Precarisation and care-citizenship

Abstract

ABSTRACT The distinction between labour and care is constitutive for liberal-capitalist societies in Europe. The hierarchization of refugees and the correspondingly disparate allocation of political and social rights, which have become increasingly apparent as societal structurings since 2015, are entangled with this constitutive distinction. Such trends are genealogically tied to a basic pillar of Western European societies: the idea of the autonomous individual and the related concept of free labour. These notions rely on deeply racialized, gendered, and heterosexualized entanglements, by which they ward off, devalue, domesticate, and feminise needs for protection and care. This is a logic forms the background of the politico-economic crisis we are facing today, and as such it must be the point of departure for thinking about current forms of precarization. In multi-dimensional ways, the regime of precarization constitutes how labour, autonomy, and care are entangled in contemporary capitalism and their function within governmentality. Subjectivation has become valorizable, allowing autonomy to turn into an instrument of government. Thus, the challenge today is to invent how might we imagine a way of living together that is based on commonly shared precariousness, on care rights, and on care-citizenship?