Embodied Solidarity: Feminist Care and Vulnerability in Parisian Squats

Abstract

Squatting has long been a strategy of migrant solidarity in urban areas. Whilst researchers in the past have focused on squats as sites of autonomous solidarity and as alternatives to state and/or humanitarian infrastructures of reception, little has been written on the care practices taking place within their walls. Based on militant ethnographic fieldwork and interviews, this article highlights the transformative social and political potentialities of care practices within squats. I focus on how the binary of provider/recipient of care is blurred in squats as intersectional identities allow for greater fluidity in identifying who can and cannot engage in care practices. As such, I argue that squats serve a role as an infrastructure of care within broader networks of solidarity while also emphasizing the way in which they enact an ethics of care revolving around radical inclusion.