Description
From structural adjustments to global health pandemics, social reproductive work has filled the gaps at told and untold costs. Found in the intersections of gender, race, and coloniality, those primarily assigned with social reproductive roles often negotiate everyday practices of care through a prism of vernacularised modernity with hues of traditional beliefs systems. Yet, whichever way you look it falls on (predominantly) women to fill the gaps (in social provisioning), to block the cracks (in economic strains from rising living costs) and hold fort (through emotive and cohesive care for the family and community). Ontologically disconnected from pre-colonial epistemes, many post-colonial states persist in pursuit of development through neoliberal policies, deeply plugged into global political and economic frameworks that serve to undermine the very self-determination that fuelled all decolonial struggles. Do we look back to a past we don’t know or keep striving for a future in constant tension of self and state? This paper seeks to interrogate the possibility of a different world by drawing from decolonial feminist epistemologies- can we encounter an approach to development that is not carceral for women’s wellbeing and pervasive in its expectations of their caring?
