To Download the Full Conference Program please use the following link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/188w73rMjbvBc_eDcVFbjlb1krgojbXCIq57yI1kINfw/edit?usp=sharing
Abstract
Drawing an inspiration from Aristotle’s distinction between the good person and a good
citizen, I ask: Do any of us want to say that we care well at the same time we are living an
obviously unjust life? Living in an unjust state, it might simply be easier to ignore many of the injustices around us, even as we go on in our daily lives doing our best to be good receivers and good givers of care for those close to us, and to those we care about. But this way of framing the question makes clear that “tending our own garden” in this way is a recipe to perpetuate injustices which will not be eliminated by our close attention to doing well to those around us. At its worst pursuing our own good care may make the world a more unjust place. Can we care well in an unjust world without adding to the injustice? Furthermore, what can we do, as people engaged in care-giving and care-receiving, to remedy this situation?
Speaker Bio: Joan C. Tronto is professor emerita of political science at the City University of New York and the University of Minnesota. She is the author of many works on care ethics, including over 50 articles and several books, including Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethics of Care (Routledge, 1993) Caring Democracy: Markets, Equality and Justice (NYU Press, 2013). In 2023 she received the Lippincott Award for outstanding work in political theory from the American Political Science Association. She served as a Fulbright Fellow in Italy and has been awarded two honorary doctorates from the University for Humanistic Studies in the Netherlands and Louvain University in Belgium. Her work has been translated into more than a dozen languages.
Time
Title & Author(s)
Abstract
9:15am-9:30am
Reconceptualizing Parental Migration as Care: Children’s Understanding in Rural China
Dr. Wan Huang, East China University of Science and Technology
whuang@ecust.edu.cn
China has witnessed the largest scale of domestic migration in human history, with nearly 296 million migrants relocating to urban areas in 2022 in pursuit of better job opportunities. This phenomenon is a result of the uneven rural-urban development amidst the country’s rapid urbanization process. Due to the institutional barriers faced by migrant workers in accessing local social services, many are compelled to leave their children behind in rural communities under the care of one parent, grandparents, or other relatives. The plight of left-behind children in rural China has garnered significant attention, with extensive research exploring the detrimental effects of parental absence on their health, education, behaviors, mental well-being, and overall development. However, there is a dearth of literature examining how these children themselves understand and interpret their parents’ migration and subsequent absence. It is important to recognize that the migration of these parents, often driven by the need to seek employment in urban areas and provide economic support to their rural families, paradoxically contributes to the well-being of their families and left-behind children. While public and academic research widely acknowledges this motivation, the focus has predominantly been on the absence caused by parental migration rather than the care it represents. Therefore, it is crucial to reframe the narrative surrounding parental migration as an act of care provided by these parents for their children. Despite being physically absent, this care may transcend spatial and temporal boundaries, impacting the child as effectively as other forms of care. Equally important is understanding how these children perceive and respond to such care, particularly whether they appreciate or resent their parents’ migration. To address this research gap, this study delves into how left-behind children comprehend and value the migration of their parents. Through firsthand data collection in inland China and quantitative analysis, this study underscores that children’s acceptance and understanding of their parents’ migration significantly influence their adaptation to urban life and shape their behavior and educational outcomes. These findings indicate that when parental migration is perceived by children as an act of care, it has a positive impact on their well-being
9:30am-9:45am
Jus Post Bellum Care in Veteran Households and Asian America Dr. Amy Chin, Vassar College achin@vassar.edu
Abstract Available for Registered Participants
9:45am-10:00am
Children's construction of care
Dr. Shipra Suneja, Azim Premji University;
shipra.suneja@apu.edu.in
The paper will explore the place of ‘children's experiences of constructing care in their ecologies’ in reconceptualising care in more inclusive ways. Children in the Indian contexts, especially in the rural settings, commonly participate in all aspects of daily living including activities that have economic and cultural value. Caring for each other as well as the environment becomes integral to their journey of making sense of the cultures they live in and their relationships with human and nonhuman worlds. Several socio-cultural features such as caste, class, gender, poverty and violence are woven into the contours of their lifeworlds. Children are actively involved in navigating through these contours. Together they develop strategies to find a way out: infusing their activities with a playful quality as they negotiate these ecological spaces. In their play-worlds, they engage in acts of navigating, negotiating and often subverting, thus constructing microcosms of the context they live in. In the process, they also construct and deconstruct ideas of care, building identities as individuals and as members of the community. They develop nuanced understanding of their ecologies- the precariousness, the possibilities as well as the potentialities. Caring is thus construed in multiple shades and hues of companionships among children and the critical enquiries embedded in the everyday experience of living in their ecology. The paper will evoke vignettes from an ethnographic research in a rural community in India. It will use postcolonial feminist perspectives to deconstruct the binary conceptualizations of care such as “care for’ and “care of” children. It reconceptualises care as a complex and pluralised experience for children. It will explore how, in their everyday acts of play, children navigate situations (often entailing risk) together, giving voices to each other, building a collective narrative of life-stories and finding ways to build caring relationships along with other skills and tasks of growing up. The paper further builds on the idea that care for others, that includes both human and non-human forms, is integral to the conceptualisation of the children’s agency. For the community that was studied, caring for others was seen as a form of competence where one strives to be responsible for the other person as well for the ecology that one is part of. The conception of care also undeniably brings into purview how moral boundaries, ethics structures related to gender, power and class are construed in everyday living. To look at the lives of others, it is integral to look at the ethics of everyday living (Das, 2012), where the language of vulnerability and resilience, of values and morality is also of their own. The paper will build on the need to promote education that integrates care, community, companionships in the most fundamental ways. It will focus on how the seemingly ordinary everyday acts of care are construed by children as just or unjust, as supportive or harmful. The paper intends to contribute to building an imagination of and commitment towards a future that is inclusive of children’s voices.
10:00-10: 15am
What does it mean to “care” in families?
Dr. Allison M. Alford & Dr. Kaitlin Phillips, Baylor University; allison_alford@baylor.edu; kaitlin_phillips@baylor.edu
What does it mean to care? For Family Communication scholars, the constructs of social support (Goldsmith, 2015), affection (Floyd et al., 2021), generativity (Peterson, 2002) and bonding (Petronio & Bradford, 1993) come to mind as schema for answering this question. Although these frameworks represent communication that enables the development and maintenance of relationships, they also skew toward the optimistic. Yet, care in families is not so easily categorized. Families are complex, often messy, and can be sites of trauma or exploitation. Caring behaviors are present in family estrangement (Scharp, 2019), surrendering a child, or even when avoiding a spouse—caring behaviors where family members are victimized or stigmatized (Brule & Eckstein, 2016). Spitzberg and Cupach (2007) call this the “dark side” of interpersonal communication: toxic behaviors easily identifiable as both socially unacceptable and personally dysfunctional. A more interesting place for us to investigate the meaning of care is where the majority of family life takes place: the messy middle. Most often, families are social spaces for the routine and mundane behaviors of life. Families can be called upon to care in ways that aren’t entirely bright or dark. Here we find interpersonal communication behaviors which less obviously identifiable as “dark,” yet still have components that are socially or personally problematic. Two kinds of care that need further investigation are those a) normatively approved by general society’s standards, yet dysfunctional for the person enacting them, and b) normatively disapproved (by society or peers), but functionally effective. Metaphorically speaking, these forms of family communication are akin to silver clouds with black linings or black clouds with silver linings (Spitzberg & Cupach, 2007). Everyday examples of silver and black cloud care include a parent who grounds a child for missing curfew, maintaining a secret that might harm other family members, supporting a family members desire to stop seeking medical treatment, cutting off communication from an addicted family member, engaging in daughtering, and on the list goes. These examples demonstrate the duality of care and loss; the simultaneity of being a fountain while feeling drained. It is in research studies where nuance truly matters. These are the often-overlooked, hidden areas that can define and draw out the true meaning of care within families. When scholars study only positive aspects of care, we enforce that some forms of care are legitttimate and valuable. Thus, what we study as care becomes how care is defined, while other types of care lose their value and legitimacy. Consequently, care becomes work; yet this work is rendered invisible and under-resourced. To fully understand the meaning of care in families, we must investigate the spectrum of caring communication behaviors. Defining care in families is a complex endeavor. In this essay, we consider the theoretical concept of care within family communication. We provide supporting literature on the spectrum of care in family communication that moves us towards a holistic understanding. We conclude with directions for future research that advance the study of care in families.
10:15am-10:30am
Q & A
Time
Title & Author(s)
Abstract
9:15-9:30am
Care in comparison: Interdependence across contexts
Dr. Julia Kowalski, University of Notre Dame & Dr. Elana Buch, University of Iowa
jkowals4@nd.edu and elana-buch@uiowa.edu
As the themes of this conference illustrate, care is an increasingly powerful category in scholarly analysis as well as political organizing in the English-speaking world. However, it also carries with it a complex set of overlapping meanings that often challenge both scholars and activists seeking to engage the term. In particular, some scholars and activists have proposed care as a solution to the harms of social inequality, particularly inequalities related to race and gender, while others have underscored that care is itself a tool that perpetuates those inequalities. In our talk, we seek to move beyond this paradoxical feature of the term “care.” Drawing on our background as cultural anthropologists, we argue that “care” is only one of multiple ways of framing the interdependent relations at the core of human experience. Specifically, we argue that using anthropology’s comparative approach can make the seemingly familiar term “care” strange again, in order to de-naturalize gendered and racialized inequalities that haunt the concept. Care is only one among many possible categories across a range of languages and traditions for theorizing how humans sustain lives by navigating a set of always-open questions about how to live together, regenerate social worlds, and recuperate interdependent relations. We propose, instead, starting from a series of empirical questions about what conceptual tools people in specific social and historical contexts use to make sense of relations of interdependence.
To illustrate this, we compare two moments from our fieldwork, with, respectively, family counselors in Jaipur, India, and home care workers in Chicago, the United States. We explore how seva, a Hindi-language concept that roughly translates to respectful service, reflects and reproduces a wider moral world in terms that resonate with, yet differ from, the role played by care in the Chicago case. In each case, locally specific systems of gendered inequality concealed some elements of interdependent relations while emphasizing others, in terms that simultaneously reproduced inequality and facilitated meaningful forms of agency and personhood. We use this comparison as an example of how estranging care can help us ask more precise analytic questions about how people draw on concepts such as care and seva to both reproduce and remake relations of inequality as they confront profound dilemmas of how to depend on and be depended on by others. Doing so reveals the power and inequality at play as people navigate the interdependence required for human survival—both estranging “care” as a culturally specific concept and helping us better understand how care estranges, even as it connects. We suggest that the methodological and analytic tools of feminist anthropology, rooted in a dialectic, iterative approach to analyzing social and historical difference, have a powerful role to play in conceptualizing care, as both an empirical phenomenon that shapes relations and identities, as well as in conceptualizing the role care should play in framing movements to build a more just and livable world.
9:30-9:45am
Mending as Knowing and Practicing Otherwise
Dr. Brunella Casalini and Dr. Alessandro Pratesi, University of Florence (Italy) brunella.casalini@unifi.it and a.pratesi@unifi.it
A concept that persistently crosses into the public debate, shifting from the everyday and familiar lexicon to the more specialized one of scientific production, can bring along a paradigm shift. This is what the recent history of the English word «care» and the Italian «cura» tells us. Almost by some sort of towing effect, the concept of care seems to have dragged other concepts outside the domestic and feminine sphere. Suffice it to think of the concepts of maintain, repair and, more recently, and perhaps most unexpectedly, the concept of mending. The act of mending, is simultaneously a gesture of care, maintenance, and repair. And yet, compared to its cognate terms, the concept of mending possesses peculiarities that make it particularly relevant to understand contemporary phenomena, whether it is a question of neighbourhood regeneration, interpersonal relationships, democratic institutions, etc. In line with the concepts of maintenance, repair and care, the concept of mending refers to a vision of the world that criticises the dictate of continuing innovation and growth to emphasise the symbolic and affective value of objects as opposed to their market value. Mending is a practice that requires creativity. It can make the damage, the imperfection of the fabric invisible, but it can also turn them into an opportunity to create something totally unique that makes the worn object even more precious. Like the old Japanese practice of kintsugi, or "golden repair", mending remind us that when something valuable cracks or breaks it should be repaired carefully and lovingly in an aesthetic way (Saito 2022), it is an art of situated repair that does not represent a solution for every form of damage, that teaches us how to live with damage (Haraway, 2016), how to recognise the threads that need to be put back together and acknowledge the healing powers for those who are engaged in the mending practice.
In our damaged planet, the concept of mending keeps us away both from catastrophic pessimism and unfounded technological optimism. It reminds us of the importance (and pleasure) of the activities we engage with to try to repair the damage, to put back together the pieces of a reality we did not necessarily create. Along with other feminist reflections on maintenance and repair stimulated by the work on the ethics of care (Tronto, 2013, 2015), the metaphor of mending also contains the promise of a radical theoretical and methodological shift. How can we translate the theoretical understanding of mending into innovative methodological practices? How can we bridge academic and experiential knowledge production and connect them with effective forms of collective endeavours? Based on these premises and questions, this paper has two main objectives: 1) reviewing current debates on the complexities revolving around the concepts of care, maintenance, repair, and mending; 2) highlighting the theoretical and methodological implications of mending as a metaphor for action, academic production and the mingling of knowledge, practice, and aesthetics in everyday care activity.
9:45-10:00am
Global Capitalism and Global Care Chains
Miguel Cerón-Becerra, Loyola University Chicago
mceronbecerra@luc.edu
Today it is widely assumed that the economic and family spheres are radically different. The latter is the realm of intimacy, in which workers repair their strength, consume goods, form kinship relationships, and carry out the nurturing and care essential to people's preservation and reproduction. The former is where commodities and goods are produced and distributed, services and information are sold, and material and financial resources are managed. Feminist historians have recently shown that this separation, while illustrating a political situation that broadly shapes social relations in capitalist societies, can conceal significant economic processes occurring in the household (Sarti, Bellavitis, and Martini 2018, 18). Notably, domestic labor's commodification is at the intersection of both spheres insofar as it is paid work performed in the home. Such labor often contributes to reproductive work and, macroeconomically, has a substantive impact on national economies, labor markets, and migration processes.This paper employs the framework of global care chains (GCCs) to study domestic workers' social marginalization and economic exploitation. It demonstrates that analyzing the affects and intimate relationships in domestic workers' labor and family relations is essential to understanding the economic and social implications of their exploitation. This ultimately exacerbates global inequality while damaging relationships fundamental to workers' well-being.
This argument is developed in four steps. The first part examines GCCs' framework, which illustrates how the global North exploits and drains care resources from the global South through the migration of caregivers. The second shows that GCCs aggravate social inequality along lines of class, race, gender, and migration status. This section examines the global situation of domestic workers and the legal obstacles to implementing decent work standards in this sector. The third part studies the intertwining of the economic and emotional aspects of domestic labor's exploitation. It demonstrates that the emotional and financial damages migrants and their families suffer due to precarious working conditions and family separation hinder them from achieving economic and human development. This paper finally characterizes domestic workers' exploitation and marginalization under global capitalism based on the above developments. It clarifies how GCCs intensify the global maldistribution of wealth while causing economic and emotional harm to workers and their families.
10:00-10:15am
Care in Times of Crises: How Sex Workers Redefine Care
Allison Rowland, University of California, Irvine
aarowlan@uci.edu
Recent years have been marked by death and decay: a global pandemic en masse disabled and laid waste to bodies, settler-colonial expansion has propagated genocide around the world, and rising fascism has eradicated protections and safety for marginalized groups. The continued life of what bell hooks calls an imperialist white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchy has eroded people’s abilities to care for themselves, and one another. Yet, transgressive relationships that embody the anti-- anti-colonial, anti-racist, anti-capital, anti-patriarchal-- continue to foment amongst those who have no option but to resist and reconfigure these oppressive relationships. How can we understand forms of care that are in opposition to dominant conceptualizations? What do the ongoing crises of care mean for how we are in community with one another?
This paper turns towards sex workers as a community that is “ideal” for care-based interventions that seek to reduce legal, social, and economic barriers due to their criminalized and marginalized status in most states. In this paper, I argue sex work is a productive site of theorization for care in times of crisis. How do international interventions addressing various crises conceptualize care in their efforts to address inequities? How do sex workers themselves conceptualize and enact care? To address this question, I utilize thematic analysis of United Nations documents on the following topics: natural disasters, decent work, gender equality, poverty reduction, sex work, and care. The UN is an international organization that is highly influential in setting dominant understandings of our world's most pressing issues. I also use semi-structured interviews with sex workers and secondary data from other sex work-based studies on care and regulations. I advance a two-pronged argument: the conceptualization of care in dominant crisis management frameworks fails to account for the complexities inherent in sex work, and thus international interventions based on this notion of care do not address the legal, social, and economic needs of sex workers. Sex workers themselves practice crisis management in ways that resist and redefine these dominant conceptualizations of care.
10:15-10:30am
Q&A
Time
Title & Author(s)
Abstract
10:45-11:00am
Professionals without a profession: how childcare workers develop professional orientation through community embeddedness and rewards
Dr. Ieva Zumbyte, University College Dublin
ieva.zumbyte@ucd.ie
Why do some care workers behave like professionals exhibiting commitment and dedication to high-quality childcare, despite the absence of institutional professionalization, incentives and monitoring? I answer this with ethnographic fieldwork and over 100 interviews with public childcare workers in 15 neighborhoods in Chennai, India. India boasts the largest and longest running free universal childcare program in the world, catering to 84 million children. The program relies on underpaid, overworked teachers, without sufficient institutional support or training to deliver quality childcare. And yet I find that some teachers cultivate distinct professional orientations towards childcare provision. They do so by actively engaging with communities and adapting to the preferences and demands for childcare articulated by parents. These vocalized expectations effectively set the benchmarks for the quality of care anticipated. Teachers’ responsiveness, in turn, generates positive feedback, in the form of community support and recognition of teachers’ efforts. In a job with limited benefits and numerous workplace constraints, community recognition serves as a significant reward, sustaining teachers’ commitment to high-quality care. Conversely, in neighborhoods where parents lacked the collective power to demand better care or where teachers confronted overwhelming personal and workplace constraints, teachers developed an “uncommitted” orientation towards work, minimizing effort or prioritizing closely monitored tasks of reporting over quality childcare. By revealing how professionalization can also develop in uncoordinated and unintentional settings this article expands our knowledge on pathways to professionalization (Oberhuemer 2005; Dahlber and Moss 2005; Vandenbroeck et al. 2016). I find that instead of being socialized to follow institutional goals by collective organizing or norms agreed upon by workers (Abbott 1988; Evertsson 2000; McDonnell 2017), it is everyday interactions between teachers and parents, initiated by both, that helped create a sense of duty, accountability and purpose for workers. Community feedback and rewards in turn allowed some teachers to cultivate and sustain professional attitudes and behavior. This indicates that elements of democratic professionalism (Oberhuemer 2005) can emerge organically, and even in adverse working conditions. Despite multiple work constraints, some teachers weaved moments of care into their demanding workloads to reclaim a sense of pride and dignity. My findings also suggest that inverting traditional notions of professionalism in care work, supports rather than hurts professionals’ interest and public good. The professional culture, encompassing ideals of expert knowledge, impartiality, and autonomy tends to encourage detachment, distance, and neutrality as to better serve public interest (Stone 2000; Lopez 2014). However, many scholars have demonstrated that care work is incongruous with such professional ethos, because genuine care necessitates engagement and attachment (Foner 1994; Stone 2000). It is precisely the situated, personalizing care aspects that make work rewarding, confers status to workers and does not disturb their autonomy. In fact, teachers who went out of their way, and actively responded to community needs reported a greater sense of authority, dignity and respect. Although formal training and knowledge is essential for establishing certain competencies, it is the personalization and emotional bonds forged between teachers and care recipients, that foster mutual benefits and enhance care quality
11:00-11:15am
The Shape of Care: An Exploration of How Geriatricians and General Practitioners in Italy Talk About Care and Its Provision
Dr. Francesca Degiuli, Fairleigh Dickinson University
degiuli@fdu.edu
Research on the relationship between long-term care and immigrant labor has traditionally focused on the triangle involving state, market, and families to understand how the organization of long-term care comes into place. Little to no attention, however, has been paid to the role of doctors in generating and sustaining these labor relationships. This paper begins to fill this gap by exploring how Italian general practitioners and geriatricians, both directly and/or indirectly, influence how families think about long-term care and shape the decisions they take in regards to individual long-term care projects. The paper is based on qualitative interviews and participant observation conducted at regional and national scientific conferences between 2019 and 2020. A preliminary analysis of the data provides insights on how these actors tend to converge on “ideal” practices of care —both in terms of physical space and relationships— but diverge on the content of care and on who should provide it, with what skills, and in what terms.
11:15-11:30am
Communities of Care: Filipino Caregivers, Mutual Aid and Transnational Belonging
Dr. Valerie Francisco-Menchavez, San Francisco State University
vfm@sfsu.edu
The invisibility of formal care workers, or caregivers, in long-term and elder care as essential frontline workers during the COVID-19 pandemic impacted the livelihood and well-being of Filipino caregivers in the San Francisco/Bay Area. In the face a dual crisis in the divestment in long-term care and the COVID-19 epidemic, my aim in this paper is to build on the theory of “communities of care” from my past book, The Labor of Care, to explore how caregivers defined and enacted individual, interpersonal and organizational forms of care for themselves. With the absence of structural supports, caregivers expanded existing methods of mutual aid before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. With constraints on gathering and mobility, many caregivers felt the isolation and anxiety in the pandemic, yet they relied on forms of cultural practices, religiosity, technological communication, and community organizations to receive and provide essential workplace protections such as personal protective equipment (PPE) and social support through difficult pandemic conditions. I argue that the gendered impacts of care in other parts of Filipina migrants’ transnational lives informed the types of mutual aid they enacted among themselves. I suggest that we can learn methods of political organizing and creative use of technological innovation from this set of care workers. More importantly, this paper will demonstrate that the conditions bereft of care can engender alternative circuits of care.
11:30-11:45am
Towards Just Care: Forging disability and migrant justice alliances in Canadian homecare systems
Dr., Mary Jean Hande, Trent University
mjhande@trentu.ca
Megan Linton, Disability Justice Network of Ontario and Carleton University
meganlinton@cmail.carleton.ca
Non-presenting authors: Sarah Malik, Trent University, sarahmalik@trentu.ca, Leah Nicholson, Trent University, leahnicholson@trentu.ca, Bharati Sethi, Trent University, bharatisethi@trentu.ca
Over the past 40 years, low-income seniors, disabled people, and racialized immigrant health care workers in Canada have experienced the worst impacts of homecare privatization and restructuring. This was demonstrated most clearly in the high resident death tolls and mass worker exodus from long term residential care homes (LTRC) during the pandemic. In response, seniors and disabled people are amplifying calls for socially just, community-driven homecare alternatives to LTRC. These alternatives require alliances across diverse communities of homecare receivers and workers (e.g. internationally trained health care workers and migrant domestic workers) that are burgeoning in Canada but are relatively fleeting and politically fraught.
This presentation features research from a recent Canadian research project called “Towards Just Care,” which mobilizes disability and migrant justice frameworks to build grassroots alliances to create bottom-up visions and practices of home care in Ontario, Canada. Disability justice and migrant justice frameworks can be employed as transformative frameworks for resisting these tensions, challenging exploitive and violent care relations, and building solidarity across diverse marginalized groups—particularly older, disabled, low-income, and racialized immigrant health care workers and receivers.
We draw on reflections from our recent community workshop with low-income home care receivers and racialized immigrant home care workers, and our “power map” of existing provincial home care systems and relations to theorize and build cross-movement and cross-sector coalitions to demand just home care in Canada. We will discuss how disability justice and migrant justice frameworks can be mobilized to shift dominant conceptions and visions of care towards care as solidarity, resistance, radical and shifting interdependencies across caregivers, care workers, and care receivers.
11:45-12:00pm
Q&A
Time
Title & Author(s)
Abstract
10:45-11:05am
A Blast from the Past: Queer Ethics of Care in Angels in America
Dr. Landon Sadler, Texas A&M University
lansadler2016@exchange.tamu.edu
Perestroika, the second part of Tony Kushner’s two-part play, Angels in America (1992), begins with a few questions. The comically long and pretentiously named, Aleksii Antedilluvianovich Prelapsarianov asks, “The Great Question before us is: Are we doomed? The Great Question before us is: Will the Past release us? The Great Question before us is: Can we Change? In Time?” Hearing Prelapsarianov’s Great Questions, left-leaning and queer audiences who watched the play’s Broadway opening in 1993 may have likely pondered the end of the Cold War, the grasp of neoliberalism on national policies, and the surging HIV/AIDS epidemic that would peak in 1995. In contrast, primed by allusions to Donald Trump and Trumpism that were absent in the 1993 premiere, audience members watching the 2017 Broadway revival of Angels in America may have considered Donald Trump’s recent election victory and his agenda of national populism. In this paper, I argue that both the 1993 and 2017 productions of Angels in America forward a radical queer ethic of care; I concentrate more, however, on the 2017 production and how its allusions to conservative Trumpism become foils to queer, futuristic caring and thereby cast queer care into sharper focus. With no changes to the script’s dialogue, both productions manifest a queer ethic of care in the form of an intimate forward-thinking survival plan for queers that destabilizes traditional heteronormative conceptions of time and history. More specifically, care in Angels in America is presented as “painful progress,” a temporality that is verbalized by the character Harper Pitt and that comprises a reckoning with the queerphobic past and present in tandem with a gazing toward a collective future.
To survive the dystopian conditions of Kushner’s physically and spiritually plagued New York City, the queer characters must form close healing and nurturing relationships that reimagine care as distinct from conservative notions that configure care in the interest of capitalism and the white nuclear family. Not only is this queer ethic of care timely—guiding us in our recent national crises over illness, death, and forced pregnancy—but it also challenges conventional heteronormative notions of time and history as positive, linear, and Eurocentric. Core to this model of care is painful progress: the notion that, although pain is constant throughout history by means of violence, lack, and disease, queers must nonetheless progress forward together, protecting and nurturing one another. Significantly, Angels in America does not view the future as distant and separate, but rather as entwined with and informed by our present and past pains. The play shows that Trumpism’s coercive regulation of care is predicated on queer theorist Lee Edelman’s concept of reproductive futurism: an imagining that links queers to disease and death and compulsory heterosexuality to reproduction and futurity. In response, the queer ethic of care that Angels in America forwards reclaims care and futurity and presents a practical, transformative blueprint for resisting Trumpism and far-right ideologies more generally.
11:05-11:25am
“It is the Neglected Meeting with the Exploited”: Making Home Care Matter in Massachusetts, 1970s-1980s
Dr. Mia Michael, Wayne State University
mia.michael@wayne.edu
“Especially when I get kind of angry, boy, I can really talk,” Geneva Evans informed the Boston Globe in 1987. “I got fun out of going out there and fighting for it. We got dignity and respect.” Employed in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts’ home care system since 1974, Evans performed essential yet undervalued work as a homemaker, a category of paid household employment. Her twelve-hour days began at 5:30AM crisscrossing Boston by bus to cook, clean, shop, bathe, dress, and otherwise care for low-income senior citizens. Beset by neoliberal costsaving imperatives from its 1970s beginnings, crisis afflicted Massachusetts’ home care system: reduced services and hours jeopardized indigent elderly clients as meager pay and inconsistent
schedules flung workers into poverty’s realm. Contemporary journalist Alan Lupo captured the
essence of this system in 1981: “It is the neglected meeting with the exploited, one set of society’s victims being aided by another.” Evans, a middle-aged Black woman and home care paraprofessional, wasn’t a typical union member. Even so, she joined the rising tide of low-wage Americans unionizing to demand economic justice. Unionism wasn’t an obvious solution to home care aides’ plight. In fact, organized labor suffered crisis during the 1980s as union membership plummeted and management mounted formidable resistance. Cast as a period of unionism’s weakness, dormancy, and decline, immigrant and nonwhite women workers also made it a time of hope and agitation, of rebirth and revival rather than repose. As part of United Labor Unions (ULU) Local 1475, hundreds of home care aides including Geneva Evans mobilized around Greater Boston to contest their degraded working conditions in the Commonwealth. Local 1475 leveraged militancy and collective power over time to reconfigure cultural
stereotypes against home care workers and gain concrete victories for thousands across Massachusetts. Aides’ creative direct actions built moral power that couldn’t be ignored while their savvy maneuvering of government bureaucracy attracted vital support from clients, state
officials, and community allies. All told, they transformed household employment from a seemingly private, hidden affair between women into a societal concern requiring government intervention. With appreciation for complexity, I gauge their activism not merely in terms of wins and losses, but also in regard to workers’ evolving sense of empowerment alongside their ability to spark larger public policy conversations concerning labor standards, the care economy, and the role of government. Ultimately, my paper explains the emergence of a powerful and unexpected form of labor organizing--the new labor activism--that is community-based, direct action oriented, and propelled by working-class women of color. Home care aides’ historical responses to social injustice and economic inequality continue to offer an effective model today for those committed to building a better future for low-wage workers in a pandemic-shaped world of tremendous economic precarity. Their consequential struggles over time also throw into sharp relief the interdependencies that shape care work. Indeed, as they demonstrate, caring for the commonwealth requires just that: concerning ourselves with one another’s welfare and sharing the responsibility of advancing it.
11:25-11:45am
Feminist Psychiatrists, Sexual Violence, and Care
Dr. Elizabeth Hearne, Texas A&M University
ehearne@exchange.tamu.edu
This paper will investigate the changing conversations around rape and sexual assault in the United States during the 1970s through the 1990s. These conversations radically changed mental health treatment for victims of sexual violence. Specifically, this paper will focus on feminist mental health professionals as they worked on changing treatment protocols in their disciplines. Their approach incorporated insights and activists in the women’s movement, especially those activists involved in anti-rape activism. Practitioners and activists, working separately and together, created new paradigms for understanding the effects of sexual violence and how best to address the needs of the victims who sought their assistance. These groups helped spur new developments in psychological and psychiatric research, practice, and professional knowledge, including a major focus on the inclusion of a different ethic of care for victims of sexual violence–a ethic that feminist psychiatrists articulated explicitly to the colleagues in their disciplines and beyond. Exploring this era reveals an important moment of collaboration between the licensed and unlicensed, between clinician and patient, and between activist and establishment. The respect and shared goals between these groups aided in the creation of a discursive process that quickly, effectively, and thoroughly shifted psychiatric and psychological knowledge and practice. Mental health professionals generally started to agree that rape and sexual assault was widespread and often caused intense trauma, and that victims required specific, caring approaches by practitioners. Additionally, many agreed that lay anti-rape activists could play a crucial role in the treatment of victims of sexual assault, acknowledging that certain kinds of care could be provided by the unlicensed–in fact, that the unlicensed might be able to provide certain kinds of care more effectively than the licensed. This paper will explore the women who found powerful ways to change existing narratives about sexual violence and the treatment of victims, and offers a model for how individuals and groups can change powerful and persistent cultural and psychomedical narratives.
11:45-12:00pm
Q&A
Abstract
In this talk, based on my forthcoming book, I draw on 170 interviews with members of different-gender and LGBTQ+ couples to argue that “mind-use” is a critical dimension of household inequality that has been neglected in favor of a time-use paradigm. I show how a widespread temporal focus leads us to underestimate both the size and nature of the gender gap in housework and care contributions: women in different-gender couples typically complete the majority of cognitive care labor, particularly its most burdensome components, for their families. Puzzlingly, this inequality persists even though most respondents express a desire for a more equitable allocation. Couples overwhelmingly resolve this tension between ideal and reality by attributing cognitive care labor (in)equality to individual personality or temperament. But while such “personal essentialism” has the benefit of minimizing spousal conflict, it also discourages change: it is difficult to ask one’s partner to become someone they are not. Contrary to the personality-based explanations favored by my interviewees, I argue that successful completion of cognitive care labor depends as much on one’s skills and capacities as on innate traits. However, I find that men and women tend to invest differently in building relevant skills and, even in areas where they have similar abilities, deploy them differently between paid work and home. This gendered division of cognitive care labor is not inevitable, however, and I conclude by exploring alternative possibilities showcased by LGBTQ+ and nontraditional different-gender couples.
Speaker Bio: Allison Daminger is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at UW-Madison, where she studies the ways gender continues to shape individuals' experiences at home and at work. She received her PhD in Sociology and Social Policy from Harvard University in 2022 and is currently writing a book about cognitive labor in family life, forthcoming from Princeton University Press.