Short abstract

This contribution focuses on the contradictory affects that develop in care work amidst planetary biocide. It aims to complement feminist STS accounts with a Berlantian theory of affects to capture the tensions of reproducing life within a life-harming world.

Long abstract

Against imaginaries of technoscientific environmental salvation, feminist STS scholars have directed our attention to the ethico-epistemological importance of the mundane work of care that sustains and reproduces human and more-than-human worlds (Puige de la Bellacasa, 2017). This contribution explores another dimension of care work in times of environmental catastrophe: its contradictory affects. Learning from interviews and ethnographic research with French households who engage in 'everyday environmentalism', this paper sits with the contradictory feelings and the feelings of contradictions that saturate the 'green' version of what materialist feminists have called reproductive labour, the labour that reproduces life. Instead of focusing on the environmental catastrophe as an effect of our material lives, it reads it as an affective signal within those lives. The environmental polycastrophe heightens a tension of capitalist systems of production and confronts us daily and materially to the contradiction of reproductive labour amidst global biocide: that the very labour we employ to reproduce our lives also harms them. Putting in dialogue the affect theory of Lauren Berlant with feminist STS ethics of care, this contribution argues that by heightening the sense(s) of the contradictions of capitalism in our daily care, the environmental catastrophe produces affects that help us register what Berlant calls the 'ordinariness of crisis' (2011) and a sense of 'feeling historical' (2005), meaning 'being forced into thought about it' (ibid.: 5), necessary for prefigurative politics.