Queering the ‚natural division‘ between care-givers and care-receivers?

In my paper, I would like to emphasize the binary division between care-givers and care-receivers, being naturalized within the so-called current care crisis. With this argumentation, I stipulate on a lack of discussion not only along the differences within care-receivers but also with a dividing line tied to intersectional power relations between those who are supposed to be cared for and those who are supposed to care, which seems somehow naturalized (Maier 2024). Among others Saidiya Hartman (2016) points to the fact that BIPoC or migrants, in most cases people who are constructed to be women, do the so-called ‚dirty work‘, but also to the functionality of doing that work for a white capitalist nation-state and the (social) reproduction of a bourgeois, heteronormative order. Through the focus on the care-givers and their conditions, the historically manifested differences between these two constructed groups seem to be mainly dropped from the feminist research agenda. This includes that the powerful construction of the phantasmic autonomy has to be analyzed not only who does the care work in keeping the phantasm alive (as care-givers) but to scrutinize the fiction of the autonomous self vis-a-vis the fixing of ‘the others’ in a naturalized sense, and therefore being forced to the vulnerable position due to standardized ideas of what bodies and health look like, as well as (racist) projections on certain bodies. I would like to elaborate further on the notion of nature used to legitimize this social order of inequality. This is especially urgent as this naturalization does not only serve right-wing politics to legitimize certain care regimes but also to critically engage with the feminist demand for ‚more care’ in a „structurally careless capitalism“ (Aulenbacher/Dammayr 2014). The normative implications of ‚good‘ care can be articulated as a dangerous romanticization of some communities (Joseph 2002) or moralities legitimized by a natural caring order. Based on the contradictions that come with this crisis of care as a crisis of social reproduction, I will unfold arguments on queering this ‚natural caring order‘.