Containment, delay, mitigation: waiting and care in the time of a pandemic

In this paper we take up three terms – containment, delay, mitigation – that have been used by the UK Government to describe their phased response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Although the terms refer to a political and public health strategy – contain the virus, flatten the peak of the epidemic, mitigate its effects – we offer a psychosocial reading that draws attention to the relation between time and care embedded in each term. We do so to call for the development of a form of care-ful attention under conditions that tend to prompt action rather than reflection, closing down time for thinking. Using Adriana Cavarero’s notion of ‘horrorism’, in which violence is enacted at precisely the point that care is most needed, we discuss the ever-present possibility of failures within acts of care. We argue that dwelling in the temporality of delay can be understood as an act of care if delaying allows us to pay care-ful attention to violence. We then circle back to a point in twentieth-century history – World War II – that was also concerned with an existential threat requiring a response from a whole population. Our purpose is not to invoke a fantasised narrative of ‘Blitz spirit’, but to suggest that the British psychoanalytic tradition born of that moment offers resources for understanding how to keep thinking while ‘under fire’ through containing unbearable anxiety and the capacity for violence in the intersubjective space and time between people. In conditions of lockdown and what will be a long and drawn-out ‘after life’ of COVID-19, this commitment to thinking in and with delay and containment might help to inhabit this time of waiting – waiting that is the management and mitigation of a future threat, but also a time of care in and for the present

Thinking through childhood and maternal studies: a feminist encounter

Feminism and the Politics of Childhood offers an innovative and critical exploration of perceived commonalities and conflicts between women and children and, more broadly, between various forms of feminism and the politics of childhood. This unique collection of 18 chapters brings into dialogue authors from a range of geographical contexts, social science disciplines, activist organisations, and theoretical perspectives. The wide variety of subjects include refugee camps, care labour, domestic violence and childcare and education. Chapter authors focus on local contexts as well as their global interconnections, and draw on diverse theoretical traditions such as poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, posthumanism, postcolonialism, political economy, and the ethics of care. Together the contributions offer new ways to conceptualise relations between women and children, and to address injustices faced by both groups

Chapter 11 Watchful Waiting

This paper opens up the relationship between vulnerability and the temporalities of care. It takes ‘care’ as not just a material practice that supports, manages and sustains vulnerable bodies, but as a temporal practice, one that produces time in situations that are otherwise felt to be stuck or ‘chronic’. It draws on some co-written anecdotes about the use of ‘watchful waiting’ by medical practitioners working in general practice in the UK’s National Health System (NHS) to think through the meanings of waiting in relation to chronic health and mental health crises. The offer of ‘watchful waiting’ as a response to ‘chronic crisis’ becomes a test case for understanding a more general condition of watchful waiting as a form of care, in a context in which waiting for healthcare has become an agony for many, experienced as a form of abandonment or a key sign of health service failure. The paper attempts to re-think ‘waiting times’ within a wider history of the temporalities of care, in order to elucidate the ways an offer of waiting can itself be understood as a response to vulnerability through a practice of staying with or alongside the chronic temporalities of others

Chapter 5 Depressing time

The Time of Anthropology provides a series of compelling anthropological case studies that explore the different temporalities at play in the scientific discourses, governmental techniques and policy practices through which modern life is shaped. Together they constitute a novel analysis of contemporary chronopolitics. The contributions focus on state power, citizenship, and ecologies of time to reveal the scalar properties of chronopolitics as it shifts between everyday lived realities and the macro-institutional work of nation states. The collection charts important new directions for chronopolitical thinking in the future of anthropological research

Chapter 5 Depressing time

The Time of Anthropology provides a series of compelling anthropological case studies that explore the different temporalities at play in the scientific discourses, governmental techniques and policy practices through which modern life is shaped. Together they constitute a novel analysis of contemporary chronopolitics. The contributions focus on state power, citizenship, and ecologies of time to reveal the scalar properties of chronopolitics as it shifts between everyday lived realities and the macro-institutional work of nation states. The collection charts important new directions for chronopolitical thinking in the future of anthropological research

Introduction. Clinical encounters in sexuality: psychoanalytic practice & Queer Theory, Eds., Noreen Giffney and Eve Watson.

In 2017, Noreen Giffney and Eve Watson brought out a landmark edited collection entitled Clinical Encounters in Sexuality: Psychoanalytic Practice & Queer Theory with the open-access, nonprofit publisher Punctum Books. This issue of Studies in Gender and Sexuality gathers a range of responses from scholars and clinicians to the book. To introduce the issue, I offer some thoughts, inspired by Bion, on “encounter.

Passivity and gender: psychical inertia and maternal stillness

Who is afraid of passivity? Historically, women and minoritized people have had good reason to be, given that passivity has been a way to keep them out of the world of “reason.” Freud’s move from the activity/passivity binary as the principle of all instinct, to its gendering as femininity/passivity and masculinity/activity, leads him to assert the “repudiation of femininity” as the bedrock of psychic life (Freud, S. 1937. “Analysis Terminable and Interminable.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 23, 209–254. London: Hogarth Press). This has led to a generative history of feminist, queer and Black psychoanalytic scholarship that constantly re-opens the question of female subjectivity and sexuality, and what we mean by psychic femininity and masculinity. However, what does remains as “bedrock,” even in this theorizing, is the figure of the mother in the internal world of the infant – supposedly castrated yet all-powerful, and requiring that the infant defend itself against what is stirred up as a result of dependency on her. After reviewing some of the psychoanalytic debates about femininity, I turn to “stillness” rather than passivity to suggest that we can identify a maternal element that is on the side of development, a figuration of psychical inertia that holds the capacity for waiting, stopping, ceasing and withdrawing in a world in which these mental functions are sorely missing

Postmaternal, postwork and the maternal death drive

The term ‘postmaternal’ has recently emerged as a way to articulate the effects of neoliberalism on the public devaluing of caring labour [Stephens, Julie. 2011. Confronting Postmaternal Thinking: Feminism, Memory, and Care. New York: Columbia University Press]. This term suggests a valorisation of values associated with care and mothering that have traditionally been gendered and rely on a heterosexist matrix for their intelligibility. Marxist feminist writers during the 1970s struggled with the question of the particular form of care that reproduction entails, and this feminist archive has been recently extended to a discussion of ‘post-work’ [Weeks, Kathi. 2011. The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics and Postwork Imaginaries. Durham: Duke], in which calls for the valuing of unpaid work as a viable form of labour have been reanimated. In this article I examine the relation between these two analytic categories – ‘postmaternal’ and ‘postwork’. Both categories require that we re-think some of the most trenchant issues in feminist thought – the sexual division of labour, the place of ‘reproduction’ in psychic and social life, and the possibilities for a new feminist commons