Carework

Carework encompasses the totality of mental, emotional, and physical effort required to sustain individual and collective life. As feminist theorists emphasize, this concept represents a broad spectrum of burdens ranging from invisible domestic work to paid care services in the market. Historically built largely on women’s unpaid labor, this process has become a field of “political struggle” for those whose work has been deprived of economic value, rendered precarious, and made invisible. Care labor includes not only support activities within the household, but also the infrastructural labor that makes social existence possible, along with the pursuit of the social justice this labor deserves.

Suggested Sources:
Mierle Laderman Ukeles. “Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969!” Queens Museum.

The Care Collective, The Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdependence, translated by Gülnur Acar Savran (Istanbul: Dipnot Yayınları, 2021)

Nancy Fraser. “Crisis of Care? On the Social-Reproductive Contradictions of Contemporary Capitalism.” In Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression, edited by Tithi Bhattacharya, 21–36. London: Pluto Press, 2017.

Paula England, “Emerging Theories of Care Work,” Annual Review of Sociology 31 (2005): 381–399.

Silvia Federici. Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons. Translated by Ebru Kılıç, Istanbul: Sel Yayıncılık, 2023.