In a variety of fields, care and cure are posed as the salves for paradigmatic violence, a kind of intramural politics discrete from domination. These positions take for granted a shared idea that care and cure are positive in orientation, thus divorced from the psychic forces of destruction and desire. More broadly, these assumptions neglect the question of libidinal economy and its centrality to the mechanisms of social reproduction. And so, rather than assuming all care is the antidote for violence, we offer this call and conference as a site to think critically about both care and cure in the hope that we might begin to unsettle the taken-for-granted ways these concepts circulate.
This conference is inspired by scholars who unsettle dominant discourses of care and cure. In “Antidoting,” Jared Sexton points to a direct linkage between the politics of care and the drive to cure, where this drive, the furor sanandi, stands in for the caregiver’s unconscious mental life. Through a political economic critique, Emma Dowling has argued that care is at the centre of the problem of social reproduction and in his psychoanalytic work, Stijn Vanheule has interrogated the inter-relation between caregiving and violence. Elsewhere, Jasbir Puar illustrates the potential debilitation of the caregiver in the endeavour to care/cure. Both concepts have long registered together within trans and disability studies, speaking to a confluence of medicalization, communal praxis, and violence (Clare, Malatino, Piepzna- Samarasinha). All of these scholars register care as a contested political space, “a problem for thought” (Sharpe). Thus, we are interested in papers that illuminate how care/cure circulates, how care/cure is thought, and how forms of care are obfuscated within the main.
Keynotes Speakers:
Patrice Douglass and Sara-Maria Sorentino
Location:
To Be Announced
