An ethic of care is key to resolve manmade environmental catastrophes

Chapter 3: Feminist Recovery Immediately after the outbreak of the novel coronavirus and the introduction of measures to prevent the virus from spreading, many new hashtags began to appear online: #stopspreadingthecoronavirus #washyourhands #covercoughs andsneezes #stayathome #wearamask #becalmbesafe #besafe #keepingpeoplesafe #stayhealthy #keepadistance #socialdistancing #quarantinecare #protectothers #wereallinthistogether #takecareofyourself #takecareofothers #takecareoftheworld. Such hashtags show how policy measures and public health rules like self-isolating, physical distancing, wearing a mask or washing one’s hands, as advised by the World Health Organization and implemented by governments around the world, created new social realities, which were immediately reflected online. Rules translated into new behaviors and routines, as people had to change habits and adopt new ones. A number of hashtags speak of responsibility, mutuality, and of protecting others.There was also the claim to pandemic solidarity based on the understanding of all of us being in this together. It was well understood that a pandemic, with the Greek word pan meaning all and demos meaning people, involves all people on their shared planet and requires societies around the world to develop new collective social practices globally. States and their societies, which make up the planetary society, of course responded in highly differing ways to these measures in terms of politics, policy, economy, and stratifications within the societies living within the borders of nation states. While the World Health Organization communicated the physical distancing rules by means of appealing to a military ethos as they encouraged people to “be a hero and break the chain of Covid-19 transmission by practicing social distancing”, such militarization was conspicuously absent from the translation of the new rules into the digital language of hashtags which emerged in March and April of 2020.1 Metaphors of war, as they were mobilized in public political oratory, were not much used in these new pandemic hashtags. Quite the 110 Living with an Infected Planet contrary: in the online language, care was omnipresent. Care was being understood at the different and interrelated scales of the individual, the social, and the entire world: takecareofyourself, takecareofothers, and takecareoftheworld. Even in many of the personal e-mails along with other digital messages which I received from colleagues as well as from family members and friends who live in different parts of the world, such expressions of care and concern for each other’s safety and protection formed a new and central part of the communication during the first months of the pandemic. Practically overnight, this new practice had formed, and e-mails I received right after the global virus outbreak began with sentences like the following: ‘Hoping that you and your loved ones are safe’,or ended with ‘Stay safe and take best of care.’There seemed to have been a mutually understood reciprocity of the need for care and a real desire to know how others were living and surviving in the pandemic catastrophe. New practices for giving answers to such questions had to be found in order to share, but not to overshare; in order to appreciate the other’s concern, but not overburden them with one’s own worries, fears,and sadness. It was also necessary to practice new ways of expressing empathy and sorrow when learning that someone had caught the virus, had fallen seriously ill, was having a hard time recovering, had family members whom they could not visit in hospitals or nursing homes, or was grieving loved ones they had lost to the pandemic or during the pandemic. I began to understand how extensively expressions of emotional caring are still connected to physical presence and closeness to others, with facial expressions, gestures, and moments sharedin silence often taking the place of words. In e-mails and other digital exchanges with my friends, colleagues, and collaborators, there was also, maybe even paradoxically, an expression of hope for more care, precisely because of the rising awareness that the catastrophe of the global pandemic was Man-made. Massive urbanization and deforestation led to increased human exposure to new and deadly viruses. This specific responsibility for the pandemic catastrophe—and that catastrophe arises from the historical situation in which the capitalist economy has taken command of the planet as a resource—, for what political scientists Ulrich Brand and MarkusWissen call the “imperial mode of living”, gave rise, perhaps counter-intuitively and paradoxically, to the hope that care, for the planet and all its living and non-living beings, would finally be placed where it belongs: at the center of politics and economies.2 There was hope that the “new awareness that each of us belongs to the whole and depends on it” in Rebecca Solnit’s words would finally lead to the recognition of interconnectedness and interdependence as the ground for organizing responsibility and mutuality.3 Chapter 3: Feminist Recovery 111 There was hope for change in real time, not abstractly, in and for the future, but in the here and now. There was feminist hope for recovery and what I have suggested seeing as a call for building a new “international global care order”.4 This chapter focuses on recovery, identified as a pandemic keyword and, in my interpretation, also a keymetaphor. Approaching the public imaginaries of care in pandemic times as they were articulated through keywords, my feminist cultural analysis places recovery adjacent to war and the frontline. War, frontline, and feminist recovery as new political terminology emerged in response to the pandemic lockdown conditions in March and April of 2020. While war and the frontline articulate the militarization and forcible conscription of care, the meaning of recovery is closely associated with processes of healing, mending, and getting better. Feminist recovery is a novel concept that was introduced in response to the pandemic catastrophe or, more precisely, in response to how hegemonic politics and economies led to a new regime of care dictated by militarized essentialism and care heroism. Feminist recovery was elevated to policy level in feminist recovery plans, which this chapter presents and analyzes. Refusing the hegemonic imperative of returning to normal, feminist recovery plans centered on the essentiality of care and on care justice.Normal would mean the continuation of massive urbanization and environmental destruction as well as deadly extraction, and exploitation. Normal would mean a continuation of inequalities defined by health, by housing and food insecurities, failing infrastructures, impoverishment and no access to basic provisions. Normal would mean continued care extractivism and exhaustion for large swaths of the global population.Therefore, feminist recovery plans defied the warring logic of back to normal.The policies for the feminist recovery plans were developed horizontally and transversally by policy makers, public administrators, and scholars and researchers together with feminist grassroots organizations, activists, and civil society groups. Feminist worry was a central method to my approach of war and frontline as political imaginaries in pandemic times. Feminist hope is key to my reading of feminist recovery plans, yet feminist hope is not separated from feminist worry. On the contrary, feminist hope makes space and time for shared worry in recovery, seeking to re-imagine the rights to care through a new international global care order. How, then, to collectively imagine rights to care in light of the interlinked pandemic and climate catastrophes? How, then, to begin to work for the imagination of care’s recovery from the necro-epistemic patriarchal violence that is based on epistemologies of separation, of policing, and regulating the boundaries of life and death. How to imagine healing so that planetary being can re- 112 Living with an Infected Planet cover from the ideological onslaught on ways of thinking and imagining that led to separating humans from one another by means of hierarchies that result from ableism, classism, casteism, sexism, or racism as well as speciesism, which separates humans from all other living and non-living beings by placing the former above the latter? The violence of the epistemology of separation has been diagnosed in many different traditions of feminist thought, in particular Afrodiasporic, indigenous, environmental, or materialist perspectives, as a regime of domination through the logic of binary oppositions. Binaries—even though always reductive, as they describe states of being to be fully understood in pairs of two—do not, per se, have to be oppositional, hierarchical, or necroepistemic, as in you can live and I cannot, or I can live and you cannot. Feminist theory, particularly from the 1970s onward, has analyzed the impact of binaries such as Man/Nature, Black/White, culture/nature, mind/body, productive/unproductive, active/passive, man/woman. These binaries have captured the imagination. They have informed Western and globalized ways of thinking that underlie economic, legal, or policy imaginaries. Binaries, separations, and boundaries are ideas, imaginaries, and realities. Imagination is needed to imagine otherwise, to re-learn how to think, feel and care beyond and outside of them. In this context, recovery, and in particular the novel notion of feminist recovery, provides inspiration and, at the same time, requires reflection on what it can, our could, mean when approached through a feminist cultural analytical perspective. Recovery is an interesting term. Recovery takes time. One can plan for recovery, but recovery cannot be planned. There is an element of unpredictability in recovery. Recovery requires patience, endurance, and care. Recovery is always tied to what one needs to recover from. At the level of language, the semantics of recovery are closely connected to disease, war, and economy. Recovery is the process after a disease, recovery is the process after economic collapse, and recovery is the process after war, genocide, and ecocide. Recovery, most broadly understood, is the process of getting better after a crisis.The medical view on crisis is useful to understanding this, with crisis meaning the turning point for better or for worse in an acute disease.The pandemic is a moment of global crisis, in which it is socially and politically decided whether this crisis presents a turning point for the worse or a turning point for the better in relation to the Man-made conditions, which have not only caused the pandemic to break out but also include insufficient preparedness for pandemics despite abundant warnings by scientists, epidemiologists, and public health policy makers.5 In the pandemic situation, recovery has to be understood at Chapter 3: Feminist Recovery 113 the scales of the individual, the social, and the planetary, which are most intimately physically and materially interconnected. No-one can recover on their own. Recovery, when one is still weaker, when one is still more vulnerable and more fragile than usual, makes one even more dependent on structures of care and support and their dependable availability. All living and non-living beings depend upon others for their recovery. The infected planet needs the support and care of human beings for its recovery. Thinking of individuals as planetary beings constituted by the conditions of the planet is helpful to understanding what living with an infected planet means.The different scales of the individual or personal, the social, and the planetary areinterconnected,as they foreground needs for differentinfrastructures and supports, as they actually enable caring for one another’s interdependent recovery. Recovery is mediated across the personal, the social, and planetary through environmental, material, infrastructural, and technological conditions. Processes of physical, mental, and spiritual recovery are tied to the specific local environmental, material, infrastructural, and technological conditions, which makes clear that recoveryis very much about these conditions as well.One cannot recover independently from these conditions.Therefore, people need to work together so these conditions, which are themselves not well, can recover from the centuries-old onslaught of patriarchal colonial violence, extraction, and exploitation. The conditions for recovery need to be restored in order for recovery to actually become possible. Bodies, minds, spirits, environments, materials, technologies, and infrastructures have to be understood not as separate from one another in their processes of recovery, but as deeply interdependent. Feminist activism and theory have long proclaimed that the personal is political. One has to add many more dimensions to such a conception of the personal: the personal is social, the personal is environmental, the personal is material, the personal is infrastructural, the personal is technological, the personal is planetary. In short, the personal is never alone, the personal is never on its own. There is, therefore, the need to recover from the modern ideology that the personal can be thought of as standing alone, separate from all these other dimensions that constitute it and support it, and, in turn, make persons able to have what is called personal relations, that is relations with other living and non-living beings. Modernization and large-scale urbanization define these relations through infrastructures. Therefore, modern life has to be understood as infrastructuralized life. The modern infrastructural condition reshaped not only the relations among humans, but also the relations between humans and their planet with all its living and non-liv- 114 Living with an Infected Planet ing things. Modern human inhabitation of the planet is founded on systems of infrastructures that intimately connect bodies and environments. One may think, here, of modern sewage or ventilation systems as salient examples that bound infrastructure and bodies as they began to reshape nature into a Manmade environment. Expanding inhabitation means encroachment onto territories that were previously nowhere near humans. The Covid-19 pandemic was caused by zoonotic spillover, which occurs when pathogens are transmitted from wild animals to humans. Such virus spillover results from infrastructure stitching bodies and environments closer together. The modern infrastructural condition, which I understand through dimensions of social equity and notions of support in tension with harmful and violent effects on bodies and environments, is a crucial starting point for understanding what feminist recovery entails and for reimagining care. In historical terms, periods of recovery after wars are linked toinvestmentin reconstruction and rebuilding. Twentieth-century realities and imaginaries of post-crisis, after the 1929 Depression or of the post-war period afterWorldWar II, are firmly linked to investmentsin large-scale infrastructures. Understanding how deeply linked wars are to the research and development that result in new technologies, which in post-war life are immediately translated into everyday infrastructures that define bodies and environments, is important to understanding how war has materially, infrastructurally, and technologically extended into life in so-called peace. Technologies and infrastructures invented for preparedness for wars—or even during times of war—have fully penetrated the everyday life of all living and non-living beings on their shared planet in times of so-called peace. One may be put in mind, here, of DDT—called “the atomic bomb of the insect world”—or of the military origins of the internet: those go back to the work of the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the US Defense Department in the 1940s, which was motivated by bringing “computing to the frontlines”.6 Military infrastructures and war weaponry migrated into so-called civilian use and have profoundly defined everyday life, as such infrastructures not only surround living and non-living beings, but pass through them and unfold their effects inside of them. In this sense, a feminist recovery from infrastructural effects and within infrastructures that bring technologies of war into everyday life would need to expand the understanding of care to go far beyond the establishment of care infrastructure, which is understood primarily as healthcare or social care infrastructure. Imagining such recovery as necessary is made possible by the term feminist recovery. (Re)building and (re)constructing infrastructures that care, as well as infrastructures of care more narrowly under- Chapter 3: Feminist Recovery 115 stood, are both central to feminist recovery. Such rebuilding and reconstructing needs to include infrastructural awareness-raising and work on cultural imaginaries that enable people to actually envision care-full and peace-full infrastructures that would come into being through a coming together of bottom-up social movements and grassroots knowledgein collaboration with topdown state politics that enacts infrastructural responsibilities. Making infrastructural politics matter to the continuous labors of feminist recovery, and to public policy and publicimaginaries at once,will necessarily have toinclude the development of robust collective forms of “feminist infrastructural critique” in order to understand better how infrastructuralization, with its origins in war, is the main cause behind today’s conditions of living with infected planet.7 At the same time, critique as awareness of these conditions is crucial to a politics of hope for imagining and building new care-full infrastructures for planetary recovery. The notion of feminist recovery was introduced in feminist policy which was written during the first months of pandemic lockdown. I understand feminist recovery to be a response to the language of war present in public pandemic oratory and the organization of the global frontline of care. Feminist recovery plans for Covid-19 and beyond articulate a dual aim: equitable preparedness, and accountability to the harms caused by centuries of (infrastructural) patriarchal violence. I see the work of feminist recovery as preparedness, understood as accountability to the future, and as reparation, understood as accountability to the ongoingness of the past: a different present is imagined as possible through the coming together of preparedness and reparation.The violence and deadliness of inequality is caused by the lack of infrastructural supports. This led to broad swaths of the planetary society not being enabled to follow pandemic measures. The feminist response to the pandemic centered on this inequality. I find inspiration for critical hope in the term feminist recovery, the meaning of which this chapter explores through my close reading of the feminist recovery plans as, at the same time, the chapter seeks to expand the meaning of feminist recovery in relation to patriarchal history as a whole and to imaginaries of healing the infected planet. The concept of a specifically feminist recovery is useful for questioning the “epistemology of mastery” inherent in modern ideologies of policy and planning.8 Processes of recovery are, per se, unpredictable.What bodies and environments that have been critically infected need to really heal today is still largely unknown, and might even change in surprising and unforeseen ways along the process of recovery.Therefore, planning for feminist recovery needs to stay attuned to such long-term 116 Living with an Infected Planet processes of recovery, which, above all, require the responsiveness of care to changing needs of care. In order to imagine feminist recovery from within, and beyond, the pandemic catastrophe, I apply the following questions: What does the infected planet, beyond the acute disease of the current pandemic, need to recover from? What does the infected planet need in order to recover and heal? When will the planet have been enabled to recover? While there is, as we have seen in the previous chapters, an official politics of beginnings and endings when it comes to declaring wars or pandemics, one can never declare the end of recovery. One can never be really certain that recovery, or healing, are over or complete. One cannot declare the end of recovery. One cannot declare the end of healing. Quite the contrary: recovery is always durational, marked by ongoingness and unfinishedness. The temporality of recovery, like all processes concerned with healing and restoring, is complex, never linear, unpredictable, and, in a certain way, never ending. When recovering from a disease, one may feel better one day and worse again the next. Recovery can be slow and unpredictable. Recovery is, first and foremost, a process and, therefore, has to be understood in temporal terms.While not only plans for disaster preparedness, but for recovery preparedness and all the necessary support structures and infrastructures are most certainly needed, there needs to be, at the same time, a better understanding of the uncertainty and the unpredictability of recovery. Planning that remains open to such uncertainties can be most responsive to recovery needs as they emerge, and to adapting supports and infrastructures accordingly. Planning based on mastery would assume knowing for certain what recovery needs. Planning that followed the needs of recovery would remain responsive to the kinds of changes needed during processes of recovery. The impact and traces of previous trauma and diseases live on in bodies, societies, environments, and the planet as a whole. The historical inequality and the harms enacted on bodies and their environments by sexism, racism, and speciesism on a planetary scale is an expression of war: war against Black and Brown people, war against indigenous populations, war against nature, war against poor people, war against vulnerable populations, war against women. This logic of war extended, in pandemic times, to forcibly enlisting care. Feminist recovery does not only address the current pandemic situation, but the historical ongoingness of multiple and interlinked wars against women rooted in the violence of colonial-patriarchal ideology as warfare.The effects of this ideology continue to penetrate conditions of life and death. Silvia Federici diagnoses that “capitalist development begins with a war on women”.9 Fem- Chapter 3: Feminist Recovery 117 inist anthropologist Rita Segato argues that femicidal violence has to be understood as “femigenocide”.10 Colonial-patriarchal warfare takes many forms that interpenetrate and support each other, economic and intimate, militarized and legal. Domestic violence has been described as “invisible war” or as “shadow war”.11 In pandemic times, as yet another example of the close traffic between imaginaries of war and epidemiological imaginaries, the so-called shadow war of domestic violence was referred to as “shadow pandemic”.12 Taking the notion of feminist recovery to refer to recovery from pandemic conditions and the lasting aftermath of ideological and material patriarchal warfare on bodies, minds, and environments as well as to recovery from the historical violence of patriarchy, which has led to the production of gendered, sexualized, racialized, and classed vulnerable populations and the large-scale ruination of their habitats and environments, requires an understanding of recovery as a slow and lasting process, the end of which can neither be planned for nor easily predicted. Feminist recovery is about never giving in to the afterlife of patriarchal violence and never giving up on the possibility of recovering. Perhaps, a politics of hope for continued living with an infected planet begins with understanding that feminist recovery will necessarily have to be never-ending, that it is ongoing for, and in futures to come. Providing in this chapter an attentive reading of feminist recovery plans as they were developed in different parts of the world, along with the policy advice for caring economies as well as the imaginaries for broader social and cultural transformation, I want to bring into play one additional dimension of recovery. Recovery can also mean the possibility of regaining something that has been lost or taken away. I argue that placing this meaning of recovery in relation to patriarchy’s centuries-old ruination of care, which includes the loss of care’s centrality and the taking away of its fundamental importance, value, knowledge, and visibility, makes for both a much more complex and, at the same time, more insistent and hope-full reading of what feminist recovery would need to entail. Regaining care from patriarchal capitalism and making the essentiality of care a source of value and recognition will require hard work, a new and much richer and more nuanced language for care as knowledge, and new social and cultural imaginaries. The idea of modern Man as an autonomous and independent individual which underpins care under patriarchy led to the silencing of the interconnectedness and interdependencies of bodies, minds, and natures. Feminist recovery, therefore, will need to regain, relearn, and retrain a deep sense of interdependency, which was violently taken away by toxic patriarchal “epistemologies 118 Living with an Infected Planet of separation”.13 The political and economic silencing, and persistent structural devaluation of care included the erasure of care as knowledge in hegemonic understandings of what counts as knowledge, of what matters to knowledge and what does not.14 Such silencing and “epistemic ignorance” is not a-historical, but continually reproduced, as care theorist Riikka Prattes has recently diagnosed.15 Central to the feminist recovery of care will be continuous work on epistemic and economic imaginaries that overcome the lasting epistemic violence of separation and ignorance, which have led to political, intellectual, spiritual, and cultural silencing and economic devaluation and deprivation of those who perform caring labors.