Time to Care: Disabled and queer lived realities of care and time as forms of non-normative resistance

Abstract

This research explores how care emerges and transfigures within queer and disabled contexts that diverge from a myriad of hegemonic ideals and ideas of normalcy, productivity, and independence. I pose the research questions: How might queer and disabled networks and practices of care change the lived understanding of care in conditions of Western neoliberal capitalism? How can acts of care be acts of resistance? How does queer and disabled subjects’ exclusion from hegemonic chrononormativity challenge prevailing capitalist notions of linear progression and acceleration of time? How can care be re-thought and transformed by living in queer and crip temporalities? Answers to these questions are traced through in-depth conversations with queer and disabled people. My interlocutors’ experiences of care expose and are contingent on the utilization of care as a biopolitical technique of governance under conditions of Western neoliberal capitalism. Under these conditions, care needs and capacities of marginalized subjects are systemically and intimately disregarded and disavowed. This caring research inserts itself as a project that scrutinizes and enriches the current normative understanding of care by figuring it through and in its complex and reciprocal entanglements with multi-layered facets of disability and queerness. Non-normative care offers productive grounds for resistance against harmful chrononormative prescriptions of productivity and progress, hegemonic standards of normativity that debilitate marginalized subjects, and systemic and personal uncaringness. I analyze care in relation to theoretical discourses within critical disability studies (Freeman, 2007, 2010; Kafer, 2013, 2021; McRuer, 2006; Samuels, 2021) and queer studies (Keeling, 2019; Muñoz, 2009, Halberstam, 2005; Edelman, 2004) that criticize life and care under conditions of systemic and interpersonal violence and oppression, by grappling with concepts such as interdependence (Clare, 2017; Piepzna- Samarasinha, 2018), debility (Shildrick, 2015), kinship (Hill Collins, 1995; Weston, 1997), resilience (Bracke, 2016; Butler, 2016) and resistance (Ahmed, 2014). Throughout this research, dominant understandings of care, time and resistance become enriched, unsettled, and transformed through their conflation.