Fighting with Family and Seeking Transformation through Care

Emma Slager, University of Washington, Department of Geography

Earlier this year, I attended a family wedding that took me into the company of uncles, aunts, cousins, and siblings. My family is big and rowdy with diverse life situations and political persuasions, and as is our custom, we did a lot of arguing about politics during the weekend we spent together, drawing a few concerned glances from strangers around us. As our talk ranged from health care to public transit and gentrification, I grew frustrated. I was unable to get my uncle to see my perspective about the Affordable Care Act, unable to convince my aunt that private bus systems set up by tech companies in San Francisco and Seattle might do more harm than good.

And yet, I think most of us left the weekend feeling closer to one another than when we’d entered it. In coming together from all over the country to support a family member getting married, we cared for one another. We made food for each other, gave one another rides, helped set up for the wedding and cleaned up after the reception, talked together about our struggles and joys, offered advice and compassion.

Reflecting on the experience of fighting with family, I wonder if the difficult conversations are worth it. Is it possible to build progressive change by working through our ideas together while we care for and support one another?

Alliance politics suggests that it is, that we can productively seek change through everyday interactions of care and support, rather than through politics of antagonism. In a speech titled “Bodies in Alliance and the Politics of the Street,” Judith Butler considers street protest in relation to the everyday bodily dimensions of collective action. Referencing protests in Tahrir Square during the Arab Spring, she said:

“Sleeping on that pavement was not only a way to lay claim to the public, to contest the legitimacy of the state, but also quite clearly, a way to put the body on the line in its insistence, obduracy and precarity, overcoming the distinction between public and private for the time of revolution. In other words, it was only when those needs that are supposed to remain private came out into the day and night of the square, formed into image and discourse for the media, did it finally become possible to extend the space and time of the event with such tenacity to bring the regime down.”

Butler here urges us to do away with a distinction between public space of action and private space of bodily support in our analyses of political action, between spaces of production and spaces of reproduction. Political action must always be supported by everyday action, and indeed, it is the carrying out of the daily activities of support—eating, sleeping, using the bathroom, attending to medical needs—in public spaces, as much as the ‘political’ activities of chanting, building barriers, and opposing security forces that make street protests effective struggles for revolution.

Although Butler does not draw on care theory in her speech, her discussion of the support that undergirds political action reminded me of care theory and of Joan Tronto’s article “Care as a Basis for Radical Political Judgments.” Where Butler examines the everyday work that supports public protest, Tronto considers the implication of making political judgments based on everyday care relations. Tronto defines care as “everything we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible” (142). Care is ubiquitous, evident in the ways that we care about, take care of, and give and receive care in our daily interactions with people and places. Care theory sees individuals not as rational actors who make decisions based on self-interest but as people “constantly enmeshed in relationships of care” (142). Therefore, unlike political judgments based on abstract and universalized principles of fairness or ‘justice,’ political judgments based on care take account of the needs and capacities of those involved in the specific and concrete situation at hand.

Both Butler’s and Tronto’s arguments hinge on erasing the distinction between public and private, on recognizing the ubiquitous, everyday relationships of care and support that undergird any kind of public politics. All of us are entangled in various communities and institutions in which we enact relationships of care, including our families, neighborhoods, workplaces, faith communities, or schools. How might we therefore go about building alliances within the institutions and communities in which we find ourselves by paying greater attention to care and the work of mutual support in order to transform our communities and our worlds? Below are some ideas of places to start.

Productively critique the power structures operating within a given community and in the broader systems in which the community is situated.

Sometimes, we need to call one another out. Our communities reinforce privilege and disadvantage, they contain and produce hierarchies, and they silence dissent. It is important that we not ignore these dynamics within our communities but that we challenge them from within. This is not easy work, and it can easily be misinterpreted as an attack on the community. However, it is essential work to do. Tronto writes, “in a society that took care seriously, people would perceive greater and wider forms of care as within their self-interest” (146). One way in which we can seek to transform our communities is to help those we are in relationship with to affirm and practice such greater and wider forms of care.

Strengthen the voices of the marginalized within the community.

This involves a process of stepping up and stepping back as we recognize that different members of any community are of course differently situated. When we find ourselves in marginalized positions, we can speak back to those in positions of power and proclaim our equality. And, understanding that marginalization also produces great vulnerability, when we find ourselves in positions of privilege, we can push back against that privilege. In this effort, I have found these suggestions from Mia McKenzie (http://www.blackgirldangerous.org/2014/02/4-ways-push-back-privilege/) to be wise and helpful.

Introduce new voices into the community.

A third way to seek transformation is to introduce new voices into the community. We can demand initiatives to increase enrollment of underrepresented minorities in our universities, and we can welcome marginalized neighbors as full members into our faith communities. We can build long-term partnerships across neighborhood groups to fight for policies that benefit all of our cities’ residents, and we can introduce our disparate family members, friends, and coworkers to one another, asking them to care for each other across lines of difference. At their worst, communities are sites of exclusion, but an alliance politics premised on care requires inclusive communities that are open to being transformed by new members.

These strategies are of course limited and insufficient, and it is vital to remember that we ourselves need to be transformed as well. As Tronto warns, we must not romanticize care. But in caring for others and in being cared for, we not only help sustain ourselves and our communities, but we also lay foundations for political change built through everyday alliances.