Unsettling care: Troubling transnational itineraries of care in feminist health practices

Abstract

Responding to the call by Maria Puig de la Bellacasa for Science and Technology Studies to take up 'matters of care', this article cautions against equating care with positive feelings and, in contrast, argues for the importance of grappling with the non-innocent histories in which the politics of care already circulates, particularly in transnational couplings of feminism and health. The article highlights these histories by tracing multiple versions of the politics of care in a select set of feminist engagements with the pap smear and cervical cancer. Drawing on postcolonial and indigenous feminist commitments, as well as amplifying Donna Haraway's call to 'stay with the trouble', the article seeks to disturb hegemonic histories and arrangements of race, colonialism, and political economy, while simultaneously valuing divergent multi-local itineraries as relevant to technoscientific matters of care. This call for a politics of 'unsettling' care strives to stir up and put into motion what is sedimented, while embracing the generativity of discomfort, critique, and non-innocence.

Modernizing the flow of blood: Biomedical technicians, working knowledge and the transformation of Swedish blood centre practices

“…We have shown how this 'recruitment of sentiment' from above (Bartlett, 2008) took several forms: engaging the technicians' interest in being closely involved in a charismatic director's groundbreaking studies, encouraging their 'itch' to create and reform inefficient practices, and using their desire to work together 'as a family' for what was constructed as an urgent task of biomedical modernization. Thus, our case also shows the contradictory, non-innocent and troubling features of how 'matters of care' (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2011; see also Murphy, 2015) become enacted and enlisted in gendered sociomaterial change.…”

Communicating Care : The Contradictions of HPV Vaccination Campaigns

“…As feminist STS scholars recently have highlighted, such a conceptualization of care can be problematic in how it sees care as something intrinsically good and positive. For example, Michelle Murphy (2015) draws upon the work of Sara Ahmed (2010) to caution against a tendency to equate care with positive or happy feelings (or as she calls it, affects) that easily can be imagined as opening up for, or affirming, a more promising world.…”

“…This is a version of care that equates it with positive feelings of happiness and love. As already mentioned in Chapter 2, equating care with happy or positive feelings is critiqued by Murphy (2015) as it presents care as something innocent and always for the better. She shows that this makes absent the politics of care, such as how care may assign responsibility to subjects and articulate a gendering of individual empowerment.…”

“…This means that I do not believe care per se is something good or desirable. As others have shown, care can be about social control and governance (Davies and Horst 2015), gendered relations of power (Murphy 2015;Viseu 2015), and a moralization of people's behavior; if only you would care! (Puig de la Bellacasa 2012).…”

Population, Reproduction and IVF in New Caledonia: Exploring Sociocultural and Caring Dimensions of Sustainable Development

“…The above stratifying arrangements need to be 'unsettled' (M. Murphy 2015), and attempts at development, including sustainable development, need to be examined in specific sociocultural, political, economic and historical contexts in order to reveal potential 'fault lines.' In this paper, I first want to make a theoretical contribution to this unsettling by critiquing 'modernist' approaches to sustainable development, such as those that focus on economic development only, and by highlighting why the sociocultural dimensions of development are important.…”