The Body of Care
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Who cares? How? • Caring in definition, understanding and practice, is not about being merely nice. Caring -for the alienated- as a practice involves power and labour relations. Care emerges as a particularly profound engagement with the world, in Maria Puig’s recent work. Puig introduces care as: “a vital affective state, an ethical obligation and a practical labor” (2012: 197). According to Puig, to care is to become subject to another, to recognise an obligation to look after another. Puig stresses that exceeding the ethical obligation of care, caring requires more from us than abstract well wishing, it is a class of skilled labor in creating caring contexts. Care means attentiveness and consideration for people, recognising the human interconnectedness of the world and the agency in it. • The ‘bad care’ is referring to the kind of care that causes damage to a certain party involved in the production or practice of care. Care is not a simple act. To maintain care carefully, is a complex, continuous and demanding process. Maria Puig -in her book Matters of Care- witnessed how care for some individuals and species translates into suffering for others, in what she calls ‘violent care’.
• In relation to care curiosity, Donna Haraway notes, “caring means becoming subject to the unsettling obligation of curiosity, which requires knowing more at the end of the day than at the beginning” (2008: 36). The kind of curious care Haraway is referring to here, expands into an inquisitive care. Though, when handling ‘care’ as a curious practice, We can not assume that all humans care and react towards others on the same level. There are even multitudes of 6
