ON CARE
In this article, I cite and link to academic articles that are not open access. Please feel free to email me for any PDFs at pc2942@columbia.edu. Additionally, many books are available for free download at b-ok.cc—you didn’t hear it from me!
Abolitionist feminists were leaders in thought and praxis of the 2020 uprisings, calling for “care not cops.” In doing so, they critiqued a fascist state that kills, captures, and controls, and uplifted community/collective care as the foundation of our future—“we are each other’s magnitude and bond,” as Gwendolyn Brooks writes. “Care not cops” invokes a world undergirded by relationships not of violence, domination, and control, but rather of deep respect, mutuality, life-affirmation, and nourishment. As Saidiya Hartman famously said during a colloquium on Christina Sharpe’s Into the Wake, care is the antidote to violence—we do not yet know a world where people learn first and foremost that others are to be loved and cared for. That world is a world without cages.
This abolitionist feminist oral history project is about care work. In this way, it is a continuation of oral history work I created as an undergraduate, on caregiving among Asian gay men and lesbians during the AIDS pandemic. Driven to study care by the end of a loved one’s life and a need for many kinds of healing, I found I was one among many people choosing to do so in 2019 and 2020. The hard intellectual & practical labors of disabled, Black, queer, trans, and femme care workers had, in a sense, come to fruition: so long ignored, care is now increasingly understood as that which people and movements cannot be without.
Still, a lot escapes notice when academics extol the virtues of community care. Whose care work is rewarded and uplifted; whose care work continues to go unseen and unshared—taken for granted, essentially required, if not expropriated outright? Within what well-worn paths does care circulate—are we merely re-circulating care where it already exists, or are we pushing beyond its usual directionalities? How do ability and desire-ability shape people’s willingness or recruitment into performing care work? How do idealizations of care obscure the true breadth of its meanings and possibilities—including when care might mean exploitation, or violence?
Obfuscations of care’s nature and limits let liberalism seep into articulations of care that are meant to be revolutionary. As a reactionary wave sweeps through the US culture war now, and as many young people (including non-system-impacted people) learn abolition, I hope we can be especially clear about what liberal abolitionism looks like, as Lee Shevek terms it, and what its failings are. So I hope to do some clarification here, especially because my project articulates care in a positive, sometimes unspecific light. I hold my friends and comrades’ care work in the highest regard, and therefore I want to make clear that care work is not easy, simple, or uncomplicatedly good. It is as much produced by our harsh world as it is an escape route from it. It can be violent. And it must be rigorous.
I believe that care is much more expansive than we might give it credit for. In exploring the lineage of abolitionist feminism, I hope to make clear that care is a thing with many sides—some of which are cast in deep and violent shadows, all of which (liberatory and oppressive) are intimately connected. The lineage of abolitionist feminism also makes clear that a “feminist care” practice is not tantamount to a “‘feminine’ nonviolent” practice—indeed, care and violence go hand in hand. And in exploring histories of disabled care work, I hope to bring the actual labor of care, as well as the many inequalities in who gives and who receives, to the attention of able-bodied people. Only from here may we begin to talk about care.
WHAT IS CARE WORK?: ABOLITIONIST FEMINIST LINEAGES
Care is intrinsic to abolitionist feminism: a core logic, a mode of relation, an animating force, a condition of possibility. But care is not just utopia and the path to it; it is unevenly held responsibility—work, as disabled writer Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha points to insistently in her essay volume Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice. If we cite Hartman saying care is the antidote to violence, we must also cite her essay “The Belly of the World: A Note on Black Women’s Labors,” in which she writes,
It seems that her [the Black woman, “the sex worker, welfare mother, and domestic laborer”] role has been fixed and that her role is as a provider of care, which is the very mode of her exploitation and indifferent use by the world, a world blind to her gifts, her intellect, her talents. This brilliant and formidable labor of care, paradoxically, has been produced through violent structures of slavery, anti-black racism, virulent sex-ism, and disposability. The forms of care, intimacy, and sustenance exploited by racial capitalism, most importantly, are not reducible to or exhausted by it. These labors cannot be assimilated to the template or grid of the black worker, but instead nourish the latent text of the fugitive. They enable those “who were never meant to survive” to sometimes do just that. This care, which is coerced and freely given, is the black heart of our social poesis, of making and relation.
Hartman unforgettably renders the paradoxical nature of care here: it is that which is violently expropriated from Black women under slavery and through its afterlives; that by which people grind out survival in unsurvivable conditions; and that which offers some of the most revolutionary, hopeful possibilities for living together.
Angela Davis powerfully elaborates this paradox in her seminal 1971 essay “Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves.” The essay is a decisive rebuttal to contemporary writers who claimed that enslaved domestics held special privileges over or were in collusion with their masters against other slaves. Rather, Davis writes, Black women were “doubly oppressed”: they performed domestic work not only in the master’s house, a site of “terroristic” sexual domination, but also in slave living quarters. They responded by making domestic spaces the site of open rebellion, “poison[ing] the food and set[ting] fire to the house of their masters.” Davis also argues that slave women’s role as housekeeper of slave living quarters was politically central: Black women were “performing the only labor of the slave community which could not be directly and immediately claimed by the oppressor … domestic labor. … As the center of domestic life, the only life at all removed from the arena of exploitation, and thus as an important source of survival, the black woman could play a pivotal role in nurturing the thrust toward freedom.” The Black woman, she wrote, was “caretaker of a household of resistance.”
Davis names care work, then, as having two absolutely central functions in Black abolitionist rebellion: the guaranteeing of survival, which is a “prerequisite to higher levels of struggle”; and the nurturing of an autonomous space away from direct exploitation. Violently exploited as caretakers, Black women could therefore not perform care work idly, Davis writes. Instead care had a distinctly political character, and in fact was at the center of Black insurgency.
Lineages of abolitionist feminist care work also dismantle the myth that care is mutually exclusive with violence. Some people read Saidiya Hartman’s care is the antidote to violence as suggesting this much—that care is itself nonviolence. People may also object to violence or uses of force based on the premise that the world we want to create is a world without structural violence. Black feminists and other feminists of color have taught us that our movements need to reflect the worlds we want to live in; therefore—some say—we must never use violence.
However, protecting one another from enormously violent anti-Black and white supremacist regimes—let alone dismantling them—has historically involved force. Historian Kellie Carter Jackson writes powerfully of the “protective violence” that enslaved Black women employed to look after their own and dismantle slavery: they plotted escape, killed their masters, took up arms to defend each other from slave catchers, hid and cared for fugitive slaves, and sometimes committed filicide, preferring death to slavery for their children. She writes, “While in slavery there was virtually no task a black woman could be protected from, similarly on the run and in freedom … there was no role a black woman could not play in protecting herself, her family, her community, and fugitives.” These extensive and forceful actions toward freedom were “a labor of love.” Jackson makes clear that in an abolitionist feminist lineage, protective violence is care.
Self-defense continued to be a core tenet of the Black radical tradition through the civil rights movement, which so many now remember as nonviolent: Fannie Lou Hamer said, “I keep a shotgun in every corner of my bedroom and the first cracker even look like he wants to throw some dynamite on my porch won’t write his mama again.” At the very least, then, it is worth making a distinction between the violence we direct towards one another and the violence we direct toward the overwhelmingly violent state and its (para)militaries. In other words, for our movements to prefigure a world based on care, we do indeed need to rethink our modes of relation and seek to minimize or abolish violence within our relationships and movements. However, we also need not—should not—take state violence lying down. Rather, as we embody an abolitionist genealogy that has its roots in slavery abolition, we must love and protect each other with everything we have.
CARE AND (DESIRE-)ABILITY
Abolitionist lineages of care work are deeply intertwined with sick and disabled lineages of collectivity and freedom. Indeed, to refer to collective care and community care is necessarily to cite sick and disabled people who, resisting institutionalization and medical harm, experimented with care practices with few resources but each other. In Care Work, for instance, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha writes of a care collective dreamed up and organized by disabled queer anarchist Loree Erickson. She found that state resources were profoundly inadequate to her actual needs, if not inimical to her wellbeing, and therefore recruited community members into helping her survive:
For the past fifteen years, her care collective has been filled with disabled and non-disabled friends and community members who work shifts each week to help her with dressing, bathing, and transferring. She doesn’t have to do all the care work herself: she has friends who take on the admin work of emailing, scheduling, and training potential care shifters.
As care becomes more conceptually mainstream and takes on a certain glamor in academic circles, sick and disabled lineages draw me back to the facts. Collective care in Piepzna-Samarasinha’s writing is unforgettably care work, not just a pleasing abstraction. Dropping off food, cleaning, sending care packages and commissary, preventing evictions, rapid response, and affective care labor—this hard work forms the backbone of survival and movement. I also bear in mind disabled sex-working organizer Yves Tong Nguyen’s words at a panel I was fortunate to be part of: “Not all care work is visible or respected. … A lot of care work is done by the most marginalized people and is often heavily gendered and racialized.” That is to say, the new visibility of care has not necessarily gone hand in hand with a more equal distribution of care labor: trans, queer, disabled femmes of color still bear the brunt of formal and informal care work.
Unequally given, care is also unequally received. As oral historian and tattoo artist Tamara Santibañez noted on the same panel, the question of who receives care is heavily determined by “likability, desirability, all these other limitations of attention and effort.” Indeed, even as Piepzna-Samarasinha expresses admiration for Loree Erickson’s care collective, she also notes that Erickson’s whiteness, extroversion, and pre-existing social supports mark her as deserving of care. If care only extends as far as like and desire, we are surely in trouble: she writes, “A wheelchair-using, physically disabled Black femme friend of mine remarked to me … ‘I don’t ever want to depend on being liked or loved by the community for the right to shit in my toilet when I want to.’” The anecdote begs the question: why is it compulsory for disabled people to build infallible relationship networks and be charming and sweet and easy to be around in order for “community” to rally around them in the way that people rallied around Erickson? Even invocations of “community,” then, presume more support than many have, and/or fall short of the unconditional, reciprocal, universal care that people actually need.
In Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness, Da’Shaun L. Harrison theorizes desire/ability as systemic violence: much as eugenicist, ableist power structures produce the premature deaths of disabled people, desire/ability produces the premature deaths of Fat (especially Fat Black) and disfigured people. Harrison’s brilliant theorizing invites us to dig deeper into circulations of care, to consider the way they are shaped by desire/ability, ability, and the other axes with which people might be more familiar. I am very much in the process of interrogating who I choose to spend time with and invest my care in, and invite others to do that with me.
I hope that we—especially those of us who are able-bodied and rich—can question whether our invocations of care actually extend care beyond its usual pathways, or whether we are merely recirculating care where it already exists. I’ll get a little personal here, by way of explanation. When I first encountered abolition, it was in the context of my own need for healing after great harm. I was drawn to abolition through the notion that social transformation begins with our relationships, and that we need to learn to deeply care for one another. Such care might have made it less easy for the harm I experienced to take place. I learned more about transformative justice; my relationships genuinely improved; and I became genuinely safer. However, I was (and am) also rich, able-bodied, light-skinned, profoundly surrounded by resources, and quite distant from immediate violence. Care was abundantly available to me. I’m glad to have healed, and to have studied transformative justice with my friends; I don’t underestimate what happens when people think deeply about safety, harm, consequences, and healing together. But I also began to question if there was anything inherently radical about me and my (mostly rich, Ivy League) friends getting really good at taking care of one another. And naturally, I have come to believe that the work of abolition must centrally concern the wellbeing of those who are most harmed by prisons and policing.
So: abolition cannot just be the act of becoming kinder and kinder to each other within narrow, care-saturated environments, especially not for financially secure, highly educated, Abled, and Thin people. This image of abolition disastrously neglects a power analysis. When do notions of “collective care” within elite spaces actually work to maintain oppressive power relations? What kinds of spaces and relations is our care work reproducing? Care work as abolitionist feminism must strive to dismantle social hierarchies, not exist within or reproduce them. Following Harrison, Piepzna-Samarinha, Nguyen, and Santibañez, I suggest that we need to meaningfully extend care, relationship, and power, lest we forget the actual work of abolition.
CARE AND REVOLUTION
How do we turn care toward revolution? How do we make a revolution of care? Cultivating relationships, growing trust and care, keeping inside comrades safe, studying together, agitating against some of prison’s many harms—these things are all of the essence. And I want to ask: what are we building toward in the next five years? Ten? For the next generation? The next seven generations? What truly differentiates the mutual aid work that we do from social work or charity? When is mutual aid actually building community power? The answer surely isn’t always, but we must name the successes we do see so that we may admire them, propagate them, and innovate upon them.
I want to center care, and I want to dream big. I want to honor life to its fullest by relentlessly ensuring the survival of our most marginalized comrades—unhoused, incarcerated, disabled, sex-working, Black, Indigenous, brown, poor & working people—and meaningfully shifting the terrain of power. I want to transform our relationships and transform our society. It behooves us to think about how to do care and revolution together.
I recognize that movements have fallen apart because of a failure to center care, healing, trust, and accountability. I recognize that learning how to care for one another is a prerequisite to “higher levels of struggle,” as Angela Davis told us long ago. And there is still so much to learn: the giving of care is still so heavily shaped by anti-Black, racist, misogynistic histories of reproductive labor; the receiving of care shaped by class, gender, race, and desire-ability. We must shift the abhorrent social conditions under which care is currently extorted, provided, and received. And our movements will continue to be fraught, unsustainable, and regressive when they lack care, healing, access, and love. I want to commit to getting to the starting line. And I want to keep dreaming and planning, following disabled, Black, Fat abolitionist feminist lineages. What are our care dreams for the generation after us? And how do we make them a reality?
