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RADICALIZING CARE

Elke Krasny // Vienna

Living with a broken and infected planet

We are living with the new pandemic regime. It is a crisis regime. Listening closely and carefully to the vocabulary that regimes use is illuminating. This vocabulary is useful to study in order to understand the orientations on which regimes base their politics. Words articulate the regime. Words are not only information or report, they become instructions and orders as they perform, putting the regime’s governance into action and law. 

Words prominently used and heard on the news every day include the following: outbreak, infection, lung complications, latest numbers of Covid-cases, coronavirus statistics, herd immunity, testing, mask order, washing of hands, public health, reduction of exposure to risk, shutdown, reopening, ventilators, critical care beds, intensive care units, immunity, mortality rate, death toll, recommendation, prevention, treatment, restriction, social distancing, remote learning, lockdown. Some of these words translate into instructions; some of these words become orders; some of these words translate into emergency measures and emergency law. They change our everyday lives. They have to be followed.

Speaking with friends and colleagues in different parts of the world, we experience the changes as swift and dramatic. Comparing notes on the measures that governments are taking in each of the nation states we find ourselves in—ranging from the European context, where I live, to other parts of the globe—we see that the measures, although comparable in their intent to fight back against the pandemic in the most efficient way, also differ largely. These discrepancies demonstrate that many of the measures taken to provide solutions to the pandemic, despite being global in their impact and effect, are bound to the territoriality, the governance, and the law making of the nation-state. While we live with the emergence of a new pandemic regime globally, the pandemic regime in and of itself is not global. The measures are taken by the governing bodies that govern our bodies. The Covid-19 crisis has thrown into sharp relief our dependence upon the governing bodies that govern our bodies, our bodily vulnerability, and, our global—and globalized—bodily interconnectedness and interdependence. The Covid-19 crisis has highlighted our vulnerabilities: all human bodies are vulnerable as they are exposable to the dangers of the viral infection; meanwhile, all bodies are potentially dangerous to each other through person-to-person spread. These vulnerabilities, and particularly the high risk for people who are in close context with others, throws into sharp relief the fact that access to reliable and good public health care as well as the obligations to perform caring labor are highly unequal. Care inequality, care injustice, and care discrimination are classed, gendered, racialized, and sexualized. This general crisis of care affecting the vast majority of the planet’s population of course predates by far the current crisis, as it dates back to colonial capitalism, which has long infected the planet with viral forms of exploitation, exhaustion, extraction, and depletion. The current pandemic amplifies the crisis of care.

Regardless of the political and economic system people are living under, people are always in need of care. Care has to be understood as essential, as vital to humans and their lives, to their wellbeing and their survival. “Care” broadly refers to paid and unpaid caring labor including housework, community work, health care, and education. Missing data on unpaid household services is, as feminist activist and scholar Caroline Criado Perez has observed, “perhaps the greatest gender data gap of all.” [1] With preschools and kindergartens closed because of the pandemic and children at home in distant learning mode, the volume of such caring labor, which disproportionately falls on women, is propelled to new heights. Furthermore, women are overrepresented in the precarious economy, in particular the overexploited and extremely precarious, often informal domestic care sector, with many workers undocumented and without access to public health care. Many care workers find themselves out of work, the global care chains that employ them broken due to travel restrictions. [2] From a global perspective, women are not only the care workers of the world, they also represent the majority of those who live in poverty. The pandemic situation renders the provision of everyday care, and the precarious income generated through this labor, even more precarious and unstable than before. 

Therefore, care is at the center of attention. The question is whether or not this centrality of care will be understood in such a way that political and economic changes will be followed through in the aftermath of the crisis. The unseen levels of inequality existing before the outbreak of the pandemic are currently being exasperated, as the same vulnerable communities that are disproportionately put at risk with the climate crisis are now the ones most profoundly affected by the pandemic. The question is: what will be learned in economic and political terms from the experience of the centrality of care that is currently understood on a global level? Will the reviving, repairing, and resuscitating of the economy in post-pandemic times return to the same violent system of extraction, depletion, and exhaustion? Or will there be a turn to care that actually puts life-supporting labor at the center of what is considered life-producing and not just value-generating? 

The necessarily fast responses to the pandemic crisis show that governments do have power and agency beyond the short-term and long-term interests of the economy. Compared to the measures that are being taken now, which are adapting their timing to the speed and deadliness of the virus, those adopted and proposed to fight the climate catastrophe have failed to adapt to the speed and deadliness of a crisis that has been causing disaster and death for decades. Will the profound understanding of bodily interdependence and interconnectedness that is experienced with the pandemic give rise to a deeper understanding of caring for a broken and infected planet? Our bodies are inseparably connected with the environment we inhale and ingest. Radicalizing care would mean upholding the centrality of care in all political and economic processes that govern our bodies and our environment in order to take the best care of our broken and infected planet. The vocabulary of this radical care regime—from which instructions, orders, and rules would follow—must be developed from the perspective of global solidarity through care. It must come from that which is at the heart of our collective survival, living, and wellbeing.

Notes:

  1. Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women: Data bias in a world designed for men, (New York: Abrams Press, 2019), 241.

  2. The term “global care chains” was coined by writer and sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild in 2000 in: Arlie Hochschild, “Global Care Chains and Emotional Surplus Value,” in On the Edge: Living with Global Capitalism, ed. A. Giddens and W. Hutton (London: Jonathan Cape, 2000), 130–146.

Author Bio:

Dr. Elke Krasny is Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Her scholarship and her curatorial work focus on issues of justice and transformative practices in architecture, art, and urbanism.