Lucile RICHARD | CEVIPOF- Sciences Po (original) (raw)

PhD in Political Theory (Sciences Po, 2023)
Associate Researcher at CEVIPOF, Paris.

At the crossroads of feminist understandings of feminized labor and anarchist and post-Marxist theories of revolutionary practice, my research centers on questions of contestation, politicization, and mobilization amid the care crisis. It weaves together different streams of feminist and queer theory, Black thought and disability studies to interrogate how critical theorists’ perspectives on resistance touch on matters of care. Its horizon is to open space, in feminist theory, to think about care work from a standpoint that troubles not only how we think about necessity and social justice but also freedom and community-building.

In my dissertation, I focus on one polarizing stream of critical thought that seeks to think resistance anew: theorists, such as Agamben, Mbembe, Esposito, Butler, Hardt and Negri, that discuss, in Foucauldian terms, strategies to counter the lethal logic of governmentality. I show that their attention to forms of precarization, as well as social and legal justifications of violence, tend to translate into liberatory projects in which the gendered, racialized and ableist organization of care stays problematically intact. I argue that, except for Butler’s, their understandings of freedom and community consolidate masculinist biases and lead them to portray as liberatory, practices that discriminate against those who are assigned to caring for others and those who are assigned to receiving such care. Against this counterproductive carelessness, my research makes a case for developing care-full strategies of resistance, that is strategies that tackle the unequal and failing organization of reproductive labor, domestic and dependency work.

My post-doctoral research seeks to revisit Foucault’s critical legacy to develop an abolitionist perspective on care. In contrast to theorists that focus on the relationship between sovereign power and bio-politics to rethink resistance, it offers to do so by reopening the genealogy of bio-power from one of its most neglected dimensions: the pastoral matrix of the government of life. Given that pastoral power, in Foucault’s work, describes a form of power based on care, it argues that exploring how it came about and continued to function alongside sovereign and bio-political forms of power can complexify feminist analyses of the organization of care today and provide decisive insights about how to resist the inequalities it generates. Building on erudite and disqualified knowledge around communal care, this work asserts that a queer and materialist perspective on the pastorate can highlight the processes of subjectivization that, both in private and public spaces, assign bodies to be caring, cared for, or uncared for, as well as collective forms of subversion of these assignations. Bringing together Black feminist perspectives on survival, ecofeminist understandings of the commons, and queer perspectives on performance and publicity, it delineates paths to rebuilding care outside the relationships of power on which it is currently based.
Supervisors: Frédéric Gros and Guillaume Le Blanc

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