Deborah Sielert: Dear Maribel and Alessandro, thank you both for agreeing to discuss your papers in this volume with us and, especially, with each other. It is important to briefly mention the steps that led to this dialogue to our readers. In the first step, both of you wrote your papers and shared them with us and each other. In the second round, you wrote answers to the questions we posed to each other. Maribel, your paper provides us, among other things, with an introduction to feminist debates on care and precarity. Alessandro, you introduce critical perspectives on citizenship, leading to current approaches to affective and emotional citizenship. Moreover, both of you are doing important work on citizenship as a ‘momentum concept’, which is a notion Lister adopts from Hoffman: “‘Momentum concepts unfold so that we must continuously rework them in a way that realises more and more of their egalitarian and anti-hierarchical potential’ (Hoffman 2004, p. 138). As such, they provide tools for marginalised groups struggling for social justice” (Lister 2007, p. 49).
1 Citizenship as a Status and as an Act
Deborah Sielert: In the concept of inclusive citizenship as we work with it at the Leibniz Research Center for Inclusive Citizenship (CINC), the tension field between citizenship as a status and acts of citizenship does play an important role in the analysis of societal processes of inclusion and exclusion. Acts of citizenship can, thereby, be both subversive engagement with dominant citizenship regimes by social movements as well as micro acts in everyday life. Each of you focuses on a different aspect of ‘acts of citizenship’. Maribel, your focus is on feminist precarity movements, and Alessandro, you focus on micro interactions in the private sphere. Could you elaborate or think further about the role that this tension field between citizenship as a status and acts of citizenship plays in your arguments and empirical material?
Maribel Casas-Cortés: The proposal advanced by feminist precarity initiatives in Spain, known as ‘caretizenship’, directly speaks to this tension between citizenship as a status and acts of citizenship (Casas-Cortés 2019). In this process of deleting and reclaiming the concept of citizenship, precarity movements are responding to an increasing loss of political and social rights granted by formal citizenship in an EU welfare state, such as Spain. Growing precarisation is generalising itself, affecting different populations sharing the same territory. On the one hand, there is a lack of job opportunities for those who are already considered nationals and legal discrimination towards those framed as immigrants (even if they might have national paperwork at hand). On the other hand, there is a growing distinction in rights among emigrants and local residents, I am referring in both cases to Spanish citizens. This distinction is marked by challenges to vote in national elections from abroad and access to national health services when visiting Spain. It is in this process of experiencing citizenship as an increasingly precarious condition, both locally and abroad, that these social movements engage in a deep rethinking of the concept, clamouring for a ‘citizenship otherwise’, able to link these disparate experiences into a set of updated demands and necessary practices for survival. I think the notion of caretizenship was a response to the growing precariousness of citizenship as a formal status. In this context, a Catalonian philosopher, part of precarity movements himself, asked, “What if we refuse to be citizens?” (Lopez-Petit 2001 in Isin and Nyers 2014, p. 5). While sceptical towards the efficiency of citizenship for those in and those out of the community of citizens, are these anti-systemic activists rejecting citizenship totally as a failed institution for arranging political belonging and social organisation of state provisions? Are they tinkering with it, rethinking, and advancing a political horizon beyond conventional understandings of citizenship?
When engaging in the field of Critical Citizenship Studies (Isin and Nyers 2014), I identify how, despite the critiques, there is a strong allegiance to the notion of citizenship. This allegiance speaks to the belief that, while there is awareness of citizenship as a limited institution, it is nonetheless seen as holding political influence, practical consequences and conceptual legitimacy. According to the critical citizenship scholars, Isin and Nyers, their work engages citizenship in a dual movement, somehow following Derrida’s approach of putting concepts ‘under erasure’, which includes an act of rejection and deleting as well as an act of alliance and retaining. Based on this appraisal, I argue the following: “While scholarly debates on post-national citizenship are well known [such as acts of citizenship], similar efforts at ‘erasing citizenship’ a la Derrida – both deleting and retaining it – are taking place in the midst of activist struggles on the ground” (Casas-Cortés 2019, p. 7).
As such, caretizenship includes both status and practice. That is, it retains traits from the classical notion of citizenship, such as official state recognition, while deleting its narrow focus on the question of legal status. Status alone is not enough, but needs to be paired with actual practices on the ground. One is not possible without the other in the notion of caretizenship. For instance, the demand for legal and monetary compensation for all care work is a way to provide raw everyday life practice to the otherwise empty legal status as a citizen. Indeed, getting care work out of the informal sphere filled with abuses based on gender and migratory status would entail regulation and legal stipulation of that sphere of practices. Still, legal frameworks alone will not suffice. The concept of cartizenship stresses that a sense of belonging and a series of entitlements come from the act of caring for oneself and others, not merely for being born in a given territory or holding family ties with a member of that national community
Deborah Sielert: Alessandro, you are stating that more empirical research on citizenship in everyday life and at the borders of citizenship regarding unequally entitled citizens is needed, and we agree. This is why it would be interesting to learn more about the results of your research, specifically with a focus on the ‘emotional charge’ you found as a non-assimilationist but still inclusive force in your empirical material. Could you give an example of the emotional charge of care in the relationship between same-sex parents and other parents? Could you also expand on the ‘paradox’ you mention in that context?
Alessandro Pratesi: In the case of same-sex families, the right to care, or rather, the right to feel fully entitled and recognised as legitimate parents indeed reflects an interesting paradox: on the one hand, the need to fight—as an unconventional family—for their own rights and for the rights of their children, and on the other hand, the need to be included—without being co-opted—within legal and more or less conventional definitions of parenthood and family. This paradox is at the origin of an ongoing social change which I further articulate as follows.
And we found out that it is straight people who are more helpful than gay people, straight people with kids. Because there are not that many gay people with kids […]. So your cohort is people who are like you with kids and job and family and shopping and laundry and the same issues. Straight, single, gay people don’t have the same issues. […] Mother and father down the block, they know my history because they have the same problems we’re talking about, care, work, mother, their parents, their kids. So, I have more in common now, in some areas […] in the care area with straight people than I would have with single, with gay people who don’t have kids. (Forrest, 38)
I was really ambivalent about taking on the label of mother, you know…I was really pretty used to being a non-heterosexual and without children, I mean like non-stereotypical, like I liked that marginality. (Donna, 39)
But as soon as you start to have kids—on a bus, in a training program with an executive, it doesn’t matter—you can relate to so many people, you know, from this shared experience, this universally shared experience of having kids. So that is interesting; so, I’m [now] part of the mainstream (laughs). (Donna, 39)
Linda Supik: You, Alessandro, describe how same-sex couples who become parents, can be successfully acknowledged and recognised as rightful parents, at least at the micro level by fellow parents, by the very care work they do for their children. We could say that the care work they do is a citizenship practice, and the recognition of parentship is kind of an entry into citizenship status. Thus, by doing the work of citizenship, people earn the right to citizenship as status, even if only in the sense of everyday recognition, not yet a legal one. The same kind of status passage option, however, is denied to migrant care workers. We do not see that by doing the work of caring for people’s children, households and the elderly, there is a way for migrant care workers to earn citizenship rights. However, we arrive at Joan Tronto’s suggestion (2003) mentioned by you, Maribel (Casas-Cortés, this volume), who suggests that the care work of undocumented migrants should be the basis for accessing and being granted citizenship. This is the very idea of caretizenship, is it not?
Maribel Casas-Cortés: Yes, caretizenship might include that very ‘status passage’ suggested by Linda and which Tronto spoke about when mentioning how care work done by undocumented migrants could be the basis for accessing and being granted citizenship. Still, caretizenship acts within and beyond the limits of nation state-based citizenship, opening the ring of belonging and entitlements in a continuous self-reworking beyond a given country.
I would like to acknowledge my fond resonance with the overall arguments in Alessandro’s writing on the Edge Effect. Given this shared perspective, this might be an opportunity to further detail and specify some of our common ground. For instance, I am attracted to your notion of the political. As you put it, “politics as non-cognizant and [non-]committed political action” (p. 11). What else could you say about this necessary rethinking of the political? How would you describe the space beyond institutional and cognizant instances of collective/individual actions?
Alessandro Pratesi: I have further clarified how same-sex parenthood represents an example of unaware and uncommitted political action. However, there are many examples of (unaware) forms of inclusion and citizenship-making that occur at the level of face-to-face interactions, are based on the emotional dynamics that take place around care practices and overcome institutional obstacles and gaps. Many cases, for instance, school children, show absolutely unique and totally spontaneous abilities to overcome cultural barriers and facilitate multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism, without having or needing any type of formal and legal legitimacy for doing this. Examples of Lampedusa, the German Sea-Watch, and many other cases of support, welcoming response and social inclusion based on what we could call micro-politics of emotions, i.e. the effects and political repercussions of emotions that are played out at the local level, both through direct and indirect interactions. There are several examples of successful forms of interactions (to recall Collins 2004) between migrants and reluctant locals, who change their minds after they have seen, felt, and interacted with diversity. Thus, the various forms of social solidarity that take the form of real and/or symbolic welcoming acts at the local level quite often contrast sharply with the nationalist, neoliberal, and xenophobic politics that take place at the national and international level, more concerned with border defence issues than with human rights.
2 Care as Work, Care as Ethic, Care as Right
Deborah Sielert: In the debates around ‘care’, we can see several strands in which care takes on different forms: care as work, care as an ethic and care as a right. Alessandro and Maribel, all of these understandings do, as I understand it, play a role in both your conceptualisations of citizenship and care or emotions at a certain point in your argument. Would you agree? Could you also detangle the role these three approaches to care play in your argument?
Maribel Casas-Cortés: I agree with your point that in the re-conceptualisation of citizenship made by feminist precarity initiatives as ‘caretizenship’, care takes on different forms: (1) care as work or practice, (2) care as ethics and (3) care as right. First, care as work is the argument made by autonomous Marxist feminists, such as Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Selma James and Silvia Federicci, pointing out that all the tasks of caring for adults and children constitute the invisible basis of production. Thus, they claim that reproduction practices must be valued and recognised as work. Second, care as ethics is grounded in a networked notion of reality, where interdependence is apparent and valued. As such, care practices constitute the process of enhancing and honouring these connections. Caring for others and being taken care of constitute the essential core of who we are as a species, part and parcel of an ecosystem and the cosmos. This non-modern understanding of humans is not based on delimiting borders around us, but on tracing and acknowledging how we are made of the connections. This ontological turn, from self-defined and independent boxes to interconnected and interdependent webs, has been advanced by certain scholars from Science and Technology Studies (classical ones, such as Bruno Latour, and those working with indigenous networked philosophies, such as Mario Blasser and Marisol de la Cadena), certain theological traditions (Leonardo Boff) and certain phenomenological strands of neo-realism (such as Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana). Regardless of which tradition one might come from, once reality is conceived in this way, politics and citizenship need to be reworked. This brings us to the third approach to care. Care as the raw material of the political entails that care becomes both a right and a duty. Care in this way becomes the fundamental basis for belonging to a particular community of practice and the basis for politics (this vision is present throughout, from the classical work by Joan Tronto to the latest feminist organising around a Care Manifesto and Care Strike). It is in these three layers that care lies at the heart of caretizenship. Your question, Deborah, brings me to the question I want to ask Alessandro: When articulating your alternative notion of citizenship, you stress its heterogeneity, ambivalence and the key role played by emotions determining sentiments of inclusion and exclusion, both in terms of belonging and recognition. This will necessarily translate into a different set of rights and duties. Could you name a few of these rethought entitlements and expectations? In this context, I further want to add that I am intrigued by your expression ‘right to care’ and its possible implications when destabilising the notion of marginality. By conceiving certain legal citizens as vulnerable, the dichotomous division between citizen/non-citizen is buffered by a common condition of vulnerability, thus emphasising the shared need to be taken care of. How do you articulate the right to care and vulnerability?
Alessandro Pratesi: The right to care, within the specific context of same-sex parents, represents the right to feel fully entitled and recognised as legitimate parents. By claiming their right to care, same-sex families challenge and redefine the symbolic, cultural and social boundaries of citizenship and provide alternative perspectives on intimacy, family, care, and care-related entitlements, rights and duties. In doing so, they challenge gender roles, hegemonic sexualities and conventional ideas and definitions of a family, producing social change. Their visibility and proximity to heterosexual cultures (in the negotiation with schools, teachers, other parents, local communities, etc.) combined with their “not being able—or willing—to inhabit the heterosexual ideal” (Ahmed 2004, p. 152) is at the origin of a model of anti-assimilationist citizenship. While gay and lesbian civil rights are still considered by many as sectarian or of limited interest for the wider society, children’s rights seem to maintain a universal and universally shared appeal, which intersects social, cultural, geographic and political borders.
A similar universal appeal concerns care and its relationship with the notion of vulnerability. We are all vulnerable, and we all need care. Care is a universal experience and a familiar phenomenon for everyone. All of us have provided help to or received a helping hand from others, and many of us are most likely going to provide care to our significant others in the future. My argument (Pratesi 2018) is that a careful, phenomenological investigation of the processes involved in doing care provides significant clues to interpret and visualise the concept of doing citizenship, that is, the multiple ways in which inequalities and dynamics of inclusion/exclusion based on socially constructed categories result from ongoing interactional accomplishments. Care environments represent a strategic site to reveal the emotion-based, interactional mechanisms through which social exclusion and inequality, on the one hand, but also social inclusion, status membership and citizenship, on the other, are constantly reproduced at the micro level of analysis.
To borrow from Tronto (2006/1993), a perspective on care and the ethics of care immediately clarifies how political choices (or the lack thereof) dramatically weigh on people, fostering their political awareness and engagement, making more visible structural injustices affect the most vulnerable (and diverse) social groups. A combined perspective on care and emotions—I add—allows us to shed light on the micro-situated mechanisms through which Tronto’s hopes can be realised.
3 Citizenship, Social Class and Capitalism
Linda Supik: Alessandro ascribes importance to the everyday practice of caring for same-sex couples for changing formerly hetero-normative notions of the legitimate caregiver, and as such, of citizenship. I find it especially valuable that you offer the opportunity to look at the role of privilege. Alessandro’s sample consists of predominantly white, highly educated (upper) middle-class people in the USA. The educated middle class was always open, liberal and avant-garde in playing with norms and lifestyles, and the consequences and effects of which for the lower middle-class or working-class milieu have been under-researched until now. The upper middle class is assumed to be a model setting for society as a whole. You make a claim for intersectionality; could you make explicit the relevance of race and class in your Philadelphia research project? I have an empirical and kind of naive question for you, Alessandro, stemming from my non-knowledge of LGBTIQ* livelihoods, and I will just put it bluntly: Does a milieu of working-class queer parents even exist?
Alessandro Pratesi: The sample of Philadelphian same-sex parents and caregivers did not intend to represent all unequally entitled citizens, and the complexity and changeability of several dimensions including social class, status, education, age, gender, race, ethnicity, etc. need to be acknowledged and carefully contextualised. That research (conducted between 2005 and 2008) did not aim to make incongruous associations or comparisons between radically diverse social actors and groups. Although it included 80 caregivers who differed in terms of class, race/ethnicity and education, my research on same-sex families in Philadelphia (Pratesi 2018) was mostly (although not exclusively) based on a middle-class sample, for the several reasons I explain in the book. However, this gave me the opportunity to thematise the importance of social class and critically highlight what I defined in terms of ‘dark sides of care’. One of the dark aspects of care I describe in the book is precisely related to the fact that care is increasingly becoming a luxury item which is sold and bought at high prices. This paradox, since care is one of the least valued goods in Western neoliberal societies, is explained and reinforced by the fact that some of the most important resources necessary to take care of loved ones (time and financial resources) are becoming increasingly scarce. Things can be further complicated for those social actors, such as gay and lesbian parents, who are still not acknowledged as fully entitled to care for their children. Building up a family and raising children is expensive, regardless of sexual orientation. Yet, not being affluent enough can lead gay and lesbian people into renouncing parenthood altogether. Money, time and other resources are crucial for everyone; however, heterosexual prospective parents can choose to take the risk and have a child regardless. For gay and lesbian prospective parents, ‘getting to parenthood’ can become an unachievable goal for several reasons, not to mention the high economic costs of conception or adoption.
This introduces a quite evident class bias between gay/lesbian and heterosexual prospective parents as well as between affluent and less affluent prospective same-sex parents. Thus, even the gratuity of the procreative choice is dissolving in a context where the economic costs of adoption, medical-assisted procreation and other forms of non-biological parenthood raise questions about the nature of care relationships. Getting to parenthood is increasingly commodified, and this creates an unprecedented scenario, the multiple sociological and ethical implications of which need to be further explored. How different is the procreative/parental choice depending on whether the child is born to a fertile heterosexual couple, an infertile heterosexual couple, a lesbian couple, a gay couple or a single man or woman? Is the idea of unconditional love affected by the presence of financial and legal issues, cultural and social capital, cash exchanges and other commodifying elements? (on this, see also Zelizer 1994, 2005). To what extent does the commodification of same-sex parenthood affect this desire to love or what we might call the love to come from prospective gay and lesbian parents? Monetary exchanges, the existence of implicit or explicit contracts, bureaucracy, legal issues, financial transactions, and—when adoption is involved—home studies, profiles of the prospective parents or the several adoptive children’s profiles publicised online and emotionally intense competition between the couples who are part of the pool of potential adoptive parents, all contribute towards casting a somehow darkish mantle on the spontaneity and gratuity of the procreative choice. This mantle sometimes pushes prospective parents to renounce parenthood altogether or to find alternative paths to it when possible. These kinds of complications affect all the aspirant parents who cannot rely on biological parenthood. However, the financial and emotional costs and the legal and bureaucratic difficulties associated with the procreative choice met by gay and lesbian parents—and, among them, by parents coming from disadvantaged classes—tend to be higher and more complex, which adds an extra layer of inequality to this stigmatised segment of the population.
Regarding your second question: Yes, there is a milieu of working class queer parents, although the literature on this tends to remain limited and marginal. This is partly related to the methodological and ethical complexities involved in accessing self‐identified working-class LGBTQI families and partly related to a persistent reluctance to consider the relationship between sexuality and class within the literature. If it is true that class-related inequalities are constructed and lived in different ways in different countries, making it difficult to make generalisations, class remains an important structuring force affecting people’s lives, opportunities, social mobility and psychological and physical health. Thus, for example, in the UK, the work of Taylor (2006, 2007, 2009, 2018) has shown how the experience of working-class lesbians is affected in different contexts, including the (limited) access to classed LGBTQI social spaces (Taylor 2009), the experience of self‐identified working-class lesbians in the classroom (Taylor 2006, 2007) and the emotional landscape of class and sexuality experienced by herself as an academic (Taylor 2018)—but also the ambivalences of the classed nature of lesbian identities. Taylor (2009) suggests that globalised capitalism is responsible for classed and classist experiences in LGBTQI people’s everyday lives, and that the continuing reluctance to intersect class and sexuality within intersectional theory can be largely explained by the difficulties of connecting complex multiple identity categories and experiences.
Indeed, multiple forms of inequality do not affect people’s lives in a homogeneous way, and it is difficult, if not impossible, to provide a one-size-fits-all solution accounting for such manifold forms of inequality that shape LGBTQI people’s lives. Nevertheless, intersectionality approaches should be considered in terms of ongoing processes that, although never fully accomplished, need to be taken into account, bearing in mind that when people deal with multiple forms of disadvantage and discrimination, some identities (such as sexual and gender identities) may become more or less important than others (such as raced, classed, religious or national identities), and vice versa, depending on the context in which they unfold and perform.
On the theme of globalised capitalism, a recent publication by Zappino (2019) maintains that exploitation and exclusion within capitalist societies do not only have a universal character, but a particular one. Exploitation and exclusion are articulated in several matrices of oppression rather than representing a monolithic and universal feature of capitalism. Consequently, if we want to tackle capitalism effectively, we must tackle each of the individual matrices of oppression from which it draws substance in order to assert and reproduce itself. In the case of gender and sexual oppression, the matrix is heterosexuality. To aspire to the subversion of heterosexuality means to fight against capitalism on the basis of its causes rather than its effects. Recent developments in queer theory and feminist theory show a renewed focus on the material components of power and the possibility of theorising it at the intersection of sexuality, gender, race and class. For example, Skeggs (1997, 2004), Hennessy (2000, 2006), McDermott (2006, 2010, 2011), and Taylor (2007) examine the construction of sexual identity and subjectivity within the regulatory class contexts in which they are produced, drawing upon queer/feminist theory. These studies consider the intersection of class and sexuality in discursive, cultural, material and embodied terms, and they describe patterns of micro/individual and macro/structural resistance and regulation at this juncture.
However, when it comes to talking about the specific experiences of LGBTQI families, most of the literature tends to focus on (lesbian) families that are disproportionately middle class, white and highly educated. Gabb’s (2004, 2005) work is one of the few studies which includes a good proportion of working-class lesbian co-mothers and their children. However, there has been almost no research on children living with gay fathers in a working-class milieu. Several other scholars (Battle and Ashley 2008; Biblarz and Savci 2010; Chauvin et al. 2019; Richardson and Monro 2012; Weeks et al. 2001; Weston 1991) consider the dimension of social class and its intersection with same-sex parenthood, but quite often, more in terms of tangential reminders than in terms of direct accounts of the intersection between class and sexual identities of LGBTQI parents. Nevertheless, these reminders are crucially important for the reasons mentioned above, while the relevance of identities (such as sexual and class identities) can be more or less important than others, depending on the specific setting and situation. Future research will benefit from dealing with multiple dimensions of difference and inequality simultaneously, rather than with one at a time. Research will also benefit from extending the cross-national studies on LGBTQI families of all types (in terms of class, education, ethnicity, etc.), as scholarship on these families will tell us not only much about them, but also much about heterosexual families, and disclose several examples of those less visible and marginal interstices where social change unfolds and develops. The fact that the current literature on these themes does not shed much light on working-class LGBTQI parents is, in itself, quite telling; it is additional evidence of the uncompletedness of any attempt to talk about ‘inclusive citizenship’ that does not take into account all those social actors who live in the margins, who live at the edges, and especially the invisible ones.
Deborah Sielert: We discussed the role that class plays in the context of Alessandro’s research. I believe that Maribel’s research ties in right here because the movements that you engage with explicitly connect questions of citizenship to the development of post-Fordist capitalism. Could you think slightly further into this relation for us?
Maribel Casas-Cortés: While originally linked to urban territory, the historical development of the institution of citizenship has been development of the institution of citizenship to the growth of nation states. The geography of citizenship with its respective sets of entitlements and senses of belonging has historically been scaled up from the city to the country. Still, not all inhabitants of a given country were granted the same citizenship rights. I would venture that only Fordist industrial workers and official civil servants, those working for the formally recognised sectors of the national economy—factories, and government institutions such as schools, offices, hospitals, etc.—were fully considered citizens. This was particularly true during the Keynesian economic regimes of the welfare state in Europe, the golden age of regimes of citizenship with a series of ensured entitlements. At least in Spain, a worker’s wife and children had a series of state provisions guaranteed, such as medical insurance and access to the public education system, because they were able to prove relationship to a ‘Fordist worker’: a worker with a full-time, long-term contract. What happened with the advancement of post-Fordist capitalism? Flexible labour regimes, paid cognitive tasks and increasing transnational mobility complicate the initial static picture of the national Fordist economy. Many ‘national’ youth entering the flexible labour market found themselves in a legal limbo where, while holding passports with very clear EU and national citizenship, they were not able to enjoy entitlements previously granted to their parents. In the span of a generation, the landscape of citizens’ rights and duties has been reshaped by the impact of post-Fordist capitalist development, leading us to ‘precarious citizenship’. This was one of the early realisations of precarity movements which started to advance the call for a ‘New Charter of Social Rights’ linked neither to certain kinds of labour contracts nor to specific national citizenship.
4 Thinking beyond Emotional Micro Interactions and Local Communities of Practice?
Deborah Sielert: Maribel, you argue that “care-tizenship suggests local communities of practice forged by ties of caring relationships” (Casas-Cortés, this volume). Alessandro, you say that for the emotions-based micro acts of social inclusion that you found in your research with same-sex families and refugees in Europe, “physical proximity and social visibility are crucial” (Pratesi, this volume). This is backed up by Doreen Massey, who states that, in Western societies there is a hegemonic geography of care and responsibility, which she compares to a nested set of Russian dolls: first home, then place/locality, nation, etc., and we first care for and take responsibility for those who are the nearest by (2004). How can we think of upscaling alternative visions of citizenship based on care/emotions to something more distant, for example, transnational or even global reach?
Maribel Casas-Cortés: Yes, caring relationships are based on local proximity and work best at ‘primary scales’, by which I mean family bonds or community alliances, regardless of the locations of the constituent parts. Perhaps the notion of quantum entanglement1 from physics gives us a concrete way to articulate this ancient notion.
Still, the attempt to theorise care as linked to citizenship speaks to the goal of upscaling that provides a conceptual and legal framework, at least to imagine citizenship otherwise. When thinking about care practices among those that are more distant, transnational and global, current efforts at planetary care, through climate justice struggles, and efforts at international solidarity, through North–South alliances on specific issues, come to mind. I wonder if the ancient image of humanity as a family and of Planet Earth as a home, which is the first Russian doll nest of family/home for Doreen Massey (2004), needs a post-national and interdependent legal framework, such as caretizenship, to actualize itself through concrete protocols beyond formal belonging to nation states.
“entails practices and claims that do not accommodate within the current exclusionary space of legal citizenship […], invokes anyone organising in temporary collective formations to improve their own individual and shared conditions [and] it is about more silent, everyday, instant yet collective strategies to take care of each other. This underground organisation helps to dissociate the stubborn need for a connection between subjectivities and their institutional representation” (Casas-Cortés in this volume).
Not only do I tend to agree with this theoretical approach, with this idea of a relational, context-bounded and scattered citizenship that occurs at the fringe of micro interactions, but I also think that this idea represents one of the few existing ways forward at the moment. However, you still say that “a care-based politics […] invokes material and immediate practices of mutual support” enacted through “transversal alliances against and within precarity”. How can this happen? What do you think the main obstacles to these “transversal alliances” (Tazzioli 2019) might be? In other words, do you think there is a way (or the need) to transform Tazzioli’s ‘motley formations’ into a (common) wave of emancipatory struggles which might have a dent on current politics and be efficacious also from a cultural and political point of view?
Maribel Casas-Cortés: While paradoxical, among certain activists the expression of ‘transversal alliances against and within precarity’ is used to organise beyond their specific sector and identity bubble, to both challenge the effects brought by the ongoing process of deregulation of labour markets towards a gig model of employment and the many consequences of reducing welfare state policies. At the same time, the precarious generation is also ready to engage with the possibilities opened by flexible schedules, lack of regulations, requirements to move, etc. The formula of ‘against and within’ as a non-utopian imperative responds to a conjuncture when precarity is becoming a generalised condition.
Historical motley formations, such as the pirate crowds, were rooted in transversal alliances across mostly racial and ethnic divisions. We might need to expand these alliances to other key divisions in terms of gender, class, sexual orientation and ableism, and one that is not so common to hear among progressive movements and scholars, the question of religious affiliation.
Still, the possibilities of building a common wave of emancipatory struggles capable of making a dent in politics are limited. To be honest, the way I envision this path towards social justice is not like a common wave, since trying to capture multiple experiences into a singular ʻsolo wave’ is always tricky. Rather, I propose to think of collective action in the plural, building on Tazzioli’s emphasis on going beyond singular expressions of a plurality, such as the multitude, the assembly and the people (2019). How about ongoing, simultaneous and ephemeral mini waves, each one working from a situated problem and perspective, distinct, yet going in the same direction, towards a reachable beach with a wide set of social justice solutions? This way of thinking about political action might not only be more accurate in terms of analysis, but also efficacious in terms of concrete and everyday solutions.
5 Precarity and Marginality as Spaces of Possibility
Alessandro Pratesi: I would like to discuss the idea of precarity in depth, which assumes particularly cogent connotations and implications in the current crisis times. In your work, you developed an idea of precarity characterised by multidimensional stratification and conflicting interests and a perspective that underlines the relevance of social solidarity for all forms of collective organisation. How do you think conflict and solidarity/social cohesion relate to each other in the present?
Maribel Casas-Cortés: Yes, I think precarity is key to thinking about the multiple and inter-related crises emerging in current times. However, the notion of precarity needs to be grounded in its double meaning, entailing both dispossession and dissent. This ambivalent notion of precarity, implying simultaneously both loss and opportunity, is rooted in precarity movements as well as in feminist thought. It is only when using this complete notion of precarity that we are well equipped to understand and face this epochal conjuncture where many and different people’s needs are not being addressed. Mainly due to the denial of access to many taken-for-granted entitlements, which have not been able to hold off the effects of decades of neoliberal policies, restrictive migration programmes and copy-right frameworks upon cultural and scientific production. At the same time, the realisation of a shared precarious condition opens the door to unexpected opportunities to address these needs. As such, conflict and social cohesion are articulated in unexplicit and gregarious terms as usual. More than open, defiant and single identity-based forms of conflict, current forms of social upheaval and collective solidarity usually occur under the radar and in kaleidoscopic ways. Under the urge of pragmatism and taking different shapes, emerging livelihoods are evolving to try to survive and reappropriate the conditions of uncertainty and fragility of each other’s current labour, administrative, financial and health arrangements. This is a common condition among differences that might provoke alternative ways of responding to the current crisis.
Alessandro Pratesi: I think that emotional dynamics are central in the production of society, i.e. that we cannot understand social dynamics without grasping them. However, there is a sort of reciprocal contamination between theory and practice, intellectual production and political action. Thus, in the same way that current social and political phenomena can be analysed in light of the theoretical developments in the study of emotions, current theories of emotions can be reconsidered in light of such emerging phenomena. The sociology of emotions surely had the merit of highlighting and thematising that what we feel is as important and socially relevant as what we do and what we think. Hochschild (1979) introduces the concept of the feeling self, providing us with another image of the self, that of the sentient self, a self who has the ability to feel and is aware of this.
In her critical analyses of the concept of happiness, Ahmed (2010) clarifies the intrinsic conservative power of happiness and suggests “rethinking of happiness as possibility” (2010, p. 220), as one of many possibilities. According to her argument, this implies giving voice and visibility to invisible and silenced subjects, those who are normally banned or who enter history only as troublemakers, dissidents or kill-joys, such as feminists, migrants and LGBTQI people. Even assuming that happiness can be associated with feeling good, she claims, can we assume that unhappiness always involves feeling bad and not rather feeling good in a different way or, more simply, wishing things were different? By suspending the belief that happiness is a good thing in itself, she claims that “we can consider not only what makes happiness good but how happiness participates in making things good” (Ahmed 2010, p. 13).
By applying a similar argument to the concepts of citizenship and social inclusion, we can momentarily suspend the belief that citizenship and social inclusion are necessarily good things and look at their much less positive face. Suffice it to think about the institution of marriage (be it heterosexual or same-sex), which is simultaneously inclusionary and exclusionary.
[Marginality] is also the site of radical possibility, a space of resistance. […] a site one stays in, clings to even because it nourishes one’–s capacity to resist. It offers to one the possibility of radical perspective from which to see and create, to imagine alternatives, new worlds. This is not a mythic notion of marginality. It comes from lived experience. (hooks 1989, p. 20)
In sum, in a manner that would seem ironic to many, there can be ‘advantages’ and vast potentialities in feeling marginal, advantages and marginalities that might be mitigated by feeling included and fully acknowledged. What are your thoughts about this? What do you think might be the role of emotions in helping us understand the contemporary dynamics of exclusion at a local, national and international level? Additionally, when thinking about the possibility of a positive and progressive social change, what do you think might be the role of marginal and marginalised subjects, those who are happy or included in a different way, or those who are happy with their marginality but discontent about current social and political scenarios?
Maribel Casas-Cortés: There are indeed some underground readings of citizenship as a homogenising project which leads to thinking of social cohesion as oppressive. Similarly, Ahmed paused to rethink the positive connotations of a solo way of understanding happiness, we could also stop and question the validity of integration tendencies towards the only way of being citizens, and a solo way of imagining social cohesion.
Marginality—usually with its exclusionary consequences—‘sticks’ with the person, while precarity is a condition that has more variability and different faces, including several layers of exclusion yet also multiple ranges of opportunities. Rather than sticking to you, I propose to think of precarity as landing on you, while also being able to take off at times. One unique trait of precarity is that it has a profound unstable character that intertwines with other marginal conditions.
The use of marginality as an argument for political action might be limited in that it is rooted in questionable identity politics. Marginality is based on an essentialist view of the self, the other(s) and society. To me, as a cultural anthropologist, this is highly problematic since we spend our work time deconstructing social realities showing how apparently natural categories are social products at given times and places. Thus, being Jewish does have different readings across a wide range of times and places, going from marginal to dominant, depending on where and when you are as a Jew: in Toledo 1493, in Berlin 1940, in Manhattan 1990 or in Jerusalem 2020?
Identity politics are also based on exclusionary dichotomous thinking where, on the one side are those considered the marginal ones, and on the other are the privileged ones, creating an impasse where neither of these is able to cross the divide. Here, the desire for justice for the marginal ones is always framed as ‘help’ and ‘top-down charity’ from those considered privileged, denying any possibility of possible common ground. What happens if besides being a national from Italy, and thus not an extra-communitarian in the EU, you yourself have to migrate elsewhere for economic reasons, becoming an undocumented migrant in Australia? While there are multiple and different layers of marginality, there is a common thread from which to feel, think and act together, outside of the essentialist framework of marginal versus privileged. In this sense, the ‘precarity pride’ is ultimately a question of feelings, regardless of the objective conditions of insecurity, instability, uncertainty, etc. Feeling precarious, rather than being precarious (Standing 2011), as a measurable and essentialised category, is what was able to mobilise across the board. Here, the considerations of Arturo Escobar with his notion of “Sentir-Pensar” might be helpful (Escobar 2018). He argues for an intertwined understanding of knowing, feeling and being supported by and argued by biological research (Maturana and Varela 1992), which, in the case of this kind of social justice movements, takes the shape of deep relationality, leading to the notion of ‘commons’ as a pragmatic and ontological political stand.
6 Knowledge Production between Academia and Activism
Deborah Sielert: I have been aware of the work of Precarias a la Deriva for some years, that you, Maribel, put in a bigger context of feminist precarity activism for us. Could you tell us more about those movements, which apparently do such important work in not only fighting for, but also in theorising social transformations? Who are the people involved, how do the coalitions that move beyond identity politics take form? In which spaces and processes is this kind of ‘radical imagination’ convoked, which is understood as a process of developing capacities in order to envisage a different world (Khasnabish and Haiven 2012).
Maribel Casas-Cortés: I would say that feminist precarity activism is born out of the relationship between longer trajectories of women’s rights organising within local struggles for housing, fair urban policies, migration rights, etc., on the one hand, and on the other hand, the more novel global justice movements at the time (Juris 2008). For instance, Precarias a la Deriva was a project based at Eskalera Karakola (EK). While a local reference for the squatting movement in Madrid, a city hit by gentrification in the early 90s, EK was also a host for an international Zapatista encounter in Spain. Feminist activists based at EK joined the anti-corporate globalisation organising where they merged with the radical imagination travelling across movements at the time based on the claim that ‘Another World Is Possible’. This imagination entailed changes in everyday practices, putting into action the realities they were envisioning and fighting for. As such, this kind of ‘performative politics’ involved detailed attention to the process of organising, which included the caring practices of mutual support among those participating. The time and place of the meetings suddenly mattered if moms with strollers, domestic workers, night-shifters or students in wheelchairs were to join. In this process, coalitions beyond identity markers were able to emerge on the ground. This attention was not given based on a preconceived category of nationality, ethnic background, sexual orientation or class position, but the focus was on the shared experiences of incertitude and vulnerability. Most of the people participating in this feminist precarity initiative were young, many with university degrees but unemployed, hopping from one contract to another in the service sector, in the translation industry, working as part-time university teachers or employed in the domestic sector. Some were born in Spain, while others were born abroad. By investigating and caring for the different experiences of living under what they defined as the common condition of precarity, they were able to criss-cross relations among a great variety of people, explicitly focusing on weaving alliances against the increasing social fragmentation they were perceiving within and beyond the workplace (Casas-Cortés 2021).
Deborah Sielert: Alessandro, you briefly mention Trumpism in your article. What can a perspective on care/emotion say against those growing exclusionary forms of politics and understandings of citizenship?
Alessandro Pratesi: A perspective on care fighting against exclusionary forms of politics and understanding of citizenship is also clearly provided by Tronto. Tronto (2006/1993) does not propose a political revolution or communitarian utopia. Rather, she proposes that individuals and groups should be genuinely valued, to the extent that they are allowed to demand care and are required to provide it, with a view to a “fair distribution of the tasks and the benefits of care” (2006, p. 188). She then suggests that care should become a tool for critical political analysis, revealing power relations, with the hope that women and other subjects traditionally excluded from politics may be increasingly included as protagonists, arguing that this can be helped by the emergence of the ethics of care. According to Tronto (2006/1993), the perspective of care immediately clarifies the impact and meaning of political issues for human lives (thus increasing people’s involvement and participation), and also provides a way to unify the powers of the vulnerable and try to persuade—by making structural injustices under formal equality manifest—those who are more powerful in giving up part of their power. These objectives are extremely arduous, but it is precisely by shedding light on and calling attention to care and emotions, with both our theories and our practices, that we can hope to achieve them.
That being said, I think that any attempt to translate theories on care and emotions into interpretations that have some political relevance should be understood as an operation that takes time, determination and perseverance, and, above all, has little to do with questions of objectivity, universality and generalisability. While maintaining a strong macro and political vocation, approaches that take into account the role of emotions tend to produce ‘situated’ and contextual theorisations. This does not reduce the heuristic, critical or political value of their contribution. One of the many things we learn from research on emotions (and not only) is precisely the need to remain open and humble in our theoretical formulations and to consider them as a process of constant revision and advancement, while not giving up the solidity of the arguments we use to support them and, with Tronto (2006/1993), the hope that the message can get through, increasing participation, collaboration between different social actors and political mobilisation.
Maribel Casas-Cortés: Alessandro, your review of the different readings of the notion of citizenship is very insightful because it focuses on those that highlight “micro-based, interactional, intersectional, and interdisciplinary approaches to citizenship” (Pratesi, this volume). Still, the hard-core institutional constraints of who crosses the border and who carries what passport is so determinant in defining citizenship on the ground. In the case of Europe, the stark terminology of ‘EU citizen’ versus ‘extra-communitarian’ marks from the start who is part and who is not part of this community. Still, I appreciate how complexity is brought into this reality by drawing upon the studies of how passports are being bought (obtaining citizenship through money, some authors speak of Ius Pecunie), and how borders are spatially shifting (moving borderwork according to where the target is found, make some authors speak of itinerant borders, see also the conversation with Nira Yuval-Davis in this volume). In an exercise of political imagination, how do you envision alternative forms of citizenship emerging out of these fluctuating conjunctures where passports and borders are not such solid institutional constructs as previously assumed?
Additionally, putting on the politician’s hat now, in concrete policy terms, how could this notion be implemented in a given time and place? Sorry! This is the same kind of question I get when talking about caretizenship. I need to know how you address this challenging question.
Alessandro Pratesi: As mentioned in my contribution, critical theories of care work, intimacy and citizenship from feminist, multicultural and global perspectives have highlighted several ways to bridge the gaps between the theories and practices of care, sexuality, intimacy, migration and social inclusion, providing a broader, more grounded, intersectional understanding of citizenship (Epstein and Carrillo 2014; Fudge 2014; Kershaw 2010; Longman et al. 2013; Pratesi 2018a; Sevenhuijsen 2003; Yuval-Davis 2007). Regardless of their different perspectives and specific foci, what these visions of citizenship have in common is the necessity to overcome deceptive dualisms (such as the public/private dichotomy) and situate the debate on citizenship within more inclusive, phenomenological, intersectional and interdisciplinary boundaries. These perspectives on citizenship and social inclusion as well as my own micro-situated and emotion-based model of social inclusion can contribute, not only to shed light on how cultural, territorial, social and judicial liminal interstitial areas emerge as a result of power dynamics and the multiple social actors involved, but, also to construct and reinforce a counter-narrative on migration, showing its potentially enormous benefits for the receiving countries.
My research on same-sex parents showed that social change occurs where different types of symbolic borders and/or edges (be they related to gender, ethnicity or sexual orientation) overlap and allow social actors to interact with each other. Research on irregular migrants has shown how different types of social actors who play the role of mediators (volunteers, social operators, interpreters, judges and local authorities) play a crucial role in the way migration is managed at both local and national levels, and help build bridges between migrant people and receiving societies, sometimes also by fighting with public institutions. All these different social actors do not only represent a parallel or hidden social world, but also intercept a series of interests, motivations and perspectives, where issues of culture, citizenship, universal rights, market, economics, politics, etc. intertwine with each other, and where refugees and migrants do not appear as merely passive victims in need of help but rather as autonomous beings trying to make their way through the world and deal with or adapt to structural and institutional constraints. Their everyday lives, care practices, interactions and emotions end up building social relations with locals and generating new spaces and meanings through a constant relational hybridisation work. This is the edge effect I describe in my paper, an edge effect approach which shows how looking at the new developments emerging from positive contaminations and has important theoretical and political implications.
It goes without saying that this is not sufficient. As I conclude in my contribution, political/institutional actions at both the national and international levels are necessary, but research contributes to the production of knowledge-based evidence of the real, positive nature of migration (see, for instance, Allievi 2018), and debunks racist and nationalist ideologies and propaganda unsupported by facts.
To conclude, I would like to make a reference to your interesting politically engaged and ethnographic approach to research. How do you manage to translate academic conceptualisations of precarity and care to the realm of realpolitik, and to effectively disseminate them—by using different strategies to reach different audiences—to conference panels, public discussions or other public spaces that we enter as academics?
Maribel Casas-Cortés: Again, I really enjoy your questions, and I wish this one in particular could be addressed in a more dialogical way, with a back and forth among us, building and clarifying among each other’s take on dissemination and translation. Very briefly, because of non-negotiable requirements in the academic job market to publish in high-end and top-impact factor outlets, many of my appraisals of precarity have been under strict copyright, not having the financial resources to pay for open access options sometimes offered by these giant publishers. Having to migrate to North America because of a lack of job opportunities in Spain, I had written under this frustrating condition in order to be able to get a stable academic position outside the USA to sustain my young family and be closer to friends and family. Still, I have been trying to disseminate outside this framework of enclosure of scholarly production, collaborating with independent publishers in the USA, Europe and Latin America as well as uploading my pieces online under Creative Commons. I consider my work as a translation of the knowledge production of social movements into other contexts. As such, one of the most concrete experiments for me is the multi-year effort at translating precarity and its care politics to the US context with initiatives, such as the Counter Cartographies Collective, which focuses on questions of precarity within the context of higher education, or Montessori Education for All for a complete implementation of this revolutionary pedagogy in the public sector to be accessible to students across the board regardless of zip code, which often reflect class. In Europe, care politics has taken the shape of working with both local and international precarious youth, finding commonalities across race, class and migration status divides to organise shared campaigns to critique restrictive migratory policies and fight for an open Europe, for both migrants and emigrants to move freely according to specific needs. These are just a few examples of mini-real politics of how my work tries to bring a care politics approach to existing struggles, an approach which is aware of multiple diversities and possibilities of intersections addressing specific challenges, including issues of labour conditions, such as the rise of adjunct contracts in the university sector, educational opportunities, such as the growing gap between high- and low-quality programs, and migration policy consequences affecting the movement of people in different precarious conditions.