Rights,affect and precarity: Post-racial formations in carework

Introduction

Work is becoming more unstable, insecure, dangerous and vulnerable. When I first started organizing domestic workers, people kind of perceived it as this very exotic shadow workforce at the margins of the economy. But when you look around these days, the conditions that define domestic work are not so different from the conditions that define every American worker’s realities. … We’re essentially all becoming domestic workers.

Today there are three unsolved problems of social justice whose neglect in existing theories seems particularly problematic. … First there is the problem of doing justice to people with physical and mental impairments. … Second is the urgent problem of extending justice to all world citizens … Finally, we need to face the issues of justice involved in our treatment of non-human animals.

Both Ai-Jen Poo, the Director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, and Martha Nussbaum call for the expansion of shareable human dignity as a means to render recognizable subjects who otherwise fall outside of juridical justice. Such political efforts, animated by the spirit of the post-racial (whereby racial equality is conceptualized as achieved or imminent in and through the West), deploy a notion of universal and shared vulnerabilities, or precarity, in order to produce a field of equivalence, where difference and particularity exist simultaneous to calls for universal humanity and rights, not only for human careworkers, but even for nonhuman subjects such as chimpanzees. Thus, for Poo and Nussbaum, (differentiated) subjects (“shadow” workers; people with physical and mental impairments, world citizens and nonhuman animals) can and should exist in equal recognition under the law. The inclusion of the particular is trumpeted through appeals to affect, or emotional relationality guided by political norms such as “we should all care.” However, what such conceptual strategies neglect in their pursuit of achieving an equivalent humanity for their subjects are the ways the site of the human is always already overdetermined. That is, both Poo and Nussbaum use as referent an imagined, universal, and self-determining subject of reason who is already differentiated and ontologically after the law rather than simultaneous to or constitutive of it, further stabilizing and naturalizing “human” as privileged category. However, the boundaries of the human are linked to modes of mattering through the law, in the sense that legal personhood functions as a threshold for the “human,” where the human constitutes the privileged domain for certain rights and protections. Humanness is hence “no longer a condition of birth” but “the effect of the work of the law, that which [is] to be animated by this work” (Esmier, 2012: 3).

In this article, we argue that juridical humanity (Esmier, 2012) is a site of racial power insofar as the distinctions of affectability and self-governance confer legibility and differentiation. The “engulfment” of Others is, as Denise Ferreira da Silva (2007) has argued, an effect of differentiating mechanisms (“raciality”) through which the post-Enlightenment universal subject retains its ostensible transparency (i.e. ontological self-determination). Therefore, calls to humanize should be read for how they continue to inscribe racial power over global others. This work brings together our shared interest in carework as a site of juridical humanization (for Hua, human careworkers in chimpanzee sanctuaries, and for Ray, domestic careworkers in human households). We map the emergence of a field of equivalence (as a post-racial landscape of political possibility) first through the legal contexts of the 2000 US Chimpanzee Health Improvement and Maintenance Protection Act (Chimp Act) and the 2013 California Domestic Worker’s Bill of Rights (California Bill). We then trace corresponding moments across these two sites that bring together the carework of the human household with the carework of the chimpanzee sanctuary (places where chimps formerly used in biomedical and military research live out the remainder of their lives after retirement from state service).

Analogizing both as similar kinds of “carework” erases the very different and differentiating structures of juridical humanization that, we argue, actually undermines domestic worker organizing. Instead, we draw correspondences between the two forms of carework that demonstrate moments of uneven humanization, where the law ultimately reproduces the domestic worker in the human household and the chimpanzee wards in the sanctuary as differentially human over and against each other as well as to their employers, caretakers and wards, a process we read as the workings of racial power. Considering our work together enables us to demonstrate how at the site of carework, a post-racial politics of shared precarity obscures the ways raciality—the onto-epistemological mechanisms that produce the human as always already a differentiated space—continues to dictate the political conditions of subjectivity and humanity. Finally, we propose a reading practice that, in tracing moments of slippage, attempts to capture what Neferti Tadiar (2009) terms “things [that] fall away” or are remaindered in the economic, political, and cultural ontological processes shaping life.

Affect and (post-racial) fields of equivalence

In this section, we trace the conceptual formation of difference(s) as situated in a field of equivalence, first by mapping how juridical legibility (the making of a subject of rights) presupposes, even as it produces, a stable notion of the human as the crux of legal personhood. We then briefly trace this legal terrain and its limits by focusing on the ways both the Chimp Act and the California Bill advance legal inclusion by redrawing the (juridical) line between legal person and thing (human and nonhuman). Because this strategy of inclusion does not question the racial as instituted in the moment of the drawing of such lines, or in the moment of legibility itself, what result are claims to shared precarity, where all previously non-legible subjects form a kind of “lumpensubaltern” (affective) subject that can now coexist with the (universal) subject of the law. Such a conceptual turn universalizes vulnerability.

Understanding racism as a manifestation of a human/nonhuman animal binary split does not address how the racial informs the very conceptual apparatus that produces the frame of the binary conscripting notions of modern humanity. For example, many early legal calls to broaden the terms of nonhuman animal legibility (often categorically referred to as “animal rights”) followed models similar to that enumerated by Gary Francione (2008), of a theory of rights premised on the consideration of animals as persons with interests rather than as property. Arguing that the “inclusion of animals on the ‘person’ side [of a person/thing dualism] is to recognize that species alone is an insufficient justification for treating nonhumans as ‘things’,” Francione (2008) uses the example of slavery to question whether the characteristics of personhood can be applied to other beings “on the ‘thing’ side of the person/thing dualism” (p. 208). This binary is central to making distinct the human as privileged category of the law, and its application through the institution of slavery, following Francione, corrupted our distinctly human sense of moral obligation. Here race, through slavery, becomes a distinguishing characteristic of human differentiation that justified placing some humans on the thing side of a person/thing binary. ¹

What this approach captures is the problematic of the human/nonhuman binary—a species binary that scholars like Francione often place as ontologically preexisting the human differentiating processes of racism, (hetero)sexism, classism, and so on. For Francione, the question is not what conditions draw and redraw the boundaries between person/thing, but whether we properly apprehend where the line falls, whether we have correctly assessed what should fall under “persons” rather than “things.” Like Nussbaum, such logic understands social inequality as the incorrect categorization of persons into things, where the person/thing binary serves as the template to understand other manifestations of inequality such as white/of color, male/female, straight/gay, citizen/alien, and so on. This conceptual approach is limited insofar as it neglects how self-determination continues to remain unaddressed as the privileged domain of humanity that, instituted juridically, writes the aspired for subject as transcendent (without ontology and before the law). In other words, calls for addressing the species binary and extending justice through analogic frame to the nonhuman not only produce a teleology of equivalence but neglect to address the conceptual terms—raciality—that already write the universal subject (now woman, person of color, and chimpanzee) as differentiated through their affectability or lack of self-determination. The incorporation and inclusion of nonhuman animals into persons, whether through varying extensions of legal rights or the acknowledgment of companion animals as no less significant than human companions and children (see Rudy, 2011), remains uncritical of juridical humanization, where the law is the scene, and the juridical the privileged frame through which humanity (as self-determining) is written.

An example of the taking for granted the (already differentiated) juridical human is evident in a 1994 National Research Council (NRC) report issued by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that argued the need for the long-term care and retirement of chimpanzee research subjects. The report’s findings are based on “scientific, financial, and ethical reasoning,” and argue that with the national moratorium on captive breeding of chimpanzee research subjects, the eventual retirement of these subjects into long-term care facilities is as much an ethical concern tied to “core human values … that go beyond purely pragmatic or economic considerations” (NRC, 1997: 8, 9). Arguing that “responsibility for long-term care of chimpanzees is greater than that for other laboratory animals,” the report identifies genetic similarities between chimpanzees and humans as the basis for an ethical obligation:

Chimpanzees are genetically very similar to humans. The special connection of chimpanzees to humans has been reinforced by decades of watching the rich repertoire of chimpanzee social, maternal, and tool-using behavior on television and in zoos; the public therefore expects a high level of respect for the animals. (NRC, 1997: 9)

The report goes on to emphasize that the affective bonds between humans and chimpanzees (“special connection”) make euthanasia (the most cost-effective retirement strategy) unviable. The report thus works to advance legal protection by justifying the placement of the captive chimpanzee research subject on the “person” side of a thing/person binary by emphasizing genetic closeness and behavioral similarities, closeness that resonates with core human values and closeness that makes chimpanzees distinct from dogs, rats, and other research subjects. The report’s justifications indeed enabled the passage of the Chimp Act in 2000, which created a long-term care facility, or chimpanzee sanctuary (Chimp Haven in Louisiana), partially funded through federal moneys and consequently redrew, at least momentarily, the lines of humanity to include chimps made captive through the state. ²

Naming specifically the maternal behaviors of chimpanzees as one key measure of familiarity (closeness to humans) and thus ethical obligation, the gendered circuits of maternal and motherly affect that evoke a discourse of (hetero-patriarchal) family responsibility become the central node for juridical humanization. The vision of shared vulnerability shaped through the NRC report—vulnerability of the chimp that must be shared with humans—is managed through the differentiating mechanisms of affect (“special connections” between human and chimps). Our interest in affect lies in how differential forms of personhood are forged through who can affect and be affected, as well as the structures of affective relations and norms. Affect has been generally understood in western epistemology “in relation to will as well as passion” (Poyton and Lee, 2011: 635). ³ Drawing from feminist theories of the body and queer theory’s exploration of fields of emotion, “affective labor” then describes embodied labor that “produces or manipulates affects such as a feeling of ease, well-being, satisfaction, excitement, or passion” (Hardt, quoted in Pratt and Rosner, 2012: 6). From these theorizations, affect is, much like self-determination, a universal condition, emerging through contingency (adjacency and duration) in the interstices of any two social forces that express and produce differentiation, whether simply through the different feelings elicited in two subjects, or the differentiation affect enables in mediated social relations.

A maternal framing, which circulates affect to enable juridical humanization, is also evident in the language of the California Bill, demonstrating the narrow ways in which carework is legible through the law. Domestic workers are defined as

household cleaners, caregivers and child care providers working in private homes to care for our loved ones … Domestic workers are primarily immigrant women who work in private households in order to provide for their families as the primary income earner. Domestic workers are essential to California as they enable others to participate in the workforce. Without these domestic workers … the economy as a whole would suffer. (AB 241-California Domestic Worker Bill of Rights Fact Sheet, n.d.)

Situating the importance of the domestic worker as measured by her role in supporting “California families” (the foundation to the economy as a whole), the Bill argues the need for state intervention to ensure that the employer’s hetero-patriarchal family remains the logical recipient of affective labor, given, as the Bill sternly writes, “[t]he unique nature of [domestic worker’s] work requires protections to prevent abuse and mistreatment from occurring behind closed doors, out of the public eye” (AB 241-California Domestic Worker Bill of Rights Fact Sheet, n.d.). Once present, the State defers to the benevolence of the employer’s family, allowing it wide latitude over industry-specific provisions. For example, struck from the Bill are intricate rules suggested by domestic work organizations to provide compensation if the sleep provision is waived. Furthermore, use of kitchen provisions may be suspended arbitrarily and without notice. The domestic worker need only be

informed that a person in the household has bona fide health issues related to food, including, but not limited to, food allergies, or has religious or dietary restrictions which make presence of some foods unacceptable, the employee shall not eat or prepare that food in the household. (Bill Text, 19 March 2013, ch. 2: 1460)

Here, the domestic worker is stripped of any bona fide issues related to food in favor of those of any “person in the household.” These subordinations establish the emergence of the domestic worker through an affective architecture, as a differentiated subject (marked in the Bill by citizenship and belonging to the national family) at the moment of her legal inscription. Yet, the continual reanimation of the California Bill underscores these necessary limits of political inclusion, which leave unaddressed the racial power inscribed through the sought-after universal subject (of reason, of the law). Instead, the changes made to the 2013 version of the bill (AB 241) after the failure of the 2012 version (AB 889) demonstrate the ways affect codes domestic workers’ strategies for legal redress. AB 241 limits its universal worker claims (by omitting AB 889’s cost of living increases, 30-days notice of termination, and California Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) protection).

AB 241 also emphasizes affective distinctions to bolster its particular ones. In its summary of issues and background, the informational sheet on the Bill devalues domestic worker personhood at the moment it provides for its legal inscription by producing the domestic worker as a cultural victim and her work as important insofar as it supports the work of others. This distinction is made through the Bill’s “persons in the household,” which draws moral differences between the careworker’s (foreign) family and her (Americanized) household. The foreign domestic worker’s family is the site of economic obligation (presumably because of a missing male breadwinner), while the Californian employer’s family emerges as the site of love (as opposed to workplace). Furthermore, AB 241 states that all other Californian workers “from the barista at Starbucks making California’s lattes to construction workers” receive overtime pay while domestic workers do not, thereby signifying an exclusion that is “outdated and rooted in the racist omission of African-American workers” (AB 241-California Domestic Worker Bill of Rights Fact Sheet, n.d.). ⁴ Thus, the domestic worker emerges as a legitimate political subject in the space between the effeminate barista and the masculinist construction worker, and in a space which has relegated the African American to the past, exemplifiying the ways “socially and institutionally produced forms of emancipation remain regulatively and constitutively tied to the nation-state form,” a form which achieves its monopoly on rationality and violence through the extension of differential citizenship (Reddy, 2011: 39). Such a framing does not bode well, given that Governor Brown was able to reject AB 889 on the grounds of the purported superior vulnerability (read: raciality) of the hypothetical elderly/disabled client, who would be unfairly burdened if domestic workers were to advance. ⁵

The legal privileging of the employer’s hetero-patriarchal family, the reading of the domestic worker’s labor as simply one (equivocated yet also gendered) component to the larger economy of the state, and the correspondence of these assumptions to the justifications posed by the NIH and NRC that chimpanzees, as part of a broader genetic family of primates distinguished by maternal practices of care, demonstrate the limits of juridical humanization and a field of equivalence. In fact, the labor that is assumed to be all the same (whether domestic labor and all other parts of the economy, the labor of the human domestic worker and that of the chimpanzee mother, and the labor of the domestic worker and the sanctuary caregiver) can only be so if the frame of hetero-patriarchal family serves as the point of departure for rights claims. If the conceptual terrain of a field of equivalence imagines particular subjects situated together in a universalized struggle for legal legibility, legal strategies of inclusion and expansion of rights necessarily premise their claims on the differentiated humanity of their subjects. In other words, because the law here presumes, by itself instituting, a hierarchized humanity, the language surrounding both the Chimp Act and the California Bill must emphasize the unequivalent status of its (chimpanzee and domestic worker) subjects by assuming the frame of the hetero-patriarchal national family.

Simultaneous to the strategy of the inclusion of the particular is the politics of shared precarity, which also produces uneven modes of legal belonging, both between human careworkers, their employers, and organizers and between human household careworkers and those who labor in chimpanzee sanctuaries, through the evocation of the national family. Using Ai-Jen Poo’s call to understand that “we are all domestic workers now,” we argue that the frame of shared precarity actually undermines the efforts of human household careworkers, and we then trace a corresponding moment where chimpanzee sanctuary careworkers distinguish their labor as that which places them on higher moral ground (to human careworkers, other human workers in general). Tracing the inhering of rights in one site (chimpanzees in the sanctuary) reveals the limits of the other (domestic worker legibility), where the same assumptions around biological and cultural proximity work to humanize chimps as they dehumanize the non-white, often immigrant domestic workers. Hence, it is not that domestic workers are like chimpanzees, rather, we argue for a mapping of the confluence of forces that come together to situate subjects differentially and in tension to each other, where such forces are mutually constitutive and thus may reproduce rhetorical similarity, but should never be collapsed into ontological likenesses.

Uneven humanizations

The sanctuary provides contradictory modes of humanization, ones that are more flexible than ones available in the private home, because of the ways racial power, specifically claims to self-determination, operate through affect. Understanding that the politics of shared precarity and the notion of a field of equivalence are fundamentally sites of tension and contention, we read in what follows the statements offered by Kelly, a female, 25-year-old paid caregiver, in order to map these moments of slippage, where notions of a stable human subject quickly fall into hierarchizing schemas. ⁶ For example, Kelly states,

I feel like middle schoolers [human], when they’re misbehaving it’s like, “come on, get your act together.” With chimps we never really say they’re misbehaving, but when they’re acting a little rowdy or something, you know, they’re in a cage and they can’t ever leave. Sometimes they might be in a bad mood and might not be very nice to us [careworkers] but we have to realize the situation they’re in, and so I guess that’s why I give them a break. Middle schoolers aren’t in a cage and they’re lucky and should know it. … I definitely have a philosophy that they’re [chimp wards] stuck here and we should do everything we can for them … they didn’t commit any crime and that’s how I look at it. It’s not their fault but they have to live in a cage. They’re in for a crime they didn’t commit.

It is in Kelly’s statements that the uneven humanizations delimiting access to political subjectivity can be mapped as they correspond to the broader discourses of carework that problematically analogize domestic workers and sanctuary careworkers (labor at both sites is all captured under one signifier, “carework”). For example, the humanization of chimpanzee wards takes place against the figure of the affectable human who makes bad decisions, circumscribing humanity through moral terms that hierarchize. The distinction between chimpanzees and humans was one of the first points to which Kelly spoke; for Kelly, who admits to never having any strong aspirations growing up, but perhaps imagined herself as a teacher when she was in high school, exposure to chimpanzees while volunteering at a sanctuary during her college years led her to “realize that this is where I fit. … I never thought I would be a chimp person.” Now, however, as both a docent who leads visitors through the sanctuary as well as a caregiver, Kelly admits that she could “never handle working with middle schoolers.”

In drawing a comparison between chimps and human middle schoolers, Kelly humanizes her chimp wards through a moral terrain, where humanity is understood as measured through self-knowing and free will. The fact that chimps do not express the self-knowing or free will of human middle schoolers (not knowing when their behavior is disruptive because they are in a perpetual state of capture) releases the chimpanzees from any culpability for actions otherwise read as misbehavior and writes the chimp in affectability. In contrast, it is the very choice to misbehave while knowing better that makes human middle schoolers culpable. Hence, even while attempting to humanize her chimpanzee wards by linking and distinguishing their behavior as better than that of human middle schoolers, Kelly continues to circumscribe the human within the capacity to self-determination (self-knowing and free will), which ultimately makes humans in contrast to chimpanzees morally culpable. The innocence of the chimpanzee signified through lack of self-knowing is precisely the cause and effect of their state of capture, of being in a cage they can never leave, of being “stuck here … in for a crime they didn’t commit.” Dehumanized via characterization as without self-knowing or free will even as humanized into morally superior persons compared to human middle schoolers, Kelly’s statement reveals some of the slippages inherent to conceptualizing a field of equivalence (notably, Kelly and other sanctuary workers use the language of individual, rather than animal, to refer to their wards). Attempting to construct grounds for equivalence in order to remedy the injustice of capture, Kelly’s moves to humanize are enabled by the juridical humanization assumed in the justifications for the Chimp Act. In ironic contrast, this is the very structure of juridical humanization that provides human rights to domestic workers even while dehumanizing them in the same document.

The fact that the human careworker must be the one to realize (because the chimpanzee cannot) the chimpanzee’s innocence within unjust conditions can be read as a moment where both the human and chimpanzee are humanized and dehumanized. Here the chimpanzee is humanized through the construction of her as not culpable, even while that innocence relies on her lack of self-knowing, the very trait that humanizes the middle school–aged humans. Furthermore, the careworkers are humanized against both the middle schoolers and the chimpanzees as persons who recognize the moral economies that distinguish chimpanzees from middle schoolers and who recognize the unjust conditions of captivity that further demonstrate chimpanzee non-culpability. What is unclear, but worth noting as a potential site of disruption, is whether the lack of self-knowing enabling chimpanzee non-culpability is itself a result of the structural conditions of imprisonment and lifelong captivity. Such a reading, which reverses the logic of post-Enlightenment humanism where self-determination presupposes incarceration, demonstrates the potentiality of what Tadiar names laborers’ “creative capacities” that are both circumscribed by, even as they escape the conditions that structure life into modes of mattering.

Such instabilities in the structuring conditions of life are evident in some of the efforts of Hand in Hand: The Domestic Employers Association, a national solidarity organization of domestic workers and their employers, which works on both legal and extralegal campaigns to identify shared stakes and better the conditions of domestic workers (http://domesticemployers.org). Hand in Hand’s stakes in maintaining bourgeois property relations have led, perhaps surprisingly, to innovative insights on domestic worker labor protections. For instance, the organization is effective in pointing out the affective logics that structure the appropriation of domestic worker labor. To challenge competitive notions of deserving humanity, Hand in Hand acknowledges them openly, albeit in carefully couched and reassuring terms. In making the argument for fair and consistent work expectations, the organization problematizes the expectations of performing “small” duties around the home. Hand in Hand recommends keeping a list of such exemplary duties, which reveals the amount of labor, skill, and time that goes into just “pitching in,” and, further, illuminates the vulnerability of the domestic worker in the private home to arbitrary work. Although Hand in Hand suggests that work be regulated by a contract, rather than relying on an employer’s benevolence (or convenient memory), it does not offer any sample language that would specifically curtail employers’ appropriation of domestic workers’ labor. In the absence of anything but presumed good will, the affective measures that govern carework remain in place. More useful is their suggestion about how to hold more informal conversations, in the form of regular reviews and meetings with short agendas. Hand in Hand recommends that “if your employee is responsible for children, try to hold these meetings in their absence or in a neutral location so that your employee is able to fully participate” (http://domesticemployers.org/employers/). This recommendation acknowledges that affective ties between careworker and charge limit the economic and political viability of the worker, and instead proposes meetings elsewhere, thus extending the space, time, and content of domestic labor outside of the regulative conditions of the private home. In the best possible reading, this suggestion imagines the careworker as a worker outside the immediate bonds of their charges and employers, and instead locates her in alternative affective encounters immanent in other environments. These moments provide a means to interrogate that which falls away, or the slippages produced through the contradictory conceptual grounds of precarity and fields of equivalence. In what follows, we foreground the uneven formations of the human that produce a field of equivalence, which, we argue, problematically brings together domestic workers in human households with careworkers in chimpanzee sanctuaries where the naturalization of a gendered servitude in the sanctuary site undermines the political subjectivity of careworkers in human households.

Naturalizing servitude

Caring for chimps is extremely humbling because you’re putting them first, before your own needs. You’re here if you have to really late. … You’re giving up a lot of your life, but you’re also only here for a certain amount of time. I spend most of my time here [at the sanctuary], so does everybody else. … A lot of people have flown across the country and moved here, just for this program [sanctuary] so that says a lot. … I don’t usually take long breaks. It’s part of the job. The chimps don’t get a summer break. … It’s pretty much the center of your life. (Kelly)

The naturalization of servitude, which is central to Kelly’s rendering of the ethical obligation inherited from a history of unjust captivity, exemplifies how conceptualizations of carework in one site come to affect its understanding in another. The very fact that different modes of labor, situated in distinct economic fields all come to be signified as “carework” is troubling insofar as it leaves unaddressed the particularities of labor that distinguish caring at the site of the human household from that of the chimpanzee. The erasure of specificity is to obscure, following Tadiar’s (2009) definition of labor, the contextual, “appropriable life-making social capacities and … theoretico-political standpoint[s]” with which we could “examine the role of immaterial and bodily practices of experience of marginalized social groups in contemporary relations of accumulation and production” (p. 13). Without this focus, as Mary Garcia Castro (1989) noted many years ago, “[w]hat is bought and sold in domestic service is not simply the labor power of an empleada [maid] or her productive work and energy; it is her identity as a person” as weighed through patriarchal, racial, and national moralities (p. 122). In contrast, focusing on labor with precision reintegrates the material with the affective in unforeseen ways, opening up possibility where before there may have only been circumscription.

In Kelly’s statement (as in the NRC report), affect, namely defined through the (gendered, maternal) ability to care about another, is that which humanizes the chimpanzee and the human who cares about the fate of the chimpanzee. In Kelly’s view, the need to care about wrongly captured and imprisoned chimpanzees requires “putting them [chimpanzee wards] first” in a way that erases the relatively privileged position of careworkers able to dedicate themselves to undervalued labor. As a privately funded organization, the sanctuary survives by mobilizing care in donors, and while such donors abound, the financial support they provide does not leave much room for extravagant salaries. For Kelly, care is measured in time, not money, where the realization that chimpanzee wards do not get a break from their captivity should move careworkers to dedicate the majority of their lives to “putting them [chimpanzees] first” at whatever cost. It is this willingness to dedicate one’s life to the undignified and undervalued labor of carework that then reinscribes Kelly’s own dignity, moral worth, and humanity. As she explains, her carework is mostly

Serving meals, providing enrichment … a lot, a lot of cleaning. It’s not very glamorous … it’s messy. It’s mostly cleaning and dealing with chimp fecal material. … I wasn’t expecting to get spit on. … I didn’t expect to get poop thrown at me. … We try to stay composed and not make a big deal about it … We don’t get mad at her [chimp throwing fecal material]. We don’t treat her differently. … Those are things I didn’t expect to deal with but are part of the job. You just have to be flexible.

Not having expected the unglamorous aspects of her work (a lot of cleaning, having fecal matter thrown at her, being spit on), yet doing it anyway, elevates Kelly’s moral worth and thus humanizes her over and against the chimpanzee and fellow humans who in the same situation might out of anger punish the chimpanzee. Kelly’s ability to deal with and continue to care for her wards despite the undignified position she is placed in due to her caring is exactly that which saves her own dignity. Over and against this position is that of the domestic worker agitating for better economic and political rights. The two-tiered politics articulated by Poo with regard to careworkers in human households is reinforced at the site of the sanctuary, where careworkers read their work—often tasks considered undignified—as precisely that which embodies chimpanzee careworker dignity. By elevating their carework as dignified because is it mobilized out of their care for the unjust situation in which the chimpanzee wards find themselves, the way careworkers like Kelly read their labor undermines the efforts of human household careworkers organizing for a change in their conditions of labor by naturalizing the servitude of the immigrant women of color who perform these roles in human households.

Maria de la Luz Ibarra (1999) notes a similar grounding of careworkers’ dignity in their distinctive ability to carry out distasteful work (as opposed to economic advantage) in her study of “deep alliances” between private home health-care workers and their terminally ill wards. In response to their former experiences in the formal sector, where they expressed frustration over substandard forms of public care as well as the racial stratification of public institutions where the labor of non-white aides is belittled by patients and staff alike, the Mexicanas in Ibarra’s study draw upon moral economies (carried through cultural and religious distinction) to explain why they would enter and stay in economically and emotionally disadvantageous relations with their wards. Stating that “my reward is not money,” these home health-care workers mark their distinction in love and compassion beyond the wage, or the “knowledge that they behaved in a correct way and that these actions would help to provide them with ‘salvation’ after their own death” (p. 118, 130).

The affective relations that characterize carework find their ideal form in the moral economies of the private hetero-patriarchal family, and indeed were formed under the conditions of racial servitude which underpinned the latter’s formation. ⁷ The study of carework reveals the reanimation of “the explanations of [economic] domination through the [cultural] flaws of the dominated” (Bodkin, 2007: xii). Given this overdetermined invisibility of the labor form, the grounds for human household careworker legibility (as political, economic subject) privileges the affective. In other words, legal and political legibility takes place through the recognition of the careworker as an affectable (already differentiated) subject, which naturalizes her racial and gendered difference by circumscribing legibility through the historical relations of the hetero-patriarchal family and enslavement. This is starkly evident in the immediate removal of all language about worker protection from the California Bill, even though (as of this writing) it has only passed the first of seven levels of the California Legislature. It is also affect that produces the social relations of carework as labor, where the value of both the work itself and the careworker as person is tied to the affective circuits elicited through the interaction of worker, employer, and charge.

For example, Eileen Boris and Rhacel Parrenas (2010) understand that the wages of “intimate labors” in the post-racial order continue to suffer from patriarchal assumptions about what racialized and feminized workers should undertake “out of love, kinship, or obligation” (p. 10), even while the ranks of intimate laborers grows. These assumptions are facilitated by the invisibility of the labor form. As Phyllis Palmer has argued, the “perfect” servant is the invisible one, an absent presence that unobtrusively removes the dirt that would otherwise besmirch bourgeois ideals of effortless, sparkling white domesticity. In contrast, unwashed dishes, an unclean toilet, dust, and so on signify the unruly presence of the domestic worker and thus also racial trespass. This idealized invisibility, in turn, is compounded by its feminization: that is, the bodies doing it are delineated as female (relational, dependent), and the work itself is gendered feminine (i.e. not culminating in authority in the masculinist public sphere). This feminization is also given life in controlling discourses such as “just like one of the family,” which is certainly the employer expression met with the most derision in domestic worker literature cross-culturally.

Thus, careworker personhood emerges as differential humanity through affective relations grounded in embodied and spatial difference. Always already feminine, the personhood of the careworker is simultaneously marked through corresponding national–patriarchal moralities based in femininity, raciality, and national difference. As we saw in the case of AB 241, the domestic worker is represented as unattached to the California economy except through the benevolence of inclusion by the employer’s family, as overseen by the patriarchal forces of state governance. The terms of this inclusion do not just forcefully rewrite differential humanity, as we have argued earlier; these terms also narrate the unruly domestic worker who clamors for redress as irretrievably foreign—a process facilitated by the analogizing of different forms of care labor, as we demonstrate below.

Analogies and engulfment

That’s how it’s always been; it’s always been a 1 to 4 ratio [of men to women]. … The time commitment, cleaning, are not that interesting to him [Kelly’s male friend who works with chimps in the field]. That’s the way it is for a lot of primate people who aren’t here [working at a sanctuary]. I just don’t think they have a desire to put so much time into it. … Everyone who works here sees it as, we’re servants. That’s what we’re doing—we’re serving them [the chimpanzees]. I think that for some people that’s not as appealing.

The naturalization of gendered servitude, expressed in chimpanzee careworker Kelly’s statement that proper carework requires accepting the careworker as a servant, works with the logics of differentiated humanity that segregate non-national, female careworkers employed in human households. Assuming rather than critiquing the racial differentiation of humanity, Kelly’s assessment of the mostly female, mostly white sanctuary workplace ⁸ further undermines human household caregivers’ legal appeals by implicitly casting human household caregivers as unruly and undeserving subjects. Again, Kelly uses affect in the form of care in order to elevate the moral status of sanctuary careworkers and to elevate the gendered labor of care itself (namely defined as cleaning and serving). Expressing how everyone who works at the sanctuary sees themselves as servants—“that’s what we’re doing, serving them”—Kelly’s statement obscures the differential conditions of labor that make her work different from careworkers in human households. Unlike human employers and wards, the fact that the chimpanzee cannot speak to the effectiveness or quality of the care they elicit only further humanizes the sanctuary careworker—the firing of a sanctuary worker is not the decision of the chimpanzee ward, nor is the chimpanzee an employer in this sense. In contrast, despite all familial claims to the contrary, the dissatisfied human household employer holds the power and means to disemploy her careworker. Returning to Ibarra’s case study of home health-care workers, we find that the family of terminally ill wards wield debilitating power. As Ibarra notes, employers can not only hire and fire at will, but poignantly choose to include or ban health-care workers from the funerals of their wards, leaving the workers either soothed (morally remunerated within the affective terms of religious distinction) or devastated (divested of a key ritual of peacemaking). These are the very different economic and political conditions that shape the work taking place in the human household and that of the chimpanzee sanctuary (who works for who?), which, we argue, is too often obscured in equivocating claims that it is all “carework.”

Furthermore, by noting the rejection of the terms of servitude, which “for some people [is] not as appealing,” as both a masculine trait and one that reflects a lack of desire and dedication (“I just don’t think they have a desire to put so much time into it”), Kelly deploys caring to affirm proper femininity as the main measure of carework. Feminist anthropologists and geographers have identified proper femininity (for female-bodied subjects) or subservient masculinity (for male-bodied subjects), rather than any inalienable rights of personhood or understanding of domestic labor as a work formation deserving of rights and protections, as the main measure of legal redress for domestic workers (Castro, 1989; Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2001; Palmer, 1989; Ray and Qayum, 2009). Others have noted that the mobile domestic worker (either between households or nations) is threatening in that her detachment from patriarchal forms (such as the hetero-patriarchal family) suggests a subject in need of discipline. Therefore, legal remedies for injustices she may incur on the job require that she demonstrate a history or at least capacity for recapture by these forms, for example, by emphasizing her dutifulness as a daughter, wife, or most significantly as a mother (see Ong, 2006).

This recapturing (or engulfment) is evident in Kelly’s attitude toward carework as a kind of servitude that the captive chimp deserves and elicits, and which careworkers willing give—a willingness that positions the careworker as morally superior to even other “primate people.” The human household domestic worker deserving of rights must exhibit just those qualities of good gender comportment (dependency, attachment, and relationality) that naturalize her servitude as well. In other words, her labor is read in terms of a moral capacity rather than an ability, thus linking her rights as a domestic worker to her behavior as a good woman (as echoed, sometimes quite cannily, in the many sentimental discussions of the transnational chain of care that lament the “real” victims of transnational domestic labor as the children the domestic worker reluctantly leaves behind). Her mode of mattering through the law is tied to caring ethics that underpin the patriarchal and uneven organization of civil life.

Conclusion

We have argued that post-racial formations that produce fields of equivalence, where differences are collapsed into a universal and shared precarity, limit political possibilities by remaining inattentive to juridical humanization, or how the law works to draw and redraw the boundaries of the human. However, the conditions that structure uneven humanization are not fully concealed. Historical experiences that are not easily appropriable by conventional affective apparatuses divert the legalistic evaluative gaze from the worker as a potentially deserving subject to practices that regulate but need not circumscribe carework. Furthermore, narratives that focus on these historical experiences directly intervene in the principles of universality and self-determination that we defined earlier as precisely those notions that constitute and delimit the reach of the law and humanity. Therefore, in conclusion, we briefly turn to the Summer 1881 Atlanta Washerwomen’s strike for its illustration of how domestic workers have not only flaunted affective economies that had long governed household work but also exposed the weakness of the state in representing its interests without being propped up by its bourgeois householder clientele. This strike gives shape to an alternative conceptual frame, one where all subjects emerge not within the differentiations of worker, employer, and ward, but instead, within overlapping structural conditions—even as these very conditions differentially situate life chances.

In the 1990s, Tera Hunter rediscovered the poorly documented 1881 Atlanta Washerwomen’s Strike, noting that it emerged in the nexus of conflated crises: anxious shepherding of the New South’s identity formation by industrialists; increased municipal control over free labor, notably through licensing of the profitable black draymen’s trade; public debates and protests against the Jonesboro lynching the year before; and the waning power of white employers to, as Hunter (1997) puts it, “determine how and under what conditions [domestic] labor would be organized and performed” (p. 97). From these conditions arose the Washerwomen’s Union, which almost immediately after its formation announced a strike to command higher fees at a uniform rate. This strike had a wide effect, as nearly every white household in Atlanta hired independent laundry workers, and the majority of laundry workers themselves had strong ties to, if not leadership roles, within black communitarian life. Municipal authorities reacted strongly, threatening to levy an exorbitant (US$25, or several month’s wages) annual business tax, thereby hoping to hold the same regulatory power over laundry workers that they had achieved over draymen. The strikers responded by deciding to interpret this tax as a protective fee: they are quoted as saying,

we are willing to pay $25 or $50 for licenses as a protection so we can control the washing for the city … and then we will have full control of the city’s washing at our own prices, as the city has control of our husbands’ work at their prices. (p. 93)

Atlanta officials may have controlled black men’s labor, but the washerwomen appear determined to divest them of authority over all black workers by using the threat of regulation to their own advantage.

This strike did not rest on calls for equivalence, but instead undermined the governance of the City Council. Defying the Council to enter into an affective relationship of supervision and protection with them, washerwomen thereby challenged Council members not only to interfere in the authority of the domestic workers’ employers but also to wade into the domestic economies of black workers animated as married co-earners. This action, to borrow from Kathleen Stewart (2007), “highlight[s] the question of the intimate impacts of forces in circulation” (p. 40). Alarmed, the City Council dropped its proposed tax, and the strike faded away. The workers’ defiant assumption of affective obligation destabilized, by exceeding the terms and norms of, the Council’s licensing agreement. As Hunter (1997) notes, the success of the strike ultimately rests not so much on rights gained, but “in heightening the city’s awareness of laundry workers’ role in the New South economy” (p. 95). Cleverly seizing affective economies, the laundry workers’ tactics exemplify the ways, to return to Stewart (2007), that affect as a “speculative and concrete attunement … is not the kind of thing that flows inevitably from a given ‘way of life’, but rather something that takes off with the potential trajectories in which it finds itself in the middle” (p. 128). Hunter writes that soon after the laundry strike broke up, household workers threatened to strike—this time at the site of an essential and fiercely defended New South institution, the International Cotton Exposition. This strike too appeared to fade away, but not without first raising panic among the exposition organizers who could not afford to have discordant domestics deface the image of a reconciled and resurgent New South. These repeated attacks on ostensibly inviolate sites help illuminate the conditions that structure uneven humanization and provide an opportunity to consider that which might fall away from the signifying orders that structure life and mattering, rather than calling for inclusion within them.