Geographies of care: spaces, practices, experiences (original) (raw)
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Care and the Common alisa del re, university of padua translated by timothy s. murphy, university of oklahoma One day Toni Negri asked me to think about how the common could be articulated in the sphere of reproduction, in the family, among the affects. Horrified, my thoughts ran to Charles Fourier, to the phalansteries, to the putting in common (messa in comune) of the sphere of sexuality of men and women. And then they turned to the communes of 1968, 1 to which neither Toni nor I had given more than a distracted and amused glance. On the other hand, the reflection led me almost spontaneously to Herland, the land of women. 2 There a rather racist feminism (only white women in perfect health allowed) imagined an ecologically organized society in which the putting in common of reproduction and its centrality was presented as the overcoming of conflicts and the attainment of a shining (and perhaps a little boring) social life. I did not accomplish anything, but the thought gnawed at me. How could something private, something that was as sedimented in practices and in sensibility as the care of dependent people, be made common? Moreover, it was not easy to think of putting in common what had already been defined by many feminist analyses as the complete exploitation of the labor furnished by women without pay and by means of coercion, the material, concrete, but obscured basis The translator would like to thank Maurizio Vito for his very helpful suggestions for refinements that have improved this translation a great deal.