Because radical care is inseparable from systemic inequality and power structures, it can be used to coerce subjects into new forms of surveillance and unpaid labor, to make up for institutional neglect, and even to position some groups against others, determining who is worthy of care and who is not.
While radical care is often connected to positive political change by providing spaces of hope in dark times, the articles in this collection simultaneously acknowledge the negative affects associated with care.
For the purposes of this special issue of Social Text, we define radical care as a set of vital but underappreciated strategies for enduring precarious worlds. Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu all reflect the global rise of an authoritarian right wing that threatens already vulnerable communities. Of course, the problem is much larger and older than Trump. While the phenomenon of care as political warfare has a long genealogy (one that we outline below), it has taken on fresh significance since the election of Donald Trump and its global reverberations: the rolling back of civil liberties, government denial of anthropogenic climate change, and human rights abuses serve as reminders that structural inequity and disenfranchisement come with corporeal and emotional tolls that care seeks to remediate. For examples we might look to the way that Indigenous peoples and their allies have rearticulated their positions as protectors rather than protesters, emphasizing the importance of caring for and being good stewards of the earth, or how Occupy-style actions emerged at US Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers to denounce the separation of migrant children from their families in “tender age camps” at the US border, positioning parental care (both to give and to receive it) as a human right. Care, then, is fundamental to social movements. That wasn’t the case before.” 2 Davis points to a growing awareness that individual impulses and interior lives, the intimate and banal details of family histories and personal experiences, are directly connected to external forces. Self-care and healing and attention to the body and the spiritual dimension-all of this is now a part of radical social justice struggles. In a recent interview, Angela Davis explicitly tied social change to care: “I think our notions of what counts as radical have changed over time. 1 But for all the popular focus on self-care rituals, new collective movements have also emerged in which moral imperatives to act-to care-are a central driving force. In the immediate aftermath of the 2016 US presidential election, op-eds on #selfcare exploded across media platforms. As the traditionally undervalued labor of caring becomes recognized as a key element of individual and community resilience, radical care provides a roadmap for envisioning an otherwise.Ĭare has reentered the zeitgeist. To that end, the articles in this collection locate and analyze the mediated boundaries of what it means for individuals and groups to feel and provide care, survive, and even dare to thrive in environments that challenge their very existence. Studies of care thereby prompt us to consider how and when care becomes visible, valued, and necessary within broader social movements. With care reentering the zeitgeist as a reaction to today’s political climate, radical care engages histories of grassroots community action and negotiates neoliberal models for self-care. However, because radical care is inseparable from systemic inequality and power structures, it can also be used to coerce subjects into new forms of surveillance and unpaid labor, to make up for institutional neglect, and even to position some groups against others, determining who is worthy of care and who is not. Care contains radical promise through a grounding in autonomous direct action and nonhierarchical collective work. Following recent theoretical interventions into the importance of self-care despite its susceptibility to neoliberal co-optation, the potentialities of self-care may be expanded outward to include other forms that push back against structural disadvantage. This article introduces the topic of radical care by providing a genealogy of care as a vital but underexamined praxis of radical politics that provides spaces of hope in precarious times.
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