Queering the politicization of care work

Since the 1970s the politicization of care work proves to be a continually relevant point of feminist critique. For what was intended with the campaign Wages for Housework, we find again today in the demands of the Care Revolution, the global Feminist Strikes or in the local labor struggles of migrant care workers: Feminists fight to make care work and its gendered and racialising dimension visible and thus for a material and symbolic valorization of it. They do so in a social context in which this work is specifically made invisible, naturalized and devalued. As a feminist critique on capitalism, this politicization of care work points at the necessity of this specific mode for the functioning of a global capitalist society – which becomes even more evident in the context of the corona pandemic. In my dissertation I analyze different struggles for the (re)valuation of care work in the german speaking context, and what assumptions of (gendered) subjects and also discourses of autonomy and dependency go along with it. As in the panel description outlined, I will use queer and trans feminist approaches in my dissertation for investigating global capitalism and the struggles against it – specifically the transnational gendered division of care work – and its politicization. Due to an increased recognition of an intensifying „care crisis“ – also as a care supply crisis – more and more different political responses become relevant. Within the discourse around the so called care crisis, we observe an increasing use of the notion of solidarity, rising symbolic valorization of certain care activities, but also actors who seek a „back to the traditional nuclear family model“. In both right-wing and left-wing political demands specific subjects are constructed and referred to – which I would argue, as specific autonomous subjects, framed through individualistic and also essentialist lenses. In the paper I propose for the panel, I will spotlight on the western (and also white feminist) idea of an autonomous subject and its intertwined discourses of essentializing gendered bodies and a specific organization of care work that comes along with it. In my presentation I will ask for a radical queering of the anti-capitalist struggles for a different distribution and (re)valorization of care work within a transnational perspective. With this analytical line of argumentation, I stress that anti-capitalist struggles are only such when they go beyond essentializing the caring subjects and the capitalist institutions that reinforce and stabilize this gendered order. Moreover I will argue that this queering of the politicization of care work is already observable in current feminist struggles.