Radical Care: Seeking New and More Possible Meetings in the Shadows

of Structural Violence

Kelly Gawel

Krisis 2023, 43 (1): 3-24.

Abstract

This article attends to the intimate contradictions that differentially shape and limit caring ca-

pacities and relations in a violent world, and the embodied ethical and political transformations

at the heart of learning to care otherwise. From manifestos calling for “universal care” in de-

fiance of the state-sanctioned horrors of the pandemic era, to the abolitionist politics of care

developed by BLM organizers through movement building and healing, and the proliferation

of mutual-aid infrastructures to meet needs and distribute resources in the face of overwhelm-

ing crisis and neglect – these examples and so many others illustrate with undeniable clarity

that radical care is finally on the agenda. In what follows, I hope to contribute to this urgent

conversation by pointing to how care is shaped in fundamentally contradictory ways under

conditions of entrenched structural violence, and the limitations of normative frameworks

when confronting this reality. To unambiguously valorize care in ethical and political life is to

risk occluding the constitutive violence of existing social structures and norms, its impact on

the intimacies of caring relations, and ultimately the ways that communities mobilize alternate

economies and practices of care towards healing and social change. While it is crucial to value

care and work for a more caring society, I claim that efforts to transform patterns of relational

harm and develop new sensibilities should also be highlighted as integral components of rad-

ical caring praxis.

Keywords

Radical care, Politics of care, Ethics of care, Social justice

DOI

https://doi.org/10.21827/krisis.43.1.37970

Licence

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC

Krisis 2023, 43 (1)

Radical Care: Seeking New and More Possible Meetings in the Shadows

of Structural Violence

Kelly Gawel

For the Care Cadre –

in gratitude and hope for new horizons, and ancient remembrances, of care

Care is the social, material, and emotional weaving that sustains life and connects us to others.

From midwifing new life, nurturing the young, the work of sex, and the tending of death,

trauma, disability, and physical and mental illness, it is vital in every life stage and process.

And yet, despite its ubiquity in all aspects of life, care has been routinely neglected and even

dismissed by hegemonic and radical theorists alike. The feminist philosophers who have been

prominent in redressing this omission are right to reclaim the ethical value of care, and to

situate it in its rightful place at the centre of political theory and action.

But the fact of care’s life-sustaining capacities does not, in itself, make it an unequivocal good.

Indeed, it points to an unsettling ambiguity. Particularly under conditions of widespread op-

pression and dominance, caring practices, capacities, norms, and relations can themselves be

shaped by, and can even play a role in reproducing, forms of violence that are anathema to the

life and flourishing of many people, even the earth itself. Exploiting and extracting the care

labour of subjugated people – as well as systemically neglecting those most in need of care –

is, and has historically been, a constitutive feature of the social reproduction of violent insti-

tutions. At the same time, transformative practices of care play a vital role in how marginalized

communities sustain themselves under these conditions, mobilize forms of resistance against

them, and nurture possibilities of living otherwise.

The systemic invisibilization, naturalization, and devaluation of care make it difficult to theo-

rize. But this difficulty also stems from its phenomenologically embedded and relational na-

ture. This article is written from such an entangled place. The theoretical framework I develop

below has its roots in my experiences organizing with a collective devoted to radical care.

Many of the insights presented here were generated out of conversations, inspired by collective

practice, and forged in response to the possibilities and limits of this project that I was an

integral part of, and cared very deeply about. Both the power and the failure of this collective

Krisis 2023, 43 (1)

imbue and motivate my argument here. The seemingly inevitable ways it fell apart along the

very cleavages that brought us together, despite the presence of incredible skill and much good

will, speaks to the contradictory realities of care, the problems they pose for organizing prac-

tice, and the level of skill and attunement needed to hold and confront them.

I structure the paper around three interrelated claims. These provide different vantages on the

overarching problem of how to politically mobilize care when caring practices and relations

are embedded in, and often themselves reproduce, forms of structural violence. By structural

violence I mean relations of exploitation, extraction, abuse, and coercion that are societally

systemic, which often trace multiple and intersecting forms of oppression, and which condition

social forms, institutions, and patterns of intimate attachment in fundamental ways. Precisely

because care is so often naturalized and de-historicized, I begin by socially and historically

situating these structural contradictions and their impact on historical experiences of selfhood

and relationship. My first claim is that radical approaches to care call for critiques of, and

sensitivity to, these systemic and historical harms that so often shape social organizations and

divisions of caring labour at macro and micro scales.

The problem deepens when we consider that such harms are often normalized, naturalized, and

mystified by given moral economies of care themselves –for example, in the assumption that

care is simply a labour of love that some (gendered, racialized, migrant) people are more

equipped to provide. My second claim is that this complicates how we ought to conceive of

care as an ethical and political good. Insofar as caring practices and relations are so often

shaped by structural violence, even in their most intimate dimensions, accounts of care con-

ceived as a species activity or set of intuitive dispositions are insufficient grounds for gener-

ating caring ethics and politics. I claim that such naturalistic understandings of care run the

risk of instead naturalizing norms, distributions, and practices of care shaped in fundamental

ways by systemic harms. While care ethicists are my main interlocutor in this regard, this is a

move shared, to varying degrees, by contemporary political theorizations of care such as those

articulated in the widely read and discussed Care Manifesto (2020).

While valuing and securing access to care are necessary and crucial endeavours, a single-

minded focus on questions of distributive justice – calling for more care in public life or more

caring institutions – sidesteps this violence embedded in social structures and norms of care,

the ways this violence is woven into the very intimacies of caring relations, and indeed the

Krisis 2023, 43 (1)

generative forms of care practiced by communities of struggle past and present. My final claim

concerns these local, engaged, and transformational dimensions of radical care. Like gender,

care cannot be conceived as a trans-historical natural attitude

(Malatino 2020) outside of or

beyond its social and material conditions. This means that reconstituting caring practices and

relations on intimate and relational levels, in and through movement building and collective

healing, is a vital component of transforming cultures of care in ways that are aligned with

social justice – and should be viewed as inseparable from the project of politically centring

care and securing its just distribution.

This article is ultimately about transforming caring relations at both intimate and structural

levels. It asks more questions than it answers, and points to the need for engaged and embodied

learning: learning, for example, new methods of political and ethical education that unwind

the vigilance, relax the hyper-attunement, enliven the insensibility, and diffuse the entitlement

through which social inequalities shape or attenuate people’s capacities to give and receive

care. Or to notice and intervene in the often subtle and intersubjective mechanisms through

which care is extracted, denied, or coerced. What relational holding environments can we cul-

tivate to tend to the wounds inflicted by normative care, or to endure the inevitable failures of

such endeavours without rupturing the relations we want, or need, to sustain? And how can we

nourish the political desire to cultivate new forms of intimacy and relation in the face of great

resistance from without and within?

1. Structural Violence and its Intimate Legacies

I understand care in a broad sense as the material and affective labour and relations through

which social bonds and individuals are reproduced. Care is thus conditioned by, and upholds,

social forms of family and labour, as well as institutional life. At the heart of daily and inter-

generational reproduction, it involves modes of knowing, perceiving, and relating that are

highly subtle and skilled, and also culturally and historically specific. A starting premise of

this article is that social organizations and divisions of this caring labour express and reproduce

gender, racialized, colonial, ableist and class oppressions on both macro and micro scales.

The devaluation and exploitation of caring labour and those who perform it, as well as the

systemic neglect of those most in need of care, are not incidental but structural to the mainte-

nance of violent institutions and social relations.

Krisis 2023, 43 (1)

Dynamics of racial capitalist exploitation, for example, perpetuate and compound multiple,

and intersecting, forms of oppression through what have come to be known as international

care chains.

Capitalist accumulation depends upon reproductive labour to support ever more

endangered life conditions. Maximizing profit requires externalizing this labour, and in doing

so, exploiting it as fully as possible: naturalizing it as a female vocation or coercing, stealing,

or paying extremely little for it. And it is not a coincidence that many migrant women of colour

from the Global South – who often work in isolation and without basic labour and citizenship

protections in households continents away from their own – are currently doing this sort of

labour.

A related point concerns the crucial differences, as well as relations, between paid and unpaid

forms of care and social reproductive labour. Drawing on the extensive feminist debates on

the subject, I understood these distinctions in terms of the broad categories of: i) caring ser-

vices subsidized by the state (e.g. welfare services, public health care); ii) caring services in

the private market economy (e.g. privately employed nurses aids and elder care workers); iii)

unpaid domestic labour that contributes to household and community reproduction (e.g. the

“housewife,” but also broader, often female, kinship networks); and iv) paid care labour that

is de-regulated and hyper-exploited in private, domestic economies (e.g. paid domestic labour-

ers and nannies). I follow theorists who centre the intersecting oppressions reproduced in these

social organizations and divisions of caring labour. Black feminists have long pointed to the

vast differences between unpaid and paid domestic labour, and the extreme forms of exploita-

tion and abuse, historically rooted in slavery and segregation, involved in the latter (e.g., Carby

1982; Lorde 1979, 1980; Davis 1983, 1972). Evelyn Nakano Glenn further articulates the ra-

cialization at play in these divisions, exploring the historical continuities between paid domes-

tic labour performed by women of colour on the one hand, and the racialized de-skilling of

care and reproductive labour in commodified service economies on the other. In doing so, she

highlights how this ongoing and systemic racialization has involved not only the “dirty work”

of tending to bodily needs, but much of the intensive emotional labour so closely associated

with care (Nakano Glenn 1992).

Political and ethical articulations of care must attend to the histories, interlocking oppressions,

and social hierarchies at play in political economies of care, as well as the specific forms of

agency and organization fostered by those at the frontlines of the struggles at the heart of caring

Krisis 2023, 43 (1)

relations. In this sense, I follow those who have critiqued the care ethical tendency to value

bio-familial care over commodified caring services (Parreñas and Boris 2010) – a move which

discounts the intensive forms of emotional and bodily labour performed by exploited care

workers, the role of paid care work in buttressing the ostensibly private home, and the histor-

ical and actual non-primacy of the nuclear family in many people’s lives.

Together, these assumptions support and motivate my claim that care is not outside of or be-

yond violence and political transformation. The flip side of this is that the harms reproduced

in caring structures and relations are not intrinsic to care as such, but features of social relations

and norms that both moralize and devalue it along multiple and intersecting axes of oppression.

“Dangers” such as paternalism and parochialism thus should not be construed as pathologies

inherent to care, but as examples of historically specific harms corresponding, in large part, to

contemporary social forms and institutions: e.g. cultural and familial chauvinism in the case

of parochial care, and, in the case of paternalistic care, the individualizing narratives of re-

sponsibilization and deservingness at play in the allocation of ever dwindling assistance.

At the same time, this structural violence impacts people’s lived experiences, intimate rela-

tions, and dispositional attunements to the world and others in ways that are not always appar-

ent, especially to those in positions of power and privilege. This non-transparency of care

poses deep political and ethical problems that can rarely be solved through individual intention

alone. To illustrate this point, and the resultant need to deepen transformative orientations to

care, I want to turn to a historical critique of empathy presented by Saidiya Hartman. The

example I discuss comes from her Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery and Self-Making in

Nineteenth Century America, a text which charts, in stark and intimate detail, the “quotidian”

terror that was routinized in daily life during this era of slavery and its immediate aftermath.

Her examination of these routine cruelties, and the processes through which they were nor-

malized, sheds unwavering light on the disavowed connections between liberal ideals of free-

dom and consent and the realities of subjugation and coercion – bringing attention to the im-

pact of white supremacist violence not only on the public life and institutional practice of this

culture, but on private experiences of selfhood and relation.

Hartman’s critical gaze lands in particular on the troubling ambiguities of white empathy dur-

ing this time, which she illustrates through a discussion of the Letters on American Slavery

composed by white abolitionist John Rankin. She questions the purpose and “complicated,

Krisis 2023, 43 (1)

unsettling and disturbing” effect of a particular instance, where Rankin describes an imagina-

tive identification with the position of an enslaved person, writing himself and his family into

a fantasy of enslavement in an attempt to illustrate its moral harms. For Hartman, the “diffi-

culty and slipperiness” of Rankin’s empathy, his “projection of self onto another in order to

better understand the other […] confounds Rankin’s efforts to identify with the enslaved be-

cause in making the slave’s suffering his own, Rankin begins to feel for himself rather than

for those whom this exercise in imagination presumably is designed to reach” (Hartman 1997,

17-18).

Importantly, Rankin’s exercise was an attempt to mobilize empathy as a tool of abolitionist

political and moral education. His aim was to elicit care for the plight of enslaved people, first

from his slave-owning brother to whom his letters were addressed, and then, with their publi-

cation, from white Americans more broadly. But Hartman reveals how this endeavor was

“complicated […] by the fact that it cannot be extricated from the economy of chattel slavery

with which it is at odds” (Hartman 1997, 21). Rankin’s “facile intimacy” belies his display of

solidarity, for it also reenacts the erasure and complicity his sentiments were intended to mit-

igate. His gesture fails to relate to the other as other, or bear witness to their pain. Even if that

was his intent, his care remains thick with the institutionalized violence he was attempting to

use to dismantle it. Despite his abolitionist intentions, his empathy retained the relational con-

tours of the white supremacy he dedicated his life to overcoming. In this sense, Rankin’s dis-

play of empathy was a contradictory manifestation of care.

Hartman’s discussion of Rankin has more than historical relevance. In the context of the above

discussion, it demonstrates the dangers of positively valuing apparently natural attitudes of

care and provides a stark example of how emotional patterns of caring attention and response

– especially on the part of those in the position of oppressor – can reproduce deeply harmful

dynamics, even in attempts at repair. However, elsewhere Hartman makes clear that her pen-

etrating critique of the relational imprints of violence is ultimately in the service of those whose

autonomous, insurgent, intimacies and desires were, and are, irreducible to it. This is most

evident in her discussion of Black women’s “coerced and freely given” care, which she locates

at the centre (“the belly”) of the world (Hartman 2016, 171). She notes that what Black women

were forced to endure as caretakers of their enslavers and oppressors exceeds available politi-

cal categories. Yet so do the freedoms they cultivated and harboured – the alternative

Krisis 2023, 43 (1)

economies of nurturance,

intimate imaginaries, and ways of living otherwise they made pos-

sible with their “brilliant and formidable labor of care.” Most crucially, these “forms of care,

intimacy, and sustenance exploited by racial capitalism […] are not reducible to or exhausted

by it” (Hartman 2016, 171).

The quality of Hartman’s caring attention itself reveals something profound about the trans-

formations at stake in learning to care in radical ways, and what this might ask of us and our

living. She has spent years in the archive and on the streets, following vanishing yet indelible

traces of the intimate lives and desires of individuals who the historical record only represents

through the violence done to them. The historical counter-narrative that she weaves is itself a

“beautiful experiment” (Hartman 2019) in caring otherwise. In her attention to the vast un-

knowns of their living, she hones new ethical and political sensibilities perhaps capable of

meeting these others at the limits of knowing, and touching possibilities of their living which

have not yet found a home in this world. It seems, in reading her work, that she feels these

histories and people, accompanies them, and brings them into the circle of her care, while also

letting them shape what that care is and can be.

2. Political Considerations on the Ethics of Care

To recall my argument as a whole, my aim is to illuminate the painful contradictions that shape

and limit intimate relations and practices of care, the deep ethical and political problems this

poses, and resultant need to place embodied ethical transformation and caring praxis at the

center of radical movement politics. The critique of care ethics and its naturalization of care

as a value which I develop in this section further motivates these problems and possibilities.

Calls for reforming ethics, or even reimagining society, based on the value of care tend to rely

on what I term naturalistic/naturalizing epistemologies of care. That is, such approaches rely

on generating normative and political value from features of care that are naturalistically con-

ceived as intuitive dispositions and forms of attention involved in care as a species activity.

While I am focusing on the care ethical tradition here, it is important to note that such ap-

proaches to care as a moral good or species activity are commonly assumed, and also, at least

implicitly, inform much recent literature on care.

To put it another way, I think that speaking

to the problems of caring radically under conditions of entrenched and escalating structural

violence requires complicating narratives that argue for a caring society on the basis of existing

norms and relations of care.

Krisis 2023, 43 (1)

The care ethical tradition in particular largely shares a consensus regarding not only the moral

value of care, but the idea that this moral value derives from intuitive caring capacities such

as attention, other-directedness, responsiveness, and receptive attunement. Because these dis-

positions or motivational attitudes are fundamental to effective care, most care ethicists take

them to be naturalistically given moral goods. My claim here is that these relational dimensions

of care are themselves often implicated in structures of violence that generate contradictions

in caring practices – even and precisely at these intimate levels.

Joan Tronto speaks to these concerns with her political argument for an ethics of care. In

calling for a more caring society, Tronto re-configures traditional boundaries of moral and

political thought by centring the political as well as ethical value of care as a species activity.

I articulate my argument below in conversation with Tronto in particular because, while I am

sympathetic with her move to bring care from the margins to the centre of politics and her call

for a more caring society, I believe her approach remains rooted in naturalized assumptions

about care. I hope that my engagement with her work here thus motivates the need for critical

and transformative – that is, radical – approaches to care, and the always already political

realities of caring practices and dispositions themselves.

I agree with certain aspects of Tronto and Bernice Fischer’s famous definition of care: “On the

most general level we suggest that caring be viewed as a species activity that includes every-

thing 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, our selves, and our environment, all of which we

seek to interweave in a complex, life sustaining web” (Tronto 1993, 103). Given its scope and

power, it is not hard to see why this definition is so commonly cited, and contested. In a broad

sense, the definition, and analysis that follows from it, summarizes many care ethical positions

in that: i) it defines care as an essential, life generating activity; ii) it moves from this fact of

the matter to care as a robust moral value; and iii) it develops an ethics and politics stemming

from the skills and practices of caring. While I agree with i), it is precisely care’s essential and

life-generating capacities that lead to my divergence from ii) and iii). The very fact that care

is so generative and fundamental to human life and meaning, and thus cannot be abstracted

from social conditions and historical contingency, entails that we must be careful when deriv-

ing “oughts” from care’s ontological primacy. This leads to my issue with the third point: it is

care’s ethical and political imbrication with existing social forms and institutions – the family

Krisis 2023, 43 (1)

of course, but also medical, educational, private and public caring services, etc. – that leads

me and others to call for more critical and transformative approaches to skills and practices of

care themselves, as well as what it means to maintain, restore, and live as well as possible in

our world.

Care ethics mark a radical departure from Western philosophy and its fixations on individual

choice and action, or the generation of rules from rational moral principles. This ethics begins,

rather, from the concrete needs of situated others, and generates a relational ethics from the

values and practices of care involved in meeting such needs (Held 2006). In and of itself, this

move to develop moral theory from the perspective and experience of caring relations them-

selves poses a deep critique of the methodological individualism and abstract calculations of

the modern Western philosophical canon.

Perhaps deeper still, the move to ethically centre

the feminized and privatized values and labour of care explicitly builds upon the feminist dic-

tum regarding the political and social nature of the so-called personal and private dimensions

of human life and world making. With its relational, experience based, and pluralist approach,

as well as its interrogation of the gendered logics organizing social life and values, care ethi-

cists fold emotional intelligence, responsiveness, and intersubjective attunement into the very

fabric of ethics. The shift in the location, methods, and agencies of moral and political philos-

ophy that they enabled in doing so cannot be overstated.

Even, precisely, in my disagreements with them, I pay homage to care ethicists, and the para-

digm shift in ethics and politics they collectively engendered. While I critique even the most

explicitly political care ethicists for inadequately politicizing care, I am also building on their

foundational assumptions. And in some respects, political analysis has been integral to care

ethics since its inception. Many care ethicists generate a politics of care from their ethical

observations: Ruddick for example offers an early example of a politics of peace grounded in

maternal care, and Gilligan overtly critiques the gendered dominations that lead to masculinist

biases in moral psychology. There have also been developments in the theory, from the pri-

macy given to dyadic, maternal caring to theorizing care in broader political and social regis-

ters. As Kittay points out, care is itself a social and political value and the question of who

performs the labour of care is a social and political question (Kittay 1999, 1). Virginia Held

likewise examines social and political questions in light of the values of care and offers sug-

gestions for the transformation of society based on this analysis (Held 2006, 37).

Krisis 2023, 43 (1)

With this move from personal, dyadic, and maternal understandings of care – largely rooted in

Western, heteronormative notions of the nuclear family – to an understanding of care in its

social and political context, the discourse of care ethics has also become more skilled at cen-

tring race, class, nationality, sexuality, and ability, and analyzing the complex situatedness of

care (Engster 2007). However, even the nuanced and socially conscious perspectives offered

by Held and Kittay ultimately derive their political critique from problematically equalized or

universalized notions of caring. For Held, a robust moral theory of care ethics is grounded in

what she understands to be the universal experience of care. Indeed, this universality is what

justifies care’s place as the “most basic and most comprehensive value” (Held 2006, 3). Kit-

tay’s dependency critique of liberal theories of justice presents an alternative to liberal theories

of equality, grounded in the understanding that we are all “some mother’s child.” This equal-

izing maxim forms the basic assumption through which her well known concept of doulia is

expressed and justified.

Thus, while Held and Kittay each theorize care on social and political

registers and point to the need for political reforms that centre more just distributions of care,

they both base this analysis on assumptions about a universal experience of care that sidestep

the structural and systemic oppressions that deny people basic access to care, normalize abuse

and neglect in existing caring structures, and/or exploit and extract the labour of care workers.

Joan Tronto takes this political analysis a step further by offering an explicitly political argu-

ment for the ethics of care, grounded in a critique of power relations that deny care as a moral

and political reality. Care, an essential element of human life, is also systemically devalued

(Tronto 1993, 158). Centering care politically thus requires critiquing the structural relations

and political norms that have led to this devaluation, which should itself “lead to a profound

rethinking of moral and political life” (1993, 111).

Like Held and Kittay, Tronto self-consciously places her intervention within feminist history

and praxis, as well as political theory. A central claim of her Moral Boundaries is that “in

order to take morality seriously […] we have to understand [moral arguments] in a political

context” (1993, 3). This insight drives her political view of care and her re-construal of the

moral boundaries that she claims preclude caring politics. Not only are morals political, but

valuing care requires reevaluating morals in a way that politically and ethically centres an

integral concept of care (1993, 101). However, rather than resort to an essentialized “women’s

morality” traditionally associated with feminized norms, she claims that upholding the value

Krisis 2023, 43 (1)

of these norms requires re-construing the limits demarcating moral and political thought: trou-

bling the boundaries separating morality from its political and personal contexts, the public

from the private sphere, and indeed morality and politics themselves.

According to Stephanie Collins, care ethics eschews the distinction between politics and mo-

rality uberhaupt: “Building on the feminist insight that the “personal is political”, care ethicists

tend to believe experiences in our individual ethical lives must inform the principles that guide

our political institutions, and that the nature of our political institutions condition possibilities

within our individual ethical lives” (Collins 2015, 6). Tronto’s claim is more critical and trans-

formative: rather than merely upholding the norms of intimate life and bringing them into

conversation with questions of public and political policy, she asks the quasi-transcendental

question “how might an ethic of care become possible?” which implies a critique of the moral

boundaries and power relations that constrain care to the private sphere or recreate paternalistic

and domineering tendencies in the allocating of caring services (Tronto 1993, 175).

This analysis has implications not only for political theory, but for the ethics of care itself,

which “remains incomplete without a political theory of care” (1993, 155). Tronto’s argument

is finally that “only if we understand care as a political idea will we be able to change its status

and the status of those who do caring work in our culture” (1993, 158). This – understanding

care as a political idea – rests on problematizing what she terms “morality first” accounts of

care’s social and political value. It is not enough to simply export an unmediated notion of

care into political life. Tronto is explicit in her critique of Noddings in this regard, who she

views, following others, to have a dyadic, sentimentalized, account of care that refuses insti-

tutional and structural analysis. Viewing the morality of care as prior to politics is incompatible

with a genuine critique of politics and morality, and ultimately re-inscribes the very divisions

between the public and private, rational, and emotional, spheres that care ethicists are intent

to shift and reconfigure.

Tronto’s aim is to place the value of care front and centre in policy and theory, while also

addressing the social inequalities and power imbalances manifest in caring relations. Tronto

calls for a more caring society on the basis of re-drawn moral boundaries grounded in the

political and moral value of care as an integral species activity. “To recognize the value of

care,” she claims, ultimately “calls into question the structure of values in our society” (1993,

180). Insofar as care is not a secondary and parochial concern, but central to, and constitutive

Krisis 2023, 43 (1)

of, human life, we are obligated to take a critical stance on existing ethical and political norms,

and ultimately to implement the value and practice of care at the centre of social and political

institutions.

This is true, but is only half the picture. For Tronto, we must change the context in which we

think about care, but we do not have to change care itself. Despite her intent to provide a

political theory of care that moves away from the dyadic and sentimentalized notions offered

by “morality first” notions of caring politics, Tronto ultimately rests on an uncritical and ahis-

torical acceptance of care as a value – specifically, the moral qualities of attentiveness, respon-

sibility, competence, responsiveness in meeting other’s needs and the integrity of good care

(1993, 127-136). “Because the practice of care is also a political idea,” she contends that her

account “does not face the problem of trying to import a moral concept into a political order.”

Rather, she contends, “the practice of care describes the qualities necessary for democratic

citizens to live together well in a pluralistic society” (1993, 161-162).

Tronto’s understanding of the disposition and practice of good care as a political ideal still

abstracts care from social relations which constitutively devalue and exploit it. While she ex-

plicitly draws attention to questions of power and difference in caring relations, and indeed to

how “care is raced, gendered, classed” (1993, 112), she ultimately contends that moral bound-

aries and their social and political settings are what preserve this privilege and oppression. She

thus does not question how relational dispositions and practices of care themselves often re-

produce or invisibilize the very power imbalances she intends to address. Despite her compel-

ling claims to the contrary, her call to move a holistically conceived notion of good care from

the margins to the centre of politics thus still relies on an abstract and apolitical notion of care.

Tronto critiques both inequalities in care-giving relations and the norms and processes that

exclude care from political and moral life. In doing so, she is bringing care into view as a

constituent force of politics. But, insofar as her politics of care rests on naturalistically con-

ceived values and dispositions of care, she ultimately naturalizes dimensions of care that are

socially, culturally, and historically conditioned.

The devaluation, exploitation, and extraction of the caring labour of marginalized people, and

systemic neglect of those in need of care, are not pathological deviations from an ideal of good

care, but essential and fundamental conditions of the world as it is. Nor – to point to the same

issue from the opposite angle – are dangers such as paternalism and/or parochialism inherent

Krisis 2023, 43 (1)

to care itself. Countering such harms should involve complicating narratives that argue for a

caring society on the basis of existing norms and relations of care – exporting feminized no-

tions of care associated with the nuclear family into the public sphere, for example, but also

questioning the more widespread tendency to generate caring ethics and politics from natural-

ized caring dispositions (e.g. attention, receptivity, responsiveness, other-directedness) or a

de-contextualized transparent self. Rather than assume them a priori, we might inquire about

the social and political forces that shape or attenuate what we mean by such caring capacities,

encourage their hyper-development or atrophy, or direct them towards some and away from

others.

The very feminist politics that care ethics draws upon and richly elaborates calls for political

orientations to those layers of experience and social practice excluded by dominant under-

standings of the political. The same goes for care: like gender, the epistemologies, practices

and dispositions of care are not natural attitudes but socially and materially contested sites of

struggle and transformation. Care is political all the way down, and thus appears as a natural

morality. This is to flip the script of care ethics, but in a way I believe is consistent with its

most radical and visionary impulses.

3. The Care Cadre

As I noted at the beginning of this article, my thesis concerning the non-transparency of care

and resultant need for collective and embodied approaches to its transformation, originated in

the beauty and failures of a project on radical care, which we lovingly and ironically termed

the “Care Cadre.” In discussing my takeaways from this project, I want to emphasize that I am

speaking from my own experience, not for this collective or any other. This itself is a limita-

tion: this article would have perhaps been more compelling, and certainly more consistent, if

it were collaboratively written. Moreover, the very contradictions I am pointing to present the

danger that my engrained patterns of relating – rooted, for example, in my whiteness, US cit-

izenship, feminization, and/or economic precarity – might lead me to misrepresent what hap-

pened or hinder the conversations I hope to invite in speaking about it. These risks notwith-

standing, I conclude with this intimate organizing experience for several reasons. First, to hon-

our this collective, the work we did, and its profound impact on this writing. Second, to present

a specific vantage point on the obstacles that care’s living contradictions present even to orga-

nized efforts to practice care in politicized and transformative ways. Finally, as a performative

Krisis 2023, 43 (1)

attempt to motivate the need for collective praxis in developing political and ethical ap-

proaches to care capable of confronting these obstacles.

The group formed in New York in 2015 in response to the failure of our radical Left political

communities to address specific incidents of sexual violence – violence that recent feminist

movements such as #metoo have shown to be endemic to groupings and institutions across

ideological and other social spectrums. It was an intimate but not small group of people, fairly

diverse in terms of race, class, ability, sexuality, and nationality, and the majority of the group

identified as women. Most of us did not know one another prior to the group’s formation, but

we largely shared an anarchist, queer, feminist, and anti-colonial ethos, and considered care to

be integral to our political activism and work in the world. While we largely ended up facing

inward toward group formation and process rather than external political action, the latter re-

mained an important goal. We met at least once a month for about two years.

Our organizing centred on the question of what a militancy of care might look like as a com-

ponent of feminist organizing. I now conceive of this question as an emergent yet guiding

theme that we elaborated through ongoing co-creative process. It was not only the content of

this question, but its form, that proved important in this regard: the project in many ways was

an attempt to relationally inhabit the space opened by the urgent questions of care in our lives

and communities. This militant inquiry, for example, informed our articulation of care as re-

fusal – as a no – which became as fundamental to our praxis as questions of when, where, how,

and for whom to provide care. In asking how our care might become, or might already be, a

militant and transformative practice, we were also engaged in the social reproduction of strug-

gle: striving to cultivate a relational container capable of holding each other’s pain, and of

generating political power.

What emerged was a space of experimentation by and for radical care workers. We developed

our collaborative methods as we went along – using freewriting and creative play to shed new

light on old dilemmas, or cultivating ritual containers to bring a sense of the sacred to our work

and to hold and process its intensity. In the process, we learned to meet specific needs as they

arose, and to gradually build trust and a shared language to express what we were doing and

why. Together, we honed our caring skills, and even maybe forged new ones. In small and

halting, but also extremely powerful, ways we rendered visible, theorized, and politically

Krisis 2023, 43 (1)

centred the invisibilized and devalued work we had all been doing for years in our political

communities.

A word we used to describe the group was a vortex – an apt term to describe the magnetic swirl

of intensity, the unruly pull of affinity and need, that allowed us to practice and theorize care

in new ways. But as time went on, the very social fractures and unmet needs around which we

so powerfully converged began to show up between us in ways that we did not yet have the

wisdom or skills to address – and the spiral unravelled. My experience with this group led me

to an embodied perception of how the contradictions of care run so deep as to hinder attempts,

even on the part of skilled organizers, to address social injustice and intimate harm. It taught

me that the honed capacities for care we bring to our politics and ethical praxis can be shaped

and limited by the very forms of violence we seek to overcome. The question I was left with,

and which lies at the heart of this inquiry, is how to generate transformative practices and

cultivate sensibilities capable of holding and unwinding such painful contradictions, rather

than succumbing to them, or being undone by their force.

This is a tender topic, but one that I believe touches the heart of care. Attending to this level

of social shaping and wounding can be deeply uncomfortable, and requires culturally and com-

munity specific holding containers and modalities for interrogating power. In pointing to this

terrain of intimate contradiction and struggle, my aim is not to make a universalizing or gen-

eralizing claim about people’s experiences. My intent, rather, is to point to how experiences

of care (giving and receiving), or lack thereof, shape the very contours of our sensory worlds

and embodied relations to others. In this sense, my argument follows care ethical insights about

the specific and relational nature of care, which, in its intimate pains and joys, can only be

known from the inside. Such specificities include the skills and virtuosities of care, but also

the personal and collective resistance strategies, protective mechanisms and deflections, and

strategies of endurance that people develop in the face of intimate coercion, exploitation and

neglect – as well as the alternative political economies, kinship networks, nurturance practices,

and liberatory values that individuals and communities manifest in their cultures and practices

of care.

Radical caring praxis is emergent in the sense that it is cultivated in response to the specific

needs of the communities who mobilize it. I thus think it is the nature of such projects to refuse

generalization, but this experience has led to my sense that developing responsive mutual-aid

Krisis 2023, 43 (1)

and collective care structures to address community specific harms and needs – however lim-

ited, fleeting, and fraught with failure they may be – is a direct and generative way to bring

new forms of knowledge, skill, and sensibilities to bear on the ethics and politics of care.

4. Answering the Call of Radical Care

To call upon Audre Lorde’s riddling metaphor, we cannot dismantle cultures built on the ex-

ploitation and devaluation of care with the tools used to build it. Although I hesitate to draw

upon an idea so frequently applied and misused, I think it is helpful for situating these problems

and possibilities of care. Lorde herself was specific about the role of intimate relational pat-

terns and attitudes in maintaining the dominant order, as well as fostering new and more life

affirming ways of living. For Lorde, “old blueprints of expectation and response” (Lorde 2007,

123) serve as master’s tools when they normalize violence and prevent genuine mutuality and

nurturance across differences. Given how profoundly social organizations and divisions of

caring labour trace social inequalities, I believe that we can take many existing norms and

practices of care as paradigmatic instances of how such oppressive blueprints can live in our

attachments and sensibilities. Such patterns of expectation and response are expressed – as she

points out – in who cares for the children of whom during academic conferences (2007, 112),

but also in unconscious and somatically engrained expectations about who should, or will, be

disproportionately responsive to the needs of others, and who’s needs should, or will, be dis-

proportionately responded to or neglected. Because care’s imbrication with structural violence

runs so deep, such patterns can show up even in earnest attempts to confront them. And yet,

for the same reason, transforming embodied practices of attention and response – forging new

caring sensibilities and “new patterns of relating across difference” (2007, 123) – is a political

task of urgent proportions.

It is difficult to forge new caring tools. Confronting the contradictions of care and developing

new caring sensibilities requires intimate and collective learning – learning how to cultivate

new blueprints of expectation and response; to develop new capacities to attune, discern, re-

spond, and refuse; to unearth hidden histories of insurgent care; and to hold, again and again,

the devastating ways our communities of care will almost inevitably reproduce the very sorts

of harms they seek to remedy.

Though we relate to them in so many ways, and from infinitely

varied vantage points, these legacies of care remain restless within and between us. In Sara

Ahmed’s terms, they are histories not yet finished with us. But neither the violence, nor the

Krisis 2023, 43 (1)

freedom, at their core can be deciphered if we insist on viewing care as external to the vital

struggles with which it is intimately bound.

While it is necessary to value care and work for a caring society, disentangling care from

violence requires transformations in caring relations at both systemic and intimate registers.

Politically and ethically transforming care at these levels is a multi-generational task perhaps

inherently fraught with failure. As daunting as this is, there are infinite ways to begin anew,

which over time might deepen mutual connection, fortify collective agency and purpose, and

help to sustain the networks of mutual-aid and collective care needed for the coming crises

(Spade 2020; Kaba 2020). There are, for example, many resources available for white people

like myself to learn somatic awareness and relational techniques for addressing our tendencies

to lash out, collapse in shame, or once again centre ourselves when faced with our racist blind-

spots and complicities (Menakem 2017). We can form racial justice pods to support our trans-

formation and avoid overburdening our BIPOC friends and political allies. Cis men can learn

to see and acknowledge the care of feminized people, expand their capacities for feeling and

expressing emotions, and share in the burdens and pleasures of caring labour. They can form

groups, and agree to hold each other accountable to transforming rape cultures. Such endeav-

ours can, and already do, form integral parts of larger social movements.

The question of how to collectively care for each other and ourselves in the shadows of struc-

tural violence is an open and living one. But there are many models to learn from. In innumer-

able ways, and on massive and micro scales, people are radically responding to individual and

community needs and desires, and forging new and more survivable ways of living at the mar-

gins. Such practices of community care are a necessary condition of sustained and sustaining

social movements, and indeed often constitute their most revolutionary, if threatened, edges.

In the US, examples such as the Black Panther Party’s Survival Programs, AIM’s (The Amer-

ican Indian Movements’s) survival schools, the queer healing modalities arising out of the

AIDS crisis, the care webs developed by disability justice activists and queer and trans com-

munities, and the politics of care which, according to Deva Woodly (2022), is the most unique

and radical feature of the political philosophy guiding the Movement for Black Lives, all pro-

vide examples of care’s essential role in radical social transformation. These legacies of care,

too, leave their traces upon the conditions of our living. Their call is heeded in concrete and

ongoing ways by queer, BIPOC, migrant, poor, sex working, and disabled individuals and

Krisis 2023, 43 (1)

communities – and so many others – whose radical caring, while under constant threat, reveals

glimpses of living otherwise.

Joan Tronto insists that care is definitively not a master’s tool (Tronto 2014, 226). I believe

that it can be, and also a revolutionary one. My argument has been that our ethical and political

practices of care must themselves be adequate to the violent contradictions, as well as the

revolutionary possibilities, of care. This is an inevitably situated and complex affair. My hope

is that this writing may speak to these problems and possibilities in caring ways that gesture

beyond the limits of its author, and toward the collective genesis and ongoing work of care so

central to the survival and healing of communities of struggle, historically and in the present.

Acknowledgments

At all levels, this writing would be inconceivable without the brilliant and careful reading and

contributions of my beloved friends, collaborators, and teachers. In particular, I want to ex-

press my gratitude to those who read and commented on this manuscript or played an integral

part in the conception of its theoretical and political vocabulary. B Love, Weiouqing Chen,

Veronica Dakota Padilla, Teresa Casas Hernández, Angelica Stathopoulos, Zhivka Val-

iavicharska, Esra Atamer, Melissa Buzzeo, Cinzia Arruzza, Jay Bernstein, Jeremy Bendik-

Keymer, Ciclón Olivares, Sandra Stephens, Caffyn Jesse. You have transformed my caring,

and this writing, for the better. Finally, I am sincerely grateful to Liesbeth Schoonheim and

Cissie Fu for the generative and ethical guidance throughout the editing process.

Notes

1] This reference is to the concluding lines of Audre Lorde’s “Age, Race, Class and Sex: Women Redefining

Difference:” “We have chosen each other/and the edge of each other’s battles/the war is the same/if we

lose/someday women’s blood will congeal/upon a dead planet/if we win/there is no telling/we seek beyond his-

tory/for a new and more possible meeting” (Lorde 2007, 123).

2] See for example Engster (2007), Feder Kittay (1999), Held (1997), Ruddick (1995), Tronto (2004).

3] I use the term ‘radical’ in both the critical and revolutionary senses of the word, to name the intersectional

oppressions at the root of social organizations and divisions of caring labour, as well as the essential and integral

role of care in the cultural and social reproduction of autonomous and resistant forms of kinship and community.

Furthermore, because of its influence on the claims and methods that I develop in this article, it feels important

to include a discussion of this collective here. However, for reasons of confidentiality and consent, I do not

discuss the specifics of our relational dynamics. I am aware that this generalization also poses ethical and political

problems, and did not take this decision lightly. I want to thank to the editors for encouraging me to develop the

Krisis 2023, 43 (1)

below section on the collective dimensions of my research, and for their wise council in deciding how best to do

so.

4] “Rather than romanticizing care or ignoring its demons, radical care is built on praxis. As the traditionally

undervalued labor of caring becomes recognized as a key element of individual and community resilience, radical

care provides a roadmap for an otherwise” (Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart and Kneese 2020, 13).

5] My contribution here is deeply informed by traditions of transformative justice and politicized somatics, and

my work with the Institute for the Study of Somatic Sex Education. The following is a limited bibliography of

resources on transformative justice, politicized somatics, and some intersections between them.

Online Resources: Transform Harm.Org: https://transformharm.org/; Just Practice’s Steps to End Prisons and

Policing: A Mixtape on Transformative Justice: https://just-practice.org/steps-to-end-prisons-policing-a-mix-

tape-on-transformative-justice; Creative Intervention Toolkit: https://www.creative-interventions.org/wp-con-

tent/uploads/2020/08/CI-Toolkit-Final-Section-1-Introduction-Aug-2020.pdf; Barnard Center TJ Video Series:

https://bcrw.barnard.edu/videos/; Building Accountable Communities: https://www.accountablecommuni-

ties.org/; Caffyn Jesse, Ethics for Outlaws Project: https://www.erospirit.ca/ethics/; Generation5 Handbook:

http://www.generationfive.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/g5-Transformative-Justice-Handbook.pdf; Mia

Mingus on Pod-mapping and Giving Apologies: https://leavingevidence.wordpress.com/2019/12/18/how-to-

give-a-good-apology-part-1-the-four-parts-of-accountability/; https://leavingevidence.word-

press.com/2019/12/18/how-to-give-a-good-apology-part-2-the-apology-the-what-and-the-how/;

https://batjc.wordpress.com/resources/pods-and-pod-mapping-worksheet/; Kai Cheng Thom, “So You’re Ready

to Choose Love”–Free Conflict Resolution Workbook https://ariseembodiment.org/free-workbook/

Books, Articles, Documentaries, Podcasts: brown, adrienne mariee. Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change,

Changing Worlds. 2017. Chico: AK Press; Chen, Ching-In and Dulani, Jai and Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha,

Leah, eds. The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence within Activist Communities. 2011.

Brooklyn: South End Press; INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, ed. Color of Violence: The Incite!

Anthology. 2006. Cambridge MA: South End Press; Dixon, Ejeris and Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, eds. Be-

yond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement. 2020. Chico: AK Press;

Haines, Staci. The Politics of Trauma: Somatics, Healing and Social Justice. 2019. Berkeley: North Atlantic

Books; Hemphill, Prentis. Finding Our Way Podcast. https://www.findingourwaypodcast.com/; Jesse, Caffyn.

Elements of Intimacy: The Dance of Loving Connection. 2019. Self-Published; Kaba, Mariame and Shira Hassan.

Fumbling Towards Repair: A Workbook for Community Accountability Facilitators. 2019. Published by Project

NIA and Just Practice; Kaba, Mariame. We Do This Till We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming

Justice. 2021. Chicago: Haymarket; Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Leah. Care Work: Dreaming Disability Jus-

tice. 2018. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press; Simmons, Aishah Shahidah. No! The Rape Documentary. https://no-

therapedocumentary.org/home; Thom, Kai Cheng. I Hope We Choose Love: A Trans Girl’s Notes From the End

of the World. 2020. Vancouver: Arsenal.

6] According to Evelyn Nakano Glenn, “The social organization of care has been rooted in diverse forms of

coercion that have […] tracked poor, racial minority, and immigrant women into positions entailing caring for

others.” (Nakano Glenn 2010, 5).

7] See Rhacel Salazar Parreñas’s study of the the global migration of Filipino domestic workers for a thorough

and careful account of both the structural violence at play in international care chains (the lack of labour and

citizenship protections, the harsh exploitations of this unregulated market, migration fees, and risks of abuse,

dislocation and isolation), as well as the agency and private desires the women she interviews bring to this work.

8] For Joan Tronto, parochial care is a “way to excuse the inattention of the privileged” (Tronto 1993, 146) and

paternalistic care is care “in which care givers assume that they know better than care receivers what those care

receivers need” (Tronto 2010, 161).

9] On the revolutionary role of African American women’s motherwork see hooks (1990) and Gumbs and Mar-

tens (2016).

Krisis 2023, 43 (1)

10] While the following influential authors develop incredibly important and nuanced perspectives, they do not

fully account for the impacts of power dynamics on people’s lived experiences of, and capacities for, care, or the

need for transformative political and ethical approaches that address them. In their Care Manifesto, the members

of the “Care Collective” (Andreas Chatzidakis, Jamie Hakim, Jo Littler, Catherine Rottenberg, and Lynne Segal-

call) call for a “politics that puts care at the centre of life.” Their definition is rich and expansive, including

affective, material, social, and ecological dimensions: care, for them, is “a social capacity and activity involving

the nurturing of all that is necessary for the welfare and flourishing of life. Above all, to put care centre stage

means recognizing and embracing our interdependencies” (Care Collective 11). However, while they advocate

for a notion of universal care in which “genuine care” and collective responsibility form the keynote of social

relations at all levels, they offer only positive definitions of care as a good, and procedural approaches (e.g. better

distribution and education) to how we might arrive at this goal. Maria Puig de la Ballacasa (2017) articulates an

emergent, ecological, and speculative ethics of care that refuses normative and a priori notions of ethical agency

in favour of a relational ontology based on interdependence and attunement, but she often lacks a critical and

transformative, that is, political, approach to how power dynamics might fundamentally condition such co-emer-

gence and relation, and thus how we might transform them in collective and politicized ways (Puig de la Ballac-

asa 2017; Ticktin and Wijsman 2017). Emma Dowling (2021) for her part articulates very helpful notions of the

structural nature of the care crisis, the insidious austerity-based “care fixes” that further externalize care work

onto marginalized people (32), and the ideologies and romanticizations of care that normalize and naturalize the

allocation of care work along racialized, gendered, and national lines (70-72). However, while crucial, her struc-

tural analysis too tends to leave out the relational and ethical transformations that must be generated alongside

and through structural changes if we are not to reproduce new forms of oppressive and exploitative power at

interpersonal and institutional levels alike.

11] Virginia Held develops this emphasis on caring relations rather than individual actors, as well as its far-

reaching implications for moral philosophy (Held 2006).

12] Kittay offers the following corrective to in response to Rosemary Tong’s critiques of this implicitly leveling

gesture. “In Love’s Labor I try to promote a notion I call doulia, the public responsibility to provide support for

the caregiver so that the caregiver can give care without depleting herself and her resources. I speak of the

aphorism that might characterize the triadic concept of reciprocity embedded here: that what goes around comes

around. But the aphorism seems sadly wrong – at least in our world. What’s worse, it is precisely because of

their caregiving labor that the women about whom Tong speaks are poor and unable to purchase the care they

require as they age.” (2002, 242).

13] Kai Cheng Thom gives a beautiful account of this painful phenomenon in her reflections on the reproduction

of intimate harms in QTBIPOC communities (Thom 2020).

14] Caring elements of struggle are thus often subject to brutal repression from the State and reactionary forces.

J Edgar Hoover’s infamous characterization of the Black Panther Party’s breakfast program as the greatest inter-

nal security threat to the US is a paradigmatic case in point.

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Biography

Kelly Gawel (she/they) is a feminist philosopher and activist living in New York. Her political and intellectual

work centers on radical care, social reproduction, and embodied ethics. She is completing her PhD at The New

School, and has been teaching philosophy and gender studies at Hunter College and Pratt Institute for the past

five years. She is thrilled to be joining the Interdisciplinary Studies Department at Governors State University in

Chicago this fall.