Mutiny of the Body

This project presents a loose framework for understanding and repairing hegemonic social depletion. Social depletion refers to the critical gap between outflows- domestic, affective and reproductive- and the inflows that sustain their health and well being. Social depletion might be measured in terms of mental health, physical health, or the health of communities. In identifying the distinct interpersonal, systemic, and economic deformations of neoliberal capitalism my interest is in mapping a constellation for radical care and repair autonomous from the grasp of the mutated nation market state.

I. Mutiny of the Body: Constellations Towards a Radical Ecology of Care

This project presents a loose framework for understanding and repairing hegemonic social depletion. Social depletion refers to the critical gap between outflows- domestic, affective and reproductive- and the inflows that sustain their health and well being. Social depletion might be measured in terms of mental health, physical health, or the health of communities. In identifying the distinct interpersonal, systemic, and economic deformations of neoliberal capitalism my interest is in mapping a constellation for radical care and repair autonomous from the grasp of the mutated nation market state.

To recognize the centrality of care in contemporary world building is to recognize care as a form of agency and resistance. The way we think about care is deeply rooted in our social, economic and political values. How and why can relational ethics of care embody a radical political practice? The deficiencies of hegemonic social depletion in financialized neoliberalism are twofold: the extraction of labor from disenfranchised citizens and migrants who occupy the working class sector of care, and the exhaustion of the productive force behind immaterial labor. How can we frame the genesis of care as an ecology, a public value, and embodied practice for economic and political resistance.

Who creates and maintains social bonds? Where are they currently replenished and by whom? What do we mean by care economies? What does the body mean as a category of social and political action if we think about the body as a workplace? How does the body reproduce the power of the nation state? There is no social change, no cultural or political innovation, and no economic practice that is not expressed through or on the body. More specifically still, I am interested in discussing the kind of labor that exists outside of the mainstream market economies, whose bodies provide civic flotation to the wealthy upper and middle class. This series I will publish in the coming weeks will be looking at the ecology of care maintained and perpetuated by sex workers.

Last week I was interviewed on Radio AVA in London. We discussed an expanded definition of care that includes economies of pleasure, sex work, and types of service work that allow for the regeneration and maintenance of our bodies and minds. As an embodied practice, interdependent care is not reliant on capitalist power structures, but rather it is reliant on the formation of community. On the show we discussed care ecologies in sex worker communities, once again upholding the interrelationality of any sensorial and or emotional labor, and the positive and negative associations between social reproduction and sex work. (A full recording and transcript of this interview will be made available soon)

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The term ‘Social Reproduction’ broadly refers to forms of activities, capacities, and labour that replenish and reproduce ‘productive’ humans under capitalism. It is the work of making and remaking people both on an everyday level and on a generational level, reproducing and replenishing the bodies that become potential labor power. Care is the expanded field of social reproduction, and while these terms are not inherently interchangeable the terminology of care has come to define a more complex understanding of what social reproduction can be. Redefining care as both a collectivized value and a collectivized practice allows for a broader analysis of how the reorganization of ‘care work’ can have profound implications for larger social, political and cognitive repair.

Care requires not only nurturing relationships but also the physical and mental work of taking care of, cleaning up after, and maintaining bodies. This includes the professionalized sector of domestic work and what may be considered “immaterial labor” such as jobs implementing caring duties that used to be allocated to the home, schools, hospitals, hospices, nursing homes, care facilities for disabled people, funeral homes etc. which includes necessary manual domestic labor such as cleaning, preparing food, removing waste. Care includes economies of pleasure such as sexual work, types of service work that allow for the regeneration and maintenance of the bodies and minds. It can be situated as caring for, caring about, care-giving, and caring with. An expanded definition of care also includes the capacity for communities to feel emotionally supported and connected to their neighborhood and their extended kin beyond the immediate institution of the family.

Focusing on care in economies of pleasure such as the multi-faceted forms of sex work and types of service work that allow for the regeneration and maintenance of the bodies and minds, let us examine the personal and public forms of care. What are the dimensions that join to generate “integrated act of care”, the affective and ethical dispositions involved in concern, worry, and taking responsibility for another’s well being. In this way, caring about and taking care of are both extremely personal and simultaneously relational whether the embodiment of those terms might take the shape of preparing a meal for your kin, providing a BDSM spanking session, or providing an emotional space for listening and sharing with colleagues. In the realm of sex work communities, these practices are an essential part of the maintenance of social (and anti-social) bodies both as services to clients, as well as services to one another. Communities of sex workers are not unique in the necessity of mutual aid, mutual support and collectivized care. They are one of the many kinds of communities of laborers that are negated, discriminated against and or criminalized in one form another. The philosophy of care in sex work is a theoretical exercise through which we can look at the philosophy of care as a practice based on interdependent responsibilities to one another, corroborating a radical ecology of care that is non-hierarchical and altogether collective.

II. Mutiny of the Body: On Sex Work and the Political Economy of Care

In this essay I want to continue looking at sex work as a dimension that generates what Joan Tronto calls “integrated acts of care” or the affective and ethical dispositions involved in relational practices of fostering attention and holding space for another human. In my previous essay, I discussed the idea of an ‘ethics of care’, introducing my research on care in economies of reproductive labor, such as service work, pleasure economies, domestic work, and sex work as forms of labour that allow for the regeneration and maintenance of the bodies and minds. Here, I will expand on what I mean by an ‘ethics of care’ and the integrated acts of care that permeate those ethics. I will discuss the entanglement of care, sex work, and gender; the historical pitfalls and the generative/contemporary considerations of those fields.

Joan Tronto’s “Ethics of Care”

Joan Tronto articulated the dimensions that join to generate an “integrated” act of care: the affective and ethical dispositions involved in concern, worry, and taking responsibility for other’s well being such as “caring about” and “taking care of”, need to be supported by material practices- traditionally understood as maintenance, or concrete work involved in actualizing care, such as “care giving” and “care receiving” (Tronto 1993, 105-108, Sevenhuijsen 1998). The distinction between “taking care of” and “care giving” does not separate these modes of agency. A politics of care engages much more than a moral stance; it involves affective, ethical, and hands on agencies of practical and material consequence.”

Relying on the feminist ideals culitivated by Virginia Held, Carol Gilligan, and Joan Tronto in the 1980s (quoted above) I want to examine the opportunities in re-defining an ‘ethic of care’. Similar to contemporary notions of social reproduction theory, an “ethic of care” provides strong arguments that presuppose an end to the profit motive’s reign over interpersonal economies. An ethic of care reorganizes the class politics of care to be a collective ecology rather than one of values concerned with self interest or privatized commodity. In as much as neoliberalism is not only a description of economic life, but also an ethical system that posits the hierarchy of the individual over the community, a contemporary ethic of care demands the organization of social and political values over economic ones, taking into account the way that the values of neoliberal capitalism allow the market to dictaxte our relationships to one another.

In an interview with Dissent Magazine, Nancy Fraser eloquently breaks down the idea of a “Crisis of Care” and the intersection of social depletion and neolibieral economics. “In capitalist societies, the capacities available for social reproduction are accorded no monetized value. They are taken for granted, treated as free and infinitely available “gifts,” which require no attention or replenishment. It’s assumed that there will always be sufficient energies to sustain the social connections on which economic production, and society more generally, depend. When a society simultaneously withdraws public support (day care, childcare, meal distribution, community recreation centers, health care) for social reproduction and conscripts the chief providers of it into long and grueling hours of paid work, it depletes the very social capacities on which it depends. The current, financialized form of neoliberal capitalism is systematically consuming our capacities to sustain social bonds, like a tiger that eats its own tail. The result is a “crisis of care” that is every bit as serious and systemic as the current ecological crisis, with which it is, in any case, intertwined.”

Fraser’s description of social depletion locates a very useful analyses of ‘the social body’ pinpoint the economic hierarchy of production over reproduction in maintaining and sustaining bodies, as well as the relational maintenance that is mis-negotiated in said hierarchy. Nancy Fraser articulates the social depletion that has become hegemonic, that is to say, nearly universal both within the context of neoliberalism but also in the context of a global pandemic that starves many communities of public support for social reproduction. Herein lies the opportunity to radicalize and redefine care both as a solution and a theoretical praxis.

Social repair then, is a project for engendering new forms of co-existence that can replenish said depletion. It is a project for radical tenderness, networks of emotional support, collaborative pedagogies, intimacy, pleasure, interconnectedness and rest. The project of reclaiming agency within problematic structures is synonymous with collectivized care and repair because the nature of affect, social replenishment, empathy, and emotional support is fundamentally a pluralized experience dependent on the feedback loop of human relationality. Equally important, if not more important than a socialized economic restructuring of care, is the paradigm shift of interdependence. An ethics of care beyond mere survival (which, as a human species, we have not yet achieved) is contingent upon the collective discernment of needs. We might also phrase this as collective accountability or the consideration of responsibility to not just the personal household, immediate family, or individual survival, but also to a wider spectrum of kin such as neighbors, friends, mutually consensual sexual players members of our local communities who need more support. Where the state is not accountable to itself, local and global networks of care can be accountable to one another. This is the expanded definition of care I hope to elevate, and through which I want to frame sex work.

The economy of personal growth, well-being, intimacy, self-hood, and the value of “authentic” interaction be it engineered or not- carves out a space both for existential vulnerabilities and the socially reproductive forms of labor that those vulnerabilities demand. The sex industry, varied in all its forms (criminalized or not) is an example of an economy that relegates emotional labor as a commodity. Sex work has existed as an economic sector of relationality for centuries- almost as long as reproductive labor has been designated to women. I wish to identify the way that sex work has historically been a source of emotional, physical and psychic replenishment to both the working and middle class yet has never objectively been assimilated into mainstream economies of care. Despite sexist legislation riddled with reactionary hypocritcal moralism, sex work is an active economy all over the world. In all its forms, sex work provides attention, emotional and physical stimulation, amusement, pleasure, intimacy, and various degrees of emotional labor on a transactional basis.

Care ≠ Femme

There are various pitfalls in the political landscape of care and gender. The problematic nature of those pitfalls involves an assumption that sex workers are performing gender and thus are providing care as part of that performance. Emotional labor in sex work, and arguably all work, refers to the invisible yet highly necessary work of keeping other people comfortable and happy- historically attributed to ‘feminine’ or ‘maternal’ gender performance. This stereotype here is deeply regressive as it binds domestic work to care to sex to feminity. It also binds services in sex work to gender performance and a gender binary that is wildly inaccurate. These are not the appropriate avenues of exploring care, gender, or sex work by any means.

The social and political value of care has been a substantial bedrock of feminism and the fight for gender equality where unpaid reproductive labor is exploited as a national resource. My analysis of care is firmly rooted alongside the pillars of reproductive feminist theory, its legacy, and its contemporary embodiment in current forms of capitalist critique. In this section I will reflect on the synapse and ambivalence in anchoring a revolution of care in the doctrines of feminism.

There is an economic compulsion towards a gendered division of labor, as women have been the labor force procreating and reproducing capitalist subjects (bodies) for centuries. As Silvia Federici argues in “Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction and Feminist Struggle”, the class that performs this work is the epitome of precariousness and furthermore is made up overwhelmingly of women. Trajectories towards repair proposed by feminist movements for the last 50 years demand solidarity and fortified socialized support of the jobs that have historically been the biopower behind ‘care work’ such as educators, service workers, childcarers, nurses, house cleaners, sex workers, midwives, and home carers. Despite the stratification of domestic and reproductive labor beneath production, the domestic sphere is central to economic and political life. Feminist social movements today successfully delineate the manipulation of a gendered workforce that is enmeshed in the exploitation of intangible labor via the institution of marriage. However, I will note that there is a tendency is mainstream feminism to diminish the true role of slavery and race that continue to perpetuate gender violence and disproportionally affect caregivers all over the world.

A proposition for the radical genesis of care should not be confined to gender because gender violence is not freestanding. The entanglement of social reproduction, care, engendered labour are tedious. That being said, my aim in this essay, is to calcify the notion that an expanded definition of care as a radical and holistic ecology will posit sex work at the forefront of maintaining the social body and in doing so (radicalizing care, means) dis-associating the term from it’s historically gendered connotations. Sex work is not a performance of gender so much as it is a performance of collectivity and care. It must be liberated from it’s historically gendered framework. As I attach ‘an ethics of care’ to the labour force behind sex work, I want to dis-integrate care from its gendered associations. I discussed this among other things on Radio AVA in October.

Towards a Commons That Supports Sex Workers

Sex work, the pleasure economy, and forms of emotional labor are provisions of care and need not be overlooked as we embark on a new year of social repair and recovery from the alienation we have experienced through a global pandemic. It is a provision of care that engenders forms of coexistence fostering radical tenderness, raw sensorial experience, networks of emotional support, intimacy, pleasure, interconnectedness, and rest. The consideration of sex work is a rudimentary part of social healing as pleasure, attention and sensorial connection are fundamentally essential ingredients of the social body.

The intervention in the deformed neoliberal practices of resource distribution, social relation, and affective continuity is inclusive of a broader effort to radicalize care as a political practice. How can we collectively reclaim our capacity to holistically support one another? Resolving the subjective crisis of social depletion calls for a new way of relating to one another, a new way of relating economy to the body politic, a new way of relating production to reproduction and a new way of relating public and private spheres.The theoretical framework and practice of ‘the commons’ addresses both an ethic of care (as it pertains to relationality) and also distributive justice. It is representative of a public form of care as it is an arena that houses both literally and theoretically public and private responsibilities to each other.

What does a generative rather than extractavist approach to care entail? An alternative model for economic restructuring might bypass the state, wherein the demand for instrumentalized subjectivity and transactional relationships involving care, intimacy, support, and mutual aid can be met with the power of an autonomous public capital for sex workers internationally.