On Exhaustion: Toward a Post-Care Feminism

This essay is a critical response to the emergence of “care” as the antidote to the multiple crises that plague the present. The call for care— intramural care, radical care, mutual aid, etc.—has proliferated in gender and sexuality studies, black studies, critical ethnic studies, and a variety of Left political projects. This intervention foregrounds the exhausting nature of care, and calls for a feminist theory that centers exhaustion. The authors read an archive of black feminist texts, including work by Patricia J. Williams and Nella Larsen, for feminist attachments to exhaustion as a necessary position from which to root our theorizing.