Transboundary migration of care
pandemia after 8th of March
Maria Dmitrieva
25th March 2020
Read Russian version of this text.
Now, when nearly all countries collapse from the perils and consequences of the global pandemic, the imperial subjects strive to plug the holes and gaps in their allegedly resilient totality whilst the stratified segments of population sense the hopeless conditions and suffer from the biopolitical panic - it is time to express the variance of reality utilising transgressive and political ingenuity.
By examining the means of proliferation and resistance to the pandemic, one can detect the architecture of social inequality and deficit of care as a phenomenon of translocality and flow at the seams of corrosion and shortage.
The self-isolation of those who can afford it at the expense of others dissects and denudes the logistics of the distribution of basic needs essential for survival. / certainly, not only in the case of pandemics and apocalypse/
The work ethic cannot remain the same any longer.
Today more than ever, it has become clear that we are in need of universal basic income (UBI) for the purpose of maintaining all the social guarantees, and global solidarity, and the responsibility for delineation of privileges.
In early March, the convivial tulips tried to mitigate the new impending social reality, and even back then it was already interesting to reflect on reproductive and domestic labour, and problematisation of fundamental structures of power in favour of women’s visibility, invisible labour, and the deficit of institutions of care as a global phenomenon. Now two weeks after 8 of March, the question of domestic labour and invisibility of workers has become a critical one.
Apparently, even the social-democratic political systems do not cover the population's need for institutions of care. The women’s right not to work the double duty - office and home, increase of life expectancy - aging population requiring attention and time / commercialisation / neoliberalisation of social policies - increase of expenses while the government relinquishes from regulating and decision-making by delegating this business to the entities + partial coverage of expenses.
One can see how gender inequality generates class and national disbalance that follows with the transboundary leak of care between regions. Who looks after children/ parents/ relatives with disabilities/ women who ply the migratory and labour flows along colonization routes?
The problematisation of research happens at the intersection of the three macro regimes: gender\welfare\migration regime
and here are some of the topology tenets of regimes of global welfare:
- the degree of state interference
- the disparity of social groups - stratification of the population according to personal income
- the degree of decommodification
The transnational crisis and shortage in institutions of care combined with legal insecurity of homeworkers are a shadow economy. It appears as the rights to reproductive functions, clean floors, and parents dying not in solitude and poverty - fundamental rights, which should not be a privilege on the basis of class/gender/race.
How can one imagine an alternative reality in this critical inequality of global care webs with nodes, holes, and leaks in them?
- political mechanisms to engage men in reproductive labour
- long term paid leave /for both/
- possible automatisation
- establishment of innovative social institutions of care
- support of the volunteer self-organisations arose from the lack/deficiency/repressiveness of social guarantees
- pregnancy beyond the general framework of the female body
(the list should be extended)
Much of the debate about the invisible and affective labour, its rationalisation, market equivalent, absence of public utility, and the lack of prestige associated with it, etc. often replicates false logic framed in the capitalistic discourse on effectiveness, productivity, success, and following the strong.
It seems as it is important to take a closer look and differentiate the desire to articulate and manifest invisible labour in the name of political discourse that requires the solution from the desire to rethink the attitude towards labour in an entirely different logic of cohabitation regime: support, care, and comprehension of codependency. Seemingly, the slipped actions, which remain invisible for capitalistic/neoliberal logic, become a floodgate, the leakage of materiality from which one can rethink reality and work ethic - otherwise, more inclusive, sensitive, living on the crossing of various regimes and experiences of coexistence.
NB: author's spelling and punctuation have been preserved
Mariya Dmitrieva is an artist, independent curator, and cyberfeminist. She is a co-organiser of Studiya 4413 in St. Petersburg, Russia, a self-regulated, artist/activist-run platform functioning as an intersection of diverse social strata, queer-crip optics, artistic mediums, contemporary critical thinking, and adequate political action; Maria is a member of N i i c h e g o d e l a t ‘ (Donoothing), a network of flickering, horizontal laboratories of political imagination researching and redescribing ideas around work ethic, machine vs human relations, and connectivity between utopian and real, and initiator of Free mapping project, a digital platform calibrating alternative culture-political landscape of self-organised liberal associations/projects, and coordinator of p2p&hackercare, a translocal agency.
Translated and edited by Tamara Khasanova