Complicating Care

Abstract

Care remains an essential feature of transformative feminist and gender politics—including performance (Hamington & Rosenow, 2019). This article takes as its starting point feminist “ethics of care” scholarship that is grounded in the Cavelian theme of the “vulnerability of ordinary life” (Ferrarese, 2016; Garlough, 2013) and builds on performance studies work engaged by issues of oppression, human rights, and vulnerability (Becker et al., 2021; Bertrand, 2020; Dolan, 2010). Exploring care and performance from both scholarly and applied perspectives, it complicates the conceptual relationship between “vulnerability” and “crisis” to better understand the limits and potential of care in performance activism. Two research examples illustrate how caring practices, during interrelated global crises, have been addressed in local performances in the midwestern United States. The first explores elders’ experiences of vulnerability, isolation, and loneliness during the COVID-19 pandemic. It focuses on local Wisconsin Raging Grannies performers, as they reimagine vulnerability as “call for caring response-ability” through community performance activism that critiques “privileged irresponsibility” (Tronto, 1998, 2013). The second considers experiences of vulnerability and isolation through the documentary-style theatre project GenderTalks (2020) by Orion Risk. This ongoing work united transgender, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming people from Wisconsin and Iowa in candid virtual dialogues about gender during COVID-19 social distancing. A virtual play from the transcripts was performed in US fringe festivals. The GenderTalks project provides important insights about care’s potential in performances to create opportunities for interconnection and social critique (D’Urso, Rosenberg, and Winget, 2021). Both performance contexts illustrate the impossibility of detangling care “from its messy worldliness” (de la Bellacasa, 2017) and how care becomes increasingly complicated and valuable in interrelated moments of crisis. This work centers ways that vulnerability can be reimagined through performance as a powerful political resource, as well as means of rejuvenation and social connection.