1. Introduction
Care and self-care are increasingly, and urgently, invoked in both popular and scholarly discourses. While this development is largely something to be celebrated, it has been difficult to keep pace with conditions on the ground. People’s capacity to care for themselves and each other is under attack, stretched to the brink by widening care gaps, the social and material impacts of inherited trauma, political repression and violence, deportation, poverty and houselessness, carceral violence, genocide, the corporate plundering of already threadbare public services and healthcare systems, despair. Like the work of care itself, the burdens of this crisis (or multiple, escalating crises) of care are far from equally distributed.
It is reasonable to be wary of the explosion of discourse about self-care in the face of such overwhelming, unmet need. What better than a market “solution” that further individualizes deeply social problems (Hobart and Kneese Reference Hobart and Kneese2020), reinforcing the fortress of self for those who can afford it, and leaving the rest of us feeling personally responsible for our inability to keep it together in the face of social collapse? A politics of self-care removed from these crisis conditions is one of vacuous individualism at best. Yet at the same time, we cannot confront these conditions without contending with how inequalities of care take up residence in our personal lives and undermine our movements for social change. Beyond the cynical opportunism of capital, this article suggests, these co-emergent narratives of the care crisis and self-care serve as a reminder of the inextricable relation between the personal and the political when it comes to the politics of care—and the need to reunite them in feminist theory and practice.
The primary claim I put forward in what follows is that the politicized care of self and community and the social reproduction of struggles are inseparable. I develop this claim by bringing the framework of social reproduction together with recent literature on radical self-care that draws on Audre Lorde and Sara Ahmed’s work on self-care as warfare (Michaeli Reference Michaeli2017; Hobart and Kneese Reference Hobart and Kneese2020; Edelman Reference Edelman2020; Kim and Schalk Reference Kim and Schalk2021). On the one hand, the lens of social reproduction helps to critically situate discourses and practices of care (and self-care), and disambiguate exploitative and extractive forms of care (what Nishida Reference Nishida2022 calls “caring injustices”) from those that support genuine individual and collective wellness. On the other, Lorde, Ahmed, and the radical theorists of self-care who have recently built on their work point to the politicized survival, healing, and resistant forms of nurturance that build and sustain, rather than undermine, long-term liberatory organizing.
I structure my argument around two takeaways that follow from this primary claim regarding the integral relation between self-care, political healing, and the social reproduction of struggles. Both of them, I believe, are useful in bridging persistent theoretical and practical gaps between personal and political, intimate and structural, approaches to care theory and politics (Arruzza and Gawel, Reference Arruzza and Gawel2020). First, politically addressing the crisis conditions presented above (and in more detail in the next section) requires revisiting a central thesis of many Marxist feminist theories of social reproduction gaining prominence on the US, Canadian, and Western European left. Namely, that a Marxian class and labor paradigm remains the “master frame” encompassing politics on this terrain. While they were among the first to diagnose the systemic nature of the “care crisis” and point to the exploitation and extraction of care at its root, I argue that this thesis obscures the politics of lived experience and embodied, relational, transformation at stake in understanding and uprooting unjust divisions and social organizations of care (Glenn Reference Glenn2012). The second takeaway concerns the underappreciated role of politicized self and community care in sustaining (and transforming) social struggles. I look to peer-support, harm reduction, and mutual-aid practices developed by radical sex workers and care workers, showing how these strategies to care for and protect themselves and each other also subvert and offer alternatives to dominant paradigms of care and social reproduction. Such “counter-normative” care has a vital role to play in building the movement cultures we need in this moment. Even (especially) when developed by and for social reproductive workers themselves, these examples of transformative care, like the outsized exposure to harm they respond to, often exceed the framework of labor rights or class struggle.
If care is a contested and contradictory terrain (Gutiérrez Reference Gutiérrez Aguilar2017; Gago Reference Gago, Veronica, Solis and Pareded2018), this is as true for the ways we do or do not, can or cannot, care for ourselves and our intimates as it is for the macro-political antagonisms that demarcate gender, racialized, international, and other divisions of caring labor and access. To name and valorize social reproductive activities as historical forms of labor rather than a natural vocation of women is an act of politicization, a shift in perception regarding the subject and location of struggle. So too with the forms of relational, embodied, self- and world-making that constitute care as a political reality and transformative force. Stretching the categories of class and labor to encompass these dimensions of life-making and struggle, I claim, robs them—and us—of their specific meaning and power.
2. Intimate and structural contradictions of care
Marxist feminists have a long history of politicizing care and reproduction and were among the first to note the dire and systemic nature of what has come to be called a “crisis of care.” Their interventions and methods have been instrumental in bringing new forms of critique and activism to bear on the brutal contradictions generated by society’s disavowed dependence on reproductive and caring labor, and emergent care industrial complex set to profit off these gaps in care (Nadasen Reference Nadasen2023). By politically valuing these invisibilized material and emotional labors, materialist feminists came to see their centrality and necessity to the social reproduction of capitalist society—as well as the movements that might dismantle it.
Social reproduction refers to the labor, institutions, networks, and infrastructures, both formal and informal, through which human life and relationships, and, for Marxist feminists, labor powers, are reproduced on a daily and intergenerational basis. Care—which I understand as the material and affective labor and relations through which social bonds and individuals are reproducedFootnote 1 —is an essential and irreducible component of this socially necessary, life-sustaining, yet systemically denied and invisibilized domain of life-making.
The “care crisis” as a term coalesced out of materialist feminist attempts to name and understand the brutal contradictions that result when the life-generating labors and relations of social reproduction are submitted to capitalist ends (Precarias a la Deriva 2006; Isakson et al. Reference Isakson, Devi and Hothschild2008; Glenn Reference Glenn2012; Fraser Reference Fraser2016). While they differ in the details, this notion of a crisis of care defined by a contradiction between capital’s drive to accumulation and extraction on the one hand and the ever more thinly stretched capacities for daily and intergenerational social reproduction on the other is a crucial Marxist feminist contribution. Capital is dependent on reproductive labor, yet at the same time, and as such, disavows and degrades it. As Nancy Fraser aptly puts it: “Destroying its own conditions of possibility, capital’s accumulation dynamic effectively eats its own tail” (2017, 24).
Fraser points to the systemic rather than accidental nature (2017,12; 2022, 53) of this “so-called crisis of care,” which is, she claims, rooted in a fundamental “social-reproductive contradiction of capitalism” (2017, 22).Footnote 2 Like Fraser, Silvia Federici argues that capitalism fosters permanent, structural crises in social reproduction (2010, 14). However, she focuses on the contradictions generated by capital’s equally rapacious dispossession of communal resources and life-making and the “crisis of the commons” it generates. This plundering of “reproductive commons” and lifeways makes them ever more difficult to sustain—especially from the margins of the global economy. She notes, for example, the terrible costs to the communities migrant care workers leave behind in their countries of origin (2010, 17) and, ultimately, the entire “world regions marked for near zero reproduction” (14).
This article builds on the work of these and other Marxist feminist theorists and organizers, who argue that such searing contradictions are a structural feature of the social reproduction of a racial capitalist, cis-heteropatriarchal, ableist, and colonialist social order. I define “contradictions of care” as what happens when the lifegiving labors and relations of care are put to the service of social death. As Marxist feminist theories of the care crisis show, these contradictions are structural and systemic. However, a fundamental assumption in what follows is that they are also intimate and embodied. Socialized expectations that other people will disproportionately care for us, that we will disproportionately care for other people, or that our needs will routinely go unmet are reproduced in our bodies, emotions, and how we respond to each other. What I call “intimate contradictions of care” sediment and normalize harm, undermine relationships and communities, and, without skills and practices capable of addressing them, work against social justice movements.
While they have done crucial work confronting the former, structural contradictions of social reproduction, Western Marxist feminists have been less adept at addressing these “personal” (and deeply political) dimensions of the crises they were among the first to diagnose. Federici, for example, claims that “cooperative forms of reproduction are so important” because “they pave the way for a world where care for others can become a creative task rather than a burden … creating those solidarity bonds without which our life is an affective desert and we have no social power” (2019, 184–85). However, even Federici, who has unceasingly organized for decades to build such solidarity from the grassroots and internationally, at times depoliticizes these very caring bonds. For example, her attempts to hold up the unwaged, subsistence labor of women in the Global South as a normative ideal risks decontextualizing ostensibly non-subsumed reproductive commons and the unique histories and struggles they are a part of.Footnote 3 Fraser hesitates to use the term “care crisis” at all, worrying that an emphasis on care risks reproducing an individualizing, liberal, narrative that mystifies the systemic roots of capital’s crisis tendency in its contemporary financial mode (Fraser Reference Fraser and Bhattavharya2017, Reference Fraser2022). One wonders, however, where this leaves the flesh and blood (not to mention shit, sweat, and tears) of actual caring relations themselves.Footnote 4
The care crisis is not an abstract phenomenon—it is helplessness, resentment, dread, and despair in the face of preventable pain and death. The suffocating impossibility of adequately caring and being cared for is multifaceted and marks countless lives, but its most cruel contradictions are borne by those at the end of the chain. We do indeed need analyses of the racial capitalist and cis-heteropatriarchal imperatives to exploit and extract reproductive labor that are stretching social reproduction to the point of collapse—and why and how this impossible burden comes to be overwhelmingly shouldered by poor women of color. But we also need to confront how the contradictions born of such inequalities of care reproduce themselves in our intimate lives and undermine our communities and movements.
In The future is disabled, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna Samarasinha points to the pain under the surface of so much recent talk about care—the pain of being reduced to and subordinated on the basis of one’s role as caretaker, of never being allowed to have needs, of feeling powerless in the face of bottomless unmet need seeping out of every corner of one’s life. It’s not that people don’t care about care, she argues, but that, especially for marginalized people, care has been a site not just of healing but of harm: sometimes both at once.
When we open the Pandora’s box of care … we have to also expect, and attend, to the well of sadness and rage that’s waiting inside. All the years and generations where we were a dishrag wiping up after someone else, where there was no help, no care without abuse, we have to be ready for that before we can begin to make care plans. Otherwise, people just stay frozen in their pain and grief about all the generations where they were used for care but never cared for and loved. Otherwise, it’s hollow. (Piepzna Samarasinha Reference Piepzna-Samarasinha2022, 39)
The hurdles are perhaps even more significant when it comes to those who have benefitted from the opposite side of the equation. The classic, ever-helpful, survivors’ acronym DARVO—Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim, and Offender—describing the maddening reversals perpetrators of intimate violence often use to gaslight and isolate those they harm and redirect care to themselves, points to the sort of mind-numbing, soul-sucking, problems that entitlement, coercion, and (mass) self-deception pose to caring ethics and politics.
Because care’s imbrication with structural violence runs so deep, such patterns can show up even in earnest attempts to confront them. As I argue below, reducing the intimate politics of social reproduction to questions of reproductive labor occludes these multifaceted ways that people’s relationships and capacities for care are shaped and ruptured by structural violence, and the diversity of agencies and tactics they mobilize against it.
3. Self-care and the social reproduction of struggles
Care, including self-care, is inextricably personal and political. It is a social practice and material relation (Held Reference Held2006),Footnote 5 and, as so many feminists and radicals have taught, understanding it as “merely” private or personal is a cruel mystification that only serves those who profit off this deception. At the same time, care is irreducibly embodied, intersubjective, and often affectively laden—and demands that we bring these elements of lived experience and intimate life into the scope of our politics.
As the Gwyneth Paltrows of the world make clear, ideologies of self-care, like those of care more broadly (Glenn Reference Glenn1992; Dowling Reference Dowling2022; Prattes Reference Prattes2023), often reinforce gender, racialized, and class divides. Even in its hyper-managed solipsism, the “robust industry of neoliberal wellness” (Hobart and Kneese Reference Hobart and Kneese2020, 3–4) is a social and relational stance, though one that denies itself as such. As the anonymous authors of a zine on the subject state: “For some of us, focusing on self-care rather than caring for others would be a revolutionary proposition, albeit almost unimaginable—while the privileged can congratulate each other on their excellent self-care practices without recognizing how much of their sustenance they derive from others” (Crimethinc 2013, 5).
Recent radical care theory helpfully situates these antagonisms of self-care by juxtaposing Audre Lorde’s notion of radical self-care (further elaborated by Sara Ahmed and other queer and intersectional thinkers) with disciplining narratives of “self-optimization” and “moralized self-management” (Hobart and Kneese Reference Hobart and Kneese2020, 4) that once again individualize social ills and place the burden of responsibility for a broken society on those it hurts the most. By contrast, Lorde explicitly roots her notion of self-care as warfare in a commitment to individual and collective liberation, which, for her, cannot ultimately be separated. In her often-cited Cancer Journals, she presents cancer as a political violence directed at her as a Black lesbian woman (Lorde Reference Lorde1988, quoted in Lorde and Gay Reference Lorde and Gay2020, 92–94, 131) and her care of self as political resistance against it (131–32, 151–54). Indeed, she saw caring for herself as materially and emotionally woven in communion with Black freedom struggles from South Africa to Grenada (Lorde Reference Lorde1988, 87–88)—and the nurturance practices that sustained them (48–49, 64, 72). As Ahmed describes it:
In directing our care towards ourselves … we are not caring for those we are supposed to care for; we are not caring for the bodies deemed worth caring about. And that is why in queer, feminist and anti-racist work self-care is about the creation of community, fragile community, assembled out of the experiences of being shattered. (Ahmed Reference Ahmed2014, my emphasis)
Indeed, for Ahmed, Lorde, and other radical theorists (Piepzna-Samarasinha Reference Piepzna-Samarasinha2018; Kim and Schalk Reference Kim and Schalk2021; Sharman Reference Sharman2023), such self-care is politicized survival, and, as such, is inseparable from community care as well as organized resistance.
What I refer to here as politicized self-care involves strategies of refusal and reclamation, used by individuals and groups who are socially “forced to care” (Glenn Reference Glenn2012) or deemed unworthy of receiving it,Footnote 6 to direct their caring towards their own survival and liberation rather than the systems that oppress them.Footnote 7 Ahmed, unpacking Lorde’s famous statement that caring for herself was an act of self-preservation rather than self-indulgence, explains that “[s]ome have to look after themselves because they are not looked after” (2014). To do so is to take a political stance against the (equally political) logics that reduce queer, anti-racist, feminist politics to private and personal “self-indulgence” (2014), and for one’s own living and an emergent community of others who society did not intend to survive (Lorde Reference Lorde1978, 31–32).
Barbara and Beverly Smith and Demita Frazier of the Combahee River Collective offer a potent example of such politicized self-care in their famous 1977 statement summarizing the politics and beliefs of this radical Black feminist collective (reprinted in Taylor Reference Taylor2017). As they clarify, their experiences as Black women subject to the multiple and simultaneous oppressions of white supremacy, misogyny, class, and homophobia led them to develop an “integrated analysis and practice” on these interconnected forms of violence and what it will take to dismantle them. This was not an abstract, theoretical stance, but one with direct bearing on their survival and liberation as Black, queer, working-class, feminist, radicals resisting multiple forms of oppression (Taylor Reference Taylor2017, 17–18).
The CRC rooted their politics in the understanding that their lived experience mattered in both senses of the word: as something worthy of care and attention (Woodly Reference Woodly2022, 91–98), and as a materially grounded force, a power to effect change. “We realize that the only people who care enough about us to work consistently for our liberation are us. Our politics evolve from a healthy love for ourselves, our sisters and our community which allows us to continue our struggle and work,” they wrote (Taylor Reference Taylor2017, 11). As Taylor explains, the CRC’s original formulation of “identity politics”Footnote 8 (which is the next line in the text) can be seen as a Black feminist articulation of the slogan “the personal is political,” which, she points out, “was not just about ‘lifestyle’ issues, as it came to be popularly understood” but “about how the experiences within the lives of Black women shaped their political outlook” (Taylor Reference Taylor2017, 15–17).
This politics of lived experience and care (their love for themselves, each other, and their communities, and “shared belief that Black women are inherently valuable” (10)) created the conditions for a sustained commitment to political struggle. As such, it is nonsensical to sever the CRC’s consciousness raisingFootnote 9 from their political theory and practice, or their politicized care from the social reproduction of Black feminist struggles and commitment to long-term political projects and coalitions (Belle Reference Belle2020, 170–71; Taylor Reference Taylor2017, 9–11).
The potential resonances between these lineages of radical self-care and the feminist traditions working to politicize and transform capitalist social reproduction are clear. “We have to work out how to survive in a system that decides life for some requires the death or removal of others,” Ahmed states (2014, my emphasis), pointing to the inseparability of social reproduction and the politics of so-called personal life.
The next section is devoted to elaborating the concept of reproductive labor, its centrality to Marxist feminist analyses of social reproduction and the care crisis, and why I believe we should resist their attempts to expand this category to encompass the dimensions of care and lived experience I elaborate in this and the final sections of this article. Reproductive labor is a helpful, needed, concept, but it is limited when it comes to the politics of care and social reproduction. Saidiya Hartman points to its usefulness, and limits, when it comes to the historical and present struggles of Black women in particular (Hartman Reference Hartman2016, 170). “Reproductive labor,” she notes, “is central to thinking about the gendered afterlife of slavery and global capitalism … Yet attending to the status of black women’s labors has confounded our conceptual categories and thrown our critical lexicon into crisis” (167).Footnote 10 I now turn to how Marxist feminists have put this category of reproductive labor to political use, and why the experiences and struggles of so many continue to confound it.
4. “Personal” politics and the limits of the labor paradigm
Marxist feminist theorists of social reproduction have long stressed that reproductive labor is basic and fundamental to human life and have also pointed to the vast array of highly specific tasks it performs and needs it fulfills—feeding, cleaning, educating, tending, and “maintaining kin and community ties” (Glenn Reference Glenn1992, 1). This labor of reproduction is “indispensable to society” (Fraser Reference Fraser and Bhattavharya2017, 21), yet capitalist economies are unique in that they systemically deny this work as labor: it is thus often unpaid or underpaid, is subjected to especially cruel and coercive forms of exploitation and extraction, and is socially organized through gendered, racialized, and international divisions of labor and the normative ideologies that reinforce them.
While this is not universally the case,Footnote 11 for the traditions of social reproduction theory gaining ascendency on the US, Canadian, and Western European left, reproductive labor remains the central category of analysis and practice. Expanding, critically interrogating, and deepening Marx’s own labor theory of value, they insist that this labor—who performs it, who is or isn’t entitled to it, the specific indignities that unpaid and under-paid care workers and marginalized people in need of care face—is and should remain the center of political critique, resistance, and transformation on the terrain of social reproduction.
The importance of this materialist feminist concept of reproductive labor for understanding and organizing against structural injustices of care cannot be overemphasized. Labor is an essential and necessary political category and for perhaps no one more than the care workers and sex workers at the helm of labor struggles (Chang Reference Chang2016; Berg Reference Berg2022). However, this does not mean that the politics of care and social reproduction can, or should, be contained by this concept.Footnote 12 As I argue in this section, conflating care and labor (and subsuming the former under the latter) robs both categories of their specificity and potency, and bypasses the politics of lived experience and communal self-determination that, for Ahmed, Lorde, and the CRC, are the heart of a living commitment to feminist, queer, anti-racist, and anti-capitalist struggle.
The Wages for Housework (WfH) Campaign was a key, and early, contribution on the part of Italian and autonomist feminists and serves as an example of both the possibilities and limits of reproductive labor as a political category. Galvanized by the insight that largely unpaid domestic labor was an essential condition of capitalist accumulation, activists such as Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Selma James, Silvia Federici, and Margaret Prescod began demanding a wage for this work and organizing on this basis. For its protagonists, demanding wages for housework was a revolutionary and transformative demand. Rather than simply a means to a political end, it was a militant stance and rallying cry for grassroots organizers intent upon reconstituting social reproduction and building solidarities between others organizing on this terrain. In Federici’s words, this perspective aimed at “revolutionizing—in the process of struggling for it—all our family and social relations” (1975, 1–2).
The WfH Campaign saw its politics emerging from a radical critique of capitalist organizations of reproductive (domestic) labor—the gender divisions of labor, nuclear family form, and heterosexual marriage bonds—and unpaid work of caretaking, cooking, cleaning, emotional and sexual labor, and general management of daily life, that keep productive workers alive and exploitable. This meant that, far from a haven set apart, the Western nuclear family—and the private “romances” of love, sex, and intimacy that go with it—was as coercive and extractive, as bound up with contradiction and struggle, as the factory, the mine, or the fields. Cooking, cleaning, doting, fucking, nagging, appeasing, and soothing were not a personal service, natural vocation, or act of selfless love, but labor. As Federici’s epic slogan has it: “They call it love. We call it unwaged work” (1975, 1).Footnote 13
From the beginning, the WfH campaign was influenced by the domestic workers movement in the US, the Johnson-Forest Tendency (Selma James was married to C. L. R. James and a political collaborator throughout his life), and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers in Detroit (S. Jaffe Reference Jaffe2018). Unlike many radical and liberal feminists, the campaign also stood in solidarity with sex workers and organized for decriminalization—calling attention to the relation between unpaid domestic work and paid sex work and establishing long-term coalitions, campaigns, and social centers with groups such as the US PROStitutes (US PROS) Collective, the ECP (English Collective of Prostitutes), and COYOTE. Autonomist feminists continued to develop these coalitional legacies after the campaign faded, for example, with their observation that the labor, economies, and relations of reproduction are sites not only of exploitation, but ongoing dispossession, which has provided crucial theoretical groundwork for connecting decolonial and feminist struggles in Latin America. These revolutionary aspects of autonomist feminism have arguably been most successfully, and radically, developed by Black, queer, and sex-working theorists and organizers. As Beth Capper and Arlin Austin note in their article on Black Women for Wages for Housework (BWfWfH) and Wages Due Lesbians (WDL), activists with these campaigns deeply interrogated the narrow focus on the unpaid, heterosexual housewife but continued to develop an autonomist politics of social reproduction (Capper and Austin Reference Capper and Austin2018, 449).Footnote 14
Black feminists were also among the WfH campaign’s most powerful critics, pointing to how “the ‘home,’ the ‘family,’ domestic and care work, and other forms of social-reproductive labor had acquired different political meanings and social value in communities surviving slavery, racist oppression and violence, and various regimes of racial and social control” (Valivicharska Reference Valiavicharska2020, 2–3).Footnote 15 As Angela Davis famously quipped: “Women of color—and especially Black women—have been receiving wages for housework for untold decades,” and certainly did not find anything liberating about it (Davis Reference Davis1983, 237). Others, such as Hazel Carby, pointed to the important, positive role of kinship and family, as well as larger community care networks, in nurturing revolutionary values, cultural belonging, and political resistance in migrant communities and communities of color (Carby Reference Carby1982).Footnote 16 As Carby notes, these strategies of resistance “embody important alternative ways of organizing production and reproduction and value systems critical of the oppressor” (52) that do not easily fit within, and are often obscured by, Western feminist perspectives on reproduction and the family. Autonomist feminists’ emphasis on domestic and reproductive labor at the expense of race, in other words, made it difficult to engage with the very domains of struggle and autonomous life-making—the forms of dispossession, extraction, and enclosure, but also of commoning and reclamation—they were keen to draw attention to and politicize.
A decade later, Lise Vogel (Reference Vogel2013) presented another paradigmatic Western Marxist feminist articulation of reproductive labor. Like the autonomist feminist organizers of the WfH campaign, Vogel claimed that the question of women’s oppression under capitalism remains underdeveloped in Marxist thinking. But, whereas thinkers like Federici, Mies, and Fortunati were often scathing in their critiques of Marxism and explicit in their use of specifically feminist insights and methods, Vogel’s aim was to build from Marx by providing a unitary theory of gender oppression and capitalist exploitation.
Vogel’s unitary theory and Marxian orientation have recently been taken up by a new generation of socialist feminist theorists and activists and popularized under the acronym “SRT” (social reproduction theory). Tithi Bhattacharya, speaking to the defining characteristics of this tendency, presents SRT as “a methodology to explore labor and labor power under capitalism and [which] is best suited to offer a rich and variegated map of capital as a social relation” (Bhattacharya Reference Bhattacharya and Bhattavharya2017, 3).Footnote 17 Similarly, for Sue Ferguson, a “central innovation” of SRT is “the theorization of feminist struggle as an anticapitalist struggle, a class struggle” (Ferguson Reference Ferguson2020, 5). These examples and many more in the literature make clear which is the more encompassing category: i.e., that “feminist and worker struggles are two different parts of the same class struggle” (5) but rarely the reverse (Arruzza Reference Arruzza2014, Reference Arruzza and Bhattacharya2017; Arruzza et al. Reference Arruzza, Bhattacharya and Fraser2020; A. Jaffe Reference Jaffe2020).
At the same time, a key claim of those working in this tradition is that, by making the connections between ostensibly private, unpaid, reproduction, and waged work, their framework of social reproduction is uniquely capable of undoing intransigent dichotomies between oppression and exploitation, class and “identity,” that undermine broad-based organizing (Arruzza et al. Reference Arruzza, Bhattacharya and Fraser2020, 8–9). Their argument, in broad strokes, is that, by showing how capital socially organizes not only productive but reproductive labor, SRT reveals the logic unifying capitalist accumulation and historically specific forms of oppression, while avoiding recourse to the reductionism, determinism, or economism of vulgar Marxism (Arruzza Reference Arruzza2014). Indeed, they claim that the expansive and articulated conception of class, and differentiated understanding of labor and labor powers that follow from this argument, are what grant SRT its superior ability to offer a unified yet non-reductionistic understanding of these varying forms of social violence.Footnote 18
This expanded politics of class and labor is highlighted in texts like Arruzza, Bhattacharya, and Fraser’s Feminism for the 99%—a manifesto of SRT that celebrates and attempts to further ignite a wave of broad-based, international, and anti-capitalist feminist struggle. Deeply influenced by the praxis and theoretical innovations coming out of the international feminist strikes movement, which has been intellectually and politically led by the work of collectives such as Ni Una Menos in Argentina, Arruzza, Bhattacharya, and Fraser claim that the perspective of social reproduction radically resituates the meaning of the strikeFootnote 19 and instigates a “new kind of politics” (2020, 8–9). The feminist strike responds to social reproductive crises, they claim, by revealing new horizons for political action and coalition: articulating resistance to mass femicide, for example, while also bringing together previously divided labor sectors in mass assemblies and fostering forms of political cooperation all but inconceivable within prior paradigms of feminism and class struggle.
SRT is motivated by a genuine commitment to center oppression and forge connections between labor struggles and social justice movements. It aims to provide a non-reductive unitary analysis of class exploitation and oppression under capitalism, and thus a theoretical foothold for political platforms that systemically link, and confront, injustices of all kinds. However, SRT’s tendency to privilege class and labor as the implicit referents for politics at times conflicts with these coalitional aims.
In the rest of this section, I develop my central claim that this also depoliticizes the “personal” politics so central to feminist, intersectional, disability justice, and other liberatory traditions, including the feminist strikes movement. Organizers with Ni Una Menos, for example, brought explicitly feminist and decolonial perspectives on politicized experience and relational transformation to their broad-based, coalitional organizing against femicide (Ni Una Menos 2017; Gutiérrez Reference Gutiérrez Aguilar2018). In slogansFootnote 20 and organizing tactics, they called for a “sensible” revolution, a revolution of feeling and desire as much as a reclamation of the social and material conditions of their lives. As Raquel Gutiérrez puts it, speaking of these intimate dimensions of this movement:
If it is immensely difficult to find words to express the horizons of desire and the most intimate contents that are bubbling over in the ongoing insurrection, some steps we can take to not avoid the task are, on the one hand, carefully reviewing our regenerated capacity to name – and illuminate – the world that we inhabit, and, on the other hand, paying equally careful attention to the forms of connection and ways of producing relationships through which we have opened this time of rebellion. (Gutiérrez Reference Gutiérrez Aguilar2018)
These shortcomings are highlighted in SRT’s treatment of intersectional feminism in particular. Pluto Press’s description of Bhattacharya’s Reference Bhattacharya and Bhattavharya2017 edited volume Social reproduction theory: Remapping class, recentering oppression is illustrative of this stance—claiming, without further explanation or context, that SRT’s perspectives on the relation between gender, race, and capitalist exploitation present “a more sophisticated alternative to intersectionality.”Footnote 21 This common refrain—expressed with more or less nuance across the work of key thinkers in this tradition such as Sue Ferguson, David McNally, Aaron Jaffe, Cinzia Arruzza, and Tithi Bhattacharya—is rooted in SRT’s Marxist commitments, and specifically its commitment to a unitary theory of oppression and exploitation rooted in an expansive understanding of labor and class.
Bhattacharya, for example, claims that “intersectionality theory shows us a world where race, gender, and other oppressions ‘intersect,’ thereby producing a reality that is latticed—a sum total of different parts” (2017, 17)—in other words, an additive approach to the social ontology of oppressions. Aaron Jaffe claims to offer a “generous” reading of intersectionality, which he nonetheless claims lacks an account of “the causes of social violence.” He states: “I will make the case that, despite intersectionality’s strengths, SRT does a better job of explaining the causes of social violence. I consider SRT to be best suited to tackling the interwoven nature of oppressions in capitalist societies, as SRT highlights the essential role class plays in these oppressions” (2020, 71). Similarly, David McNally claims that intersectional theory is “haunted” by an “ontological atomism” or even “social Newtonianism,” that is, “the idea that there are independently constituted relations of oppression that, in some circumstances, crisscross each other” (2017, 96). He claims a Marxist-Hegelian understanding of an articulated totality is a better model of relationality for theorizing social differences.
However, the need to explicitly confront the problem of external, additive understandings of multiple oppressions constitutes a basic epistemic and political premise of many theories of intersectionality (Belle Reference Belle2020). To name just a few: the Combahee River Collective’s “integrated analysis” in the face of “interlocking oppressions”; Crenshaw’s discussions of the inadequacy of discrimination law—which offered protections against sexism and racism, but not their combined and compounded effects in the discrimination faced by women of color; and Collins’s “matrix of oppressions,” all distinctly opposed the additive fallacies that followed from the single-issue politics of women’s liberation, Black liberation, and socialism.
It is thus somewhat puzzling that thinkers in the SRT tradition so frequently levy the accusation of additive thinking against intersectional theory. The reasons for Marxian SRT’s supposed upper hand over intersectionality are also difficult to parse: namely, why class should be regarded as the reference point, or heart, of critical understanding and the social totality alike. “Without centering class relations,” Jaffe contends, “social theory could recognize many systems, social structures, physical infrastructures, and forms of social oppression, but we would not be seeing that these oppressions are situated as parts of the constitution and social reproduction of capitalist societies” (2020, 89). But unless we presuppose the very Marxist framework Jaffe is attempting to justify, SRT’s superior ability to explain the “causes of social violence” and offer a unifying framework for addressing them remains opaque. What, in other words, does granting the analytic primacy of class enable us to see that is not already contained in this very assertion? Namely, that accumulation (the “valorization of value”)Footnote 22 is the unifying heart of social relations under capitalism; therefore, the exploitation of labor (i.e., the class relation that generates value) provides the unifying frame and causal explanation of social violence.
This insistence on the analytic primacy of class and labor, even in an expanded and nuanced sense, truncates SRT’s political perspectives on care and social reproduction and limits its ability to center oppression. This is apparent in its defensive stance toward intersectionality as a critical social theory (Collins Reference Collins2000, Reference Collins2019) but also as a transformational practice. Collins, for example, does not only offer a diagnosis rooted in Black women’s experiences of multiple oppressions—she equally presents examples of the creative and oppositional praxis made possible by their collective self-definition and empowerment (2000, 2019). For Collins, such a Black feminist standpoint expresses a dialectic of thought and action through which new agencies, forms of knowledge, and coalitional politics become possible. Like Lorde, Ahmed, and the CRC, she is concerned with connecting such politicized consciousness to broader lineages of struggle. This means valuing lived experience, dialogue, and an ethics of care and accountability as meaningful standards of knowledge and guides to political action (Collins Reference Collins2000, 265–66).
Prentis Hemphill, “a leading practitioner of somatics and healing justice” in the Movement for Black Lives and into the present, defines oppression as “the requirement that you hold another’s center at the cost of your own” (cited in Woodly Reference Woodly2022, 49). In the tradition of politicized somatics Hemphill is drawing upon, one’s center refers to their safety, connection, and ability to take dignified action in relation to others and the world (Haines Reference Haines2019; Starr Reference Starr2019). Care becomes oppressive when some people’s safety, dignity, and belonging comes at the expense of that of others. For somatics practitioners, this inevitably affects the embodied “shape” and emotional range of those in such a relation.Footnote 23 And yet, from a somatics perspective, shapes change and emotions can be held, expanded, and made more conscious. We can learn, and reclaim, capacities for care and transform our ways of being in relation to ourselves and communities.
Even the most nuanced accounts of affective and intimate labor (e.g., Oksala Reference Oksala2016; Weeks Reference Weeks2007, Reference Weeks2011) cannot encompass the dimensions of harm and its transformation that Collins and Hemphill speak to. Nor should they have to. My point here is not to contest Marx’s critique of capitalist exploitation, the indispensability of class as a political category, or the importance of labor struggles—but to ask why understanding such complex and interrelated forms of violence, or the politics of transforming them, should be thought of as contingent on centering class and labor in particular.
As Collins, the CRC, Ahmed, Lorde, and other intersectional thinkers show, oppressions are connected in people’s lived experience as much as in the broader world. This is a primary epistemic, methodological, and political starting point of intersectional feminism and other, aligned traditions. This grounding in the lived experience of oppression and resistance is a key feature of its paradigm shifting, integrative, approaches to political critique and empowerment. The fact that so many Marxist feminists in the SRT tradition accuse intersectional thinkers of additive reasoning despite this foundational stance against it points to a systemic rather than accidental misunderstanding. It moreover suggests that SRT’s expanded notions of class and labor (the framework which, its proponents claim, demonstrates intersectionality’s additive fallacy and SRT’s superior analytic powers) is itself the likely cause of this widespread misapprehension.
This unwillingness or inability to meaningfully engage with situated knowledge claims and political practices that are unique to intersectionality and other oppositional traditions ultimately points to a larger gap in Marxian social reproduction theory. Namely, that between the political reclamation of lived experience and communal bonds on the one hand, and the social reproduction of emancipatory, broad-based movements on the other.
5. Counter-normative praxis in sex-worker and care worker organizing
In the previous section, I put forward the claim that, despite their crucial contributions to a materialist feminist politics of care, taking care and social reproduction seriously means rejecting Western Marxist feminists’ call to return to labor and class as the umbrella for politics on this terrain. I now turn to the second key takeaway that follows from my overarching claim about the relation between politicized self-and community care and the struggles we need to face the current moment. Specifically, I point to the role of what I term “counter-normative”Footnote 24 care in subverting and offering alternatives to dominant paradigms of care and social reproduction and sustaining (and transforming) broader social justice movements.
In doing so, I look to transformative justiceFootnote 25 practices and peer-to-peer support networks that radical reproductive workers have developed to care for themselves and each other in the face of criminalization, precarity, and disproportionate exposure to harm. These collective survival strategies, everyday practices of harm reduction (Hassan Reference Hassan2022a), peer-support, and self and community accountability embody both a transformational politics of personal life and of structural antagonism. They offer inspiration and examples of the difficult, humbling, practice of cultivating alternative intimacies and infrastructures of care more capable of reducing and transforming harm, protecting communities, and nurturing liberatory visions and values.
As Heather Berg (Reference Berg2023) points out, politicized sex workers have posed radical interventions into care theory. They care for themselves and each other outside of and in opposition to legal, moral, and political structures that devalue their lives and labors. Such care is a form of refusal, and of alternative life making. Like the CRC’s “healthy love” of themselves and each other, it is both a “powerful site of self-valorization” by and for a multiply marginalized community and a “world building practice”; a care that “prepares us for struggle” (Berg Reference Berg2023, 26).
The global demand to recognize sex work as work, decriminalize this work, and grant it protections is important context for this discussion.Footnote 26 Importantly, as sex worker scholars and organizers point out, the labor issues involved in sex work are difficult to disentangle from the criminalization, stigma, and resultant exposure to structural and intimate violence that many sex workers navigate as part of their job (Grant Reference Grant2014, 75–82). The decriminalization movement itself was initially focused not on labor rights but on the demand to end police violence (Grant Reference Grant2014, 22). Beyond its gendering (most clients are cis men, and sex workers are overwhelmingly cis women, trans women, and other gender non-conforming people, and gay men) racialization, citizenship status, poverty, gender identity, and disability intersect with criminalization and stigma in ways that differentially condition workers’ experiences in the sex trade.Footnote 27 Trans, undocumented, BIPOC, poor, and disabled sex workers are much more likely to be subject to cycles of what Dean Spade (Reference Spade2011) terms “administrative violence”—hyper-exposed to both intimate and state violence and harassment, incarceration, fines, evictions, deportation, and loss of children.Footnote 28
Their criminalized status, exclusion from labor protections and formal economies, increased exposure to patriarchal and other forms of structural violence, and limited access to social services have compelled many sex workers to rely on informal networks, forms of mutual aid, and knowledge-sharing commons like “bad date lists” to survive. As Berg shows, these peer-to-peer practices of collective survival and refusal are also generative and counter-cultural.
Shira Hassan, for example, points to how multiply marginalized sex workers were at least as responsible for the radical skills and practices that have come to be known as harm reduction as the predominantly white and male needle users often credited for it. Yet sex worker legacies of what she calls “liberatory harm reduction” (Hassan Reference Hassan2022a, Reference Hassan2022b) are often scrubbed out of the official public health narrative. Speaking from her experience working with collectives like the Young Women’s Empowerment Project (YWEP) in Chicago, Hassan speaks to how this radical approach to harm reduction combined material forms of mutual aid including popular education (e.g., on safer practices and navigating legal rights and risks); logistical support (e.g., access to legal aid and abortion services); and resource sharing (e.g., condoms and birth control) with an emphasis on intimate relationships, community, and “self-care and empowerment” (2022a, 31–49). As she details at length, these practices were painstakingly, lovingly, forged by and for sex workers (as well as drug users and others who lived and worked in informal and street economies) as a way to mitigate risk, reduce exposure to harm, and protect themselves and each other from state and interpersonal violence—but also as a loving alternative to punitive justice and paternalistic care. They are, she claims, fundamentally at odds with the norms (deservingness, responsibilization), conditions (sobriety, citizenship, employment), and procedures (conditional access to resources and services, evading liability) that have come to characterize institutionalized, social service-based, models of “public health harm reduction” (2022a, 115–125).
Sex workers were instrumental in fostering the combination of radical values (e.g., an ethos of acceptance, responsibility, and non-disposability); concrete networks of mutual aid and community defense; and collective capacity building (e.g., for conflict and repair outside the criminal legal system) that Hassan celebrates under the banner of liberatory harm reduction. These values and practices are liberatory in that they center the agency and needs of those with “criminalized and stigmatized life experiences” (Reference Hassan2022a, 30), mitigate their outsized exposure to structural violence, and build alternatives to punitive and carceral “justice” (Reference Hassan2022a, 24–25). They are also counter-normative and counter-cultural in that they subvert rather than uphold the criminalizing logics, norms, and procedures so systemically weaponized against sex workers and other marginalized people. Starting from a survivor-centered, non-pathologizing, commitment to real people and communities rather than a top-down set of norms or rules (Reference Hassan2022a, 152–58), they facilitate the kind of embodied and emotional “sense making” that allows us to engage with care as a contested political reality (Pugh Reference Pugh2023, 142).
Importantly, such counter-normative practices do both oppositional and transformative work for communities and movements. In their book, Let this radicalize you, Mariame Kaba and Kelly Hays emphasize the integral role that such generative, counter-cultural, relationship building plays in social movement work (Hayes and Kaba Reference Hays and Kaba2023, 46–50), and why it can be so challenging to sustain in an over-culture of possessive individualism and organized abandonment. In their words, “[o]ne of the greatest struggles of our time will be to create a life-affirming political culture that can be enacted in the everyday, a counterculture of rebellious care” (51).
Hassan cautions against reducing such politicized forms of care to labor politics. The political wisdom embodied in sex workers’ strategies of harm reduction and transformative justice, she claims, goes deeper than labor: “showing us how we build relationship, community, and transform culture through everyday actions with each other” (2022b). As she reminds us, channeling Lorde: harm reduction, like so many liberation practices, was developed and passed on by people society did not intend to survive. This work comes from people in “the sex trade and street economy, from drug users, from people who are street based,” from “BIPOC, queer and trans survivors who are giving you this information so that you can continue to practice these tools and strategies towards our collective liberation, towards a way of caring for ourselves through the mess that is this moment” (Hassan Reference Hassan2020). Hassan’s loving homage to these suppressed traditions asks us to honor and name the outsized, unacknowledged, role of the radical sex workers and care workers, paid and unpaid, who have been contributing such deeply transformative skills to social movements for untold generations—often from the shadows or the closet.
Sex worker advocate and facilitator-writer Britta Love speaks to these legacies of political healing with their claim that “whores are healers.” This is not a romanticization of sex work nor an “appeal to respectability,” but a way of honoring the care skills and labor of those who have built spaces of refuge and safety outside the system and, in the process, forged alternative routes to intimacy, belonging, and pleasure. It is an emergent and situated reclamation of power, in relation to a community of other sex workers: a refusal of a “patriarchal culture that denies the value and importance of pleasure, of sex, and of feminized labor” and “a celebration of the essential and valuable work we do.” While founded on the premise that “the human and labor rights of sex workers are non-negotiable” (Love Reference Love2023), Love’s position, like Hassan’s, exceeds the political horizon of labor.
Such counter-normative and counter-cultural care is transformative and world building, and it is also quotidian. Like the radical self-care practices outlined above, everyday practices of transformative justice and self-and community accountability work on multiple levels, integrating structural and intimate, personal and political, change. They can help us situate ourselves in relation to power and unlearn embodied and emotional habits (e.g. entitlement and appeasement) that reproduce inequalities of care. And they can also become building blocks of an oppositional and transformative culture: embodying both a refusal of the over-culture’s moral and political economies of care, and an alternative politics of life-making that supports and prefigures the social movements we so desperately need.
While inevitably limited, such everyday care praxis can teach us the kind of bottom-up culture skills, values, and practices that help us hold contradiction and care for each other in ways that link up to and support—rather than undermine—structural, social change. Like Lorde’s radical self-care, which Kim and Schalk describe as “a practice of political creation,” they can be thought of as both a “politics of self-transformation” (Wyche Reference Wyche2025) and “a practice that necessarily goes beyond the boundaries of the self and toward the genesis of other ways of being” (Kim and Schalk, Reference Kim and Schalk2021, 10).
The work of Spanish Collective Precarias a la Deriva (Precarious Women Adrift), a collective of precarious feminized and migrant workers coalescing in Spain in the early 2000s, offers examples of the creative generativity and political power of such embodied praxis and skill building.Footnote 29 Their “militant research” on caring labor and social reproduction has been especially generative in Latin American traditions of social reproduction feminism and resonates with the grassroots praxis Hassan discusses. Here I want to discuss how they also put forward a politics of social reproduction more responsive to the elements of experience and intimacy that, this paper argues, are not reducible to labor.
Precarias outlined a situated, collective critique of the care crisis from their perspective as precarious reproductive laborers. Indeed, the collective was born from an act of refusal and autonomy during the Spanish General Strike of 2002, when, disillusioned by dominant labor politics so unresponsive to the realities of precarious feminized workers, they decided to creatively explore alternatives on their own. Adopting the Situationist practice of the dérive Footnote 30 to suit their feminist project, they began to accompany each other and other workers through the isolating and individualizing “circuits of feminized precarity” (Precarias 2004a).
Through their practice of “walking while questioning” (caminar preguntando)—a notion that originates with the Zapatistas—they learned to put aside routinized habits of perception and brought new ones into play (Precarias 2004b, 85). These communal imaginaries and practices they developed as they accompanied each other on their isolating daily grind were key to the research process. Through ongoing collective, “militant,” investigation into the mystified conditions of their lives, they were able to “politicize[] existence,” and lessen the distance between self and other, “us” vs “them” (2004b, 83–84). This enabled them to better understand and mobilize against the gendered and racialized exploitation they faced as workers, and also unearthed dimensions of social reproduction that exceeded the paradigm of work (2004a, 66, 72).
A key concept that emerged from this praxis is what the collective termed the “continuum of care/attention/desire.” Human capacities for desire, attention, and care, they realized, are not split off and dichotomized from each other by nature. Constructs like the mother/whore dichotomy, for example, are “historically determined social stratifications of affect” (Precarias 2006, 34, my emphasis). The predatory exploitation and extraction characteristic of contemporary capitalism, they claimed, involves a particularly intense stratifications of care, sex, and attention, the effects of which alter not only the form but the quality of our relationships and emotional capacities. In short, they alienate care from attention and desire by limiting our capacities to feel and relate and the time we have to do so.
By politicizing caring affects and dispositions themselves (i.e., by arguing that caring capacities are not ahistorical givens, but are rather attenuated and transformed by dominant social relations and norms), Precarias also point to the revolutionary importance of situated, counter-normative practices that can help us “transform care into a social value” and “collective and corporeal knowledge” (2006, 41). In a violent society such as ours the pathways to such care praxis are not given in advance. When it comes to the politics of care, “recipes are useless” (“las recetas no sirven,” Precarias 2004b, 88; see also Sharman Reference Sharman2023). It is, rather, through the process of feeling their way together that the collective articulated their multifaceted critique of the care crisis, and a radical call “for a social transformation that would ally care with desire in a more just manner for each and all” (2006, 37).
Care workers and sex workers are at the forefront of social reproductive struggles in our times. They are indeed the vanguard of labor politics (Chang Reference Chang2016; Berg Reference Berg2022), but also of other forms of political healing and embodied transformation on this terrain. What Evie Vigil terms “whore wisdom” is an example of such intimate social reproduction politics, rooted in sex worker autonomy, resistance, and community care. As Vigil (Reference Vigiln.d.) states:
Sex workers already exist and work on the edges of capitalism. We come from and survive through resilient networks and lineages that have created shelter, infrastructure, and possibilities for our communities despite centuries of violence and criminalization. We are shape-shifters and we are care-givers. We are very familiar with the implications of sexual and cultural trauma on desire and empowered choice and voice … and we practice and negotiate dynamic consent on deep and … confrontational levels.
To conceive of this embodied and collective wisdom wholly through the perspective of an expanded framework of labor and class is to flatten the ethical and political life of social reproduction itself—reducing it to the very categories used to exclude care and sex from moral and political life.
As Vigil, Hassan, and Berg note, sex workers have cultivated wisdom, skill, and sensibilities for navigating the contradictions born of such unjust arrangements and have shared them generously, often without credit or thanks. These practices run counter to normative paradigms of care, and support “world making” possibilities more aligned with their own, and collective, liberation. Such qualitative shifts in consciousness and relation, and the wisdom and skills to bring them about, are an integral component of liberatory social reproduction politics, and are irreducible to a Marxian class and labor frame.
6. Conclusion
By bringing social reproduction theory together with radical self-care literature and practices, I hope I have shown that reducing care to labor, like reducing it to a moralistic individual imperative, risks depoliticizing the dimensions of emotional and embodied life that are specific to care and social reproduction as such, and thus limiting our ability to confront the crises and contradictions that afflict them. At odds with the intersectional, feminist achievement of the personal as political, this position overlooks the plurality of care practices needed to build and sustain horizontal politics in the present, and to counter the relational power dynamics that will surely threaten them from within.
In Luz en lo oscuro, Gloria Anzaldúa offers a powerful metaphor of reaching through our wounds and fractures to connect to others. “We are all wounded” she states, “but we can connect through the wound that’s alienated us from others. When the wound forms a cicatrix, the scar can become a bridge linking people split apart” (Anzaldúa Reference Anzaldúa2015, 21). Systemic harms create woundsFootnote 31 that alienate us from others, furthering cycles of violence and reinforcing their apparent inevitability. Violent inequalities of care long woven into the social fabric threaten to unravel it: ruptures in care bleed into political, ecological, economic, and moral crises and the contradictions that relentlessly follow even our best efforts to weave alternative communities of care across differences. Like the individual solutions of commodified self-care, which are at best a band-aid of the privileged, our structural diagnoses remain empty if they bypass the living intimacies through which these wounds are perpetuated, or healed.
Attempting to subsume systemic denials and coercions of care under the banner of labor and class limits what we can understand about this violence and what it will take to end it. Conversely, characterizing what Precarias a la Deriva term the “affective virtuosity” of care as a form of human productive activity, like reducing it to an individual moral virtue, flattens and depoliticizes care’s creativity and power. Care’s revolutionary potential, that is, not only to tend these impossible wounds, but transform them into something different, a changed and tender skin that might yield connections no longer rooted in harm.
Acknowledgments
I am deeply grateful and indebted to the many relationships and communities that inform this work. I want to thank the editors of this special issue, Dr Roksana Alavi and Dr Tempest Henning for their tireless work and care to bring it to the world. Thank you, Dr Margaret McLaren and Dr Farha Ternikar for the mentorship, feedback, and support on earlier drafts of this article, and to Dr Cinzia Arruzza for her long-term impact and enduring inspiration on this research. Many thanks as well for the wise editorial suggestions of Dr Angelica Stathopoulos, Dr Sandra Stephens, Dr Lisette “Ciclón” Olivares, B. Love, Mithra Lehn, Dr Zena Sharman, Dr Eliana Luxemborg-Peck, and Dr Eliza Wells. I especially want to extend my gratitude to the anonymous reviewers whose productive, thorough, and insightful comments were invaluable.
Kelly Gawel (they/she) is a feminist philosopher and scholar-activist and has been part of experiments in queer and feminist politics for almost 20 years. They received their PhD in philosophy from the New School for Social Research and her BA from the University of California, Berkeley. Gawel is Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Governors State University in Chicago. Her academic and public scholarship has appeared in multiple prominent outlets, and she was recently awarded the Iris Marion Young Prize for the best paper in feminist philosophy by the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP).
