Care

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Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Feminist scholarship has examined an “ethic of care” (Tronto), “transnational regimes of care” (Ticktin), the “global care chain” (Hochschild), “earthcare,” (Merchant), and “the disruptive thought of care” (Puig de la Bellacasa). To Black lesbian socialist feminist (and mother of two) Audre Lorde, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare” (205).

² María Puig de la Bellacasa reminds us that “Care is omnipresent, even through the effects of its absence” (1). Alexis Pauline Gumbs observes how social and institutional structures render care as “the unsustainable work, the massive unpaid labor that breaks backs, hearts, and the visionary will of multitudes on a regular basis” (56).

³ Haraway, 2008 writes in When Species Meet, “Caring means becoming subject to the unsettling obligation of curiosity, which requires knowing more at the end of the day than at the beginning” (36).

⁴ See Jenny R.Isaacs’ excellent dissertation.

⁵ There is an enormous body of work on this topic – sources that have been vital to my own thinking include Spillers, Sharpe, Weheliye, Jackson.

⁶ My sincere thanks to both Judith Bettelheim and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert for a helpful discussion of these terms. See; Paravisini-Gebert and Fernández Olmos’ new edition of Creole Religions of the Caribbean.

⁷ See also Jackson, especially on the black mater(nal) (39).

⁸ This maternal ocean is examined at length in Elizabeth DeLoughrey and Tatiana Flores, “Submerged Bodies: The Tidalectics of Representability and the Sea in Caribbean Art.” As we discuss, the French feminist work of Luce Irigaray foregrounded the gestational materialities of metaphor, particularly the play in some Francophone Caribbean works between the terms mere/mother and mer/sea. To; Gaston Bachelard, “To love the infinite universe is to give a material meaning, an objective meaning, to the infinity of the love for a mother” (116). On “Submerged Mothers,” see Kamau Brathwaite.

⁹ See Puig de la Bellacasa who argues “Care is not about fusion; it can be about the right distance” (5).