political economy of care

(well, I never did make a post out of this, so I might as well just put it out there as a small puddle of barely-begun thoughts...)

Over the past few years, especially since my relationship with RC revealed itself to be irreparably fucked and not at all what I thought it was (ie not feminist in nature), I've been interested articulating the concept of "care" (and love, for that matter) in a social and political way.

I've found quite useful Arlie Hochschild's concepts of "emotional work" (usually unpaid, in personal relationships) and "emotional labour" (usually paid, in relationships with strangers/customers) (also called "affective labour" by Hardt and Negri -- and Sara Ahmed refers to "affective economies").

This article is focused particularly on childcare, which is only the most obvious (and not my favourite) example of domestic and reproductive care labour. But it is at least a starting point of a conversation I want to have.

As is this: "Polyamory as a Reserve Army of Care Labour" (which has been removed *again*):

"Pretending that polyamorous relationship itself were a liberating mechanism, simply because they don’t have a conventional framework for relating, has done a few things: in some cases it has provided men with immunity to womanize, in many cases it provides men with a reserve army of care labor while giving them less impetus to be mutually responsive to the activity of the relationship, and so I would argue that there is potentially even less of a two-way mutual flow of care labor between men and women in polyamorous relationships. Beyond that, heterosexual polyamory, can at worst be a threat to sociability and solidarity between women."

 And the part on "hedging" and care labour:

"As often happens, responsibility and empathy can be replaced by the care work of another relationship. If she demands that a male partner treat her better in some sense, or commit to her emotional or sexual well being, he has the option of not relating to her subjectivity (my experience in the relationship), and going to another woman for gratification."

I also watched the Public Feelings Salon with Lauren Berlant and took some very brief notes:

• optimism and trauma make you non-sovereign 
• (a good non-sovereignty, dependence)
• forms of losing control are forms of belonging to the social
• attachment to the political
• relationship between personal romantic and political fantasies
• trying to imagine intimacies where they feel recognized (I want to have that feeling again of being recognized and held in the world) - political and personal guiding fantasy