On care
Within the framework of the TRACTS COST Action and City of Women international conference Connecting Lines: International Conference on Ecology, Feminism and Care, we tried to bring together discourses on gender equality and care in the deteriorating conditions of the late Anthropocene. For this purpose, we brought together artists and researchers who explore the issues of the climate crisis and social justice from a feminist, intersectional, queer, and decolonial perspective with a focus on care as a central paradigm for redefining our relationship with the environment and each other.
In the fourth of five parts of Reflecting, we explored diverse perspectives on the concepts of care concerning feminism, ecology, social justice, and the field of artistic and curatorial practices through presentations by Isabel Carvalho, Magdalena Buchczyk, Jasmina Husanović, and Sascia Bailer.
It is commonplace to recognize that the pandemic triggered a boom of writing on care. Care, as one of the central reference points in feminist critique, has been a major theme in feminist writing long before the care turn. This short introduction to the panel On Care is intended as a quick examination of some of the recent relevant literature connecting feminism and care.
In her recently published book The Care Crisis: What Caused It and How Can We End It? Emma Dowling takes on the complex care issue of delipidating social and health services in the UK. She provides a possible definition of care as supporting activities needed to enable and sustain society and both the physical and affective capacities employed to do so. Making clear that care is much more than the individual sentiments and behaviours supported by private responsibility for care1, Dowling distances her analysis from the neoliberal incentive to privatize and financialize care in the form of luxury spaces and promotion of self-care only to those who can afford it. She focuses her book on structural state-organised support systems. While analysing the essential need for such state-organised care institutions, she makes clear that the ones still functioning are not even close to ridding themselves of the gendered and racialised exploitation of unpaid or underpaid labour. Finishing her book before the explosion of the care crisis during the pandemic, Dowling analyses underlying structural issues of the crumbling public social and healthcare system (in Great Britain). With a shorter experience of the financialization of health and social care some of the consequences of this undoing of the social state are also experienced to different degrees in Slovenia and other post-socialist states of South Eastern Europe.
In her book, Dowling invites us to engage with feminist thinkers who have primarily focused on care during the last decades. In her 2015 text Who Cares?, Joan Tronto, one of the seminal authors on feminist care ethics, emphasises that care is always relational and that most of us enter different roles during our lives, both as caregivers and as care receivers. She thus reminds us of the solidary understanding of care that was institutionalized in many states in different times around the mid-20th century in the form of welfare state provisions. Further, she claims care should not be conceived as a means to an end, and politics, especially in democratic societies, should be engaged with organizing care and social reproduction as they are necessary preconditions for maintaining society.
Learning from the Marxist feminists of the 1970s, focusing on the critique of labour of love that was imbedding care in the web of patriarchal exploitation, Nancy Fraser’s text Crisis of Care? On the Social-Reproductive Contradictions of Contemporary Capitalism 2 explores the different roles given to care within the development of capitalism during the last 200 years. Distinguishing three stages of capitalism paired with specific relations to care, Fraser looks at how emancipatory projects like the feminist or ecological movements unwillingly contributed to the dissolving of some social structures crucial for providing care. In her analysis, the neoliberal turn and the financialization of capitalism withdrew the social services introduced in the Keynesian era (which had prioritised the white nuclear family and in the US context the family wage, while ignoring those who did not fit neatly into this paradigm.) Her stages of development admittingly focus on the development of capitalism in the West, making sure to emphasize that the security the welfare state provided to some was based on the division of binary gender roles within the nuclear family and on the exploitation and exclusion of the newly decolonised world and the racialised and gender non-normative communities in the West. As much as the socialist (Yugoslav) state did not discriminate by stipulating that women should stay out of paid labour and many social provisions inherited from the socialist system have, at least in Slovenia, persevered, in the era of financialised capitalism we can still find many similarities to the paradigm Fraser describes as the contemporary relation between financialised capitalism and care.
Today, time scarcity is producing a new global order in which women are part of the active working force en masse, while the social state is withdrawing. Many work multiple jobs to make ends meet and others who have better-paying jobs are working overtime. While the poor and many times the middle class relinquish care, those that are better off outsource it to the less privileged. Fraser refers to the loss experienced by all social strata but the focus of Francoise Verges's seminal book Decolonial Feminism is on the racial (and, I would add, class) divide that puts the emancipated women in the Global North on the exploiting end of their sisters in the Global South or as low paid diasporas in the Global North, emphasizing that feminism should be a movement for (gender) equality for all. In the words of Nancy Fraser:
Northern feminists often describe their focus as the “balance between family and work.” But struggles over social reproduction encompass much more—including grassroots community movements for housing, health care, food security, and an unconditional basic income; struggles for the rights of migrants, domestic workers, and public employees; campaigns to unionize those who perform social service work in for-profit nursing homes, hospitals, and child-care centers; struggles for public services such as daycare and eldercare, for a shorter work week, and for generous paid maternity and parental leave. Taken together, these claims are tantamount to the demand for a massive reorganization of the relation between production and reproduction: for social arrangements that could enable people of every class, gender, sexuality, and color to combine social reproductive activities with safe, interesting, and well-remunerated work. (40)
All this invites us to rethink care along the feminist lines in a push for emancipation as well as security amidst the many crises that we confront today.
In the first presentation in the panel On Care artist Isabel Carvalho talked about her publication Leonorana Magazine which she has been self-publishing as an artist and editor since 2017 with 8 issues published so far. In her presentation she specifically focused on the seventh issue of the magazine subtitled We Care a Lot, which was conceived upon an invite by the MAAT Museum in Lisbon and through her personal experience as a caregiver of a family member. This issue was envisioned as a series of interviews informed by activism within the field of physiatry, viewing care as positive interdependency rather than through the individualist lens of self-care.
Anthropologist Magdalena Buchczyk has presented her research connected with the Museum of European Cultures in Berlin. Prompted by the everyday life objects from the museum collection, specifically baskets made in Sardinia, Buchczyk visited the place of their origin in the salt marshes of Sardinia where the local community of handcrafters maintains the fragile ecosystem which prevents coastal erosion. Buchczyk introduces us to how they have cared for the environment which enables their existence.
The academic and activist Jasmina Husanović introduced us to environmental activism in Bosnia and Hercegovina, specifically an organisation called Ekofem Bih. In the post-war context of what she calls a sacrifice zone, where a huge extraction of resources is enabled through systemic violence of the ethnic-capitalistic transition, the labour of environmental care for the left to Groups of underprivileged individuals, most of them women. Ekofem Bih, established in 2022 (after two years of online workshops), is grounded in principles of materialist eco-feminism and critical pedagogies.
Curator and researcher Sascia Bailer brought the conversation back into the art field. Referring to the art field as fertile ground for exploitation in the first place (the art field as a paradigmatic field within the labour of love concept is explored by researchers such as Kathi Weeks or Bojana Kunst) when crossed with gender/care it becomes a place a place of increased inequality. In her presentation, Sascia Bailer talked about her curatorial focus on care for caregivers and the development of infrastructures that could enable those with caring responsibilities to participate in the art field.
1. the feeling of caring about someone or the act of caring for someone, or even caring about the state of the world
2. Nancy Fraser’s text is one of several essays published in the reader Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression edited by Tithi Bhattacharya that brings together several contemporary Marxist feminist thinkers and proponents of social reproduction theory.
LITERATURE:
Dowling, Emma. The Care Crisis: What Caused It and How Can We End It? London: Verso, 2021.
Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression; Ur. Tithi Bhattacharya. UK: Pluto Press, 2017.
Tronto, Joan, C. Who Cares? How to Reshape a Democratic Politics. New York: Cornell University Press, 2015.
Vergès, Françoise. Decolonial Feminism. UK: Pluto Press, 2021
