Editorial Comment: Performing Minoritarian Care

Abstract

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• Editorial Comment:Performing Minoritarian Care
• Laura Edmondson

I want to think "care" as a problem for thought.

—Christina Sharpe¹

The front cover of this special issue on Care, Carework, and Performance features an image from Sung-Min Kim's article on Operation Babylift (1975), a US mission in which over three thousand Vietnamese children were airlifted to the US for adoption during the final weeks of the Vietnam War. In her analysis of this traumatic evacuation, during which the children experienced a social death to facilitate their rebirth as US citizens, Kim coins the phrase "militarized care" to theorize gestures of care within a necropolitical order of US military destruction. The Vietnamese children nestle into mattresses and blankets while the unsmiling white-presenting adult male watches over them as a surrogate of US imperialism and counterinsurgency destruction. This image serves as a powerful reminder of the "noninnocence" of care, the labor of which is easily appropriated to buttress and carewash the work of violent regimes.²

The authors in this issue are clear-eyed regarding the threats posed by these regimes as they analyze how performance navigates and confronts white supremacy, neoliberalism and gentrification, authoritarian states, imperialism, and land theft. And yet their work also demonstrates a profound faith in care as a means to counteract these multifaceted forms of violence and harm, not as palliative but as worlding à la Donna Haraway.³ Through acts of critical imagination grounded in archival and ethnographic research, they locate and theorize worlds limned with the aesthetics and politics of care. They also share a fierce investment in performance as a means of articulating these worlds. As just one example, to return to the image on the front cover, Kim finds promise through the children's sensuous gesture of leaning against the plane and looking out the window, suggesting that the glimpse of the sky allows them to [End Page ix] find "respite between the demanding bounds of departure and arrival." Even within the confines of a US militarized plane, radical care percolates and endures as "a set of vital but underappreciated strategies for enduring precarious worlds," to quote Hi'ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart (Kānaka Maoli) and Tamara Kneese.⁴

Significantly, these worlds are minoritarian worlds and thus they offer interventions and strategies that are honed through activism, ancestral knowledge, and aesthetic boldness. In my original call for papers, I asked, "How to center the radical potential of care while also critiquing its capacities for academic extraction from Black feminist thought, Indigenous studies, disability studies, and queer theory?" This question speaks to my concern that white settler scholars such as myself would use discourses of care as a means of appropriating radical forms of thought honed through decades of theory, art, and activism. If we follow Christina Sharpe's lead and "think 'care' as a problem for thought," we must also attend to who gets to do (and be cited for) the thinking. Ultimately, though, my concern was unfounded, as these articles collectively mount a sustained challenge to the endemic whiteness of care ethics.⁵ They insist that radical care and minoritarian care are mutually constitutive.

Una Chaudhuri has observed that care is a form of knowledge that could help ensure our collective survival on this increasingly fragile planet.⁶ In that vein, this issue contains a wealth of knowledges that deserve a wide hearing despite our field's lack of representation in care studies. Joan C. Tronto, who along with Berenice Fisher developed a widely cited definition of care as "a species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our 'world' so that we can live in it as well as possible," categorically excludes artistic creation from this capacious definition.⁷ María Puig de la Bellacasa, whose taxonomy of care as "labor/work, affect/affections, ethics/politics" has also been widely influential, touches on questions of performativity and embodiment but stops short of a sustained engagement.⁸ More recently, Hobart and Kneese's 2020 special issue of Social Text on radical care, a series of wide-ranging essays that historicize and deepen the explosion of care studies that followed the 2016 US presidential election, does...