the Cartesian philosophical distinction between mind and body, between thinking things and extended things, had important implications for women and indigenous people. Within that paradigm, not all humans were defined as fully human thinking beings, and this included slaves, women and indigenous peoples; they became part of the non-human, so-called extended things, part of nature rather than society. Thus, Cartesian logic was built on and legitimated the exploitation and domination of nature, and of those things equated with nature, among them women (Patel and Moore 2018: 45–55).
Given the conceptualization of women as an object of use, it was inevitable that their caring work would also be open to exploitation. What was feminine was inferior, and what the feminine character produced was of less value simply because it was produced by a woman (De Beauvoir 1993). Even when women entered into the work of animal rationale or homo faber, they still found that their work was not granted equal standing (Smith 1987). Women poets were not seen as writing about matters of universal interest (Boland 1996).14 There is no profession or job that women dominate that is comparable in status and power to that of men, even when that job of work is in the public domain (Witz and Savage 1991).
Denigration of care and domestic labour
While the intellectual denigration of care work as natural to women, part of their essential nature, facilitated the exploitation of colonized women/carers, care was denigrated whether women did it or not as the dependency that called for care was seen as an aberration in the adult human condition, ‘a sign of incompleteness in an adult’, in neoliberal thinking (Moynihan 1973: 17). Being an adult and a citizen was closely aligned with the ideals of independence and autonomy in the post-industrial era; there were no ‘good’ dependencies for adults (Fraser and Gordon 1997: 135).
As being dependent is shameful in a society where productivity and ‘active citizenship’ reign as superior values, by extension, caring for non-citizens (adult dependents and children) is shaming by association, with significant political and economic consequences (Müller 2019). The abjection of dependency, carers and their caring work is not just a psychic matter however; it has had material and violent consequences, especially as reflected in the violence that women experience during pregnancy when they are likely to be more dependent (Tyler 2009: 87–94).
The abjection of care has been closely linked to the abjection of domestic work, where women also predominate. Although care work and domestic work are analytically distinguishable, in the embodied world of lived material reality they overlap (Duffy 2011). Because they do so, the lowly status of domestic work compounds the lowly status of caring. When care involves body work, it is often dirty work; it involves cleaning and managing the leaking fluids from the orifices of the body that are often uncontrolled and even uncontrollable.15 The leaky body smells, soils, and demands a huge amount of time and energy to keep it managed without harm, to keep it under control; the management of this human waste adds to the designation of hands-on caring as low-level life work (Hughes, McKie, Hopkins and Watson 2005: 266–8). The abject status of body work and domestic work is reflected in the fact that it is work very few people choose to do. Paid carers for frail older people in Europe are disproportionately migrant workers who often have no choice about doing this work (Da Roit, González Ferrer and Moreno-Fuentes 2013), as are domestic workers in many wealthy countries (IOM 2020).
While feelings of disgust and abjection at leaky, disintegrating bodies are not a modern phenomenon, the achievement-led, competitive individualism that characterizes contemporary culture is premised on the managed, contained, intact, cleansed and controlled body; bodily disintegration and leaking threaten this (Twigg 2000: 396). There is a ‘dematerializing tendency’ in how the vulnerable body is interpreted in contemporary Western culture; excretions, especially where they are involuntary and uncontrolled, and death and decay are distanced and sanitized in a way that hides the body. Status, especially professional status, is inversely related to the amount of body work involved, especially work with vulnerable, frail bodies (Twigg 2000: 391). Those who do hands-on body care work are made abject by their association with vulnerable bodies in a society that valorizes individualistic independence and productivity.
As Simone de Beauvoir observed in 1948, domestic work is governed by endless repetition (De Beauvoir 1993). In so far as domestic work is part of care work (Gutiérrez-Rodríguez 2014), it is repetitive work, a remark we heard frequently in our care conversations for Affective Equality (2009).16 It goes on incessantly in cycles of hours, days and years. And when one cycle ends another begins, be it in the meals that have to be produced, the cleaning that is required, or the cycles of age and illness that follow each other as life ebbs and flows.
Yet many tasks in life involve endless repetition: teaching the same school syllabus or fixing the same parts in cars year on year, meeting patients in surgery with the same illnesses time and time again or answering the same queries about computing on a software support line. What makes domestic work abject is not the repetition, but the conditions under which it is undertaken. Cleaning is not demeaning per se, but it becomes so when it is unrecognized, underpaid or unpaid. This is something women spoke of a great deal in our care conversations studies for Affective Equality,17 as did the minority of men who were primary carers.18
There is no doubt that the demanding, at times dirty, and thankless character of unpaid care labour and related domestic work helps explain its abjection. However, it is also made abject by the deep cultural assumption that this necessary work is not citizenship-defining labour; it is not the kind of work that those who are fully human (part of society rather than nature) have to do. This problem is greatly exacerbated in capitalist society given the deeply classed and gender-stratified division of care labour.
Abjection and capitalism
Capitalist societies are driven by the demands of the accumulation process, where production is oriented to exchange, not use or provisioning (Nelson 1993; Mies 2014). Production matters in so far as it can be monetized; the use value of products is a non-market consideration. Capitalism, while it benefits from the use value of unpaid family-care labour in particular, does not see itself as having any obligation to pay for it as it is not defined as real work (Dalla Costa 1972; Folbre 1994; Hochschild 1997; Federici 2012; Fraser 2016).
Love and care live and produce life in the underground of political and economic life, creating use values that are invisible in the exchange market. They are concealed beneath comings and goings, doings that only become visible in their absence, when they fail to happen, or happen badly over time. The absence of care or love is not defined as a political or a structural problem. Instead, it is individualized and reconstructed as a responsibilized failing of ‘dysfunctional’ families, ‘poor parenting’, a signifier of the immorality of the class, race and/or gender and marital status of the carer (Dodson 2010).
Care’s centrality to life is further invisibilized when resolutions to care deficits are framed in terms of supplying care on market terms, as a purely technical service, through monitoring, recording and surveillance in a supply-chain management system. The emotionally demanding character of hands-on care work is not recognized for the time it takes and the demands it makes on those who are expected to do it (Gutiérrez-Rodríguez 2010). The assumption is that people can be organized and compelled by market rules to care well, and if that care is not available, e-health care or robotic care will suffice. The limitations of commercialized (Dowling 2021) and digitalized health care are frequently overlooked (Moisil 2019). Care is constructed as a technical product, a package to be delivered in minutes and hours, as if counting time on task makes care happen. But care is not reducible to a product that can be bought and sold as it involves ethical and relational dilemmas and ‘the maintenance of life for itself’ (Dowling 2021: 45).
Yet there is a growing corporatization in which for-profit businesses are increasingly entering the world of care, seeking
