The panel has its focus on the in-between: on our orientations towards/to/from others as well as the relations of care in which we stand or want to stand in. How do artworks and technological developments determine and change our view of care work? What role do narratives representing alternative forms of relationships play in changing our actual understanding of them (e. g., Sophie Lewis' “Abolish the Family”)? How can relationships and orientations not only be understood as objects of critique, but themselves become effective as critique? To what extent can they be understood not only as guided by normative structures, but also as a nucleus of their change or suspension? How is the conflictual nature of care work to be understood?

Speakers

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Fornicating Frogs and Spurting Shafts: Ruth Asawa’s Andrea (1969) as a Case Study of Antinormative Motherhood in the Arts
Jordan Troeller

This talk centers on a controversial public sculpture created by the self-identified “artist-mother” Ruth Asawa. Read as a harmless mermaid fountain for some, for others it embodied a radical challenge to the norms governing sexuality in urban space. I discuss the various dimensions of the work and its reception within the larger context of midcentury America’s taboo against the mother as artist and the unspoken norms governing what counted as creative labor. What Andrea demonstrates for us today, I argue, is the centrality of the question of visibility for critique; or rather, under what representational conditions can a critical gesture be read as such?

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Archive and Autofiction: Writing Care in Times of Crisis
Liza Mattutat

In my presentation, I will share my work in progress on my current book project, “Care in Crisis”. The book examines past shifts in the regime of reproduction through case studies and draws implications for the current care crisis. The book alternates between narrative and argumentative chapters and incorporates archival research, interviews, and auto-theoretical essays. For the latter, I craft storylines about protagonists in historical struggles based on letters, diaries, and memoirs found in archives. These storylines give voice to the limitations and frustrations, as well as the dreams and strategies, of people involved in past utopian communities, cooperative housekeeping, feminist campaigns, and women's strikes. I interweave these storylines with autofictional narratives that address the same issues. Together, these narratives raise philosophical questions, which I discuss by drawing on philosophical, sociological, and psychological literature.

To demonstrate my work, I will read an excerpt from an essay that addresses the gender-stabilizing power of pregnancy and motherhood. What contributes to the feminizing nature of motherhood? Then, I will discuss the critical potential of auto-theory as a performative writing praxis and a mode of presentation.

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Doing Family in times of increasing right-wing conservative and authoritarian attitudes
Anna Lena Göttsche

The question of the "family as a constructive achievement," which underlies the concept of ‚doing family‘ (Jurczyk) is not a new one. However, it deserves recurring attention and raises new follow-up questions: In times of resurgent (right-wing) conservative family and social ideals, who is considered ‚family‘ and who is not? Which (legal) norms have already been changed by lived family realities, and where are achievements (once again) up for discussion? Examples will be used to illustrate the extent to which lived family realities have, by their very nature, exercised or continue to exercise criticism of the law as a norm, thus shaping the law. But also, how the law is in turn used as a constructive means of power to challenge traditional societal notions of family.