Leveraging feminist approaches to care

Abstract

The work of thinking about, with, and through care is not the prerogative of any single discipline or positionality, as this Special Issue vividly illustrates. Rather, its wide-ranging and enduring force as empirical reality, conceptual approach and political disposition are best grappled with through a multidisciplinary lens, bringing into meaningful conversation and careful comparison different subjects, sites and scales of care. In the process, care emerges as a contested terrain, an object of debate and difference, as well as an ongoing central dimension to life as lived across the realms of the individual to the collective and the institutional. It is thus our hope that the offerings in this Special Issue invite further attention to care's role in shaping social and political life, in Australia and beyond, and for humans and non-humans. We intend for this Issue to stimulate the kinds of coalitional thinking and acting that care demands of scholars across fields and also across differently situated communities of ‘we’.

Scholarly and popular attention to the concept of care, according to Hi’ilei Hobart and Tamara Kneese (2020), has re-entered the zeitgeist. While the concept has a longstanding history, some recent developments have given greater urgency to employment of the term. The global pandemic revealed in no uncertain terms how care was practised (or not) in terms of health, aged care, animal welfare, and a host of other consequences wrought by COVID-19. At the same time, other ongoing crises propelled care into sharp focus: vast numbers of refugees due to war, hunger and genocide, infrastructural ruin, growing wealth inequality, unremitting sexual and gendered violence, geopolitical failures and anthropogenic climate change. Such issues have catapulted care and caring to the centre of politics and public life, highlighting care (or lack thereof) for our health, that of others, our environments, democracies, economies and communities. Transnational and global social movements (#Black Lives Matter, March for Climate Justice, Stop Black Deaths in Custody, #MeToo, #FreePalestine) express profound dissatisfaction with the widespread erosion and lack of care, demanding care and respect for environments, groups of people who are marginalized and disempowered, as well as a different set of public, governance and institutional values. The rolling back of civil liberties, structural inequities and disenfranchisement come with significant consequences that position lack of care as a significant problem, and also bring into focus practices of care as possible solutions.

This recent attention to care is of course underpinned by four decades of feminist research, critiques and debates on care, which have been foundational to the important theorizing and translation of care. Many feminists would argue that caring about care never went away. It was nevertheless often rendered invisible and marginalized in mainstream debates as a subordinate, gendered concept. This significant body of scholarship has centred around, the need to value caring and domestic labour in law and society, the utility of a feminist ethics of care and limitations of care as a normative and conceptual framework (Beasley and Bacchi, 2007; Mol et al., 2010; Harding, Fletcher and Beasley, 2016). Care has also been a critical concept in a broad range of other fields and disciplines ranging from feminist science and technology studies to public health, philosophy, Indigenous studies, geography and more (Martin et al., 2015; Singleton and Mee, 2017; Lindén and Lydahl, 2021; Chatzidakis et al., 2020). While not all this work has been informed by feminist analysis, it has nonetheless brought critical insight into the question of how care might be theorized and the practices and problems of care's application. The practical care of the body, of enabling access to services or justice, land management, the operation and funding of institutions, and of cultural safety and awareness all require critical analyses of what care can mean, along with considerations of care's implementation and what constitutes best practice in this space. These matters become ever more complex as the notion of care is increasingly expanded beyond the human to posthumanist engagements with non-human animals, environments and technologies (Braidotti and Bignall, 2018; Haraway, 2016; Tsing, 2015).

It was this renewed public and political attention to care and our desire to leverage the well-established history of care in feminist scholarship that prompted us to gather a group of academics, community practitioners, curators and landscape architects in July 2022 at the University of Adelaide to critically examine how feminist approaches to care might contribute and intervene in current crises and socio-political debates. Entitled ‘From Theory to Practice: Leveraging Feminist Approaches to Care at a Time of Crisis’ and funded by the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia Workshop scheme, our attention was firmly positioned in a range of feminist and social justice standpoints, and involved a concern with tracing and tracking caring relations in both local and global flows and contexts, and with how care was understood, practised, obscured and situated within and across these spaces.

Our interdisciplinary workshop brought together early career and established researchers, policymakers, along with practitioners in creative industries and government agencies, to interrogate how feminist approaches to concepts of care might be mobilized and incorporated into practice, or possibly reimagined, to create sustainable social change. Authors in this Special Issue come from differing disciplines, institutions and environments, spanning gender studies, anthropology, political science, public health, state-funded community organizations, media studies, sociology and climate change education. Critical here is drawing together conversations of everyday views of what care involves and its practical application in a wide range of domains, with the analytical insights that feminist and other theorizing has offered to this topic. This Special Issue presents a selection of articles derived from this interdisciplinary workshop.

The aim of the workshop was to identify and address the difficulties attached to acknowledging and incorporating care. The dismissal of care harks back to early feminist critiques of the ways in which care and care work is immediately associated with femininity (Tronto, 1987). One of the participants at our 2022 workshop began her talk by declaring her discomfort with talking about care, of ‘exposing’ herself as a person who becomes gendered in a particular way, of being folded into entrenched representations and practices of care that conflate care with a singular and conservative version of femininity. She drew on memories of her childhood and Anglo family dinners, of how her mother would always take the ‘burnt chop’ so the rest of the family wouldn’t have to taste the grilled failure – a familiar scene of an altruistic mother putting herself last. While some might argue that this is an act of love, a different and critical framing would argue that this generational practice of domestic care work in which mothers ‘took the burnt chop’ underscores the feminization and undervaluing of care as a form of labour. This articulation relegates care to a practice associated with women ‘knowing their place’ in family and societal orders, where to care means deference and asymmetry – and to, literally, eat second best. To care still resonates with these gendered power relations, and in many everyday and taken-for-granted understandings, care can reproduce these strong emotions associated with denigration (Gilligan, 1982; Tronto, 1987).

We want to take this burnt chop as a metaphor for thinking through theoretical inflections of care in our Special Issue. Care can of course be studied as a singular object, but pressed into service it is much more. It is, for example, an object connected to myriad socio-material practices and technologies that foregrounds relations between people, between people and animals, between bodies and systems of food production and consumption that spread out to farmlands and abattoirs and international trade agreements.

As feminist scholars, we know that despite advancements in feminist theories of care, caring comes to any table laden with multiple meanings. It is a gendered, classed and racialized concept, among others, and intimately associated with women's work, in terms of reproductive and other social roles as well as labour. The burnt chop is an object typically positioned in the societal structures of heteronormative families, where the free and private labour of mothers and wives is intimately tied to much broader systems of financialized capitalism (Fraser, 2023: 54). It provides one iconic illustration of the myriad ways in which care and care work – and the embodied subjects associated with this labour – link micro and macro power relations. We know that while this care work is essential to society and to capitalist economies (Marçal, 2016), it is afforded no power or monetarized value, and while highly productive, is still seen as ‘unproductive’.

In her most recent book, Cannibal Capitalism (2023), feminist critical theorist Nancy Fraser examines how ‘social reproduction’ is intertwined with other spheres of life that are devoured by the ‘voracious appetite’ of capitalism. Fraser articulates how the capitalist system is ‘structurally primed to cannibalise the very basis of its own existence: to guzzle carework and scarf up nature, to eviscerate public power and devour the wealth of racialised populations’ (159). This cannibalization of care work, nature and public power is entangled in a feeding frenzy, she says – a lethal binge (160) of extraction that serves wealth on a platter to the corporate [white] classes (xv). In this cannibalistic frame that captures the multiple current crises, Fraser extends food metaphors to her overarching question, ‘are we toast?’ Fraser's book thus reminds us of what is at stake in dealing with care.

To talk about care means engaging with the breadth of feminist histories to recognize the varying understandings and contexts of care, including how care is practised within the material world and its related forms of production. Care, as scholars such as Annemarie Mol (2008) and those from The Care Collective (2020) suggest, is a complex, ambivalent and shifting phenomenon, a slippery term that can easily be co-opted. This Special Issue highlights how care circulates in differing places, across the informality of everyday and digital spaces and the more formal arrangements of institutional and organizational spaces. The articles in this collection pinpoint the multiple enactments of care, and the ways in which care and care work can be strategically theorized, weaponized, politicized, undermined, corporatized, commodified, collectively practised – and guzzled.

The first article by Chris Beasley and Pam Papadelos provides a detailed overview of feminist excursions into theories of care and their alignment with major theoretical ‘waves’ and ‘turns’ in the last half-century. Noting the decolonial critiques of feminist histories of waves and generations, Beasley and Papadelos critically consider key conceptual shifts in thinking about care, including analyses of care as labour, early accounts of feminist ‘ethics of care’, postmodern/poststructuralist, post-humanist/new materialist perspectives and, finally, the concept of ‘radical care’. In laying out these broad trends and genealogies of care, the authors do not lose sight of the racialized and colonial legacies that continue to fuel increasing economic and social inequality on a global scale, and the potential of care in effecting progressive social change. Nor do they shy away from the ways in which care (and feminism) have been co-opted by right-wing, neoliberal agendas, as noted by many other authors in this Special Issue.

The following article by Rob Cover builds upon some of the concepts offered by Beasley and Papadelos and applies them to contemporary social problems of digital hostility and online abuse. Specifically, Cover asks how a feminist care ethics might improve online communication, shifting it away from individual users to an embodied concept of collective care in a digital ecology. In an innovative argument, Cover places a range of care theorists in mutual conversation, suggesting that Tronto and those employing her work offer an approach that can be viewed as aligned with Butlerian theories of violence and vulnerability, as well as Berlant's focus on ethical ecologies and infrastructures. In this context, Cover suggests that a feminist ethics of care presents a new approach to dealing with digital hostility – one that is centred on feminist thinking around care, community, interdependency and liveability.

In considering how to make positive change to reduce digital hostility, Cover draws on Eagleton to caution against the ‘sovereignty of the profit motif’ (Eagleton, 2011: 270). The profit motif of care is a central theme of Megan Warin, Andrea Bombak and Bailey George's article, and the digital (and exploding) sales of injectable weight loss drugs. This analysis speaks directly to the ongoing ‘crisis’ around obesity, and how a ‘miracle’ cure is purported to ‘release’ many people – and particularly women – from the stigma, shame and blame that is associated with fatness in the West. Leveraging neoliberal ideas of self-care and choice, the commercial marketing and promotion of Ozempic creates a form of ‘freedom’ while simultaneously undermining women's pleasures and self-acceptance as expression of ‘self-care’. The desire for Ozempic and the reproduction of long-held cultural orthodoxies of health and feminine beauty is an instance of cannibal capitalism. The market, which has created the problem, provides a solution to purchase whilst simultaneously deflecting attention from the food industry and lack of government regulation.

Many other articles in this Special Issue demonstrate how care is not always available or provided in spaces where we assume it would be. Setting their sights on a key place of care, Katie Barclay and Vivienne Moore make a strong argument for critically considering how care plays out in the context of institutions. They acknowledge that despite the many ‘recent provocations designed to encourage new imaginaries of care’, surprisingly ‘little emphasis has been placed on the institution’. The examination of the ‘scale and horror of institutional failure’ is timely and provides a practical and substantive corrective to the absence of care. The choice of institution examined in the text and, in particular, the article's close analysis of the Ockenden Review of maternity services in a National Health Trust in England provides the empirical basis for this argument. The article's nuanced consideration of questions of scale, bureaucracy and professional identities, as well as the way they shape both practices and affects in institutions of care, begs the question: ‘can institutions care?’

This question is also one that Tanya Zivkovic deeply engages with in her research on organ donation in institutional settings in Australia. This powerful piece of ethnographic writing focuses upon the pressures of care that emerge in the crisis of unanticipated injury or sudden death of a loved one, involving the technological machinery that keeps bodies alive, the swelling physical pressures of traumatic brain injuries, and the temporal pressures placed on families and clinical staff in negotiating the emotionally fraught terrain of organ donation. In these pressed spaces and times Zivkovic speaks to the ways in which pressures course through bodies and institutions, how during this process care can unravel and become undone, and the moments of care that work to repair relations of care. In these intensive care settings, the ‘capacity to care’ is generated and shaped through socio-material infrastructures of care – that is to say, the intertwining of architectures, emotions, bodies, technologies and systems of governance.

The last two articles in the Issue open up possibilities of care as a radical practice, as described by Beasley and Papadelos in the first article. Jacqueline Millner draws on feminist care ethics to explore how contemporary artists in the Care: Art and ethics: An exhibition series focus on aesthetics to value those caring practices that have been historically devalued in gendered and colonial discourses. In critically exploring how care can be creatively enacted in regional Australia, Millner draws on philosopher Puig de la Bellacasa (2017) to highlight how care in art practice materializes through the ‘mundane doings of maintenance and repair that sustain everyday life’ – acts that are marginalized and overlooked by dominant, successful (technoscientific) mobilizations. The care that is elevated in the artwork refuses to be guzzled up by capitalism, colonialism, neoliberalism or other existing power relations, instead offering other possibilities of care that move away from the privileging of autonomy and independence to an ethics that vaunts interrelatedness and shared vulnerability.

The final article by JaneMaree Maher, Danielle Abbott and Tanya Zivkovic details an innovative community programme that operates among families in an Australian city. Here, care is clearly centred as the problem and also the solution. Family by Family has emerged as both a result of and a response to the dismantling of state responsibility and its associated ‘crisis of care’. Locating this crisis in the social contradictions of neoliberal capitalism, the authors make use of Nancy Fraser's concept of cannibal capitalism to argue that our contemporary dysfunctions of care entail a systemic exhaustion of the resources available within public systems and in domestic spaces for sustaining social connections. Marked by decreased state provisions and increased household debt, the current regime of capitalism destroys its conditions of possibility by destabilizing the (gendered) relations of care on which it depends. With ever fewer provisions available, families and communities are increasingly positioned as unable to care for themselves or for others. The outsourcing of care through the market is only available to those who are already well resourced, and those further down the social hierarchy lack the means to outsource care. Family by Family offers possibilities for care in the context of this care gap, demonstrating Hobart and Kneese's radical care, as well as Mol’s (2008) and Vogel's (2021) work on relational care.

Conclusion

Hi’lel Hobart and Tamara Kneese write how ‘when mobilised’, care ‘offers visceral, material, and emotional heft to acts of preservation that span a breadth of localities: selves, communities, and social worlds. Questions of who or what one might care for, and how, can be numerous’ (2020: 2). The articles in the Special Issue clearly demonstrate how differing versions of care circulate as socio-material, affective and gendered sets of practices in current neoliberal economies. There is resistance and refusal of the care guzzling and carewashing that capitalism disguises in its workings, and this collection of articles has provided clear feminist possibilities of care to counter such cannibalism.

The directions we have taken in this collection are at least uncommon and in many ways novel. The initial piece summarizing and analysing the diverse character of notions of care, from established to innovative, provides a rare comprehensive examination and critique that enables a means to evaluate what follows. While it is usual to attend to care in health settings, the collection then addresses some unusual topics such as the role of the institution in advancing or inhibiting care, the fraught character of organ transplant, and the use of injectable drugs in weight loss. Cultural directions are less frequently the subject of considerations of care and here the collection deals with issues pertaining to digital hostility and the place of visual art offering care. Finally, the special edition turns to care and community and, once again, the topic is a less common concern with evaluating the possibilities of peer-to-peer connection. In each of the arenas discussed in this Issue there is a concern to untangle and stretch the ways in which care is often understood and to deliver directions suggesting how it can be reimagined. Care is by no means a simple or static concept but one which demands continual investigation and challenge.

As this collection vividly illustrates, the work of thinking about, with and through care is not the prerogative of any single discipline or positionality. Rather, its wide-ranging and enduring force as empirical reality, conceptual approach and political disposition is best grappled with through a multidisciplinary lens, bringing into meaningful conversation and careful comparison different subjects, sites and scales of care. In the process, care emerges as a contested terrain, an object of debate and difference, as well as an ongoing central dimension to life as lived across the realms of the individual to the collective and the institutional. It is thus our hope that the offerings in this Special Issue invite further attention to care's role in shaping social and political life, in Australia and beyond, and for humans and non-humans. This invitation could not be more timely. As the opening of our Introduction suggests, and as the articles in the collection exemplify, care in the current epoch is not only a topic of growing debate and co-optation, but also a central realm of activism and protest. We intend for this Issue to stimulate the kinds of coalitional thinking and acting that care demands of scholars across fields and also across differently situated communities of ‘we’.