Rethinking Care Work: (Dis)Affection and the Politics of Caring

Abstract

This article analyzes the discourses of the care crisis and its implications for how we understand the practices of care. Contemporary efforts to revalue "care" in some activist and scholarly circles mark a shift away from Fordist demands of workers' rights simply because one works to a neoliberal model of justifying rights because of a worker's emotional investment in their labor. The care discourse premises the collective social good on ensuring that the more privileged are well cared for while making the needs of the less privileged contingent on the well-being of the better off. This article argues that a Black feminist analysis and the language of social reproduction are better frameworks for understanding the labor of care in the context of neoliberal social and economic relations. I draw on my research on domestic worker activists in the 1970s who resisted characterizations of their work as care or love, terms they associated with the framework of "one of the family," which was a basis for underpayment and exploitation. Instead, they demanded equal labor rights and insisted that their work be treated the same as all other forms of labor. I conclude by pointing to models of collective care, justice healing, and radical care as one possible way forward.

Embodying a praxis of care: The urgency of carework in supporting student activists

“…Moreover, feminist scholars have revealed the gendered and racialized privilege to be care less or care free — the absence of care— where (white) men are less expected to demonstrate care (Grummel et al., 2009). Institutions fail to recognize how this labor is raced, gendered, and classed (Nadesen, 2021), and also how they consistently undervalue the work itself because of its “feminine” valuation (Cardozo, 2017). Within these environments, staff of color have described similar ways carework becomes integrated and additive to their responsibilities (see Briscoe, 2021; Jones Boss et al., 2019) because they care about students.…”

“…Within these environments, staff of color have described similar ways carework becomes integrated and additive to their responsibilities (see Briscoe, 2021; Jones Boss et al., 2019) because they care about students. Care becomes weaponized into the expectations and demands that, “privilege the emotional relationship and obscures the inequity and exploitation that undergirds this work” (Nadesen, 2021, p. 166).…”

the domestic workers’ strike: migrant women, social reproduction and contentious labour organising

“…The labour of poor women from the Global South was harnessed to provide reproductive services such as childcare, cooking and cleaning for families in the Global North, thus meeting the care gap of the north and sending back remittances to ensure the survival of their families in their home countries. While the labour of women from the Global South subsidises the cost of reproducing labour for capital, the massive care industry itself is also a source of wealth and capital accumulation (Nadasen, 2021). Thus capital benefits from low-paid, undocumented domestic labour in multiple ways.…”

Childcare struggles, maternal workers and social reproduction. By MaudPerrier (Ed.), Bristol: Bristol University Press. 2022. pp. 148. £80.00. ISBN: 978‐1‐5292‐1492‐5

“…Perrier deftly connects the scholarships of black feminist thinkers like Patricia Hill-Collins, Tracey Reynolds, and Sara Ahmed with a body of work-social reproduction theory-that has sometimes been accused of ignorance toward the differing experiences of motherhood and care for women of color (Davis, 1983;Ferguson, 2020). Perrier's work builds on the critiques leveraged by Ferguson (2020), Nadasen (2021) and others that by locking SRT into an analysis of unpaid sets of relations, within individualized (often heterosexual) partnerships and homes, much of the utility of the theory is missed.…”

“…Perrier deftly connects the scholarships of black feminist thinkers like Patricia Hill‐Collins, Tracey Reynolds, and Sara Ahmed with a body of work—social reproduction theory—that has sometimes been accused of ignorance toward the differing experiences of motherhood and care for women of color (Davis, 1983; Ferguson, 2020). Perrier's work builds on the critiques leveraged by Ferguson (2020), Nadasen (2021) and others that by locking SRT into an analysis of unpaid sets of relations, within individualized (often heterosexual) partnerships and homes, much of the utility of the theory is missed. What this book does is to remind feminist theorists of social reproduction of the crucial insight that women's oppression lies in the contradictory, dialectical relationship between paid and unpaid work that has historically played out very differently across racialized and classed subjectivities.…”