[“How are we showing up for each other, and how come it sometimes feels so hard to do so? The language we have to describe exhaustion in the context of coalitional political work—burnout, compassion fatigue, vicarious trauma, self-care—doesn’t quite grasp the complicated reality of working to make one another’s (deeply interwoven) lives more livable in the broader context of institutional disinvestment and systemic harassment and discrimination that produces mutually resonant forms of traumatization and triggering.
I think through how we might begin to move beyond the rhetoric of burnout and toward a logic of postscarcity in order to do justice to the methods of collective support that we have spent decades actively inventing and elaborating—and to render them more robust. This necessitates really grappling with questions of care—how we understand it, how we measure it, how we account for it.
For far too long, both hegemonic and resistant cultural imaginaries of care have depended on a heterocisnormative investment in the family as the primary locus of care. Let me use a colloquialism from my years in the South: this ain’t right. Another colloquialism: this shit is fucked.
To state the obvious: some of us have okay relationships with our families of origin, but a whole lot of us don’t. A lot of us don’t have families, full stop. We lost them somewhere along the way. They rejected us. We had to escape them in order to survive. We cobbled together some network of support, some other kind of care web, instead. We might call that a family, too—a family of choice, a family constructed through consent rather than accident and forced relation. But whatever our relationship to family—the word, the construct, the ongoing practice of building one—it’s also obvious that our ability to flourish is reliant on forms of care that outstrip the mythic purported providential reach of the family.
One thing—maybe the main thing—I’m trying to do here is think about what care actually looks like in trans lives. This means decentering the family and beginning, instead, from the many-gendered, radically inventive, and really, really exhausted weavers of our webs of care.”]
hil malatino, trans care, 2020