This paper investigates the temporal characteristics of collective care as a central praxis within abolitionist feminism in the UK. Drawing on qualitative interviews and creative research with feminist and queer abolitionist organisers across the UK, I explore how activists experience and enact care as a practice, politics, ethic, and affect. These abolitionist practices of care include detention visitations and care packages; transformative justice processes; penpalship with incarcerated queer people; mutual aid; resisting immigration control; defending community spaces; building disabled ‘care webs’; and solidarity pickets.
Analysing care through the Marxist feminist temporal framework of power-chronography (Sharma, 2014), I argue that these practices do more than address immediate needs: feminist abolitionist care forms a crucial part of a spatio-temporal struggle against the crisis-ordinariness (Berlant, 2012) of racial capitalism and carceral regimes through which temporal socialities — shared time and futures — can be built. The temporalities of care are both contradictory and ambivalent: care failed or frustrated my participants, often perpetuating the gendered, racialised, and classed burdens of caring labours. Whilst these ambivalences of care endured, they had potential to engender new experiments in alternative and collective modes of caring.
I argue that care (with its experimental, dialectical, critical and ambivalent temporalities) is a form of concrete utopic practice (Bloch, 1986; Muñoz, 2009): a politics of hope rooted in everyday survival, affective transformation, and material collective struggle. If feminist abolition is both a revolutionary vision of the future and a demand towards activity in the everyday, care is the thread between these two orientations: an enduring political strategy that both sustains life and social movements in the present and offers glimpses of alternative futures outside the institutions and technologies of racial capitalism.
