Towards an "Otherwise" of Care

Abstract (English)

In both clinical encounters and everyday acts of care—whether with patients, loved ones, or neighbors—there are moments that tug at a fragile, ephemeral thread. These moments reveal that the world is constructed around a presupposed mode of relationality—a specific way of being with others that is taken for granted. Drawing on Judith Butler’s theory of performativity and Louis Althusser’s account of ideology, I argue that care contains within it marginal spaces of potentiality: moments that challenge normative understandings and open up imaginaries for what care could mean, allowing for a “radical rethinking of the psychological presuppositions” of what it means, and could mean, to provide care. These moments allow us to contest care’s supposed naturalness and originality by exposing how its gestures and enactments are performative—fabricated and sustained through corporeal signs and discursive practices (Butler 2002). They reveal that our understanding of care, along with its dialectical entanglements, is not innate but ideologically constructed through material practice. As Althusser notes, ideology is enacted through “material actions inserted into material practices governed by material rituals” (Althusser 2014).

Based on ethnographic research with clinicians in both “formal” and “non-formal” healthcare settings, as well as with mutual aid free clinics across Los Angeles, this paper examines how “non-normative” practices of care destabilize the category of care itself. I ask: how do these moments of instability shift both the imaginary and material dimensions of what it means to care for another? And how might such shifts make space for a “radical shift in one’s notion of the possible and the real” (Butler 2002), as well as a movement toward “creat[ing] real liberatory solidarity” (Dubal 2021)?