people talking at workshop

Intimate Economies of the Nonhuman: A "Care Work" Workshop

people talking at workshop

On Saturday, November 2, 2019, Duke Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies hosted an all-day transdisciplinary event on “Intimate Economies of the Nonhuman”. The workshop brought together six scholars from a range of institutions and disciplines to present works-in-progress around the question of “care” as it relates to various nonhuman actors. At the intersection of feminist scholarship on political “care” economies and posthuman scholarship on nonhuman actors, the following framing questions were posed: “Does the intimate economy of care look differently when the objects of care are more than human? Are nonhuman care workers significant to emerging economies of care as well as global infrastructures of capital and labor”? The workshop was divided into three panels with two speakers per panel; following each speaker was a thoughtful response often leading into a larger discussion where
connections were often drawn across speakers and panels. In the first panel, Ingrid Meintjes presented
an essay juxtaposing human and robot care; this question, she explained, came out of a decade of working alongside unpaid HIV/AIDS care workers in South Africa where care work is highly feminized and deeply impoverishing. Here, she thinks seriously about interventions promised by rapidly growing populations of care robots in the context of care itself becoming a major problem or crisis. Correspondingly, Alex Blachette considers nonhuman care in the form of corporations. In “Off-Animals”, he follows the life and death cycles of “off-specification” hogs used in semi-automated slaughter plants to ask: “what are the politics and limits of care work — and caring for animals — in a context where 99% of U.S. hog life has been monopolized by corporations”? In the second panel, Harris Solomon offered an explication of “Last Stop”, a chapter from his current manuscript which tells the story of traumatic injuries from traffic accidents. Based on five years of fieldwork in Mumbai’s biggest public hospital trauma ward, he aims to conceptualize relations between subjects and power through relations between medicine and movement. Also situated in India, Radhika Govindrajan’s fieldwork moves us out of the urban landscape of Mumbai into rural villages of the central Himalayas with her essay on political lives of cows, rivers, and mountains. She offers a nuanced critique of a right-wing Hindu nationalist
organization’s dedication to protecting cows from slaughter as a means to justify slaughtering those who
consume beef in India, including Muslims, Christians, and Dalits; demonstrating human-nonhuman alliances are not always ethically motivated. In the third panel, Juno Parrenas provided a feminist
comparative ethnography of a lion sanctuary in South Africa with two sites in South Asia, one corporatizing conservation of Bornean orangutan and another corporate rescue mission for a protected species that would drown to death in the Bakun Dam. Parrenas argued how each case highlights relations of private property held up by conservation goals are often to the detriment of human and nonhuman others. Maura Finkelstein’s “The Work of Horsemanship” similarly draws attention to the kinds of invisible work nonhuman laborers—horses—perform in equine therapy through her interspecies ethnography at a facility in Eastern Pennsylvania called True Hearts.