"Care entails life-giving and sustaining activities, an absence of which may entail abandonment into abjection, or towards (slow) death. Care ethics proposes a materialism to make bodyminds and lives come to âmatterâ in the sense of social and cultural worth. It brings into focus activities of care work to counter transphobic or transmisogynist or xenophobic or racist denigrations. These are concrete interactions with living beings or the spaces we inhabit, rather than simple statements of âcareâ or solidarity. Thinking reflectively about our care practices in relation to separability, we can consider who is with us in these moments, and who is missing, of enacting or receiving care. We typically provide or receive care within classed, racialised, familial, or institutional or community- oriented settings; or we are employed or solicited to provide/receive (paid) care work (potentially) across these lines. (Collective care may create forms that are an exception, or partly an exception.) In addition, as Sophie Lewis argues, typical kinship is often inadequate for meeting our desires for care, especially in the contexts of home-lessness and precarity, histories of (ongoing) settler colonialism, and of transphobic, queerphobic and sexist violence. Thinking through care and abolition helps to bridge structural divides, even if those divides arenât completely overcome in the process.
Our ethical orientations can both reproduce and counter separability, reproducing, and/or dissolving the order of racial capitalism (in local, or direct, ways). Materialism, Marxism, and Marxist feminism emphasise the importance of our actions in the world â the transformations they produce, the norms they reproduce â even when they are without economic value, or seem unimportant in the context of capitalist norms. After all, neoliberalism wouldnât hold up if we didnât obey its commands, some of which are imperative, some moral â hence, the power in the idea to âbecome ungovernableâ. In discussing complicity and femmeness, we acknowledge that all of us get tied into neoliberal expectations â but thinking care through femmeness encourages looking out for each other in these contexts, and registering how these expectations divert our actions away from the things, people or worlds that nourish and shape our lives. In its multiplicities, care is a resource that we can reorientate towards supporting our worlds, our friends, our lovers, and even passing strangers, to exist and thrive. It is one tool to challenge the disposability of marginalised people, to undo stigmas that deem some people more worthy of life than others. The ethos of prison abolition proposes that no one is disposable; practices of care nourish life in the face of disposability. We are conscious of the need to move beyond practices focused on survival, and towards interconnected care practices for humans and non-humans, working towards our collective flourishing. Good care can be the ground for exploring desires and growing worlds, nourished by love and budding with possibility. Our actions manifest possibilities of social transformation by tending the social contra capitalism."
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