Rights, affect and precarity: Post-racial formations in carework

Abstract

Bringing together two sites of carework, the human household and the chimpanzee sanctuary, this article considers the limits of a politics of precarity, where vulnerabilities and differences are conceptualized as shared rather than hierarchical. Outlining the ways the notion of shared precarity produces a post-racial landscape where the labor taking place in human households is rendered equivalent to the work of providing lifelong care for captive chimpanzees formerly used in state-sponsored biomedical research—both captured under the shared sign of “carework”—we argue instead for attention to the different and differentiating mechanisms that come to define carework. We trace the ways differentiation takes place at the site of carework, both among humans and between human careworkers and chimpanzees in order to highlight the ways the politics of shared precarity reproduces the very differentiation it claims to move beyond. We examine the differential dispersal of deserving subjectivity through affective economies that govern and also exceed the legal personhood of the careworker; we argue that affect enables equivocal analogies of understanding carework for chimpanzees as like carework for humans, hiding the ways the frame of moral obligation for and to care institutes differentiating mechanisms on which the notion of humanity is itself constructed.