It’s been a busy few days — Sunday was the AWP news, Monday was all finishing up Old New York stuff, Tuesday Monk was randomly at home for a pre-K only in-service day of some kind. Wednesday was devoted to the workshop and [to] moving the car, and then yesterday I actually got a million hours of work done on the actual manuscript.

January 10 2020

I come to the desk after failing to convince my seven-year-old to go back to his own bed at this pre-dawn hour. It’s never a good sign when he wakes up debating us, which is only ever a signal of more argument to come. But as I’ve been going through some older work from school and processing life as it continues here at my in-laws’ house, I’m struck by a single word in the title: ‘devoted.’

Maybe I key in on this because of some work I was doing with the older child (who in my writing I call by his old nickname, Tune) about words that can be multiple parts of speech: verbs that can be nouns, nouns that can be adjectives. I realize here that “devoted” is one such word. As an adjective, it means loyalty bordering on subservience and subordination. As a verb it means to conduct that service, to become enmeshed in time in an activity that produces care. That care may not matter much in the long term (moving the car) or it may benefit people over time in direct proportion to their own devotion (the “family book club” workshop). That kind of wordplay also led, in the kitchen sink essay I wrote a year ago for TS, to the thinking I’m now doing about care and power for women (real and imagined) in Victorian England.

One place to start is where Rosemarie Garland-Thomson defines feminist ethics of care in her foundational essay on feminist disability studies. She writes that feminist ethics of care ” contends that caregiving is a moral benefit for its practitioners and for humankind.” Garland-Thomson continues:

A feminist disability studies complicates both the feminist ethic of care and liberal feminism in regard to the politics of care and dependency. A disability perspective nuances feminist theory’s consideration of the ethics of care by examining the power relations between the givers and receivers of care.

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, “Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory”

All of which brings me back to the perpetual questions of care and the pro/con of distracting from time to write but the provision of experience to write about. I was thinking about Professor Straw-Man, the white Boomer professor who lives in my head and takes all the good stuff from others. In my head, Dr. Straw-Man doesn’t care who grows his flowers. He only notices them when they start to wilt on his manuscript of literary theory.

The difference between him and me is that I individually reject things and work to alter the system but that doesn’t really matter a great deal as long as the system that produced the debility from which I benefit remains intact. If I have to move the car, at least I’m privileged enough to have a car.

But in COVID times, care isn’t really a choice. (It’s one you can ignore, I guess, but that’ll circle back to you.) And so the politics of care and dependency have to inform every conversation about every thing. Along the way, the emotional aspect that strips care of its value (devotion) has to get recognized. Sure, devotion has a value and a payoff, but the way that gets determined depends on people in power recognizing it, and they often don’t, or valorize the selflessness without recognizing the skill. (Here I think of the “A few minutes in the life of a sign language interpreter video series, of which the only unfunny one, from the legal interpreter, speaks to this most bluntly.)

I still prefer the biology teacher–he’s way funnier than Professor Straw-Man.

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