Rethinking notions of inclusive belonging and reformulating mutual responsibilities seem more necessary than ever in times of multi-layered uncertainty and rising vulnerability. The COVID-19 scenario has put conventional notions of country-based citizenship to the test, proving such a citizenship framework insufficient to address international emergencies. For instance, the urgency of administering medical attention, restricting movement and carrying on vaccination campaigns are conducted regardless of passport. In fact, under current circumstances, national governments are not so concerned about distinguishing national origins or administrative paperwork in order to determine who should wear a mask, who is hospitalised or who is under confinement. Therefore, COVID-19 restrictions and protections dictated by the state, for the most part, seem not to be bound to citizens solely, but to those living in a given community in a particular place and time. The shared vulnerability of humans has been exposed under the threat of a common risk. This virus, which does not operate on the basis of national borders but which targets victims according to multiple health-related factors, helps raise the following question: How might citizenship look like under this crisis of a global pandemic and, eventually, during the post-COVID-19 era? Elsewhere, I explored how alternative concepts of citizenship have developed within debates among precarity organizing prior to and after the 2008 financial crisis in Europe (Casas-Cortés 2019). Specifically, how feminist precarity collectives in Spain came up with the play-on-words of caretizenship to evoke a different notion of political belonging with updated collective rights. The original Spanish term is arguably the result of a typo: an accidental switching of the order of vowels in the word ciudadanía resulted in cuidadanía, which totally changed the root word: from city to care. I contended that these feminist precarity efforts were able to re-signify and re-politicise conventional understandings and practices of citizenship in creative ways. I highlighted the notion of caretizenship as a concept that ties in the critique of a precarity/migration nexus. Furthermore, I argued, such theorisation from below on alternative notions of citizenship holds strong resonances with critical citizenship studies’ debates around the theoretical and strategic relevance of this institution in contemporary politics. As such, I proposed to understand the activist concept of caretizenship as a creative erasure and democratic re-iteration of the conventional notion of citizenship, an argument that I developed at length in that piece. As a working definition in progress, I signalled how caretizenship suggests a community of practice forged by ties of caring relationships, mutually attending to basic needs in a context of increasing vulnerability among local, migrant and emigrant populations: “Caretizenship is a call to reorganise the ties among the subjects of a polity not based upon sharing a national territory, nor certain ethnic origin or abstract individual rights, but founded upon the urgency of place-based responses to situations of shared needs” (Casas-Cortés 2019, p. 20).
While far from a working institution, this activist theorisation provided a ‘horizon’ to work toward constituting an opening of the political imagination. The notion of care-based citizenship ultimately clashes with and suppresses the inherent exclusionary logic underlying the currently established institution of citizenship and its correspondent restrictive border regime. Instead, the goal of thinking with care about citizenship hints towards imagining and practicing inclusion otherwise.
At the time of the height of the precarity struggles, this conceptual exercise might have looked like a fantasy tale in a moment where borders were deemed to be a number one national priority. Yet, the human and socio-economic impact of the coronavirus has put a sudden break on that well-known government border mania. Such timing is an opportunity to re-engage the legacy of feminist precarity analyses which were wrestling with conventional understandings of citizenship, redefining collective rights and envisioning other parameters to design public policies. In the midst of struggles about precarity from 2000 onwards, feminist precarity activists have been questioning the inter-relations between citizenship, gender and race through the prism of care; thus, rethinking classical concepts of political theory. The neologism of caretizenship is found in the midst of organizing events and activist paraphernalia such as blogs, flyers, meetings, workshops, militant research projects, scholarly publications, etc. during a period of precarity activism in southern Europe known for its effervescence in the production of terms and transnational networks (approximately from 2000 to 2010).
This chapter then further engages the notion of caretizenship, pointing to its analytical depth, in terms of articulating issues of class, gender and care as well as race, in search of a flexible and multi-layered sense of inclusion. This chapter traces the genealogy of this thinking. Some of the critical readings put forward by the precarity struggles of current forms of capitalism became quite present in scholarly and social debates. Furthermore, they developed and clustered a series of keywords, compiling them in vocabulary lists called ‘Precarity lexicons’ that travelled through online networks, forming a common ground for sharing terminology.1
Many of these terms still inform analyses of late capitalism (post-Fordism, bio-unionism, immaterial labour, copyleft, etc.). Still, the trend of feminist precarity activism no longer has the same visibility, and we are not so familiar with expressions such as ‘the becoming-woman of labour’, ‘precarisation of existence’, ‘care-strike’, or ‘care-rights’. The notion of care is recently getting traction, as manifest in the recent activist discourse and actions around International Women’s Day. This chapter reviews some of this terminology, arguing for the importance of documenting and rescuing these feminist precarity activist concepts in this conjuncture. The currency of their contributions will aid to understand and face recent economic shifts, as well as imagining political horizons and notions of belonging within scenarios of rising vulnerability. 1. The first part of this chapter, A Precarity Lexicon and Its Feminist Critiques, deals with the emergence of precarity struggles and the critical appraisals put forward by feminist precarity activists, drawing on its historical foundations. 2. The second part, Feminist Readings of Precarity, engages their actual neologisms and their arguments, identifying how there is a distinctive feminist take on precarity. In these feminist readings of precarity, the question of care, vulnerability and interdependency rises with conceptual prominence and political urgency. 3. The third part, Towards a Politics of Care: Citizenship after Precarity identifies how care then becomes key to rethinking notions such as citizenship.
As an overall point of this piece, I argue that the conceptual contributions by feminist precarity analyses enrich post-capitalist and post-border vocabularies and imaginaries within the academy and beyond. Specifically, this piece engages the way in which feminist precarity activists rethink the notion of citizenship where issues of class, gender and race are dealt with, building a latent theory of care and citizenship in the making. Feminist precarity voices advance a two-fold emphasis on the question of care: (a) as a key yet ignored analytical factor, and (b) as raw material of the political with consequences to rethink key notions such as citizenship. The question of race is dealt with implicitly through these activist debates, with incipient attempts to work with it. For instance, it is possible to identify a rich critique of Eurocentrism and a sustained and systematic engagement with migration and racial hierarchies, through these activists’ public actions and also within the notion of care-based citizenship. For this chapter, I build upon my own political engagement with feminist struggles and ethnographic work developed with a feminist precarity research project based in Madrid, known as Precarias a la Deriva, and its later articulations as La Oficina de Asuntos Precarios and La Laboratoria.
1 A Precarity Lexicon and Its Feminist Critiques
During the decade of the 2000s, mainstream activist debates in Europe spoke in terms such as precariat, cognitariat, EuroMayDay or the social factory as part of a larger new vocabulary, which, as they argued, was necessary to apprehend the socio-economic shifts underway (Kruglanski 2005). The notion of precarity was often conflated with the Italian autonomous Marxist notion of immaterial labour and its analysis of cognitive capitalism (Neilson and Rossiter 2005). Thus, during this decade, mobilisations around the precariat and the cognitariat were born and spread under the compound of prec-cog struggles (Foti 2005). Indeed, so-called ‘chainworkers’—as in, those with short-term contracts working for service industries in commercial chains—, and ‘brainworkers’—those working in universities, research centres and cognitive industries—, were the initial main characters of EuroMayDay parades spreading across European cities (Mattoni 2012, Doerr and Mattoni 2014).2 This period also saw a transformation in the language of resistance when the take on labour deregulation explicitly shifted from a stand against flexibilisation to a more self-affirmative call along the lines of ‘long-live to the rebel precariat!’ The goal was to rethink the possibilities offered by this shift in labour organization while updating labour and social rights to it. As such, they reappropriate the official EU term of ‘flex-security’ as their own demand, endorsing the opportunities offered by a flexible labour regime, but only when guarantees specific for all kinds of work and family arrangements were fully developed (Casas-Cortés 2014).
As such, feminist activist groups felt compelled by this fresh approach to labour and organizing, yet they also identified a significant distance from it. Concretely, a series of voices from feminist political efforts have decried that the discussions on immaterial labour as articulated by Italian autonomist thinkers and movements have ignored many of the contributions made by feminist economics for years. Also, by focusing on the most technological sectors and latest transformations in production, initial precarity debates were criticized as being largely northern- and male-biased, neglecting other forms of precarious labour (Fantone 2007; Pérez Orozco 2006; Mitropoulos 2005; Precarias a la Deriva 2004b).
“The experience of regular, full-time, long-term employment, which characterised the most visible and mediated aspects of Fordism, is an exception in capitalist history. That presupposed vast amounts of unpaid domestic labour by women and hyper-exploited labour in the colonies. This labour also underpinned the smooth distinction between work and leisure for the Fordist factory worker. The enclosures and looting of what was once contained as the Third World and the affective, unpaid labour of women allowed for the consumerist, affective ‘humanisation’ and protectionism of what was always a small part of the Fordist working class” (Mitropoulos 2005, p. 92).
Therefore, one of the main feminist critics to immaterial labour theory (Lazzarato [1996] 2010; Hardt and Negri [2000] 2003) is that it ignores many post-colonial dynamics and has a strong Eurocentric bias. When assuming that the reorganization of production is doing away with the hierarchies that exist within the working class on the basis of race, gender, age, ability, etc., this approach is de facto ignoring the uneven power relations resulting from this reorganization. That is, a flat reading of precarity as solely immaterial labour, pretending to be gender-neutral and blind to racialisation, lacks the theoretical and political tools to tackle ongoing shifts acting upon historical yet well-engrained gender and racial hierarchies. Nonetheless, feminist critiques were not geared towards undermining precarity activism. Rather, feminist precarity activists provided a deeper engagement with the concept, opening it to other axes of power and more populations beyond the post-industrial worker figure. That is, precarity a la femme stretches the conceptual and political reach of the initial precarity concept even further. By embracing the feminist contributions to precarity, it became possible to politicise other terrains of struggle that had been neglected or under-analysed in popular interpretations of precarity, including the very notion of citizenship. As such, feminist precarity activism involved a cautious and un-heroic engagement with the concept: first, by not claiming the total novelty of precarity, and second, by including sectors that were not so glamorous as the emerging cognitariat or ‘creative class’.
Instead, feminist precarity activists clamoured for attention to the ‘old’ sphere of unpaid reproductive labour, which had been ignored by classical Marxism and the industrial workers’ movement. They built upon historical autonomous Marxist feminist theories and the struggles of the 1970s which had redefined housework as labour and as the basis for reproducing labour power, rather than as a personal service (Dalla Costa and James 1975; Federici 1975). While these are previous-generation activists, their voices have still been very prominent in recent precarity and feminist organizing. This kind of autonomist thinking on race, gender and class has slowly fuelled an intersectional awareness among feminist precarity movements in Europe, although was not always made explicit. Initially, these movements were focusing mostly on the argument of reproduction as key for understanding and intervening in recent transformations.3 The main concern was bringing feminist economics to precarity struggles. While sharing a few analytical points with post-Marxist theories of labour transformation, very soon, feminist precarity activists looked for a distinct conceptual framework. Feminist autonomous works such as those of Silvia Federici, Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James, which are quite intersectional in their connection of race, colonialism and migration, came to the fore.
For instance, Silvia Federici has been very outspoken about the limits of the immaterial labour theory behind the political organizing of the so-called cognitariat and young precariat in Europe (Federici 2010). The works by Dalla Costa, Federici and James contributed greatly in pointing out to the unrecognised value of other forms of uncounted labour, and this has materialised in numerous public efforts at publicizing the importance of domestic labour since then. They signal how, during housework, women and people of colour engaged in reproductive activities were contributing to support capitalist accumulation, while not being recognised for that. This thesis constitutes the basis of the historical and ongoing international movement of Wages for Housework, starting in Italy in the late 1970s, travelling to the USA and UK, and eventually going global through campaigns about how housework is truly work but still remains excluded from the official workforce. This movement simultaneously criticizes the capitalist economic system and Left alternatives, while attempting to recognise housework as labour. Eventually, starting from 2000 onwards, this movement has called yearly for a Global Women’s Strike (GWS) on March 8th, International Women’s Day, with a plethora of demands geared to the overarching appeal for the reorganization of society and economy at large.4
Feminist precarity activists were building upon works such as The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community, co-authored by Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James (1975). They also read works by Silvia Federici about housework, including Wages against Housework (1975). These texts launched the domestic labour debate by redefining housework as reproductive labour necessary to the functioning of capital within precarity struggles. Still, most autonomous Marxism of the 2000s bypassed this feminist contribution, missing its important political implications. When ignoring reproduction, this leads to exclusionary readings of precarity, such as theories of immaterial and cognitive labour which speak solely to and about workers working at the highest level of capitalist technology. By ignoring reproductive labour and presuming that all labour forms constitute a common, it hides the fact that the central concern is only a section of the working class and could not lead to the general theories and claims being made. In contrast, feminist/post-colonial critiques acknowledge the substantial differences in terms of gender and race, suggesting provocative alliances between otherwise unconnected types of labourers (e.g. putting local computer programmers and international domestic labourers into a potential dialogue). Among feminist autonomous Marxist authors, the question of race is worked primarily by Selma James, a women’s rights and anti-racist campaigner and author born in New York 90 years ago. From 1958 to 1962, she worked with C.L.R. James, the author of Black Jacobins (1938), in the movement for Caribbean federation and independence. In 1972, she founded the International Wages for Housework Campaign, and in 2000 she helped launch the GWS which has the strategy for change of ‘Invest in Caring not Killing’. She coined the word ‘unwaged’ to describe the caring work women do. It has since entered the English language to describe all who work without wages at home, on the land and in the community. Within this organizing work where gender and class were so present, the question of race emerged transversally through her writings (James 1974; 1985). In Sex, Race and Class, Selma James explains in direct language how capitalism and the Left have mystified the real relationships between these categories. Her analysis of the working-class movement reiterates that we must position the Black working woman—often immigrant, at the centre of the analysis. She strategically uses the term ‘caste’ to refer to women, non-whites and children. This term helps to mark the groups as having specific interests and traits related to their ‘nature’ rather than the work they do, thus they seem to be categories of identity rather than class. However, she proceeds to demonstrate that this exclusion from class is misguided and these identity groups castes are the very substance of class. The divisions of castes are a way of creating a hierarchy of class, she argues (James 1985).
2 Feminist Readings of Precarity
The previous section points out how feminist readings of precarity have been advanced by economic analyses about the transformation of labour according to historical processes in the spheres of reproduction and colonisation. This section engages its philosophical foundations based on feminist theories on precarity as induced vulnerability and a particular mode of governance. This theoretical engagement will be presented via a series of terms used among precarity feminist activists that point to this novel take on precarity as something much more intersectional in its reach beyond the labour sphere: precariedad femenina, precarización de la existencia, políticas y derechos del cuidado, etc. By interweaving both readings, feminist precarity activists arrived at the conceptual and political centrality of care.
2.1 Labour Precarity à la Femme
“A renewed meaning of feminization of labour refers to the process through which traits that usually characterised women’s work and lives such as flexibility, vulnerability, total availability, high degrees of adaptation, talent for improvisation, and the ability to assume simultaneous roles and tasks (as housewives, wives, mothers, grandmothers, daughters, nurses, teachers, midwives) are nowadays spreading through a growing spectrum of types of employment, for both men and women” (Gelabert 2014).
“In order to overcome the dichotomies of public/private and production/reproduction, recognizing and giving visibility to the interconnections between social and economic spheres, making it impossible to think precarity from an exclusively labour and salary centred point of view, we define precarity as the set of material and symbolic conditions that determine a high level of vital uncertainty in regards to the sustained access to essential resources for the full development of a person’s life” (Precarias a la Deriva 2005, p. 1, emphasis added).
By not ignoring reproductive work, and realizing how productive and reproductive work are so interwoven, it is no longer possible to speak just about precarious labour. It was necessary to expand precarity to the realm of life as a whole. Precarias a la Deriva was key in stretching the concept of precarity beyond the workplace to a more existential notion, emphasizing how the intrinsic vulnerability of life was exponentially multiplied by capitalist logics of exploitation operating not only in the officially recognised realm of waged labour but in those unregulated and invisibilised spaces of the household, the colonial plantation, children’s schools, etc.
Building on the analysis put forward by historical feminist autonomist thinkers, housework was historically rendered invisible by its removal from the wage/formal job relation. These feminist post-Marxist interpretations established that capitalism is built on an immense amount of unpaid labour, that it is not exclusively or primarily assembled by contractual relations. According to this interpretation, the wage relation hides the unpaid, servile nature of so much of the work upon which capital accumulation is premised. Building upon this rich tradition, both in terms of conceptualisation and organizing, contemporary feminist readings of precarity provided a deeper and broader understanding of an apparently novel transformation. Precarity was not just a shift in labour patterns and the organization of production, but a process that involved a much larger portion of existence. Thanks to those contributions by feminist autonomists, precarity is not considered to be equivalent to cognitive immaterial labour.
“the politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks...becoming differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death” (Butler 2009, p. 25 my emphasis),
“Precarity stipulates how precariousness [inherent insecurity] is distributed hierarchically, as well as how inequalities are established among beings” (Lorey 2015, p. 12).
“Notwithstanding, in the present context it is not possible to speak of precarity as a differentiated state and, as such, to distinguish neatly between a precarious population and another guaranteed one. Rather it is more fitting to detect a tendency towards the precarization of life that threatens society as a whole” (Precarias a la Deriva 2005).
As such, Precarias a la Deriva’s notion of ‘precarisation of existence’ makes an important move in dealing with the concept of precarity, focusing on the general tendency towards intermittency, fragmentation, mobility and vulnerability, beyond a concrete occupation or a particular workspace. This notion of precarisation of existence emphasises how the multi-layered process brought by economic deregulation, selectively restrictive immigration policy, technological change, etc. unrolls increasing levels of uncertainty at many corners of everyday life. Life itself is under these intensified conditions of accelerated vulnerability. Such conceptual enlargement of precarity as provoked and induced vulnerability has been fuelling struggles beyond the labour sphere as well as prompting empirical research based on a more multi-faceted understanding of precarity (Motakef 2019). Lorey further argues how precarisation is not an exception but the rule expanding to all spheres of life, previously considered secured. According to this author, intensifying the inherent fragility of human beings becomes the very mode of social control in what she calls a “government of the precarious” focused on producing and maintaining a hierarchy of different levels of vulnerability (Lorey 2015).
Therefore, this feminist version of precarity is a less production-centric notion and a less identity-based affair. By refocusing on the question of vulnerability, the attention shifted from risk, insecurity and despair into the realisation of the interdependency among living beings, sustained by necessary threads of care.
2.2 Reclaiming Care at the Core of Provoked Vulnerability
There is a point of inflection among feminist precarity activists in southern Europe when care becomes a crucial point for rethinking and strategizing. From the analysis of global care chains, and a growing care crisis, eventually the struggles shifted from precarity to care, focusing on reproduction as a renovated site of struggle. Reproduction as the forging of life, constitutive to humans, animals and plants, and the environment as a whole. As such, all kinds of exploitation, including extraction of natural resources, became read under the lens of reproduction and care (Vega Solís, Martínez Buján and Paredes Chauca 2018).
This care-centred approach leads to different kinds of demands, not just those related to financial retribution and labour standards, and to broader political horizons beyond sector-based struggles. For instance, some feminist movements started to call for a profound restructuring of the current socio-political and economic system through ‘a social reorganisation of care’. This was the main slogan during the International Women’s Day march in Madrid 2008, written on thousands of flyers and on the main banner in front of the demonstration. This call implies a series of shifts in the notions of work and non-work. The goal aims at the well-being of the many, speaking in terms of life-enhancing policies or care-oriented policies. The most recent proposal of a care income (by the GWS coalition on March 27, 2020) and other related measures entails a deep questioning of the current status quo in terms of the gender/class/racial divisions of production and reproduction. This is how a care-centred approach to the question of precarity has taken shape, fuelling ongoing feminist efforts related to care struggles, especially migrant domestic workers organizing. Domestic workers in Spain, Italy, and France are mostly underpaid women from previously colonised areas. As intersectional thinkers, feminist precarity activists forcefully point to the centrality of racism and the current configurations of coloniality5 in order to rethink how class, gender and international migration impact uneven practices of care.
This care-centred approach towards precarity would move the debates beyond a well-defined identity politics focused on ‘who is the precariat?’ towards a necessary sensitivity towards the unspoken affinities among several produced vulnerabilities. By embracing a politics of care, it is possible to identify a series of resonances among different sectors and situations: forced migration, disability politics, domestic work, etc. foregrounding the basis for a radical inclusive citizenship. In fact, the premise of precarity as a provoked tendency towards vulnerability and uncertainty affecting many different sectors and populations opens possibilities for organizing differently from usual. As such, thinking and organizing in terms of care provided the conditions from which to weave unusual grassroots alliances and political propositions.
“Those material and immaterial tasks – such as cleaning, cooking, nursing, rearing, smiling, reassuring, child-raising, etc. — which provide security and comfort to third parties. That is, those activities necessary to sustain life itself” (Colectivo Feminista Lilitu in Casas-Cortés and Cobarrubias 2007).
Following their argument, despite care’s centrality in producing and maintaining life, contributing greatly to economic growth and socio-political development, all that production generated within the sphere of reproduction has been, for the most part, undervalued and made invisible. Historically, these invisible, non-recognised and unpaid care positions have been assigned to women. This is still currently the case, since the majority of those who take care of care, so to speak, are women, and increasingly, migrant women from former colonies, and also Eastern Europe. Feminist precarity activists were influenced by the popular books of Servants of Globalization by Parreñas (2001) and Global Woman by Ehrenreich and Hochschild (2003). Based on these readings, the notion of ‘global care chains’ entered into their activist vocabulary kit. These chains are mainly formed by women, transferring care tasks from one woman to another, in the context of globalisation, where some of the tasks might be with or without remuneration. Normally, these chains start in ‘poor’ countries and end in ‘rich’ ones, formed by women dispersed through homes, working simultaneously at local and international scales. For instance, a sister or grandmother replaces the child-rearing work of a mother who migrated to northern countries to take care of the children or ageing parents of another woman, who herself works outside of the home. This migrant woman will engage in at least two homes, multiplying her presence and transcending borders. This is the kind of affective work in chain, or sequence, formed by women located in different parts of the world, yet marked by relations of power and hierarchy, depending on the social value of care work, the history of racism, and the situation of legality at each link in the chain (Parreñas 2001; Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2003).
As such, this view links care, migration and globalisation, highlighting the three central concerns among feminist precarity activists: the unfair gendered distribution of care work that is mostly imposed on women, discrimination against women in the labour market, and the third axis of discrimination against women, i.e. their immigration status. In a way, at least feminist precarity activists in Spain were reading and tinkering with the approaches from Black feminism and third-wave feminist thinking, translating and engaging their works in seminars (hooks et al. 2004, Truth and Jabardo Velasco 2012). These North American trends called for the importance of intersectional analysis considering class, race and gender to gather more complex analysis of different forms of oppression. If missing one of the three variables, the analysis will be blind to oppressions lived by many. In this way, practices of care are to be thought within these uneven relationships of power, both between men and women, but also between social classes and among different race/ethnic/migrant backgrounds among women.
Despite this problematic situation, precarity activists posit that care is to be reappropriated for a renovated politics, focused on a critical approach to the current state of care work, and, at the same time, reclaim it as an ethical praxis within movements and for policy-making. This contrasts with a previous feminist take on domestic work such as Angela Davis’ call for its obsolete character and the need to industrialise it (Davis 1983). While it is closer to Dalla Costa and Federici’s for wages to valorise and make care practices less oppressive and invisible, precarity activists also draw upon the intersectional emphasis brought by Black and third-wave feminist theories (including Selma James’ work). Those theories speak about the need to be aware of oppressive dynamics within care practices. Nonetheless, there is yet another and complementary reading of care among feminist precarity activists, which somehow resonates with the moral current calling for an “ethics of care” since the eighties (Rodriguez Ruiz 2005). In The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, Global, Virginia Held argues how the relational conception of persons, which is in stark contrast to liberal individualism, is the basis for a moral and political alternative based on mutual aid and shared responsibility (Held 2006). Another version of this notion of care as essential practice to respond to the basic human need of interdependency is articulated by other feminist interlocutors, such as Butler and Lorey. Both of them speak of vulnerability as an existential condition (although exacerbated by certain historical contexts), and its need for care-based relationships (Butler 2006; 2009; Lorey 2015; 2018). A series of related authors posit that when vulnerability is recognised, the need for care is also assumed. From that realisation, an interdependent notion of subjectivity and mutual-aid support forms of collective action might emerge (Butler, Gambetti and Sabsay 2016).
3 Towards a Politics of Care: Citizenship after Precarity
Building upon this intersectional gaze and interdependent understanding of care, feminist precarity activists call for public policies not to be designed and implemented on the basis of national security and capital accumulation, but to be founded on the sustainability of life itself.6 Also, care, as the set of activities oriented to sustain life, is said to generate a certain sense of commonality among diverse situations and different populations, helping to amplify notions of shared political strategies and collective belonging. I select two concepts here used by those activist initiatives which attempted to knit those commonalities through the notion of care, and implicitly and explicitly bring together questions of gender, ethnicity/race and citizenship: Care Strike and Care-tizenship.
“We’re talking about the sustainability of life, that is to say, the daily activities of affective engineering that we propose to make visible and revalorise as the prime material of the political, because we don’t want to conceive of social justice without taking into account how it is built in day-to-day situations” (Precarias a la Deriva 2004a).
“[This] paradoxical wink soon became a slogan. Faced with the abstract (and mystifying) bond that unites the cuidadanía as a whole population linked to a territory and a State, the cuidadanía appears to us suddenly as a concrete and situated bond created between singularities through the common care (and care for the common).Thus, from the experience of fragility and isolation that produces the process of generalised precarisation, the rights that we want to instantiate are care rights: right to resources, spaces, and times that permit the placing of care in the centre and, with that, the possibility of constructing the common in a moment in which the common is shattered. But, look, if we speak of care it is not as the exclusive task of women to care for others, but rather as an ecological mode of taking charge of bodies that breaks with the securitarian logic and rejecting the logic of accumulation. Care as passage to the other and to the many, as a point between the personal and the collective. Care as a fundamental weapon against the precarisation of our lives” (Precarias a la Deriva 2005).
“It proposes that we elaborate a model of citizenship that does not rest on the myth of (male) independence, but assumes instead human beings’ interdependent and relational nature. It proposes that we move from a model of citizenship towards a model of caring-zenship” (Rodriguez Ruiz 2010, p. 87).
This happy typo, difficult to translate into English, gave rise to a very unique deleting and rewriting of the modern notion of citizenship (Casas-Cortés 2019). Currently, the legal status of citizenship is granted by nation states according to a series of requirements which vary according to country, mainly one or several of these: place of birth, family origin and/or given time legally residing in a given territory. A care-based redefinition of citizenship entails practices and claims that do not accommodate within this current exclusionary space of legal citizenship, which determines your status according to definite, even impossible to change, conditions: your either are born here or elsewhere, you either come from a family or not. Rather, care-based citizenship pays attention to forms of community-building ties and forms of belonging that cannot be codified through pre-established categories of the political such as citizenship itself, defined by states based on a territorial notion of collective belonging and long-term access to state-granted rights. Rather, a care-tizen invokes anyone organizing in temporary collective formations to improve their own individual and shared living conditions. Such temporary collective formations often work outside or regardless of official recognition and remuneration. This politics is based on an ephemeral yet very material basis of belonging, through practices that are not necessarily protests, claims to governments or antagonistic poses. Instead, it is about more silent, everyday, instant and mutual strategies to take care of each other. This underground activity, happening de facto, helps to dissociate the stubborn need of connecting subjectivities with institutional representation and legal categories. The context of transnational undocumented migration might be one of those sites where caretizenship is being enacted, through “the sharing of knowledge and infrastructures of connectivity, affective cooperation, mutual support and care among people on the move” (Papadopoulos and Tsianos 2013).
“Transversal politics has been developed as an alternative to the assimilationist ‘universalistic’ politics of the Left on the one hand, and to identity politics on the other hand. While the first has proved to be ethnocentric and exclusionary, the second has proved to be essentialist, reifying boundaries between groups and, by homogenizing and collapsing individual into collective identities” (Yuval-Davis 1999, p. 94).
After engaging with this concept, I would bluntly summarise it as putting the feminist concepts of intersectionality, standpoint epistemology and situated knowledges into practice. That is, hands-on feminist thinking in action. This is precisely what caretizenship might entail, bringing all the nuances and complexities of a rich feminist trajectory in terms of thinking through production/reproduction, precarity/vulnerability, and universal politics/identity-based politics into a concrete theoretical proposition with political consequences.
Without being able to further elaborate on the potential applicability of cuidadanía, I contend that feminist precarity activists were able to advance a complex and caring political analysis addressing gender and reproduction, citizenship and social welfare, immigration and race. This care-based conceptual and political enlargement of the notion of precarity is definitely more equipped to face the condition of multi-faceted uncertainty of our COVID-19 times. Early on in the pandemic, engrained and generalised ways of migration management were turned upside down: some migration detention centres were closed temporarily, while many undocumented migrants were deemed ‘essential workers’ during lockdown, not only allowing, but expecting, mobility from them. Not long before, this mobility would have been punitively acted against, as ‘illegal’. This kind of carnivalesque impasse within the current border regime during the initial phase of the Corona crisis shows the urgency to redefine citizenship. My future work pushes the notion of care-citizenship forward beyond the circle of precarity struggles towards rethinking the political at times of generalised uncertainty. Building upon the notion of “motley formations” (Tazzioli 2020; Linebaugh and Rediker 2000) and Yuval-Davis’ work on “transversal politics” (Yuval-Davis and Werbner 2005; Yuval-Davis 2006), I hope to show how care-based citizenship foregrounds intersectional articulations within different conditions of vulnerability. It is urgent to come up with notions of collective belonging and responsibilities, which ultimately inform public policies that are not based on individuals’ territorial or ethnic origin. By introducing a more practice-based approach to citizenship, and fully aware of historical uneven racial, gender and class formations, caretizenship will hopefully provide a theoretical guidance to promote care-based alliances, enhancing daily-life communities of practice in-situ, as well as at other political scales.