Care As a Strategy for Countering Backlash: Building Solidarities within Women’s Movements

This paper studies women’s movements through the analytic of ‘care’ as an emotion and practice of love. Examining who cares, for whom, and what expectations of receiving care (from whom) will help reveal dynamics of movement formation, how movements are strengthened and enable an examination of practices within women’s movements that promote cohesion and mutual support.

The paper will pay attention to the practices, processes, and perceptions of care, and how care is used to build identities and solidarity within women’s movements. Focussing in on care practices and processes will highlight the basis for these care practices – especially in terms of nature of different struggles and the forms and effects of backlash that members within the movement experience. In doing so, the paper will put forth a novel conception of care as a strategy for countering backlash – mainly through forging solidarities within women’s movements. We will re-think care as both an affect and as practice, providing a rejoinder to the critiques of empathy as the basis for solidarity, instead arguing that processes and practices of care are central to the politics of solidarity.

While the paper will draw on affect theory, especially following affect to find sites of care (and its’ deficit) and how care is enacted, the main analytical contributions of the paper will be to feminist social movement theory (using care as an entry point to analysis of feminist movements and understanding care practices as a means to countering backlash), and to literature on care (conceptually expanding the concept of care beyond the family/ community sphere to the public sphere of feminist social movements and delineating what care is for in women’s movements). Finally, the paper will shed light on how the emotion of care influences the creation of sustainable and supportive environment within women’s movements.