Covid-19 and the existing “crisis of care” it made visible returned attention to the concept of care— and the difficulty of defining such a capacious and contested term. Strands of thought in care ethics emphasize care’s linkage to affect, to motherhood, to nurturing and to attentiveness, yet care also has an unsavory history as a vehicle for violence, repression, disempowerment, and state control. Its relational features implicate it in the inequalities of interpersonal and structural relations –– an angle that Marxist feminist analyses of care, capital, labor, and social reproduction emphasize. These theorists worry about characterizations of care that lean on the affective – what forms of violence might close associations between love and care cover over?
In her study of care and Inuit experiences with illness and state control in the Canadian Arctic, Lisa Stevenson challenges the notion that we associate care with “good intentions” or “positive outcomes” (3). She moves toward an “ambivalence” of care, leaving space to account for the horrors enacted out of “care” as well as the subversive kinds of care emerging in response to violence. She retains a relational thread in her work by attending to the varied ways in which “people can come to matter.” Thus, care can include colonial violence and bureaucratic “maintenance of life” (3).
Aisha K. Finch takes up care as a conceptual and practical disruption to such systems. In the introduction to a 2022 Palimpsest issue on Black feminism and care, Finch describes care as a form of Black feminist attentiveness that disrupts the unrelenting death-dealing forces that threaten Black life. Care, thought of as an ethical corrective, enacts “a form of connection that derails the needs of state and capital, producing a radical otherwise in the midst of their violations” (2). Authors in the special issue elaborate Black feminist practices of attention, which do the work of “unmaking and remaking” toward “something more livable” (2). These perspectives gesture toward the radical potential of care.
These diverging approaches to care illustrate both the difficulty and importance of considering care anew. How might political theology engage discussions of care?
This essay series emerged out of a series of meetings and conversations convened to explore the relevance of care to religious studies and theology. Eleanor Craig and Dana Lloyd organized a working group on Care as Theory and Method in the Study of Religion to discuss what religious studies might learn from and contribute to the ongoing interdisciplinary conversation on care, gender, labor, and ethics. More specifically:
We are asking participants to think about what changes when they center care, both methodologically and theoretically, in the religious studies scholarship they already do. We’re constructing a conversation about what values, power dynamics, relationalities, and ideologies become more visible when we take care in its many valences as the organizing concept. Our intuition is that care is an important nexus for analysis of 1) how religious ethics materialize in action, praxis, and impact; and 2) how religion takes shape amid the gendered, bodily, and racial dimensions that wider theoretical discourses on care bring into focus.
The contributions to this series convey some of the rich insights that emerged from our meetings on Zoom, at Villanova, and at the Political Theology Network meeting in Nashville last year. They add further complexity to the conversation on care that I sketched above by delving into— and expanding— the tangle of relationships that involve care. Together, they offer a constellation of interlocking themes that show what engagements with care can bring religious studies and political theology— and what the methodologies and theories in our fields offer to conversations on care.
Josh Cohen exposes how tensions between care, love, and labor that emerge in contemporary dynamics of surrogacy echo premodern models of motherhood. Tracing Rousseau’s notion of care as sollicitude alongside the shifting roles of the wet nurse and the mother figure in eighteenth century Europe, Cohen shows how reproductive labor and affect intertwine in the construction of maternal care as material and spiritual nourishment.
Sebastian Budinich picks up the theme of care and the family in contemporary Chile, considering how state and ecclesial concerns about falling birth rates fail to respond to the crisis of care that burdens families. He shows how Christian ethics in conversation with feminist philosophical work on virtue and moral luck preserve specificity about the burdens that particular families face when it comes to care— and help articulate what the church and the state must do in response.
François Zammit scrutinizes state efforts to care, demonstrating how “pastoral power” in a neoliberal market economy advances a politics of sacrifice. Zammit considers the aftereffects of liberal states’ humanitarian efforts made in the name of care, showing how these policies leave social hierarchies in place and deflate possibilities of structural transformation. However, Zammit sees “counterdiscursive potential” in pastoral power, as he turns to theological understandings of social salvation grounded in concern for “human life at an individual and social level.”
Picking up questions about the possibility or impossibility of care by institutions, Laura Simpson considers care alongside horror. Reflecting on the experience of her class during an on-campus armed person alert, Simpson shows how the institution’s acts of care followed a familiar script, which preserved “normality” and in doing so, valorized a kind of “carceral care.” Simpson explores how leaving care and horror entangled can make room for uncertainty and “excess” in care and lay the groundwork to cultivate “practices of care unbeholden to institutional norms.”
Méadhbh McIvor also examines practices of care in our university life, focusing on the problems of peer review in religious studies and the difference that a commitment to care could make. Reckoning with the methodological diversity in the field, McIvor considers how practices of attention central to care set a relational horizon for peer review. Through reflection and self critique, McIvor suggests, one might “review unto others as I would have them review unto me.”
TJ Bryant brings another perspective on attention to conversations on Black suffering and social death. He unfolds resonances and divergences between Simone Weil’s notion of attention in response to affliction and Christina Sharpe’s emphasis on Black care and “wake work.” Bryant finds in their emphasis on care and attention a “radical counter-praxis,” which helps respond to the distinctive kind of suffering that he calls “Black affliction.” The work of attending, for Bryant, requires “an uncompromising commitment to attend to black life against the forces designed to destroy it.”
Joi Orr brings the discussion of attention and care in response to anti-Blackness into an ecological frame, asking, “What is care when the end of the world (as we know it) seems imminent? More pointedly, how do I, a Black woman, think about care knowing that my communities are on the frontlines of disaster?” Drawing on Black feminist linkages between care and survival, Orr considers how “radical care,” specifically radical self-care, is visible in practices of Black feminist survivalism. Escaping commodified capture of self-care, Black feminist practices of hunting, foraging, fire safety, water collection, and garment-mending reorient self-care toward sovereignty and toward “right relation with the rest of creation.” Survivalism as self-care can become, therefore, “a return to nature and ourselves.”
Himanee Gupta extends an ecological engagement with care— alongside legacies of violence and colonization— by turning to Indigenous understandings of land, relationality, and reciprocity. Reckoning with her own relationship to the land and to Indigenous communities in Hawai‘i as a South Asian American, Gupta describes her evolving understanding of nature and its implications for care, turning to the unorthodox geneticist Barbara McClintock’s care for corn as an example of a sustaining practice of care. Through patience, attention, and an appreciation for reciprocity, McClintock cultivated a “feeling for the organism,” taking in “the intimate knowledge that the corn gave her back.” Gupta thus demonstrates the importance of affect in ecology, and she returns to Indigenous ways of knowing as disruptive to anthropocentric accounts of care.
Taken together, these essays show the generative potential of care for political theology and the importance of reckoning with care’s risks. In several essays, care offers a theoretical gathering-place for the excesses of suffering, horror, love, and embodiment. In others, we can glimpse the radical potential of care in practice, as care considered anew unsettles how we attend to suffering, how we conceive of relationality and interdependence, and how we understand survival and flourishing.
