WHO TAKES CARE OF US ?
This article was originally written in Spanish. In view of March 8, we stand up to say that it is not a slogan, it is a paradigm shift so intimate that scares: feminism. I say alternative because I want to bring in a weird and vomitous way some reflections that stayed in my head in relation to my trip to Buenos Aires. They do not have a common thread, but they do have a green paste that agglutinates, three reflections that throw us the question of who takes care of us.
By Mili Hurtig
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Before arriving
The summer in Vienna was relatively free, we had encounters and (enjoyment) of post-pandemic public life. In June we were in bars, in parks, walking the streets of cities that were (slowly) returning to a vital pulse. However, in Buenos Aires a strict quarantine continued. In September, with spring peeking, people were still in a locked-down and it seemed that it was not going to end any time soon. I remember (around November) seeing via Instagram the first time my friends got together in a park near the waterfront. Their happy faces were not disarmed by the new social distance. I come to this to bring something that I noticed with this 'in the middle’ that builds up when you live outside your native country. The positionality: we are all positioned and we create a perspective that cuts, it seems something very simple but it is something that we do not have very present. The pandemic is global, the virus is everywhere, but how we experience the pandemic varies depending on where we are, who we are with, how we are, and more.
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Recognizing how we are positioned and from where we speak involves effort and attention to oneself. It is an exercise that is and has been historically demanded by feminist researchers and practitioners. To reflect on where we are, is to understand ourselves as a part of a larger whole, is to reflect on our privileges, is to understand what the other says and from where they say it, is to acknowledge that we are not alone. A caring and feminist city is one where we all do a daily exercise to understand where we are positioned to integrate the difference, embracing ourselves in the tiny scale of a body, next to other thousands of different bodies.
My home
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The arrival: arriving at a place that was once so much yours is a bit strange after more than a year of navigating other languages, other cities, other neighbourhoods and other streets. The same feeling I got the first time I went to dinner at my mother's house some weeks after I moved out by myself for the first time. When I moved out on my own, the feeling of freedom swelled my ovaries, and for a while going back to my mother's house for dinner was a feeling of discomfort that only made me remember how little that house had been mine. But you see, one always needs distance and perspective and over time we transform ourselves. When I returned this time to my mother's house, I saw myself recapitulating my home and adolescence. This year and a half outside investigating feminisms among women and experiences opened up certain sensibilities that surfaced in the teenage home: Who takes care of us? I went from the scale of the body and recognizing myself as part of a context, to the scale of my home and my neighborhood.
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My mom, single mother of two teenagers in an apartment: and getting up for school, organizing mornings, noons and afternoons, listening to us cry about everything we wanted to cry about, parent meetings (when most are Mothers), every dinner, every lunch, everything in my house: the dipped cookies and dulce de leche, every visit to the doctor, every attentive listening, every cake on birthdays, every haircut, every hair scan for lice, every empanada Sunday, sitting for hours studying math, organizing paradigmatic programs. Every hour, all the time: CARE.
Caring without being a recognized, remunerated and valued 'doing'. Because unfortunately we still live in a society with a patriarchal instinct that what is valued is what has to do with production: with what generates money. The sectors related to care are a precarious and invisible asset, that is to say, what happens inside the home is not contextualized as a political expression. However, all these frameworks around 'care' are indispensable for life to function: we all have to eat, we all have to receive care, and ideally we should all receive support in order to grow and subsist. A society that does not care is not a society.
My mother and Mariela were the two women who made mine and my brother's life work. I wonder how they were able to give so much time and love without expecting any social return? A feminist city is a city that cares and lets you care, it is a society that values the tasks associated with health, education, cultural diversity, that listens and contains the most vulnerable populations such as children, the elderly, migrants and dissidents.
