennessy 2020, Ferguson 2020. A few examples of the movements and practices discussed by those in this tradition are: the assemblies and organizing practices that led up to and made possible the International Feminist Strikes Movement; migrant movement politics in Argentina, indigenous organizing in Bolivia, which Gutierrez discussies in terms of the tension between the practices of "pachakuti” (which "refers to the subversion and transformation of social relations” in Andean indigenous language) central to the uprisings of the early 2000s, and through which Evo Morales came to power, and the turn to state-centric politics that also emerged through these struggles; the popular economies dating from the 2001 crisis and the piqueteros movement (a number of these organizers were first politicized through this movement, and were also involved in developing the militant research methods of Colectivo Situationes which are a crucial president to many of their theoretical positions); the autonomist indigenous politics of the Zapatistas; and feminist anti-carceral approaches emerging out of collectives of imprisoned women and their supporters in both the US and Latin America (Gago). 190 239 care. Moreover, these theories depart from those discussed above insofar as their orientation to struggle and transformation is attentive to these intimate and embodied dimensions of life, as well as the structural contradictions and economic-distributive or overgeneralized notions of commoning that has characterized so many feminist debates on social reproduction transformations. Indeed, Federici—who’s work in many ways is itself part of this tradition—has pointed out that such emergent forms of caring must be experienced from within. This is like care ethicists’ claims, which I have discussed at multiple points throughout this dissertation. However, Federici, Gago, Gutiérrez, and Draper all claim that these transformations in care are a contested field of struggle rather than guided by a given norm. What Gutiérrez terms the “interior horizon of struggle” (Horiontes) synthesizes many of these points. The idea of an interior horizon of struggle is itself fascinating, shifting the inner/outer, personal/political, domestic/economic divides that would always put the horizon outside and beyond, and would rarely position ‘inner’ as something that applies to collectives as well as individuals, as Gutiérrez concept does. She elaborates that this concept “refers to the most intimate contents of struggles” (51). And, utterly crucial for the constellations I am marking between these feminists’ work on care and my own, is the fact that these intimate yet collective contents of struggle are themselves fraught with contradictions, and are wholly imbricated in social transformation, in the constitution of alternate forms of subjectivity and relation. The interior horizon—as Cornell’s notion of the imaginary domain does for individual feminists but also feminist struggle191—holds, contains, outlines, guards, the “deepest aspirations of struggle.” And, like the imaginary domain, it includes the symbolic, affective, embodied elements of 191 For Cornell, the imaginary domain as a psychic/affective space safeguards the possibility of freedom and is also the terrain of its elaboration. In this sense, she claims that ethical feminism concerns the possibility of autonomous and liberated sexuality and desire, as well as the limits of theoretical reason in determining them (The Imaginary Domain). 240 intimate, individual, and collective experience. It thus provides the kind of intimate, transformative, and materialist perspectives I have been calling for throughout this dissertation: naming both the depth of the problem, as well as the scope of transformations, at stake in the ethics and politics of care and social reproduction. These intimate and contested zones of struggle and life-making are, she claims, “where old morals and politics are falling apart” and where new ones are constituted (85). Like the affect cultures which Hennessy claims “can nurture life or abuse and destroy it,” the interior horizon, and the intimate dimensions that constitute its proper domain, are a crucial location for the reproduction of violence and also for the individual and collective desires, joys, pleasures, meaning that guide, motivate, and empower social movements as well as the intimate political and ethical transformations that Gutiérrez and others call the caring commons. Both this violence, and this liberation, Gutiérrez claims, are crucial parts of social reproduction, too. The interior horizon is “grounded in the reproduction of collective life” and is also that most meaningful and potent “hinge of hopes and practices of transformation” (Horizontes 59). Like the communal care of which it is an essential and irreducible part, this horizon of collective longing and desire, and this process of cultivating new intimacies— “new blueprints of expectation and response” (Sister Outsider 123) as Lorde says—is how we are forged as subjects who belong to our communities of struggle and healing, to each other, to ourselves, to life itself. Only by including these material, social, ethical, and intimate dimensions can care be radically ethical or radically political in the deepest and most expansive sense. II b. Transformative Justice: Abolitionist Alternatives for Care In placing affective and intimate transformation at the heart of the politics of social reproduction, these contemporary Latin American thinkers have much in common with the radical practices of 241 care developed by practitioners of transformative justice in the US—practices which originate in abolitionist, sex worker, youth, and anti-violence organizing contexts, and have largely been developed by queer and disabled women of color. By valorizing care in multiple locations of struggle both traditions reveal that politicizing care involves more than rendering necessary services and collectivizing the privatized domains of care (which are of course necessary). They also place both the affective and embodied dimensions of care at the heart of their politics while also paying close, ethical, and practical, attention to the politics of harm, and the politics of transforming intimate as well as structural relations. This means, they both claim, that we must also work, in and through movement building and struggle, to qualitatively transform modes of care rooted in domination and subordination—often in ways that run counter to state and NGO infrastructures. Transformative justice (TJ) is a collective and living orientation to social justice that seeks to uproot and transform the conditions of harm rather than reproduce them. Practitioners often trace its roots to practices of survival, healing, and community accountability long developed by marginalized people (who, as Mingus points out, often cannot call the police even if they want to due to threats of deportation, harassment, sexual violence, or murder (“Transformative Justice, a Brief Description”)). TJ as it is understood today originated in the early 2000s and has been explicitly developed and documented over the last 20 years in movement organizing contexts such as police and prison abolitionism, women of color led antiviolence work (INCITE! Collective), disability justice, mad pride, youth work (Project NIA, YWEP), organizing against child sexual abuse (Generation 5), healing justice (Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective), sex worker communities and activism, harm reduction, queer and trans activism, and anarchist activism. 242 Transformative justice is an organizing strategy, a political healing tool, a model of antioppression political and moral education, a tool of revolutionary magic and transformative, collective empowerment—-and so much more. Crucially, as a kind of counter-normative ethics and intimate politics it assumes that caring relations are shaped in violent ways in our world. And, as such, it is also rooted in practices that concretely redress these relational imbalances, and to develop and shift sensibilities such that people (e.g., community bystanders of domestic abuse) are more empowered to change them. Finally, it also develops concrete skills and practices of justice and care that build both individual and community accountability and capacity to hold and transform the conditions of harm on multiple scales—from the individual, interpersonal, community, local, and societal levels. Transformative justice is thus a multidimensional approach to healing, transformation, and political and ethical education that revisions care and justice by uprooting their normative and violent forms from people’s bodyminds and relations and aligning them with emancipatory visions of these core values. Transformative justice can thus be thought of as the generative side of abolition—from which abolition is inseparable. If abolition involves dismantling institutional and social forms that constitutively reproduce racism and other forms of oppression at structural and intimate levels, then what social supports, skills, ways of addressing harm and fostering accountability, do we need to build a different world, one that is life affirming for all? For example, how do we uproot forms of sexual violence and abuse, given how widespread they are—and given the grotesque failures of criminal and carceral models of justice in addressing them, and the inseparability of such punitive notions of justice from racist, colonial, heteropatriarchal, and ableist norms and histories? A transformative justice lens reveals that with care as with justice, the most egregious harms as well as the most revolutionary transformations are done in its name. 243 Again, transformative justice is a way of i.) understanding the systemic roots of injustice and ii.) working on multiple levels (social, political, interpersonal, personal) to immediately address these harms ‘outside the system,’ while also beginning to interrupt and heal intergenerational and societal cycles of violence. It is a collective and incredibly skilled labor of love, and not in the capitalist sense. For example, the Creative Interventions Toolkit, which many refer to as the “TJ Bible” is free online, an offering of over 600 pages of practical wisdom that “builds on our connections and caring rather than looking at solutions that rely only on separation and disconnections from our communities” (2).192 The following are some themes in the discourse and practice of transformative justice— potential ways to speak to dilemmas and possibilities of caring for ourselves and each other this way. • NO experts! (Hassan and Kaba). TJ is a living, embodied, and relational praxis and process. Nobody owns this work, and it is so important to name elders and stay humble. To respect the sacred care-labor and skills of the people who have offered their learnings. To respect the radicality of this work, and its distinction from, and incompatibility with, many of the institutions and social forms we find ourselves imbricated within. • Strategies of community and self-accountability: Deepening and de-coupling concepts of self-responsibility and community responsibility. Normalizing accountability in self and community. What would it mean to want to be accountable rather than fear fucking up? How can communities develop sensibilities for understanding and holding the social nature of harm 192 To my knowledge, Creative Interventions, and Mimi Kim in particular, should be cited as instrumental in this incredible offering. 244 and survival, and “engage in strategies that reduce contact between people and the criminal legal system” (Kaba). • A commitment to “just practice” given the fraught nature of community violence (Kaba and Hassan): The pun. Given the entrenched nature of structural violence failure is inevitable. But there are also infinite ways to practice more justly (Kaba and Gilmore). And it is intergenerational work. For example, the Generation 5 collective, which asked about the conditions for child sexual abuse to no longer be thinkable in five generations. • Survivor centeredness and the commitment to center the most marginalized people in communities of struggle. Survivors’ needs should be centered in an accountability process. Many practitioners have moved from a survivor led model however: if a survivor wants to get revenge on their abuser for example, this won’t be something to act upon in the process, but can represent a need (e.g., to express rage or self-protection) that can be honored or met in another way. This also relates to the social justice commitment to center the needs of those most marginalized in a given community or organization. See e.g., Woodly 2020 for a discussion of this principle in BLM and the Movement for Black Lives. • Non-disposability: Hurt people hurt people. Nobody enters violence by causing it. (Kaba). Punitive justice continues this cycle of violence. This doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be consequences, or that we are obligated to be in relation with those who hurt us. But the aim is to move beyond the individualizing and pathologizing logics of justice as punishment (Davis Are Prisons Obsolete?) and towards a vision of justice in which those who cause harm, and those who survive it, are held by community rather than exiled from it. 245 • Embodied and relational strategies to address harm prior to its escalation: e.g., apologies (Mingus). So many small things to learn about how to engage conflict and reduce or intervene in harmful behaviors before it turns dangerous (Thom, Mingus). • A commitment to remain in critical opposition to carceral, state, corporate, and NGO logics and institutional forms (Hassan, Kaba) and to building alternative “social justice infrastructures” (Spade). • Bringing revolutionary values into play: developing individual and community practices for feeling and aligning with what we, as individuals and movements, value, and care about is a commonality in many practices of TJ and politicized somatics. In her “No Transformative Justice Without Harm Reduction” talk in the Just Practice TJ Mixtape Shira Hassan shares a pledge that she asks all workshop participants to make. She asks that “every time you are going to talk about harm reduction”—in mainstream, predominantly white, institutional, settings in particular, that we “promise and say out loud” that harm reduction comes from queer and trans people of color in “the sex trade and street economy, from drug users, from people who are street based,” from “people who are fighting to survive.” She states: “Our ancestors have been whispering survival strategies to us for at least 10, 20, 30, 40, 100 generations.” And that these modalities are just the most recent set of strategies and come from “BIPOC, queer and trans survivors who are giving you this information so that you can continue to practice these tools and strategies towards our collective liberation, towards a way of caring for ourselves through the mess that is this moment and this unbelievable uprising in the midst of a pandemic. We are so lucky to have been given these strategies and been gifted these tools.” She notes that “many of those who have given us these tools” are no longer with us, and that it is our “duty to pledge back to them our collective survival” and to ensure that these 246 ancestors “get acknowledged and seen as the originators of this absolutely lifesaving movement.” Hassan’s pledge illuminates one such situated, revolutionary, value of transformative justice. Developing an ethical practice situating oneself and naming the individuals and communities that originated these brilliant ideas and tools counteracts the horrors of individualism and teaches us to be accountable to ourselves and others. As Hassan shows, it also allows us to connect to a sense of sacredness, purpose, and commitment as we strive, and fail, in our practices of transforming justice and uprooting harm from our relations and communities. III. Conclusion: The Call of Radical Care Confronting the contradictions of care and developing new caring sensibilities requires intimate and collective learning—learning how to cultivate new blueprints of expectation and response; to develop new capacities to attune, discern, respond, and refuse; to unearth hidden histories of insurgent care, and to hold, again and again, the devastating ways our communities of care will almost inevitably reproduce the very sorts of harms they seek to remedy. Though we relate to them in so many ways, and from infinitely varied vantage points, these legacies of care remain restless within and between us. In Sara Ahmed’s terms, they are histories not yet finished with us. But neither the violence, nor the freedom, at their core can be deciphered if we insist on viewing care as external to the vital struggles with which it is intimately bound. It is necessary to value care and work for a caring society, and to name and struggle against the institutions and social forms through which caring relations are systemically devalued. The authors I engaged with in this dissertation provide a groundwork for such projects. However, disentangling care from violence requires transformations in caring relations at both systemic and intimate registers. Politically and ethically transforming care at these levels is a 247 multi-generational task perhaps inherently fraught with failure. As daunting as this is, there are infinite ways to begin anew, which over time might deepen mutual connection, fortify collective agency and purpose, and help to sustain the networks of mutual-aid and collective care needed for the coming crises (Spade, Kaba). There are, for example, many resources available for white people like myself to learn somatic awareness and relational techniques for addressing our tendencies to lash out, collapse in shame, or once again center ourselves when faced with our racist blindspots and complicities. We can form racial justice pods to support our transformation and avoid overburdening our BIPOC friends and political allies. Cis men can learn to see and acknowledge the care of feminized people, expand their capacities for feeling and expressing emotions, and share in the burdens and pleasures of caring labor. They can form groups, and agree to hold each other accountable to transforming rape cultures. Such endeavors can, and already do, form integral parts of larger social movements. The question of how to collectively care for each other and ourselves in the shadows of structural violence is an open and living one. But there are many models to learn from. In innumerable ways, and on massive and micro scales, people are radically responding to individual and community needs and desires, and forging new and more survivable ways of living at the margins. Such practices of community care are a necessary condition of sustained and sustaining social movements, and indeed often constitute their most revolutionary, if threatened, edges. In the US, examples such as the Black Panther Party’s Survival Programs, AIM’s (The American Indian Movements’s) survival schools, the queer healing modalities arising out of the AIDS crisis, the care webs developed by disability justice activists and queer and trans communities, and the politics of care which, according to Deva Woodly, is the most unique and radical feature of the political philosophy guiding the Movement for Black Lives, all 248 provide examples of care’s essential role in radical social transformation. These legacies of care, too, leave their traces upon the conditions of our living. Their call is heeded in concrete and ongoing ways by queer, BIPOC, migrant, poor, sex working, and disabled individuals and communities—and so many others—whose radical caring, while under constant threat, reveals glimpses of living otherwise. My argument has been that our ethical and political practices of care must adequate themselves to the violent contradictions, as well as the revolutionary possibilities, of care. This is an inevitably situated and complex affair. My hope is that this writing may speak to these problems and possibilities in caring ways that gesture beyond the limits of its author, and toward the collective genesis and ongoing work of care so central to the survival and healing of communities of struggle, historically and in the present. 249 BIBLIOGRAPHY Ahmed, Sarah. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004. ---. Living a Feminist Life. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017. Anzaldúa, Gloria. 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