Care Work by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

Author:Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press
Published: 2018-11-23T16:00:00+00:00

38 Patty Berne, “Disability Justice: A Working Draft,” Sins Invalid, June 10, 2015, http://sinsinvalid.org/blog/disability-justice-a-working-draft-by-patty-berne, accessed June 18, 2018.

39 Cyree Jarelle Johnson, personal communication with the author, May 15, 2018.

40 https://www.lightningbolt.vision

A MODEST PROPOSAL FOR A FAIR TRADE EMOTIONAL LABOR ECONOMY

(CENTERED BY DISABLED, FEMME OF COLOR, WORKING-CLASS/POOR GENIUS)

Femme: A person who has one of a million kinds of queer femme or feminine genders. Part of a multiverse of femme-gendered people, who have histories and communities in every culture since the dawn of time. Often complicated remixes that break away from white, able-bodied, upper-middle-class, cis femininity, remixing it to harken to fat or working class or Black or brown or trans or nonbinary or disabled or sex worker or other genders of femme to grant strength, vulnerability, and power to the person embodying them.

The thing about being a working-class or poor and/or disabled and/or parenting and/or Black, Indigenous, or brown femme is that people are going to ask you to do stuff for them. Oh, are they ever.

They’re going to ask you to listen, do a favor, do an errand, drop everything to go buy them some cat food or crisis-counsel them. Manage logistics, answer feelings emails, show up, empathize, build and maintain relationships. Organize the childcare, the access support, the food. Be screamed at, de-escalate, conflict resolute. They’re going to say, “Can I just pick your brain about something?” and then send you a five-paragraph email full of pretty goddamn complex questions. It’d be real nice if you could get back to them ASAP. They’re going to ask if you can email them your powerpoint and all your resources. Some of them will be people who are close to you; some of them will be total strangers. Do you have a minute?

For free.

Forever.

And you know what’s going to happen? You’re going to do those things. Because you do, indeed, care. Because it’s the right thing to do. Because you’re good at it. Because you want to.

And because: your life as a working-class or poor and/or sex-working and/or disabled and/or Black or brown femme person has taught you that the only damn way you or anybody survives is by helping each other. No institutions exist to help us survive—we survive because of each other. Your life is maintained by a complex, nonmonetary economy of shared, reciprocal care. You drop off some extra food; I listen to you when you’re freaking out. You share your car with me; I pick you up from the airport. We pass the same twenty dollars back and forth between each other, building movements and communities as we go. It’s maybe what hippies mean when they talk about the gift economy; it’s just a million times more working-class, femme, Black and brown, and sick in bed.

We live in a white, capitalist, colonialist, ableist patriarchy that oppresses in many ways. One of them is that femininity is universally reviled. Patriarchy, racism, transmisogyny, colonialism, ableism, classism, and whorephobia come together to dish out hate to folks who are femme or feminine in extra fun ways.

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