Abstract
This thesis is positioned within a conjunctural crisis that involves the deterioration of our social reproductive capacities. Even though the discourse surrounding care, spurred by the advent of the Covid-19 pandemic, has taken on a central role in various critical academic perspectives and activist initiatives, this lexicon has also been co-opted by government discourses, corporations, and digital platforms, often to endorse profit-driven policies and facilitate cuts to public services. This thesis aligns with the imperative to politicise care labour through its socialisation and aims to counteract its reduction to mere rhetoric. To address this, it provides a critical analysis of the nuanced and structured debates on social reproduction and care labour advanced by feminist Marxist and decolonial social movements and scholars, while scrutinising the current conflicts emerging in these fields.To analyse the ferocity with which the current economic, political, and cultural system increasingly renders specific bodies and territories disposable to support the good life of others, this thesis proposes and develops the conceptual framework of a “Necropolitics of Care.” This framework reflects the capitalist model of organising care as rooted in patriarchal norms and colonisation regimes, which today renews itself by incorporating the qualities typical of social reproduction into the productive sphere: From the precarisation of labour and the privatisation of care labour and provisions, to the pervasiveness of digital platforms in our daily lives. The Necropolitics of Care aims to unmask the long and violent genealogies of the extraction of (non)human workforces and resources, highlighting the profound link between our societal necropolitical assumptions and a model of organising care under capitalism that thrives on the sexual and racial division of labour. Those who provide care are mostly feminised and racialised bodies, while those who are cared for are predominantly middle class affluent white people.
Amidst the deterioration of living conditions, by employing militant research methods, this thesis observes the growing attention given to care practices by separate groups of activists. Starting after the 2008 financial crisis onwards and taking inspiration from the recent transnational wave of feminism that erupted in 2015, this thesis examines how activists started to organise themselves and focuses on an analysis of three case studies based in Southern Europe—Obiezione Respinta, Territorio Doméstico, and the PostWork Group. These organisations are actively involved in rethinking and reorganising care labour and provisions in crucial areas such as reproductive health, the working conditions of outsourced domestic labour by migrant women in Western homes, and access to basic income. The strengths and limitations of these projects show various attempts to dismantle the capitalist dominant model of care by putting into practice “pragmatic utopias” that critically interrogate the care dynamics between humans, other living beings, spaces, and digital technologies. On one hand, these organisations socialise the risks of care needs, burdens, knowledge, and provisions to address very material survival-related issues. On the other hand, they reveal new forms of living together.
This thesis will explore potential political strategies and alliances among various actors and conflicts in the field of social reproduction by highlighting two main aspects. First, that the body, increasingly dematerialised on digital applications and platforms, remains the main site of exploitation and capital accumulation. Second, that the practice of reorganising and rethinking care labour inevitably implies rethinking and reorganising the so-called productive sphere. These aspects underscore that what is at stake when thinking about care is not merely a question of revaluing the unvalued labour that sustains life, but a matter of revaluing value overall. Only within this nexus does the call to place “care at the centre,” frequently repeated in recent years, have the power to re-politicise and de-romanticise the discourse on care to transform the ways in which to cohabit this planet.
| Date of Award | Jul 2024 |
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| Original language | English |
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