Complicating Care

Abstract

Care remains an essential feature of transformative feminist and gender politics—including performance (Hamington & Rosenow, 2019). This article takes as its starting point feminist “ethics of care” scholarship that is grounded in the Cavelian theme of the “vulnerability of ordinary life” (Ferrarese, 2016; Garlough, 2013) and builds on performance studies work engaged by issues of oppression, human rights, and vulnerability (Becker et al., 2021; Bertrand, 2020; Dolan, 2010). Exploring care and performance from both scholarly and applied perspectives, it complicates the conceptual relationship between “vulnerability” and “crisis” to better understand the limits and potential of care in performance activism. Two research examples illustrate how caring practices, during interrelated global crises, have been addressed in local performances in the midwestern United States. The first explores elders’ experiences of vulnerability, isolation, and loneliness during the COVID-19 pandemic. It focuses on local Wisconsin Raging Grannies performers, as they reimagine vulnerability as “call for caring response-ability” through community performance activism that critiques “privileged irresponsibility” (Tronto, 1998, 2013). The second considers experiences of vulnerability and isolation through the documentary-style theatre project GenderTalks (2020) by Orion Risk. This ongoing work united transgender, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming people from Wisconsin and Iowa in candid virtual dialogues about gender during COVID-19 social distancing. A virtual play from the transcripts was performed in US fringe festivals. The GenderTalks project provides important insights about care’s potential in performances to create opportunities for interconnection and social critique (D’Urso, Rosenberg, and Winget, 2021).

Both performance contexts illustrate the impossibility of detangling care “from its messy worldliness” (de la Bellacasa, 2017) and how care becomes increasingly complicated and valuable in interrelated moments of crisis. This work centers ways that vulnerability can be reimagined through performance as a powerful political resource, as well as means of rejuvenation and social connection.

Notes

1 The authors would like to thank members of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Ethics of Care Initiative (2022) – especially Professors Michael Peterson, Paola Hernimdez and Finn Enke – for valuable discussion, enquiry and feedback on the development of GendeiTalks and earlier drafts of this manuscript.

2 For brevity and political reasons, this article will follow jack Halberstam (2017) and use ‘trans’ as an imperfect signifier representing all genders expanding beyond alignment with sex assigned at birth. This is a broad definition failing to perfectly hold all deeply personal and mutable iterations of gender; the individuality and specificity of gender experiences beyond cis do not permit comprehensive categorization. Orion describes themself as trans and non·binary for the reasons above, but both fail to communicate the nuances of their gender experience.

3 At its core, ethics of care scholarship contends that ‘care’ is a fundamental social good important to everyone’s well-being and existence (Gilligan 1982; Robinson 1997; Tronto 1998, 2015; de la Bellacasa 2017). Caring, in all its stages, involves relationality (Tronto 2013). As Held observes, ‘Even when one is just beginning to understand another’s needs and to decide how to respond to them, empathy and involvement are called for’ (2006: 34). Sevenhuijsen (2003) conceptualizes care as a critical practice that serves the goals of citizenship, inspiring judgement and collective action within a democracy. A significant body of care research published by Black feminist scholars during the COVID-19 pandemic builds on the work of bell hooks and Audrey Lorde and reveals the ways that self-care – reconceived outside of neoliberal commercialism – can serve as a powerful political strategy (Caldera 2020).

4 The Raging Grannies originated in 1987 in Victoria, British Columbia. Now a thriving movement, international chapters exist in Canada, the United States, Australia, Greece, India and other countries; these are linked nationally and internationally through the Internet, newsletters and conferences (Sawchuk 2009).