Rearticulating Relationships of Care
rMa Thesis Cultural Analysis University of Amsterdam 15-06-2018
Content
Introduction...3
Objects of Analysis...5
Kinship and Care...6
Theory Matters...9
1.Care and the Nuclear Family in Truman Capote’s The Grass Harp...11
Reproducing the Nuclear Family, Reproducing a Family Model of Care...15
Breaking Away from Talbo Lane: Beyond the “Interpersonal Commerce of Customs”...18
Reading The Tree-house Reparatively...21
Care: a Question of Onto-Ethics...24
Conclusion...26
2. Not Quite Human, Not Quite Material: Conceptualising Careability through With Animal 29 “Make Kin Not Babies!” Staying with Haraway’s Trouble...31
Grief, Care and Sheep...33
Being with Nebulae: Imagining Relating Differently...39
Conclusion...43
3. Tracing Care Through Objects: Touching, Feeling and Seeing with Judith Scott...45
Finding Sustenance: The Artist and Her Work...46
Reading Texture: Untying the Subject-Object Divide...50
Disrupting Textures: Negotiating Scopic Regimes...52
Conclusion...56
Conclusion: Towards an Ethics of Careability...58
Introduction
Care is an elusive phenomenon. Some of the practices we consider care are tangible and easy to demarcate, for example healthcare or nursing a baby. But what does it mean to say that I care for you? Or that I care about the environment? Is care, as the subject – verb – object structure of these sentences indicates, always a one-way-street? In that case caring relations seem infused with power dynamics, as the caregiver can refuse to provide care, ask something in return, or make life-affecting decisions about the care recipient.
But often the distinction between giver and recipient is not clear-cut. Family ties, romantic relations and friendships often imply a certain reciprocity in their care dynamics1. If
that is true, in what kind of reciprocal relations is care involved? Can I only experience care from humans, or does a good cuddle with my dog also count as a form of care? And the pillow I hold at night, when its softness and the warmth it absorbs from my body help me fall asleep in a bed that feels too big and too empty? Does that count as care?
Clearly, care is a phenomenon with many aspects. It can be practical in the case of medical care, feeding, or even hugging. It also has an affective side: I can feel cared for as much as I can feel the desire to care for others who seem in need of attention, warmth, food, or moral support. Care as affect then may spill over into an ethical issue. People, animals, as well as objects need to be cared for as they often do not survive, let alone thrive, in a social vacuum, even if some humans seem prone to uphold a fantasy of self-sufficiency.
Why is it then, that we hierarchise and privilege participants in the way we distribute care, even despite the insight that we might all be interdependent? Is it only because it is practically impossible to bestow on everyone and everything we know the same amount of care, time, attention? Or are there other reasons why caring and being cared for seems to stick to some bodies and not to others? In any case, care is a question of intensity – for some
people, animals or objects (I think of fervent collectors here) we are willing to give a lifetime of care, at the cost of neglecting others.
The shape care takes is not only a matter of “feeling” or intimacy. The way our social world is organised influences who is a possible, or even compulsory, subject of care for us, either as giver or recipient. Where we grow up, how we are supposed to organise family life, the gender we are assigned by birth, but also our cognitive and physical abilities all influence the roles we are supposed to play in economies of care2.
These social norms can be quite stringent. Precisely the strictness of those norms concerns me in this thesis. Especially the spectre of the nuclear family ideal seems to haunt what counts as “good” care, distributing caring roles along gender lines3. Most care work,
paid and un(der)paid, is done by women. People trying to organise their care differently from a the nuclear family model encounter a myriad difficulties. They are often met with moral criticism and it can be hard or even impossible to find understanding and empathy, state legitimation and support, in short, the means to sustain these different formations of care4.
In this thesis I aim to investigate this normative notion of care and explore less normative varieties. I analyse three different objects, namely Truman Capote’s novel The Grass Harp (1951), Carol Guess’s and Kelly Magee’s volume of short stories With Animal (2014) and a 1999 photograph by Leo Borensztein of the fibre artist Judith Scott holding one of her sculptures. I try to figure out how they negotiate, resist and reformulate
(hetero)normative notions and practices of care that render alternative forms of those relationships invisible or illegible.
2 See Troubling Care: Critical Perspectives on Research and Practices (2013; ed. Pat Armstrong & Susan Braedly) and Nirmala Erevelles’ Disability and Difference in Global Contexts: Enabling a Transformative Body
Politic (2011) for book length, in-depth studies concerning the axes of differentiation and oppression that
structure the organisation of care on private, institutional, political and ideological levels in “western” society. 3 See Suzanne Day’s “The Implications of Conceptualizing Care;” first chapter of the abovementioned edited collection Troubling Care for a discussion of the relations between gender, family and the distribution of care work. A short discussion follows further on in this introduction.
4 See the texts mentioned in footnote 1; but also for example Judith Butler’s article “Is Kinship Always Already Heterosexual?” (2002).
In what remains of this introduction, I will first introduce these objects further and explain why I have chosen them. Then, I discuss the relation between the nuclear family ideal and care in some more detail, as the relation between the two forms the conceptual ground for this thesis. In the last part, I elaborate on the theoretical framework that informs my analyses.
Objects of Analysis
In the first chapter I focus on Truman Capote’s novel The Grass Harp (1951). The novel is populated by characters who do not fit into society’s normative framework in one way or another. They are unmarried or parentless, have difficulties to earn a living, and they are often stigmatised by the other members of their small town society somewhere in the South of the US. What interests me most in this novel is that a group of misfits tries to turn their backs on the society that fails them, and attempts to find a new mode of living together in a tree-house on the verge of town. Temporarily, they seem to thrive there, but in the end they yield to society’s pressure and are forced to return to life as it was before.
The main question in this chapter is: how is care organised before the tree-house, and in what respects does the organisation of cohabitation in the tree-house differ from that? Why do these characters seem to thrive in the tree-house, and why is this alternative organisation of care untenable? In answering this question I develop the notion of “affective economies of care” to account for the different forms of distribution of care the novel provides.
In the second chapter I extrapolate from the notion of affective economies of care the following question: when is life careable? Through a close reading of two short stories from With Animal, I develop the concept of ‘careability’ to try to answer that question – or, at least, to advance an understanding of why some lives are deemed careable and others are not. At the same time, I try to distil from those stories specific insights of what a different, less normative notion of care could be.
I choose With Animal, because all the stories in this volume are about humans giving birth to nonhumans. The specific stories I selected, “With Sheep” and “With Nebula” both portray kinship relations that exceed the human: the one deals with a human-animal pregnancy, and the other with a human-natural phenomenon pregnancy. Both pregnancies seem to incite practices of care as much as moral judgment and rejection in the subjects involved. What attitude towards others then, allows for acknowledging the careability of those others when other attitudes fail to do so?
In the last chapter I offer an analysis of Borensztein’s photo of Scott together with one of her art works. Scott’s sculptures generally consist of a frame of wooden, metal and plastic objects bound together by layers of yarn, thread, rope and textiles. The photo depicts Scott hugging one particular object, one that has roughly the same size and silhouette as her own body.
I analyse the ways in which texture mediates the relation between Scott and her work, but also between the photo and the viewer, to see how haptic involvement can constitute intersubjective relations that include a form of care, be it avowed or disavowed. The haptic aspect of care forms the final building block for an ethic of careability that I propose in the conclusion and that aims to bring together insights from all three objects. But first, I will explain in the next section where I start my conceptual work.
Kinship and Care
Care touches upon a wide array of topics. From healthcare and social policies to parenting, from informal and formal, unpaid and paid care work to affect and ethics. As an academic field of research, it draws on feminist ethics and philosophy (see Tronto 1993; Noddings 2013), the social sciences (for example Hamington & Sander-Staudt 2011; Armstrong & Braedley 2011) and disability studies (most importantly Kittay & Feder 2003, but also 2011;
Erevelles 2013). In feminist philosophy care functions as an alternative starting point for thinking ethics, often with an essentialising tendency towards “feminine” qualities. Research in disability studies, but also in the social sciences, often emphasises exploitative dynamics in paid and unpaid care work.
In this thesis I propose to look at care through the framework of kinship and to kinship through care. I use the idea of kinship to highlight certain types of care. The focus on objects in which family relations play an important part, specifies the scope of this thesis. I am most interested in care as affect and as ethical demand, and those aspects are most salient in intimate relations. A primary way of organising these relations, is through kinship or family ties. The blue-print of the nuclear family is inevitably interwoven with ideas, ideals and norms of care in complex ways.
In “The Implications of Conceptualizing Care,” the first chapter of the edited
collection Troubling Care: Critical Perspectives on Research and Practices (2013), Suzanne Day investigates the relation between the nuclear family and the concept of care. Day takes social policy as her starting point for investigating both institutional forms of care and the ideological framework that underlies them. She argues that policies “implicitly rely on and sustain a “family model” of care” (22). Care then, is often defined “as a private responsibility” and idealizes “care in the home as the best possible care, associated with feelings of love and security” (22).
This conception is problematic, however, because of “its implicit reliance on the unpaid care labour of women” (22). Drawing on a vast body of research, Day identifies three reasons for this5. First, women take up this form of labour more often “due to the gendered
division of labour in the home,” and second, caring is often associated with “women’s work”
5 Day bases her argument on a wide array of scholarship. For more background to her argument, see for example
Caring for/Caring About: Women, Home Care, and unpaid Caregiving (2004; ed. Pat Armstrong); Arnlaug
Leira’s and Chiara Saraceno’s entry “Care: Actors, Relationships and Contexts” in Contested Concepts in
Gender and Social Politics (2002; ed. Barbara Hobson, Jane Lewis & Birte Siim) and Trudie Knijn’s and
Monique Kremer’s 1997 article “Gender and the Caring Dimension of Welfare States: Toward Inclusive Citizenship.”
(22). Third, paid labour has in many places been organised according to the bourgeois ideal of “a male breadwinner model” (22). Thus, “good” care is defined in terms of a “family model” which leaves especially women vulnerable to economic dependency and exploitation.
Day’s argument evokes a set of questions. How is this normative framework experienced from the side of the care recipient? What about situations in which there is no clear distinction between giver and recipient? What are the punitive consequences of this normative framework for groups of people that cannot or will not comply to the nuclear family norm? And most importantly: what needs to change in our conceptual understanding of “good” care in order to prevent the multiple acts of exclusion such a framework performs? What her discussion makes clear, however, is the ongoing importance of the family ideal in thinking, practicing and criticizing care.
Of course, the Western and bourgeois nuclear family is only one possible shape kinship relations can take and none of the constellations in this thesis complies with the nuclear family norm unproblematically. As my analyses proceed through the chapters, a non-normative family constituted by human beings in The Grass Harp is followed by families consisting of humans, animals and natural phenomena – sheep and nebulae – in the second chapter’s close reading of With Animal. In the last chapter, I analyse Judith Scott’s intimate, affective relation with one of her sculptures.
Hence, I move from interhuman to interspecies relations, and finally to human-object relations. This structure serves a purpose. My discussion of Day above shows how difficult it is to define “good” care in terms of the heteronormative, nuclear family. My analysis of the distribution of care in situations that move further and further away from those norms, intends to make explicit the challenges that these objects pose to the hegemonic conception of care.
My goal is to figure out what can be learned from those challenges. I want to figure out how a concept of care can be reformulated so that it accommodates more than human
beings in their normative capacities, and is able to account for the interdependencies – entanglements with animals, natural phenomena and objects – that constitute us. I draw on a wide variety of theoretical texts to do so, because the different kinds of caring relations I analyse all ask for theories that take their specificities into account. I will elaborate on my these theoretical choices in the last section of this introduction.
Theory Matters
So, in this thesis I analyse three different kinds of caring relations: interhuman, interspecies and human-object relations. I focus mainly on the affective and ethical aspects of these caring relations. Underlying this sustained focus on relationality is the presupposition that every being, of whatever kind, is constituted through their relations. Always already entangled, always already dependent. However, those different kinds of relations between different entities require different theories.
In order to come to terms with human ethics, I focus on the work of Levinas, and on Judith Butler’s and Mari Ruti’s elaborations of his work. Levinas’ book Entre Nous:
Thinking-Of-The-Other (1991), Ruti’s Between Levinas and Lacan: Self, Other, Ethics (2015) and Butler’s Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (2004) and Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (2009) play a key role here. Their work takes an ethical stance on the premise that human beings are interdependent and even come into being only through their relations to others.
But their work is also thoroughly anthropocentric and fails to take into account the entanglement of human and nonhuman species. With Animal’s speculative fiction asks the reader to consider the ethical, affective and political boundaries of perceiving both kinship and care as exclusively interhuman practices. To counterweigh Levinas’ anthropocentrism, I introduce Donna Haraway’s Staying With The Trouble: Making Kin in the Chtulucene (2016)
and Karen Barad’s notion of intra-activity (see Barad 2003; 2007). Their work focuses on the interdependency of humans, nonhuman beings and other natural phenomena. At times their language as well as the planetary or even cosmic scope of their work sit uncomfortably next to Levinas and Butler, but the concepts they have to offer are too valuable to leave out.
In the third chapter my object is visual and haptic rather than literary. Interdependence still is a key concept here, but the theory I draw on deals specifically with visuality and tactility. Martin Jay’s “Scopic Regimes of Modernity” (1988) and Mieke Bal’s Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History (1999), as well as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s reading of Borensztein’s photo through the concept of texture in Touching Feeling (2003), all help me to account for the ways in which the viewer, photo and subject of representation come to co-constitute each other.
As a result, care as concept and phenomenon travels considerable distances in this thesis. At times it leaves its comfort zone and the encounters with theories from different times, places and contexts are sometimes difficult and uncomfortable, but also productive. In her article “Working With Concepts” (2009), Mieke Bal writes: “[w]hile groping to define, provisionally and partly, what a particular concept may mean, we gain insight into what it can do. It is in the groping that the valuable work lies” (17). That is what this thesis attempts: in groping for meaning, provisionally and partly, one sometimes touches upon something valuable, something worth holding on to. But, as the transitive verb “to grope” implies, this something is always other and never ours to keep. One must also be prepared to let it go again.
1.Care and the Nuclear Family in Truman Capote’s The Grass Harp Focal point of this chapter is Truman Capote’s novel The Grass Harp. The novel appeared in 1951 and was quite successful. Today, the novel remains in press and is still widely available. All the more remarkable then, is the text’s relative absence from academic writing6. Perhaps the interest in Capote’s glamourous personal life overshadows his literary
heritage; perhaps, this glamour even makes him unfit for the category of “serious writer,” or as subject of serious academic work78.
The Grass Harp however, is a very serious novel in my view, one that shows the workings of a small village society with remarkable insight and irony. The novel narrates the childhood of its protagonist, Colin Fenwick. After his mother’s dead, his father’s emotional instability leads his sister, Colin’s aunt Verena, to take Colin into her own household. Verena lives with her sister Dolly and their ex-servant Catherine in Verena’s house on Talbo Lane. Verena is the breadwinner and Dolly and Catherine divide the homework amongst
themselves. A conflict between Verena and Dolly, who is economically dependent on her sister, leads Dolly, Catherine and Colin to move into a treehouse.
Visited by other outcasts from the village, they seem to thrive there, on the margins of their small village’s society, as they take care of each other and try to make the best out of their precarious situation. Unfortunately, the tree-house situation proves untenable and under society’s pressure its inhabitants end up having to leave their temporary dwelling behind. They return to life as it was before, if only with a little more dignity.
6 See for an exception Thomas Fahy’s 2013 article “"It May Be That There Is No Place For Any Of Us": Homosexuality, Communism, and the Politics of Nostalgia in Capote's The Grass Harp.” However, some excellent literary criticism is written on Capote’s oeuvre more generally (see Joseph J. Waldmeir and John C. Waldmeir’s 1999 edition The Critical Response to Truman Capote.
7 During his life, Capote often wondered about this, and voiced his frustration about not being taken seriously. See for more biographical details Gerald Clarke’s Capote: A Biography (1988).
8 Even in academic writing the emphasis often lies on a biographical reading of Capote’s work, for example in Helen S. Garson’s Truman Capote: A Study of the Short Fiction (1992).
What interests me in this narrative is exactly the juxtaposition of these two different modes of cohabitation. At Talbo Lane, Verena’s household seems to be structured according to the nuclear family ideal, even though this ideal can only be approximated and never attained as the family does not consist of a married father and mother with their own children. In the tree-house however, the nuclear family template is absent altogether.
There seems to be a reinvention of what I call the affective economy of care that structures these ways of living together. I am interested in this reinvention because it makes visible both what it can and cannot leave behind; it is a hopeful gesture as well as a hopeless enterprise bound to fail. The question this chapter poses then, is: on what premises is the internal, affective economy of care of the Talbo Family built, and in what ways does the economy of care in the tree-house differ?
My starting point for thinking through affective economies of care is María Puig de la Bellacasa’s article “Nothing Comes Without it’s World: Thinking with Care” (2012). In this article, she distinguishes 3 aspects of care. First, there is care as a practical doing. Second, there is care as affect and third, care has an ethical dimension. She draws on Joan Tronto and Berenice Fisher’s much quoted, quite general definition of care, that defines “care as
including 'everything that we do to maintain, continue and repair “our world” so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, our selves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life sustaining web'” (198; Tronto as quoted in Puig de la Bellacasa; Bellacasa's emphasis).
So first, we have to actively do things in order to “maintain, continue and repair” our world. Second, we do so because we feel we care for our bodies, selves and environment, because we want to see them sustained and thriving. Third, we are also in some ways, in some cases, obliged to do so because all these bodies, selves and environments are as dependent on us as we are on them. This last point also forms Bellacasa’s critique on Tronto’s and Fisher’s
definition: we do not only seek to interweave, we are always already interwoven and this vulnerability obliges us to be responsible (198-199).
To account for the specific webs in which care takes place, I turn to Sara Ahmed’s notion of the affective economy. In her 2004 article “Affective Economies,” Ahmed writes that “emotions do things, and they align individuals with communities—or bodily space with social space—through the very intensity of their attachments” (119). An affective economy then, is the circulation of a certain affect that “align individuals with communities” and shape the way we relate to certain bodies in certain social spaces. They “mediate between the psychic and the social” (119).
Ahmed develops this notion to come to terms with large scale, societal issues, with “economies of hate” for example that centre around asylum seekers (122). I propose to attune the concept to smaller scale situations. In The Grass Harp, the social organisation of the family at Talbo Lane, and the reconfigured social organisation of the tree-house, seem to function as precisely such an affective economy. Care as affect “aligns” individual bodies to social organisations, or sometimes fails to do so. If people living together under one roof are co-dependent on each other, care as practice, affect, and ethical demand seem to attach them to each other through very intense bonds – with very intense consequences if it fails to do so.
Now, before I start to map the different affective economies that The Grass Harp proposes, the last issue I want to address is the relation between care and the nuclear family ideal. In “The Implications of Conceptualizing Care,” the first chapter of the 2013 edited collection Troubling Care: Critical Perspectives on Research and Practices, Suzanne Day elaborates on the social and economic issues bound up with ideas and ideals of care.
Answering some of the questions Tronto’s and Fisher’s definition leaves open, she argues that an implicit “family model” of care often structures practices of care, from care for children and vulnerable adults within a family, to social policy and health care institutions implicitly or
explicitly privileging, promoting and sustaining that model as the best possible form of care (22).
This family model is often critiqued, Day continues, for its “reliance on the unpaid care labour of women” (22). It associates caring with “women’s work” and underpins the bourgeois ideal of a family formation that economically depends on a male breadwinner (22). As such, this normative caring model re-inscribes the heteronormative nuclear family ideal, tying immediate kin and care closely together. In her problematisation of care, Day already shows how care and economy are implicated in each other.
Judith Butler makes a similar statement from a slightly different perspective in her article “Merely Cultural” in which she argues how gender, sexuality and economy “cannot be understood without an expansion of the ‘economic’ sphere itself to include both the
reproduction of goods as well as the social reproduction of persons” (40). As such, through a family model, care sustains not only the reproduction of certain “life sustaining webs,” namely the nuclear family, but through that family it also reproduces a certain economic model.
In my analysis of The Grass Harp I will draw on this theoretical context to come to terms with the two affective economies of care the novel proposes. I will first analyse the “family model” of care as it is lived in the Talbo household. Second, I analyse the fall-out between Verena and Dolly that leads Dolly, Catherine and Collin to move into the three-house, and lastly, I will analyse the shape care takes within the tree-house to see how it differs from the Talbo household and in what ways it succeeds, but also fails, to formulate a different care model.
Theoretically, this chapter brings together writings from a wide variety of authors, as the multiple facets of care ask for different theoretical angles; in my analysis of the family model, I draw on Nirmala Erevelles’ and Judith Butler’s work as they deal with social,
political and economic inequality. Emmanuel Levinas’ writing sheds light on the ethical deficit of Talbo Lane’s caring economy and helps thinking through Dolly’s, Catherine’s and Collin’s relocation to the tree-house. Next, I introduce Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s notion of “reparative reading” because it allows for an understanding of the function of the tree-house in the novel, as well as an understanding of the social critique the novel performs, Last, I turn to María Puig de la Bellacasa’s rethinking of care, in concert with Sara Ahmed’s notion of “affective economies,” because I can make the differences between Talbo Lane and the tree-house theoretically explicit through their thought.
Reproducing the Nuclear Family, Reproducing a Family Model of Care
First, I want to map out how the Fenwick-Talbo family, consisting of Verena, Dolly, Catherine and Collin relates to the heteronormative idea of the nuclear family, and how the shape their family life takes then relates to the distribution of care as labour in the time before the tree-house.
As I noted in my introduction, Collin is Verena’s and Dolly’s nephew. When his mother dies, his father goes mad with grief and Verena, his father’s sister, comes to haul Collin away because she thinks Eugene will not be able to care for him. Later on, Collin describes this as the moment when, “after my mother’s death, she’d come to our house to claim me” (93). Apparently, Verena is someone who claims, both property and people as will become clear throughout the story. She lives with her older sister Dolly, who in Collin’s words, “seemed someone who, like myself, Verena had adopted” (5). Catherine lives with them too. She was an orphaned girl who worked for Dolly’s and Verena’s father and so grew up with them.
Catherine and Dolly are good friends, spending most of their time together in the kitchen, talking and cooking, dividing the housework between them or looking for the
ingredients for Dolly’s famous dropsy cure, with which she earns a little pocket money (9-11). Verena on the other hand, is “the richest person in town. The drugstore, the drygoods store, a filling station, a grocery, and office building, all this was hers” (4). When at home, she spends most of the time in her room, that looks like an office (11).
Now, I would argue that in this household, labour and the access to capital are distributed in a heteronormative way, even if the family does not consist of a married father and mother with a child. Verena is in fact the pater familias. Collin tells the reader that “Verena in her heart wanted, I think, to come into the kitchen and be a part of it; but she was too like a lone man in a house full of women and children, and the only way she could make contact with us was through assertive outbursts” (11). She provides the rules and the money. Her position is further complicated by rumours of her presumed intersex condition and her attraction to a girl, Maudie, the only attraction or affection she is said to ever have
displayed (4, 7). Through the contradictions in her gender, sexuality and economic position, Verena, to quote one of Judith Butler’s famous sentences from Gender Trouble (1990), “fails to do her gender right” and becomes illegible as a normative subject in the town’s society (190)9. Collin observes that “men were afraid of her, and she herself seemed to be afraid of
women” (Capote 6). Her economic and therewith political power within the village are augmented by this, as the men’s fear for her makes them afraid to contradict her or compete with her (6).
Catherine and Dolly, on the other hand, function as sisters (having grown up together), friends and mother-like figures to Collin, as they cook, clean, and help with homework (10). This is in line with the “family model” of care as described in the introduction. The Talbo family does not live up this ideal perfectly of course, since Verena and Dolly are sisters, not husband and wife. However, their ways of living together seem to be designed on this model.
9 The sentence here speaks somewhat for itself. For background and in-depth discussion of Butler’s ideas on the performativity (and so, fallibility) of gender, see especially Gender Trouble’s last chapter, “Subversive Bodily Acts.”
In ‘The “Other” Side of the Dialectic: Toward a Materialist Ethic of Care,” the sixth chapter of her book Disability and Difference (2011), Nirmala Erevelles addresses the problems arising from the sexual division of labour that arises from the nuclear family ideal. She argues that feminist revaluations of caring skills and practices sometimes forget to take into account the economically dependent conditions under which such skills and practices thrive (176-177). Erevelles argues that this division is upheld by a “peculiar logic of caring that requires certain skills and virtues that make women especially vulnerable to this exploitation” (176).
Especially Dolly embodies this vulnerability, as she is said to be “sophisticated” about “all things natural,” to feel what she sees, and in writing letters to her dropsy cure patients she is seen to display a well-developed receptivity to the needs and desires of the those around her (The Grass Harp 6, 11). Part of Verena’s engendering the role of male, or masculine, breadwinner on the other hand, is her lack of these qualities and the consequent inability “to come into the kitchen and be part of it.”
When Collin has just arrived on Talbo Lane, he observes: “[p]ulled and guided by the gravity of Verena’s planet, we rotated separately in the outer spaces of the house” (6). This description strengthens the idea that the organisation of the Talbo household implies Verena’s autonomy and Dolly’s, Catherine’s and Collin’s dependency as its constitutive others. So, in the first part of the novel, labour is divided between the different characters in a way that seems to “gender” the family members into certain economic positions, leaving Dolly and Catherine financially speaking largely dependent upon Verena; it leaves Verena, on the other hand, somewhat unhappy, as her economic position goes hand in hand with the rumours around her sex and sexuality only to leave her an outsider both within and outside of her home. Care work then, is part of the household’s internal economy, but as such, also shapes the positions of the different members in the world outside it.
Breaking Away from Talbo Lane: Beyond the “Interpersonal Commerce of Customs”
This organisation of care work as it exists on Talbo Lane however, is about to collapse. In the second section of this chapter I analyse the fight between Verena and Dolly that leads Dolly, Catherine and Collin to move into the tree-house. This scene marks a turn away from the nuclear family model on which the economy of care at Talbo Lane was based. I want to analyse the rupture that produces this change because it lays bare a problem that is at the heart of the former household organisation and plants the seeds for their prospective reorganisation in the tree-house.
Trouble starts when Verena conceives of a plan to mass produce Dolly’s dropsy cure in order to make money. She has bought an old canning factory in town and without
informing Dolly beforehand, she asks her to prepare a dinner for her new business partner, Morris Ritz. When he arrives Verena forces Dolly, who is usually very shy, to share their meal. Only then do Verena and Morris tell Dolly of their plan and they try to coerce her into giving them her recipe. Dolly refuses and after the disastrous dinner that ends in chaos as Dolly breaks a crystal bowl and spills gravy on Morris, the two sisters have a fight (18-20).
Verena is upset that she organised “all of this” for Dolly only to encounter refusal, at which Dolly replies: “in my heart I love you. I could prove it now by giving you the only thing that has ever been mine: then you would have it all. Please, Verena (…) let this one thing belong to me” (20). Belonging here Verena then argues that she herself, in fact, is the person that has given Dolly everything, but her enumeration falters at “This house, that…” (20). This ellipsis is telling, because the reader never gets to know what else Verena gave her sister.
However, Dolly seems to understand what Verena means: “You’ve given everything to me,” she concedes (20). What interests me here is the fact that they both speak of giving, but apparently mean completely different things. Dolly goes on to argue that she and
Catherine have deserved their way a bit, that they “kept a nice home” for Verena (20). So, Dolly talks about the informal care work she has been doing in and around the house. Her gift consists of the cleaning and cooking, setting up and dressing up of the rooms in the house.
Verena, on the other hand, talks about giving property, something to be bought with money. She also downplays Dolly’s gift by stating how unhappy she is with the home: “[h]as it not struck you that I never ask anyone into this house? And for a very simple reason: I’m ashamed to. Look what happened today” (21). Dolly then apologizes, saying she “always thought there was a place for us here, that you needed us somehow,” but that she now understands Verena and will go away with Catherine and Collin (21). After this fight, Dolly, Catherine and Collin sneak away to the tree-house.
I draw attention to this scene because it hinges on Verena’s and Dolly’s different takes on what it means to care for one another. To understand this better, I take recourse to Levinas’ ethics of the face, as it elucidates the major reasons for Dolly’s departure as well as the foundations of the alternative community of the tree-house.
In “Breaking the Obstinacy of being: Levinas’ Ethics of the Face,” the first chapter of her book Between Levinas and Lacan: Self, Other, Ethics Mari Ruti attempts to come to terms with the consequences of Levinas’ thinking for post-enlightenment ethics. Ruti argues that Levinas tries “to move beyond the sovereign, self-contained I,” that he aims at “discrediting the sovereign subject of the metaphysical tradition,” because it fails to grasp that the “I” only comes into being face to face with the other (5, 7). Western Metaphysics, according to Levinas, “refuses this sociality, (…) it uses reason to assassinate alterity” (Ruti 10). The face of the other demands of “me” that “I” recognize them as beings eternally other, “a being whose meaning cannot be captured (tamed, conquered, domesticated) by concepts, the other as face defies generality (the genus)” (8). Or, in Levinas’ own words: “What escapes
Levinas understands the ethical demands posed by his understanding of subjectivity as a sociality prior to the social, as he writes that “[t]he interhuman is also in the recourse that people have to one another for help, before the astonishing alterity of the other has been banalized” and “has become established as an ‘interpersonal commerce’ of customs” (Entre Nous 101). So, before or outside of the “interpersonal commerce of customs,” that I
understand to be the thoroughly regulated and normalized social world, the presence of the other that constitutes the “I” as it is addressed by the other, poses on that “I” the demand to help, to be there for the other, as their otherness escapes domestication by any social order.
Going back to The Grass Harp, Verena is thoroughly formed by an understanding of being human as being a sovereign and self-contained “I” and thus she is unable to see beyond the “interpersonal commerce of customs.” What she conceives of as giving Dolly
“everything” is in line with her social and economic position within the household and the town. She demands in return an equal gift, namely Dolly’s marketable dropsy cure recipe. Dolly’s plea to let her keep the recipe to herself seems to come from an altogether different place. As she recognises Verena’s giving (“you’ve given everything to me”), but still refuses to give the recipe and highlights the work she has done for Verena, subsequently substituting the demanded gift of the recipe by the gift of her caring work, Dolly places the recipe outside of the economic circulation of “gifts.” Her attachment to the recipe is affective and not so much economical; her agony suggests that it is immensely important for the way she relates to the world. Her cry for help, for mercy from Verena, precedes or exceeds that economy.
Whatever it may be that binds her to the recipe and her practice of preparing the cure, Verena, for sure, has no sensibility to it, she has no feeling for Dolly’s “astonishing alterity”. Moreover, she is ashamed by Dolly because of her clumsiness and social anxiety. In a sense,
Verena “uses reason to assassinate alterity,” she denies Dolly’s difference, and formulates it as a shameful lack of the qualities a “normal” human being should possess.
Dolly, on the other hand, is quick to recognise Verena’s giving and I read her decision to leave as a revolt against that conception of subjectivity that is stuck within the
“interpersonal commerce of customs” and thus cannot grasp alterity, let alone ungraspability itself. Between Verena and Dolly, in this scene, two different conceptions of what it means to care, coming from two different places, overlap, clash and diverge: on the one hand, there is the conception of care – invoked when the sisters speak of giving and debate matters of exchange – as work both affective and physical that takes place within the household,
reproducing a division of labour that “genders” the household members into roles both social and economic.
On the other hand, there is the notion of care as recognition and help – in whatever form appropriate – that arises from the other’s presence, the other’s alterity, one that asks us to preserve and acknowledge that alterity without fully grasping it. This notion of care as an ethical demand seems to somehow precede and sidestep the notion of care that is imbricated in the world of social and economic exchange.
Reading The Tree-house Reparatively
Interestingly, it is exactly that notion of care as an ethical demand that comes to shape the mode of living together Dolly, Catherine and Colling invent in the tree-house. My analysis follows the narrative of the novel as these characters as they leave Talbo Lane and move into the trees. Since the tree-house is placed on the margins of the village’s society, it finds itself stripped largely from the social and economic framework that that society provides and this temporary disentanglement allows for a clearer understanding of how care as ethical question and affect always already circulates in human entanglements. In short, this allows for an
understanding of what affective economies of care entail. Juxtaposing the modes of living together of Talbo Lane and the tree-house then, foregrounds the social critique the novel performs.
So, when Dolly, Catherine and Collin have sneaked out of the house and move into the tree-house the following morning, they are soon joined by the other outcasts of the town. An orphaned young man, Riley Henderson, visits now and then, supplying them with food and news. In town, he usually wears “a tense, trigger-tempered expression, but there in the China tree he seemed relaxed: frequent smiles enriched his whole face” and he especially bonds well with Dolly and to a certain degree with Collin, who adores him (Capote 28).
Another person who soon joins is Charlie Cool, a retired judge pushed out of his house and ridiculed by his own sons. He arrives on the scene when Verena first comes to the tree-house with the Sheriff and the Reverend to get Dolly, Catherine and Collin out. The Sheriff claims he has come because this is “a matter of the law,” and the Reverend because this situation is unchristian, but the Judge, as he is called, points out there is nothing unlawful about the situation, nor did the Lord command them to chase them out, “unless, of course, Verena Talbo is the Lord, a theory several of you give credence to, eh Sheriff?” (33). He then decides to join.
Meanwhile, Dolly, Catherine and Collin are “peaceably setting about to make the tree-house cozy” with a scrapquilt and “a deck of Rook cards, soap, rolls of toilet paper, oranges and lemons, candles, a frying pan, a bottle of blackberry wine, and two shoeboxes filled with food” (30). Eventually, after Catherine is abducted and half of the village has marched out to besiege their stronghold in the china tree, they team up with the travelling sister Ida and her fifteen children to defend themselves. They then hear that mr. Morris has robbed Verena while she was only paying attention to the tree-house troubles, and that he has fled the village
with large sums of her money. Catherine and Collin see themselves forced to leave the tree and return to Talbo Lane.
Considering these events, my interest is not so much in the untenability of the tree-house situation, nor in idealising it as a lovely, warm, all-accepting utopia. One could even critique such an idealizing tendency in the novel as possibly sustaining a normative
framework that confines the freedom these people experience in the tree-house, with a certain cruel optimism, to the realm of hopes or dreams10.
Instead, my interest is primarily in what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick calls a reparative reading, In her text “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or You’re So Paranoid You Probably Think This Essay is About You,” Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick calls a critical paradigm she sees at work in much culturally oriented academic writing “paranoid” and describes “the present paranoid consensus” as requiring “a certain disarticulation, disavowal, and
misrecognition of other ways of knowing, ways less oriented around suspicion” and then goes on to argue that this “monopolistic program of paranoid knowing systematically disallows any explicit recourse to reparative motives” (144).
She proposes a conception of reparative reading to counterweigh this knowledge politics and argues that “to read from a reparative position is to surrender the knowing, anxious paranoid determination that no horror (…) shall ever come to the reader as new” and “to a reparatively positioned reader, it can seem realistic and necessary to experience surprise. Because there can be terrible surprises, however, there can also be good ones” (146).
Sedgwick continues that reading reparatively “will leave us in a vastly better position to do justice to a wealth of characteristic, culturally central practices,” sometimes reparative themselves, “that emerge from queer experience but become invisible or illegible under a
10 I use the term “cruel optimism” here in a rather “flat” sense; to indicate an optimism that has people believe in a betterment of their conditions that is highly unlikely to occur, an optimism that is, hence, cruel. For the origins of this term and a thorough elaboration of its meaning and conceptual potential, see Lauren Berlant’s
paranoid optic” (147). I do not necessarily draw attention here to Capote’s own queerness although, admittedly, that was one reason to discuss this novel. But I do want to envision the tree-house as precisely such a “surprising” space; for the characters it is born out of bare necessity and a feeling of displacement, of having nowhere else to go, and it is explicitly a temporary dwelling, not a definite destination.
Indeed, the tree-house assembly, being constantly under thread of erasure, is neither a utopia nor an idealization. It is, in Sedgwick’s terms exactly that: a surprise, an opening door to imagining “other lineaments of possibilities,” a glimpse of what it means to be otherwise (146). It provides, for the reader as much as for the characters, a possibility to learn from and about “the ways selves and communities succeed in extracting sustenance from the objects of a culture – even of a culture whose avowed desire has often been not to sustain them” (150-151). Especially so, if one takes “objects of a culture” to be a wide variety of possible objects like a tree-house, a pack of rook cards, a scrap quilt, or Capote’s text itself.
Care: a Question of Onto-Ethics
The question that arises from such a reparative reading then, would be: how do the people in the tree-house seize the possibilities of their unusual gathering? What changes in respect to their former homes and households? First, I want to re-emphasise the importance of a Levinasian idea of alterity. After conversing with Dolly for a while, the Judge calls her “a spirit (…). Spirits are accepters of life, they grant its differences” (43-44). He then goes on to talk about “the energy we spend hiding from one another, afraid as we are of being identified. But here we are, identified: five fools in a tree (…) no longer any need to worry about the picture we present – free to find out who we truly are” (44).
Apparently, that is not possible outside of the tree-house, in the village, as the Judge claims that “it’s the uncertainty concerning themselves that makes our friends conspire to
deny the differences” (44). Interestingly, the Judge twists the derogatory term “fool” here so that it allows such differences. The predicate of “fool” discharges its receivers from an all too constraining normativity.
This move can be considered what Maria Puig de la Bellacasa calls a “politics of diffraction.” She coins this term in “Nothing Comes without its World: Thinking With Care,” the second chapter of her book Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds (2017). This chapter is a reworking of the article quoted in the introduction to this chapter. Here, she propagates the creation of ““diffraction”: a politics of generating
difference, rather than mere “reflection” of sameness, and the fostering of accountability for the differences we try to make” (72)11. So, Puig de la Bellacasa is at the same time concerned
with the differences that we are and the differences that we make. She folds the ethical over the ontological.
She takes his idea of “diffraction” from Donna Haraway and their theoretical move relates to Levinas ethics of the face in interesting ways. Levinas’ ethics, that I used for my analysis in the first part of this chapter, is about the encounter with a vulnerable other whose life we are demanded to preserve. In contrast, Puig de la Bellacasa’s notion of diffraction seems to place emphasis on the fact that one generates difference and that the differences we try to make need to be fostered and accounted for.
So, both notions have a structurally different relation to “alterity,” respectively as something one encounters and as something one produces. However, to preserve the life of the other one must sometimes make a difference and the reflection of sameness, the inability or unwillingness to , might be exactly what kills the otherness of the other.
If one believes the Judge, this fostering of difference is easier in the tree-house than it is in town. Dolly’s politics of personal bonding, of negotiating the encounter with the face of
11 Puig de la Bellacasa takes up the notion of “diffraction” from Donna Haraway. See How Like a Leaf: Donna
the other that became apparent already in her relation to her dropsy-cure patients and that she refused to have erased by turning the cure into a mass-produced care commodity, a politics that also structured her fight with Verena, seems to thrive in the tree-house’s relative distance to the capitalist socio-economic structure of the village.
That it becomes the general foundation for the tree-house’s social organisation however, becomes apparent when Dolly starts missing Verena and contemplates her
precarious situation. Collin observes: “[i]n the dark one of us was crying, after a moment we knew that it was Dolly, and the sound of her tears set off silent explosions of love that, running the full circle round, bound us each to the other” (42). Dolly’s hurt, her vulnerability, incites “silent explosions of love,” and this “love” binds all the dwellers together.
Now, drawing back on Sara Ahmed’s article “Affective economies,” one can clearly see here that “emotions do things,” that “they align individuals with communities (…) through the very intensity of their attachments” (119). In this case, love is incited by hurt or, arguably, the affect of care is incited by vulnerability. Through emotions, but doings and objects as well – remember the food, the Rook cards, the eating and cooking together – care as affect and ethical stance becomes the very backbone of the affective economy of care in the tree-house.
Conclusion
So, the novel shows two different affective economies of care at work. In the beginning of the story, when the Talbo family still lives together on Talbo Lane under Verena’s rule, an affective economy of care based on a notion of the full human subject as autonomous and self-containing upholds a gendered division of labour and thus cannot go beyond the “interpersonal commerce of customs” to accommodate the “astonishing alterity” of its members.
In contrast, the affective economy of the tree-house is based exactly on such an attempt. Puig de la Bellacasa speaks of the differences that we are and the differences that we make. In her thinking, care folds the ontological, the question of being, over the question of ethics, the question of doing good. To her, requiring care is an inherent characteristic of being. In order to be true to these interdependencies, one needs to acknowledge the other’s specific ways of being dependent. This is also the case with Levinas’ work. For him too, the ethical demand issued by the other precedes any social order. It is posed by the very existence of the other. In the tree-house, the ethical demand to preserve and foster alterity, seems to align temporarily with the actual practice of caring, it becomes the principle on which their affective economy is based.
The affective economy of care at Talbo Lane freezes its subjects into fixed positions. Hence, it bars a sensitivity towards the inexplicable and unfixable needs and desires of the other, as soon as that other deviates from the set of expectations and expressions that comes with their socio-economic position. On the other hand, we have a temporary rearticulation of an affective economy that creates more space for the undefinable differences of its subjects.
There is a question however, that my analysis of The Grass Harp leaves unanswered. During a midnight conversation in the tree-house Dolly tells her companions: “Verena scolds at me for what she calls hiding in corners, but I’m afraid of scaring people if I show I care for them” and she continues to recount how she scared away a woman from the village once when she tried to offer her shelter and something warm to drink during bad weather (49). Here, once again, Dolly’s outcast status makes her illegible as a subject of care.
Who is legible as a possible subject of care is defined by the way an affective
economy of care is structured. Or, one could argue this the other way around: the legibility of certain persons as subjects of care affects the organisation of such an affective economy. This issue comes back throughout this chapter in many forms, as Verena and her housemates
cannot negotiate her position as breadwinner and head of the family to accommodate her desire “to come into the kitchen and be part of it all.” Next to Dolly, the village is rich in other outcasts who find in the tree-house a form of sustenance they do not find outside it. This issue boils down to the question: “when is a life careable?” This question does not only sit at the centre of the distribution of care, but also allows for an analysis of the organisation of care that starts from a specific care situation. It directs attention to a subject’s ‘careability’ and might help to focus an analysis of care as it draws attention to what counts as life, what counts as care, and on what premises this care is given or withheld at the same time. An attempt to understand what it means to ask this question and what the notion of careability may entail will be the focus of the second chapter.
2. Not Quite Human, Not Quite Material: Conceptualising Careability through With
Animal
In the first chapter of this thesis I focused on the ways in which the socio-economic world with its structures of exclusion informs caring practices in kinship constellations. In my analysis of The Grass Harp I have tried to make explicit on what premises an alternative way of “making kin” could be based, and what difficulties it might encounter.
The object of this second chapter takes imagining such problems and their possible solutions to a next level. This chapter will focus on two pieces from With Animal, a collection of short stories written by Carol Guess and Kelly Magee. The stories all play with the idea of giving birth; in every story a human character is pregnant, and often, indeed, delivers a baby. These babies however, appear in a wide variety of different entities: from dragons to storms to sheep to nebulae.
Commenting on their stories – they are truly “theirs” as the writers finished each other’s stories – Magee and Guess claim that one of the reasons for writing them was to celebrate and explore the possibilities of queer families consisting of nonnormative subjects12.
But these stories do more. As Clare Archer-Lean points out in her article “With Animal: Exceeding the Absent Referent through Maternity” (2016), they also break “the systemic discursive silence implicit in all forms of animal exploitation” as the focal points of the stories switches between those of the mothers and the children (24).
She argues that they problematise the ontological and therewith ethical distinction between “human” and “animal.” Because giving birth is exactly to produce an “other,” the stories emphasise both the “difference” in capacities between different beings, and their “indistinction,” as the mutual love and dependency between mother and child shows a shared
12 See “The Sudden and Stunning Stories of With Animal: An Interview with Carol Guess and Kelly Magee,” by Karin Cecile Davidson (2014).
sentience (29). In With Animal’s human-animal pregnancies, this dynamic is shown to transcend the categorisation of species.
I would add that these tales of kinship relations and practices ask their readers to rethink not only the different affects, but also the physical processes that surround the coming into being of a new life form. As such, they draw attention to care as an affect bound up with the physicality of what we consider “life.” Reimagining pregnancy as an interspecies business also foregrounds the ways in which care is not only bound to different bodies in different ways, but is also always embedded in institutional and discursive settings.
As a starting point for this chapter, and as a connection between the first and the second, I focus on the idea of “careability” that emerged at the end of the first chapter. If careability can serve as an analytical tool for elucidating the recognisability of subjects and their relations within affective economies, it is precisely because no subject would survive without any form of care13. Through reading “With Sheep” and “With Nebula,” two of the
stories from With Animal, this chapter aims to come to an understanding of what it may mean to be or not to be a subject of care.
My view of the volume as a whole is embedded in the practice of imagining “making kin” that Donna Haraway proposes in her latest book Staying with the Trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene (2016). So, before picking up With Animal itself, I first elaborate on some of Haraway’s writing and its possible relations to With Animal through its understanding of kin and babies.
In the first analytical part of this chapter, I read “With Sheep” and explore what careability could actually be and do. I question why some beings are careable and others are not. In order to answer these questions I will trace possible building blocks for this notion of “careability” in the work of Judith Butler as she reads Emmanuel Levinas. I draw on Butler’s
13 See for a discussion on the relation between care and the relationality of subjects “Nothing Comes Without It’s World: Thinking with Care,” the second chapter of Maria Puig de la Bellacasa’s book Matters of Care (2017).
notion of “grievability,” because it deals with care after death. The distribution of grievability that she analyses, can show something about how care is distributed in the first place. Levinas is part of this discussion, because his ethics of the face informs Butler’s ideas.
In my second close reading I analyse “With Nebula.” Here, I build on Karen Barad’s writing on intra-subjectivity, in order to develop a different way of thinking (emerging) life forms, a way in which care is more than, and different from, a suffocating practice infused by reproductive heteronormativity. I draw on her work because unlike With Animal, Butler and Levinas hold on to the human as ultimate ethical horizon. Barad’s work on the other hand, provides the tools for thinking care beyond the human.
“Make Kin Not Babies!” Staying with Haraway’s Trouble
Drawing on Donna Haraway’s work when discussing interspecies stories might seem an obvious move14. To the extent that With Animal, drawing on genres like speculative fiction
and science fiction, allows us to imagine interspecies relations differently, it is. I offer Haraway’s writing here as a way to extent my analysis of how care circulates beyond the interhuman, to be able to analyse the role of beings who cannot claim humanity, or even full materiality, as in the case of “With Nebula.”
In the fourth, short chapter of her book Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Donna Haraway invents the slogan “Make Kin Not Babies!” (102). She writes that “[m]aking – and recognizing – kin is perhaps the hardest and most urgent part” of reconfiguring the relations between humans and their fellow inhabitants of the planet as well as the planet itself (102). She argues that this reconfiguration is necessary for the survival and thriving of “critters”, both human and non-human, “in the midst of the earth’s sixth great
14 “Interspecies relations” seems to be Haraway’s middle name; see for example The Companion Species
extinction event (…) engulfing wars, extractions, and immiserations of (…) people and other critters for something called ‘profit’ or ‘power’” (4).
Haraway argues that we need to acknowledge that our existence is bound up with different interspecies entanglements. We must “stay with the trouble” of trying to survive and thrive within these entanglements as well as possible. “Making kin” is a vital part of this project as Haraway proposes “to make “kin” mean something other and something more than entities tied by ancestry or genealogy” (103). For her, “[k]in making is making persons, not necessarily as individuals or as humans;” furthermore, “making kin and making kind (as category, care, relatives without ties by birth, lots of other echoes) stretch the imagination and can change the story” (103). “Story” does not only mean fiction here, but also the ways in which we account for our interdependencies.
Haraway goes on to argue that feminist thought has busied itself with “unravelling the supposed natural necessity of ties between sex and gender, race and sex, race and nation, class and race, gender and morphology, sex and reproduction, and reproduction and composing persons” (102). But “[i]f there is to be multispecies ecojustice,” she argues, “it is high time that feminists exercise leadership in imagination, theory, and action to unravel the ties of both genealogy and kin, and kin and species” (102).
“Make kin not babies!” epitomises her contribution to this project. With Animal contributes to this project too. Of course, the stories are all about babies, but the babies problematise our understanding of “babies.” As such, the stories ask if we can imagine close kinship ties with nonhuman animals, if we can imagine this kind of care relations beyond our conception of the “normal” human.
Throughout my analysis of “With Sheep” and “With Nebula,” I attempt to stay with Haraway’s concerns. I try to think with With Animal to envision the relation between kin and babies differently. If the first chapter of this thesis tried to unravel the conflation of
“genealogy and kin,” what could be gained and complicated by the attempt to also unravel the ties of “kin and species?” What would such an unravelling bring to our understanding of who counts as subject of care, of whom is careable?
Grief, Care and Sheep
The first story from With Animal I want to look at is “With Sheep”. The woman in the story is pregnant with a sheep. This entails her growing a sheepskin and requires the prescription of body-adapting drugs that will facilitate the pregnancy and the birth. In the story’s worlding this pregnancy is apparently a bad thing. Mother and child are considered “woolies” by doctors and kin, a species discriminated against and often commodified for their precious skins (30).
The mother will return to her pre-pregnancy state of full humanity, but offspring of this kind is usually abducted and then, the suggestion is, killed or at least kept under poor circumstances for their wool. The wool is sold for high prices and used for expensive clothes. Medical institutions are far from supportive of these pregnancies, as the father of the child notes that “her doctor was a prick who thought all woolies should be quarantined or banished” (29).
The mother decides to give birth in secret. The one book her husband can come by on the subject of human - sheep childbirth is dubious: he figures that the “test-material was all half-wrong anyway, designed for vets and pawned off on woollies like they didn’t still have human anatomy” (30). In the middle of the story the point of view changes from husband to wife. It is through her eyes that we see how the pregnancy ends. She runs away mid-labour, because she sees the greed in her husband’s eyes: “You were waiting for me to birth what would market. You were waiting for money to fall from my purse,” she thinks, adding “no way in hell was I selling my baby” (32). She ends up in a so-called safe house, a barn, amidst
a flock of sheep, as a sheep, deciding not to resist a full transformation, slowly retreating from language.
This story shows how pregnancy and giving birth always imply different relations, practices and institutions usually assumed under the banner of “care.” In order to understand the relations between the different concerns that care theory deals with, Kathleen Lynch and Judy Walsh invent a graph in their chapter “Love, Care and Solidarity” from the edited collection Affective Equality: Love, Care and Injustice (2009). They distinguish three concentric circles of care work according to intimacy: love labour, general care work and solidarity work (40).
Within these circles, they locate different care issues along, on the one hand, an axis of intimacy, while on the other axis they place aspects of care like trust, emotional engagement, cognitive work, mutuality and physical labour (43). The criteria they propose to distribute different care issues to different regions of an academic field are sometimes problematic, as no single issue will fit the table neatly – as is, alas, often the case with these tables.
I draw attention to their work however, because “With Sheep” shows how a single story of pregnancy brings together a variety of relations and practices that would, according to this map, be miles apart. First, there is what they call “love labour” and physical labour in the capacity of the parents and the shepherd. Second, there is professional health care: the doctor, the body-adapting medicines and the care institutions to which the doctor and the drugs are linked. Next to those institutions, there are also the clandestine networks of the wool trade and the safe house. Third, there is the normative framework that stigmatises the mother and the child as “woolie.”
What seems to shape the roles of these different persons and institutions are exactly assumptions about what it means to care, who is the possible recipient of these different kinds of care and who is inclined to give it. “Woolies” in this story are commodities, hence not
subjects legible for care. This is exactly what affective economies do15. In this case, the
affective economy of care connects some individuals to social infrastructures, but not others. The affect of care sticks to some people, in this case the “normal” human, and not to others, in this case the woolies.
Instead of the question that Judith Butler asks in the subtitle of her book Frames of War (2009): “when is life grievable?” one could ask the question: “When is life careable?” instead. But what does that question of grievability, and its adaptation into a question of careability entail? And what conceptual work could it do? In order to answer that question, I engage with Judith Butler’s work on Levinas in the last chapter of her book Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence (2004), and various interconnected discussions in the later book Frames of War: When is Life Grievable?
In “Precarious Life,” the last chapter of her book by that same title, Butler engages the complex thought of Emmanuel Levinas in a slightly different way than Mari Ruti does in the work that I discussed in the previous chapter. Butler’s reading of Levinas’s notion of the face centres around a quote from Levinas’ work Peace and Proximity. He writes: “The face as the extreme precariousness of the other. Peace as awakeness to the precariousness of the other” (167). This notion of precariousness is what Butler specifically takes up. In “Precarious Life” she writes that to “respond to the face, to understand its meaning, means to be awake to what is precarious in another life or, rather, the precariousness of life itself” (134).
Butler then goes on to politicize this ethical demand of awakeness. Drawing on the example of the wave of shock and grief that the first photo’s of people suffering from napalm during the Vietnam war brought with them to the U.S., she writes that “if the media will not run those pictures, and if those lives remain unnameable and ungrievable, if they do not appear in their precariousness and their destruction, we will not be moved” (150). In this
15 For an explanation of Sara Ahmed’s notion of the affective economy see her article “Affective Economies” (2004). For a discussion on how I use the term, see the first chapter of this thesis.
sentence, the face that asks for awakeness to its vulnerability, becomes a political demand for public grief and action.
This extrapolation of Levinasian ideas from ethics to politics is a premise of the writing that follows Precarious Life. In the introduction to Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? Butler writes that “[p]recariousness implies living socially, that is, the fact that one's life is always in some sense in the hands of the other. It implies exposure both to those we know and to those we do not know” (14). The other way around, this equally “implies being impinged upon by the exposure and dependency of others, most of whom remain anonymous” (14). Butler turns away from Levinas’ notion of precariousness here. An awakeness to the vulnerability of the other and the obligation to act accordingly, is not something that comes about in a face to face encounter anymore. So, Butler’s politics of vulnerability goes beyond the individual perception of the face of the other.
Instead of ethics, we are dealing with politics here and moreover, with a politics that implies ontological claims concerning the relational and dependent character of beings. If a life needs to be sustained by other lives in order to thrive or even exist, that life can also be unsustained. In short, “[p]recisely because a living being may die, it is necessary to care for that being so that it may live. Only under conditions in which the loss would matter does the value of the life appear. Thus, grievability is a presupposition for the life that matters” (14).
Grievability is introduced here as a concept to come to terms with the question of why some lives matter and others do not. The notion of grievability functions as a means to
account for the workings of violent political conflicts. Answering the question of which lives can be grieved tells something about the ways in which senses of community are lived and performed to the benefit of some and not of others.
However, there is a sadness inherent to the concept of grievability, as it poses a question that is always only asked too late. It is not always possible to determine beforehand
