BIG CARE: EXPLORING THE IMPLICATIONS OF CARE WORK THAT HAPPENS BEYOND INDIVIDUAL CAPACITY AND BOUNDARIES

Abstract

This dissertation explores what I call "Big Care," a phenomenon which emerges when women, a term I use broadly and inclusively, are required to shoulder labour caused by systemic care failures. Through a methodology of post-criticism and personal reflection, I’ve structured this scholarship as a combination of academic writing and creative nonfiction. In Section One, I close read Katherine May’s Wintering, Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing, and Tricia Hersey’s Rest is Resistance, all nonfiction texts that discuss wintering, doing nothing, and resisting-in-place as practices that trouble capitalist and patriarchal claims on women’s time and capacity. As I read and analyze these texts, I also engage in the rest practices for which they advocate; for example, I discuss in Section One the monthly cold water plunges I undertook over the course of a year after reading May’s Wintering and consider the ways in which these plunges encouraged me to slow down and reset, especially in the midst of my personal precarity and overwhelm. I also close read two works of fiction in this section, Claire-Louise Bennett’s Pond and Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, as examples of what effective retreat into a space of intentional rest and a complete abandonment of the generative function of rest can look like. In Section Two, I read Sigrid Nunez’s What Are You Going Through, J.M. Coetzee’s Slow Man, Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, and Karla Cornejo Villavicencio’s Undocumented Americans as examples of neighbour-to-neighbour care provision that happens beyond the boundaries and capacity of the individual providing care, and therefore becomes Big Care. I read these fiction and nonfiction records of Big Care as examples of what it looks like to listen for and respond to calls for help made by people who have fallen through the cracks of exploitative systemic structures that dispense care resources based on an individual’s perceived compensatory production value. Throughout both sections, I interweave my own creative nonfiction with my academic scholarship as a way of thinking through the implications of Big Care. My goal with this self-reflective work is to consider what Big Care means for my self-care and also then how the capacity that I regenerate as I winter, rest, and do nothing can not only be shared amongst those individuals who don’t have the privilege of dedicated rest time but can also be actionably levied against systemic inequality on a larger scale.