Care in crisis: Entangled dimensions of care work during war

Abstract

In this essay, we draw on two reflective interviews with Yosh, leader of the Ukrainian gender-based activist organization Feminist Workshop, illustrating her views on providing care-based services to displaced women during the full-scale invasion by Russia. Situating the interviews within the scholarly literature on care and the contemporary realities of the Russia/Ukraine war, we surface Yosh’s experiences and her consideration of more disruptive alternatives of care. In doing so, we assert the need for scholars (ourselves included) to be more willing to reframe feminist assumptions of care.

Introduction

Late-night news scrolling and one of us found the article, “The feminist community emerging from the war in Ukraine” (Ong, 2023). We read the piece, captivated by Feminist Workshop, a Ukrainian non-profit founded in 2014 and based in Lviv, concerned with combating gender-based discrimination, violence, and the advancement of women and the LGBTQIA+ ¹ community. Following the full-scale invasion by Russia in February 2022, Feminist Workshop expanded its offerings to include care-related community services. We were inspired by the radicality of their mission and how we envisioned care work as being wielded as an antidote to war. We expected Feminist Workshop to echo our narrative of strength, empowerment, and superiority of the feminist cause. Both authors of this essay identify as women and advocate for feminism through pathways of teaching, research, and community outreach, with scholarly work that spotlights various intersections of neoliberalism and care, with the first author focusing on climate justice and the second author on labor reform for marginalized workers. We jumped at the opportunity to engage in ongoing and reflective interviews with Yosh, the leader of Feminist Workshop, to learn more about her lived experiences leading an organization concerned with empowerment without violence, focalizing help, housing, and what we perceived to be, hope. Because war is so far outside of our privileged purview, we assumed Yosh’s care work would be intensified, elevated, and even celebrated. Admittedly, we had not considered care and feminism in the context of radical adversity and as such, Yosh’s interviews gave us pause for thought, with us parking our perceived idealism for her palpable pragmatism. We came to realize that in fact, radical adversity changes everything.

In what ensues, this essay is our attempt to explore what activist care work looks like in times of crisis, illustrating how Yosh challenges our understanding of feminist care against the backdrop of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In doing so, we contribute to ongoing dialogues that seek to widen feminist perspectives about what it means to care (Hobart and Kneese, 2020; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017) while considering different iterations of women’s empowerment for a post-war Ukraine (Phillips et al., 2023). We use the Acting Up essay format to build on the momentum of “writing differently” as a way to drive the change we hope to see in the academy and broader society (Fotaki et al., 2014; Mandalaki et al., 2022; Pullen et al., 2020). Methodologically, we embarked on “reflective backtalk” (Frisina, 2006) with Yosh across two interviews, both conducted in 2023. Specifically, having transformed our first interview onto the written page, we shared the draft essay with Yosh to prompt an open and ongoing dialogue. We received feedback about the integrity of our interpretation of her care work and what it means to “care,” and importantly, this dialogue provided her with the opportunity to reflect on how her views and opinions have evolved as the war has progressed, which the second iteration of the essay then captures. We structure the essay following the arc of her first interview, interspersing ideas from the second interview throughout along with our own reflections and quiet murmurs amongst our authorial team as we considered care in more “transformative, non-innocent, disruptive ways” (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017: 71).

Gender-based activist care work: Then and Now

At the onset of being interviewed, Yosh described Feminist Workshop. She explained that the official categorization of Feminist Workshop is a “громадська організація,” which roughly translates into “public organization.” Yosh told us of the challenges of defining Feminist Workshop to both recipients in Ukraine, to potential donors from the Global North, and even us as scholars. We had tried to describe Feminist Workshop as a community organization, which she refuted, saying:

It feels like we are under pressure from the Global North to call ourselves a ‘community’, but this is a more fancy English vocabulary used mostly by young progressive people and this creates a distance from other actors in our society. . . I saw many texts written about ‘grassroots organizations’, community-based organizations, or queer feminists, which looked something similar to what we do at Feminist Workshop. But these texts have never referred to the context of countries like Ukraine or Poland or Kyrgyzstan, for example. They sometimes included the experience of the Global South, but it’s not clear if Ukraine belongs to the Global South or not. What we did in order to be recognized and valued in the Western world, is that we started to describe ourselves in existing English terms, using ‘community’. That strategy is quite good for the survival of Feminist Workshop. But when we speak about what I personally think is the concept of the work of Feminist Workshop, I am missing that decolonial perspective.

Following Yosh’s lead and taking a more decolonial perspective, we situate Feminist Workshop as a “громадська організація,” a public organization and collective of like-minded people. Pre-war, their focus was on the “cultural advancement of women, as well as more profound changes in societal norms and combating discrimination and violence of various kinds” (Feminist Workshop, 2023). With a deep focus on advancing social needs (O’Neill, 2002), they offered feminist courses, activities, and learning experiences to women and members of the LGBTQIA+ community. Their care-based activities included things like lectures on feminism, and educational camps to advance English language skills and improve written communication skills, while also promoting queer parties and social gatherings (Feminist Workshop, 2023). Since its inception in 2014, Feminist Workshop always operated on the fringes, experiencing funding issues and garnering little public attention or acceptance from the community. She explained, “In Ukraine, our civil society and in general this culture and structures, they work in a way that is not very friendly and supportive of feminist activists. It’s kind of magic that Feminist Workshop can exist in Ukraine.”

The war, Yosh explained, changed the axis of their activism and their care-based activities. Given its flat and diffused structure as a non-profit already operating on the fringes with little public support, Feminist Workshop was particularly adept at being able to respond to crises with agility especially when supporting marginalized and precarious people. The very “magic” that enabled Feminist Workshop to exist under the radar with limited public support for their feminist activities, also meant that they could easily change course and provide new offerings with few stakeholders to convince. This proved to be useful in extreme cases, like war. Thus, at the onset of the full-scale invasion of Russia, Feminist Workshop began to offer augmented caregiving activities to support their reshaped target community of women, their children, and the elderly. For example, they began providing accommodation for displaced women and their families after the deployment of their husbands, fathers, and sons. They offered babysitting and educational programs for children, while now single mothers sought work or waited in long governmental queues for social assistance. They also delivered groceries while visiting the elderly who faced new bouts of abandon, and provided psychological counseling to each community member as the post-traumatic stress from all that was occurring penetrated and transformed those living through it ² .

Yosh, at the helm of this care-based activist organization, faced the double hurdle of survival, trying to lead an underfunded non-profit, whilst in a warzone. While the warzone aspect gave us pause for thought, she reminded us that the financial futility of running a public organization gave her pause for thought. She acknowledged that many European countries and NGOs had begun to offer support by giving aid to Ukraine. However, as a small, local, female-led, and gender-based organization, hers got lost in the funding efforts in favor of international organizations. Yosh explained, “We managed to fundraise some crisis response money but now we have to compete with other NGOs and with more professional ones, not grassroots but international ones.” While Yosh’s organization navigated the complexities of the war, deeply entrenched in the local realities on the ground, “professional” NGOs were often swooping in, acting from a distance. Yosh elaborated, “It’s something that pisses me off because it’s so unfair that our feminist activists should compete with some patriarchal and international organizations, where people work from abroad or maybe in bigger Ukrainian cities, but with twice bigger salaries.” The reverberation of the financial burden of running Feminist Workshop contours Yosh’s interviews, stoking the mounting emotional and physical toll of providing activist care services during the war.

(Trying to) care for oneself and others

When the full-scale invasion began, Yosh explained that she, along with many of her colleagues, felt a moral obligation to stay in Ukraine to help displaced and vulnerable people despite the personal risks and inherent danger. The pull to stay and help underscores the strong vocational characteristics associated with the wider discourse of care including morality, selflessness, and familial love, seen to undergird the normative gendered assumptions that guide caregivers and their caregiving actions (Nadasen, 2021; Phillips et al., 2023). When infrastructures to provide collective support in society are inadequate, the imperative to care most often falls to women, with care efforts that are often invisible and undervalued, leading to the essentialization and simultaneous exploitation of their care work (Hobart and Kneese, 2020; Nadasen, 2021; Phillips et al., 2023). Care, anchored in relationality and interconnection, is shaped by the caregiver’s emotional, political, and economic landscape (Butler, 2004; Ettinger, 2006; Federici, 2019) and oscillates between responding to the simultaneous demands of caring for others and caring for oneself. In Ukraine, with deteriorating conditions to already-challenged infrastructures of care due to war (Phillips et al., 2023), the resulting instability placed additional pressure on Yosh and her team, which she described:

We are trying to find this balance between effective structure and between support in individual approaches and regions and situations. Because if we are trying to continue to work with activists they need time to take care of themselves. But for the moment, it’s not very possible.

The care literature has well established that caring is often equated with the emotional labor of empathy and compassion, which often takes a big emotional toll on the caregiver (Mandalaki et al., 2022; Nadasen, 2021). This was clear for Yosh and Feminist Workshop even before the war, in their pursuit of supporting women and members of the LGBTQIA+ to continue living life in Ukraine under patriarchy. After the full-scale invasion, the emotional toll of caregiving was exacerbated, with elevated emotional and physical distress from the structural complexity of war leaving Yosh and the other women on her team feeling the added fatigue, trauma, and suffering of war (Bolton and Laaser, 2021; Phillips et al., 2023). Ongoing pressures due to prolonged exposure to war took a toll on Yosh, chipping away at her resilience, and replacing it with a sense of helplessness (Russo et al., 2020). Yosh revealed:

In activism, we often have this problem that we don’t see the results or outcomes. What are the outcomes of your work? When we spend a year trying to change the culture, for example, the violence or rape culture and we want to change this culture and to make it into a consent culture. The outcomes of our own efforts are not so visible. But when we join the army, and you can kill some Russians, it’s more visible, immediate. Now I don’t feel that our common efforts make any difference and that the war can be stopped quickly or soon. I don’t want to share this opinion . . .I want to believe that it is still possible to end the war. We need to try and we need to put everything into stopping the war; not only helping to cope with the consequences of the war. But at the same time, I feel very tired and I don’t know how we need to continue. That’s why some of my friends are joining the military forces of Ukraine. Because for some people it’s more obvious that if you want to stop the war, you should go to the military. This choice is very understandable for me. I think it’s something right to do if you want to help to stop this nightmare.

Yosh problematizes the pace and outcomes of her activist care work. The work is slow and shimmers of positive results unfold even slower, especially when trying to make systemic cultural shifts. Yosh questioning her care work reminds us that caregivers often grapple with a constant, nagging introspection of whether they could care more (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017). The patriarchal culture that Yosh was trying to fight before the war was prevailing, giving Yosh a sense that her feminist activism had ultimately failed. Understandably, she felt despair at the horizonless outlook of her mission.

We reflected on the litany of her concerns- lack of funding, caring for self and others, questioning the very value of her care work, and judging herself for not being caring enough, realizing that they were quite specific to feminist activism rooted in care and differed from other public organizations with grassroots initiatives in the context of war. ³ While she did not personally want to join the military, she supported other women that did. We sat very quietly, listening, trying to process how as a feminist, Yosh could advocate to join the army, and how that laddered up to our understanding of care. Even more, though we understood at a high level that joining the army was synonymous with violence, with killing the opposition, there was a seeming casualization to how she rationalized “join the army and kill some Russians” that we had to reflect on this as it so radically juxtaposed our working definitions of care, which implicitly equated care with nurturance.

A call to protect

We were surprised to hear Yosh share that she did not find her care work to be effective but understood her mounting sense of fatigue in helping others cope with the consequences of war, which from her perspective, could only be abated with the “nightmare” war ending. She articulated,

I’m not scared about the fact that I could be killed, but I’m scared of the continuation of the war. I have some depressive thoughts. I feel that I already did a lot to try to stop the war because I spent much time in Europe trying to build solidarity projects and networks. I tried to do something and to explain to others in other countries that we can stop the war. People in Europe say ‘We don’t know how to stop the war. Of course, it will be good to stop the war. But how do you do this?’ It’s not clear to them or me anymore. It’s so difficult.

Yosh’s excerpt reveals her care work, both on the ground and in building solidarity networks, was not gaining enough traction. Where this work now felt like an inadequate response to war, joining the military appeared as a remedy, opening up the possibility of control through immediate action, violence, and siege. What struck us through these distinctions was that Yosh’s distress was discernible: people needed support and would continue to need support until the war ended. How the war ended, was, of course, another story. She believed her care activism could not stop the full-scale invasion and might actually lead to her death if she opted to stay in Ukraine. Thus, she deeply understood how for others, joining the army was a more viable option. Her description illustrates the underbelly of radical care, which has the propensity to blend right-wing views in support of Leftist utopia (Hobart and Kneese, 2020), favoring some groups over others, depending entirely on the ideology of the caregiver and context. Yosh’s activism is both left-wing because of its orientation towards marginalized groups, and at the same time, tainted by right-wing views in support of violence for national defense.

Feminist Workshop’s raison d’etre was caring for marginalized groups, but now confronted by war, Yosh’s own feminist ideology of gender-based equality was overturned with one of human survival. She explained,

Some activists are organizing street demonstrations about the sexist advertisement of a local bar, because it’s important for people to feel that it is still important to fight sexism and to feel that you are not alone in this fight, even during war. But for us, gender quality is not very important right now during the war. It’s not a topic in our discussions really. Now we are just humans and we do what we need to survive.

Here we see a shift in Feminist Workshops’ prioritization of care-based efforts, with Yosh privileging protection, defense, and military engagement for survival. Wanting to protect her country, she was willing to pick up where the perceived shortcomings of her care work left off and promote violence through war, with war itself a facsimile of the patriarchal regime she was so fixated on alleviating. When probed about her comments about joining the army, “killing some Russians,” and whether that was aligned with feminist theory, she reflected:

I’ve spent a lot of time in discussions with my Western comrades. I discovered that feminist theory, which often comes to Ukraine from Western academia, observes and integrates many notions and ideas from feminist theory to our context. But when the full-scale invasion began, we understood that we have a huge lack of understanding from our colleagues in Europe because they don’t understand, for example, how feminists could join military forces. That’s why I think some Ukrainian feminists have doubts about the understanding of feminism and how we can find a common language about this. So now, we are just humans and we do what we need to do to survive and to practice at least some of our values.

Listening attentively as Yosh spoke during this interview, we wanted desperately to probe her further on her ideas surrounding feminism and feminist theory beyond gender-based equality. We realized though textured and differentiated through various theoretical anchorings, colloquially rather than scholarly, “being feminist” carries with it a rather homogenized, accepted, and often silent definition. What did she mean by “feminist theory,” we wondered. As self-proclaimed feminists, what iteration of feminist theory were we relying on? Given the tempo of the interview and our acknowledgment that as two Western academics in Europe, probably more similar to the “colleagues in Europe who lacked understanding,” we let the moment pass in the interview. It did not feel appropriate to probe the foundations of her understanding of feminism or if we even shared a common language with her about what feminism was or could be. Instead, what resonated with us was her emphasis, above all, on alternative caring practices centered on survival, transcending distinctions between feminist schools of thought or what might be considered feminine for masculine conceptions of care (Nadasen, 2021). History offers numerous occasions where women called to arms to survive, for example, the Freiheit organization in Nazi-occupied Poland, where women fought against the Nazis by manipulating railroads, smuggling weapons, and fighting in combat (Batalion, 2020). Yet, as two Western feminist scholars, Yosh’s call to arms still caught us off guard as we had latched on to the notion that violence was the antithesis of power (Arendt, 1970) and thus subscribing to violence to perpetuate a care agenda, seemed to us to be counterintuitive. Siding with early feminists like Addams (1902) among others, we understood violence as domination, which is incongruent with care (Fischer, 2006; Ross-Sheriff and Swigonski, 2006). For Yosh, violence and feminism were not incongruent. Yosh explained in our second interview, “I think at that moment when we talked last, I hadn’t recognized yet that our struggle is still feminist, just our enemy had changed, it’s not just the patriarchy but now also Russia.” The war meant prioritizing protection, which for Yosh, had become a legitimate form of feminist caregiving, one that she felt was particularly more efficacious than her own care-based activism given the turn of events. We were reminded of Tronto’s (1993: 103) assertion that care is, “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, ourselves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web.” From this vantage point, protection could be considered a practice of care, though this expression of care, involving the use of violence for protection and survival, diverged from the gentle and nurturing connotations typically associated with women’s care work, rooted in principles of morality and love (Nadasen, 2021). Yet, aligning with Puig de la Bellacasa’s (2017: 87) assertion, “care refers to those layers of labor that get us through the day” (italics in the original), we recognized its possibility.

Reconsiderations

We entered into our first interview with Yosh convinced that her feminized care-based activism was vital to the resilience and survival of Ukraine. From our vantage points of admitted safety, security, and privilege, this care-based activism was enough. In our second interview, we felt our ears burning as she surfaced some of the murmurs we had privately shared about her feminist mission. She expressed:

I didn’t see support in the feminist struggle we were experiencing in Ukraine from feminist comrades from Europe. Instead, they were claiming that we were not true feminists and I felt rejected by them . . . But some Western feminists who wanted to know the truth found out what some Ukrainian feminists do and found a way to support us. Other Western feminists have continued to focus on their context, not really caring about war in this region. That eventually showed us that even among feminists there are also enemies.

We met Yosh anticipating equality as researchers and activists, united by a feminist cause, only to realize that we too had made assumptions about Feminist Workshop and feminism in Ukraine. Her assertion that there are multiple enemies rings true, patriarchy, a full-scale invasion, and even narrow-minded feminists. Retrospectively, we rather naively entered our conversations with Yosh, expecting a story of activist care as an act of resistance but what we got was a story of symbolic and literal human survival (Butler, 2015). At times, we were left wondering if the lengthy delays in her communication were because of power outages, if she was busy, or if she was no longer alive. We met a woman who was strong, but also very tired, expressing fatigue and despair, no longer seeing the value in her feminist activism. We knew that care work and activism were both challenging, however, we (also fueled by the media’s portrayal of Feminist Workshop) expected that Yosh would elevate her activist care work as being more important than ever. We were not expecting the challenges of her care work to be as pronounced as they were, leading her to question the very value of her work or us to question our understanding of feminism. We are most certainly aware that in many ways our essay may leave the reader with more questions than interpretative keys to solidify a firm answer or position because that too is how we felt with Yosh’s experiences widening our own perceptions of care and feminism. Our essay is not an attempt to sway female-oriented renditions of care to masculine alternatives. It is not our intention to favor protection over nurture. Rather, we are trying to create space to hold these different complexities and contradictions together (Haraway, 1997), because as Yosh said, “Is it a surprise that there are contradictions inside of the feminist movement? No.” If anything, we hope our essay, aligned with the work of Puig de la Bellacasa (2014, 2017), helps to build and foster solidarity about caring from seemingly divergent feminist positions.

We are reminded that feminism is a theory propped up and supported through practice, and those practices take shape through the contexts in which they are flexed. To say it in the words of Gay (2014), “Feminism is flawed because it is a movement powered by people and people are inherently flawed. For whatever reason, we hold feminism to an unreasonable standard where the movement must be everything we want and must always make the best choices.” Activist care work as part of a feminist agenda is also then inherently flawed, human, and messy (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017). We realized that we, too, were holding Yosh’s work to an unreasonable and gendered standard. We hoped for a woman full of energy and strength, embodying mantras of non-violence. We hoped for a tale of the superiority of feminism as a mission of pacifism, shunning the violence and patriarchal domination of the war. But then, reality caught up with us, and we saw a woman living in a country under attack, a woman who needed to survive and help others survive.

We are humbled by how Feminist Workshop is enduring precarity and advancing political change, albeit slowly, through their disruptive views on caring and through the materialization and manifestation of their care work. We of course want to shout from the roof-tops, with a reverberating call to action for scholar-activists and the international community more broadly to recognize, support, and respect care-related community services, especially in conflict zones. Feminist Workshop provides a safe space, useful services, and a stitch of normality for the families left behind. Yosh is helping people survive as a form of care work, which for us, already goes hand-in-hand with stopping the war. Through our interviews with Yosh, we also understood her perspective of protection as care and view that necessitated violence to ensure survival can also fit within a feminist ideology. We saw value in her original mission of maternalistic and tender care work (Tronto, 1993) but also recognize the continued prioritization and elevation of this sort of care work reinforces the ready-made discourses on care that continue to propagate society, degrading and exploiting feminized renditions of care in both paid care work professions and unpaid home-based care domains (Nadasen, 2021). Instead, as feminist scholar-activists, we would encourage feminist solidarity, aligned with Hobart and Kneese (2020) to research and write with more care and humaneness. We call for an empathetic focus on the lived experiences of those like Yosh, who are on the ground and in the grit of the everyday, hearing their assessments and trusting that they know best the ongoing and evolving needs of their “community.” By using a decolonial, feminist perspective we widen our understanding of feminism, rather than making paternalistic assumptions of what we think women need, which only diminishes their lived experiences and agency. Doing so requires care conceptualizations to shift beyond the feel-good attitude we most often associate with caring within and beyond conflict zones and in human and more-than-human terms. If not, by continuing to chant, "Keep it up, just keep caring!" we are not in feminist solidarity, but rather, gaslighting the very real experiences of care-based activists like Yosh. Care work built on gendered assumptions of nurturance does have limits, though perhaps caring does not.