Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Our discourse is based on a great silence, why? Because we don’t want to understand
that the concept of life implies death.1 (Feminist abortion counsellor in Mexico City)
reproductive labour? How might doing so open up different kinds of questions about
autonomy and dependency, freedom and necessity, mortality and political life? In order
to explore this possibility one must begin with the premise that reproduction is never a
simple matter of the biological continuity of the species, but rather involves the
Marxist Materialist feminist Selma James writes in her introduction to The Power
of Women and the Subversion of Community that ‘we inherited a distorted and reformist
manage, rather than as a social relation which we struggle to destroy’ (Dalla Costa and
James, 1972: 5; emphasis in original). James ultimately argues that capitalism exploits
our [women’s] reproductive relations, ‘our relations with men, with our children and our
very creation of them, into work productive to this accumulation’ (Dalla Costa and
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James, 1972: 12). In her view, the exploitation of domestic labour stems from women’s
isolation within the household – which is paradoxically productive for capital in so far as
women’s activities prepare and discipline the husband and the child for work. By arguing
for the political potential of reproductive labour, James draws attention to the difficulty
that gender poses within Marxist orientated concepts of labour and emancipation.4 One
might track this difficulty through the tendency in feminist thought to regard the
Hartsock, 1983; Ruddick, 1989; Zerilli, 1992; Tronto, 1993). There is a persistent tension
between imagining the feminine role in both biological and social reproduction as a
conceptual tripartite of labour, work and action, elaborated in The Human Condition
(1958), and later the concept of ‘natality’, provide a compelling ground from which to
explore this tension further. Revolving around Arendt’s conceptual matrix is a series of
fragile distinctions between freedom and necessity, or the capacity for newness and the
similar double valence. Like Arendt, James locates political action in the creation of
such creative acts might involve perpetual undoing and re-doing, as much as newness.
In this article, I first examine how Arendt marks the difference between labour,
work and action, arguing that her effort to separate bodily life from the capacity for
political action stems from her concern for the durability of the world. I then bring
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acompañantes, or advocate-companions, in Mexico City who facilitate access to safe
how one of my interlocutors describes her feminist ethics, in spite of its contracted and
of care between women in situations of abortion and feminist activists. They require a
quality of attention in spite of the fact that connections dissolve, and in this sense they are
a form of political action that inhabits a space in-between world-making and repair.
Hannah Arendt is often cited as a theorist of freedom and natality in so far as she
envisions our humanity in terms of a radical agency of interruption and the capa- city to
begin anew (Day, 2010; Lambek, 2010; Halpern 2011). Feminist political theorists have
debated the implicit hierarchy of masculine and feminine values in her thinking, for she
distinguishes the capacity for natality in opposition to the repetitions of bodily and
domestic life (Rich, 1979; Benhabib, 1993; Dietz, 1995; Honig, 1995; Zerilli, 1995;
Pitkin, 1998; Hartsock, 2004; Honig, 2013). Rather than focus on debates about ‘the
body’ as a feminised biological fact pushed outside Arendt’s notion of political space, I
want to turn our attention to how her distinc- tion between labour and action implies a
Hannah Arendt (1995) delineate the non-binary complexity of Arendt’s concepts.5 Honig
points to how the oppositional pairings of public and private, active and passive, freedom
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and necessity, interruption and automaticity proliferate in an ‘effort to resist the erosion
of a distinction that is tenuous’ (1995: 144). Honig’s attunement to the shifting centres of
Arendt’s thought, and based on this attunement the refusal to inscribe a gender dualism,
leads her to argue that the tripartite of vita activa – labour, work and action – might be
developed her sense of Arendtian agonism as an alternative to what she calls the
corporeal vulnerability and finitude (see, for example: Butler, 2004), Honig draws on
‘grievability’ with immortality, pain with pleasure. My interest here is not so much to
orientations, but to rethink the relation between political and bodily life, or ‘life lived and
the life of living matter’ (Fassin, 2009: 48). I shift from a sense of finitude and fragility as
necessary to the biological body to how mortality and natality are knitted together in the
way one lives in the world (see Das and Han, 2016: 41). Mortality does not only, or
primarily refer to bodily limits, but to the ‘finiteness’ of our moral and political relations
In the opening pages of The Human Condition, Arendt writes of the nightmare of
‘painless and effortless consumption’ in which ‘eventually no object of the world will be
safe from consumption and annihilation through consumption’ (1958: 132). Positioning
herself critically towards Marxist theory, she argues that having con- ceived of labour as
the highest and most natural of human capacities, Marx leaves us ‘with the rather
distressing alternative between productive slavery and unpro- ductive freedom’ (Arendt,
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1958: 125). Her argument in The Human Condition thus begins by reconfiguring labour
as a property of being animal, or having a living body, rather than unique to the capacities
of being human: ‘Of all human activities, only labor, and neither action nor work is
unending, progressing automatically in accordance with life itself and outside the range
Labour is ‘automatic’, inseparable from the natural cycles of life and death. It is
precisely this degradation of labour as tied to nature that has led feminist readers of
Arendt to try to recuperate ‘the body’. But perhaps equally important for Arendt is the
sense that labour does not produce the durable objects that would protect us from our
own mortality; for this we need a shared world – what Arendt elsewhere refers to as the
‘space of appearance’. The world is made of human artifice, the ‘durability’ of which
transcends the individual cycle of life and death as well as the smaller-scaled cycles of
production and consumption. What haunts Arendt about the necessity of labour is that it
reveals the fact that we might lose our place in the world. Like pain, which is the most
private and unshareable of all bodily neces- sities, labouring throws the body back upon
itself:
How might we understand this condition of the body ‘thrown back upon itself’? Here
worldlessness and imprisonment in our relation to nature, calling to mind the tension in
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Marxist Feminist debates about the emancipation of women’s labour from the private
sphere (see Weeks, 2011). But it might also call to mind the phenomenology of illness
activities of work. While animal labourans is tied to the cycles of life that cannot make a
durable product, homo faber erects objects that mediate the human rela- tionship with
nature:
...the things of the world have the function of stabilizing human life, and
their objectivity lies in the fact that—in contradiction to the Heraclitean
saying that the same man can never enter the same stream—men, their
ever-changing nature notwithstanding, can retrieve their sameness, that is,
their identity, by being related to the same chair and the same table. . .
(Arendt, 1958: 157)
The ‘world’ is, in part, a material architecture that protects us from eternal movement;
objectivity saves us from our otherwise impermanent nature.6 But superior even to the
concrete objects of homo faber are the world-making capa- cities of action. The products
of action are the ‘webs of human relationships. . . no less real than the world of things
that we visibly have in common’ (Arendt, 1958: 203).7 Both work and action are
productive of worlds, but only action propels us into relationships with others. Action is
therefore imagined as the antithesis of the ‘body thrown back upon itself’, as it opens us
While Arendt’s theory of humanity foregrounds the capacity for action over the
suffering of labour, we must not confuse her idea of agency with taken for granted
notions of the liberal humanist subject. In her essay ‘What is Freedom?’, she argues that
freedom is not synonymous with free will, but rather an ‘infinite improbability’, a
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‘miracle—that is something which could not be expected’ (Arendt, 1961: 169).8 In
distinction to homo faber who is master of himself and his doings, the freedom of action
implies that we cannot control or even foretell its consequences. Action is therefore not
Rather, it erupts when our care for the world presents no other alternative (see Halpern,
2011). Furthermore, Arendt alerts us to our capa- city to disrupt the ‘automatic processes’
In this sense, as Arendt opposes the interruptive agency of action to the repetitive
necessity of labour and biological life, she also describes how the possibility of freedom
is bound to the fragility of human relationships. We might then re-imagine the labouring
body, or the body-in-pain, as one picture (among others) of that aspect of the human
condition governed by ‘the time of mortality and [the] risk [of our] eradication’, as a way
of being in the world (Lear, 2008; Honig, 2013: 43). Whereas some critics have read
mortality as mere biological life, I argue that the mortality Arendt fears is the
other words, what is interesting about Arendt’s conceptualisation of the labouring body is
not that she separates ‘bare life’ from the political sphere of ‘men’, but rather that it alerts
us to the uncertain way our life is implicated with others.10 Arendtian action exposes us
to vulnerability not because our biological lives are at stake, but because, in Bonnie
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Honig’s words, ‘if action goes awry, we may be hurt or misunderstood’ (2013: 43).
Latin American scholars have documented the intensification of legal debates sur-
rounding abortion in the region over the last decade, pointing to the co-occurrence of the
expansion of reproductive rights discourses with a surge of legal restrictions and criminal
prosecutions of ‘illegal’ abortion practices (Morgan and Roberts, 2012; Gloppen and
Gianella-Malco, 2014; Ruibal, 2014; Yamin and Bergallo, 2017). In 2007, the legislative
assembly of Mexico City made a series of reforms to decriminalise abortion within the
first twelve weeks of pregnancy, stipulating a new regulatory framework for the
provided free-of-cost in city government health centres. The reforms were followed by a
severe backlash across the country. Many Mexican states made local constitutional
amendments to protect life ‘at the moment of conception’, re-iterating the criminality of
human rights advocates have extensively documented how women who petition states
under such exceptional provisions are so delayed and morally attacked in the process of
giving proof that they are either not able to attain the procedure in time or give up trying
The normative disjuncture between the legalisation of Mexico City and its crim-
codes and health laws, allowing for extreme variation across jurisdictions. On a federal
level, the Mexican National Supreme Court of Justice upheld Mexico City’s reforms in
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2008, and, in following years, also reaffirmed the constitutional amendments to protect
life at the moment of conception on the grounds of jur- isdiction. The progressive
opening of Mexico City abortion laws and healthcare services has thus coincided with the
Mexico. Against this backdrop, Mexico City- based feminist organisations have emerged
with the explicit aim of facilitating access to safe, legal abortion to women living in states
where it remains illegal. Between 2009 and 2014, I conducted ethnographic research as
an abortion access advocate in the feminist organisation Fondo MARIA, or the MARIA
information about safe and legal options for terminating pregnancy over the phone and by
email, arranging bus and plane tickets to Mexico City, counselling women in their
counsel or legal advocacy) and physically accompanying women to public and private
clinics when they have no one else who can go with them. This final activity, referred to
is what the feminist activists in the MARIA Fund consider most expressive of their first
organising principle: to respond to women’s immediate needs within the limited time
shared between a small group of volunteers and a core group of five women who work
with paid office hours. Oftentimes women dealing with an untenable pregnancy call the
office or fill out a request form for support on the Fondo MARIA website. Sofía, the
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elaborate protocol that has been designed incrementally over the years. Working in the
office every day, she holds many things together. She follows cases over time, collects
post-support evaluations and systematises information from each case in the database.
She also keeps an accompaniment mobile phone with which she maintains contact
between acompañantes and the women travelling to the city. On a typical day of
accompaniment work, text messages begin relaying between the travelling woman, Sofía
and the acompañante at 5.30 in the morning. Because all public clinic procedures are
partners and children – begin to gather outside the clinic gate around sunrise. At 6.30 am
numerous occasions when I was already at the clinic with someone who had contacted
the organisation through the usual channels, I would encounter other women and families
in need of support. This was not unusual in the chaotic public clinic environment where
situations inevitably poured out of the bounds of regu- latory frameworks and limitations.
There was one occasion early on in fieldwork when I encountered two women leaving the
clinic in a panic because they had been denied services. The receptionist had suggested
that they speak to me about their predicament, knowing I was outside waiting for one of
The sisters had travelled from León, Guanajuato by bus the night before, arrived
at the clinic and waited outside, unsure of how or where to enter until 9 am. The entrance
is around the side of the health centre, while in front a pro-life stand that masquerades as
official information about ILE deters women from finding the actual entrance. When the
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sisters finally found the entry, the doctor agreed to do an ultrasound but would not give
the woman who was pregnant, named Marisol, an aspiration procedure because it was too
late in the day. The particular encounter made a lasting impression on me, maybe because
In retrospect, it has come to mark the tension between the conditions of ephemerality
under which accompaniment unfolds and the feminist aspirations for a durable network
of solidarity.
It was Marisol’s sister who spoke, her eyes filling up with tears as she told me in a
hushed voice what had happened leading up to their arrival to DF. She spoke so quickly
and so under her breath that I only caught the major points: that Marisol had taken pills
and vomited and so it was as though she had not taken them at all, that they had then
gone to the hospital in León where they were told that Marisol could not have an
abortion. . . at which point it vaguely became clear to me that she had been sexually
assaulted. They had come to Mexico City under a lot of pressure and then waited in front
of the health centre until 9 am or so instead of coming around the back to the ILE clinic.
They had no money to pay for a room to wait until morning, not even for food. As
Marisol’s sister recounted the details, we sat on the bench outside the clinic, the two of
them often holding hands, resting their knees against one another and sharing a juice.
I called Sofía in the office to see if the MARIA Fund could offer support.
Listening to Marisol speak to Sofía I gathered that she was just my age with a similar
birthday, and that her sister was younger. She was very pretty, wearing a beige fuzzy
beret, but her hair looked distressed and the skin on her arm was so dry and chaffed that it
was flaking off around the inner crease of her elbow. As she spoke her voice seemed flat
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and she stared off into the distance. How many weeks did they tell me? She asked
holding the phone away from her ear. 9.6, I said. Huh? She asked again distractedly, 9.6 I
Sofía gave her directions to a private clinic where she could be attended that day
and the MARIA Fund would cover the costs. I pulled out a paper and pen and handed it
to her and she wrote diagonally across the page, Metro San Lazaro, Linea 1, 8, la Rosa. It
was the first time they had been to Mexico City. Marisol seemed tender and grateful
towards her sister; perhaps she was relieved not to have to muster up a voice, or perhaps
not to have to demonstrate her feelings. I stepped inside to let the clinic staff know they
were leaving and when I came back outside they were no longer on the bench. I thought
to myself, both a bit relieved and perplexed, now that they know what to do they have
gone on without me. Then I saw them gathering their things against the wall of the clinic.
Ready? I asked. Yes, Marisol’s sister answered, and we all walked out to the street to
catch a pesero (informal mini-bus). The sister gave the driver ten pesos for all of us; I
We didn’t speak during the bus ride. When we got off we awkwardly waited to
cross the busy highway between the bus stop and the metro station. As they entered
through the gate they turned around and asked if I would also take the metro. Yes, but in
the other direction, I said, which was not true, but at that point I felt we should go
separate ways. We hugged and kissed on the cheek, as is common practice between
acquaintances. I watched them walk down the platform from above and waited until their
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message from Sofía who let me know that Marisol had made it to the clinic and that
everything was fine, punctuated with a smiley face. My heart sped up and my thoughts
began to race – what if they are in danger in León; what kind of situation are they going
back to? What if they are involved in a terrible mess that this abortion doesn’t come close
to solving? Why didn’t I ask her, why didn’t I find out more? Somehow it hit me then,
sharply, that Marisol must have been through something awful. With just the piecemeal
information about their situation and a series of complicated and painful impressions
from our encounter, I found it hard to let go. I was terrified by the sense that I would not
know what could happen to her. I would not know how she is, if or when she would come
out of the blank state she had been in. I wondered how old her sister was, who was now
courageously taking care of her. And a sense of panic, the gnawing sense that the
‘support’ I facilitated was partial, superficial even, while at the same time dire and
intense.
the MARIA Fund works hard to generate and apply measures of self-evaluation, but they
often become unstable in the spontaneous interactions between women seeking support
and the activists. Thus there is an elaborate effort on the part of Sofía, the coordinator of
accompaniment, and Oriana, one of the founders, to build accompa- niment practices into
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with women until at least two months after the abortion proce- dure so that they can
respond to a series of questions about their experience and, in the best of cases, so that
the women remain part of the network by facilitating access to safe abortion for another
women’s legal right to abortion are the professionalisation activities aimed at supplying
activists and workers in the organisation with the lan- guage and expertise of
describes how they are composed of ‘institutions, knowledge practices, and artifacts
thereof that internally generate the effects of their own reality by reflecting on
themselves’ (2001: 3; see also: Alvarez, 1999; Groeneveld, 2015). This is an apt
description of many of the professionalisation activities that the women in the Paulina
Network value very highly, but at the same time Riles’ narrow focus on the reflexivity of
knowledge practices obscures the potential action involved in feminist activism (Day and
Goddard, 2010; Grewal and Bernal, 2014). Here Arendt’s distinction between homo faber
and ‘the man of action’ is helpful, for as the former instrumentalises the world while
creating it, the latter is involved in the possibility of newness and the uncertain outcome
A discomfort arose from a sense that my encounter with Marisol and her sister
private clinic counts as political action, it could only be so within the ephemeral
temporality that Arendt attributes to the labouring body in opposition to the creation of a
durable world. We acted together out of necessity in the present, without an anchor in the
past or a shared project into the future. While Marisol’s ability to access abortion
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certainly opened towards a different future than what would have followed from having
to carry her pregnancy to term, I did not know the details of where she was coming from,
nor where she was going. The horizons of her life could not be reduced to the aspirations
of accompaniment. While the idea of the ‘feminist network’ is the constant expansion of
accompaniment as political action, then, when it has such little claim on durability?
about the world-making effects of accompaniment practices. Sofía describes her work as
a counsellor in an ILE clinic, and later as a feminist advocate in the MARIA Fund, as a
kind of affective labour that counters the technical frameworks of clinical intervention
that characterise the ILE program. Just before I returned to Baltimore afternearly two
woman from Venezuela who called the Señora of the house abuelita (grandma), and they
often yelled back and forth to one another across the patio. My apartment was accessible
by a rickety spiral staircase that led to a small rooftop area. Sofía and I sat there, with the
Señora and my downstairs neighbour calling out to one another in the background, until
Sofía had joined the core group in the MARIA Fund office six months after I
began a long phase fieldwork in 2012. Beforehand, I had known her as an essential
contact person at one of the clinics when I was beginning to do accompaniment and was
quite unsure of myself. She was calm and careful, and whenever we spoke in the clinic
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she redirected my nervous energy. Before working at the feminist organisation, she had
been an abortion counsellor in one of the ILE clinics administered by a national civil
society organisation that emerged in the 1970s at the height of population control policies
and has since altered its organising dis- course to reproductive rights. Such clinics are
operate with sliding scale services that are accessible and familiar to women with limited
economic resources. Sofía described her work there as attending to the ‘affective part’ of
the abortion process, in contrast to the physicians who worked like technicians:
I saw to the affective part, how she felt that the decision impacted her
relationships, domestic life, aspects having to do with work and
school...because sometimes the doctors concentrated only on the
procedure and doing the technical part of the process, I mean oftentimes
forgetting that on the other side there is someone who is feeling what is
happening in this moment, and its importance, I mean. . . in their life.
They [the doctors] were wrapped up in that and nothing else, so we [the
counsellors] worked on the human part of the process.
She also said that the abortion procedures were performed in a modality of begrud- ging
beneficence, which she connected with the way clinic doctors inflicted moral
punishment:
After working there for three years, Sofía explained that the environment became heavy
sources. In addition to the pressure to do more ILE procedures, she felt that the discourse
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of reproductive rights that framed her counselling sessions was undermined by women’s
Sofía’s move to work in the feminist organisation was prompted by the exhaustion of her
labour in the clinical setting, and the way she articulates her feminist ethics – the goals
and the kind of attention she gives to women in situations of abortion – is linked to her
working conditions in concrete ways. I asked her how working in the MARIA Fund had
improved her life and she responded that it had allowed her to be part of a process of
empowerment:
...to respect women’s autonomy, with the idea that this experience could
trigger a positive process in the woman, of empowerment, of citizen-
making [ciudadanizacio ́ n], as though to be able to exercise this right
meant to continue exercising other right- s. . . whereas in the clinic, well I
paid attention to- a little of what I was telling you before, to numeric
goals. . . and no, I mean no, looking back on it now, well it wasn’t totally
respectful of women’s rights. . . with the lack of care—of self-care—it
was too easy to impose one’s own prejudices. It was also a way of
obstructing the woman’s decision, I mean by making it more complicated,
by not making it simple.
Sofía’s admittance of her own inability to ‘totally respect woman’s rights’ appears almost
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as a mode of resistance to the pressure to achieve numerical goals in the clinic. In this
sense, the affective labour of attention, or its withholding, has the power to interrupt the
automatism of the institution. In her work as an acompañante in the MARIA Fund, it was
not that reproductive rights gained a reality that they had lacked in the clinical
environment, but rather that she found the support she needed to sustain her own
commitment to them. With that support, she is able to give attention to each woman: to
what each woman says with her words and with her body:
I asked her what counts as a successful outcome of accompaniment and she said she felt
good if it seemed as though it had reduced the burden on a woman’s shoulders. Her
response echoed the way she had described her own relief working in the feminist
organisation in contrast to the burden of working in the clinic: ‘. . . To know that she can
get rid of, in a way, or reduce the burden, by at least being able to talk in a natural way
about the experience...and to help her recognise that she is capable...’. When I asked
Sofía what she thought the limits of accompaniment were, she spoke of the inability to
fully know the circumstances of each woman’s situation and the contracted moment in
I guess the fact that we are only there in this moment. . . of this woman. . .
and she is likely to be living a situation of violence or something that goes
well beyond what we can do, but the intention of accompaniment is
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exactly this: to support her so that she can search for supportive
relationships, by turning to other relationships or by broad- ening a little
bit the networks that she already has.
political action. What is it to make a new world versus to make this world livable?
Women who participate in the accompaniment network, either in their search for a way to
end an untenable pregnancy or as advocates for reproductive rights and abortion access,
act together in the face of uncertainty and, as I suggested earlier, are governed to some
degree by ‘the time of mortality’. As Sofía said, to support a woman so that she can ‘turn
to other relationships or broaden the networks she already has’ is of dire necessity. The
‘webs of relationships’ that forge the world we have in common, and especially in
character, to dissolve and to reform (see Han, 2012; Mulla, 2014; Pinto, 2014). In light of
such dissolution, we might revise Arendt’s notion of action as that which creates new and
durable worlds. Accompaniment practices find ground for action by paying careful
attention to women’s concrete bodily and affective situations, albeit from a limited and
tempo- rally constrained perspective. Sofía spoke about the partiality of accompaniment
in the broader context of a woman’s reproductive life, and the extent to which that life
could not be known. She evoked the gap, even incommensurability, between the fantasy
of sovereign action that could shape either the subjectivity of the feminist activist who
acts on behalf of another, or the imaginary subject of reproductive rights who decides to
terminate her pregnancy. In fact, she describes the ethics of accompaniment in other
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terms – ‘to share the burden’, however temporarily. Lauren Berlant argues in her essay
‘Slow Death (Obesity, Sovereignty, Lateral Agency)’ that ‘the casting of the human as
most fully itself when assuming the spectacular posture of performative action’ has
obscured the varied political horizons of ordinary life, encouraging ‘a melodramatic view
of agency in the temporality of the event of the decision’ (2011: 97). Indeed,
isolated event of sovereign decision-making. How, for instance, would our perspective on
Arendt describes labour, like pain, as a condition in which the ‘body [is] thrown
back upon itself’. This description resonates with anthropological approaches to illness
and suffering. In an essay on affliction, Thomas Csordas describes one man’s psychiatric
illness in phenomenological, rather than biomedical terms, as the radi- cal narrowing of
his lived experience in the world (1992; see also: Kleinman, 1988; Good, 1994;
Desjarlais, 1997). In these works it is as though the body, which is our opening to the
world, in states of ill health becomes a closure – returning us to Arendt’s labouring body.
Across her work, Veena Das has understood the body of illness in a subtly, but
importantly different register (2015). In her effort to grasp the ordinariness of suffering,
Das has approached ‘the failures of the body in relation to the failures of one’s social
world’, suggesting a picture of the body-in-pain as never entirely private and indeed as
capable of ‘speaking’ (Das and Das, 2007: 69; see also: Lock, 1993; Mol, 2006). Rather
than understand illness experience as a radical loss of the world, it may be understood to
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‘darken’ it, or make it ‘a little less benign’ (Das, 2015: 2). Along these lines, we might
disruption of them. Rather than take illness or the body-in-pain as a closure of our
opening into the world, we might look for ways in which worlds emerge from, and in
To sustain her aspiration for a durable world, a shared world that would with-
stand even the ordinary destruction of private suffering, Arendt draws an opposition
between our capacity for action and our capacity for labour as a condition of mortality.
The tenuous quality of this distinction reflects a more general difficulty in how we
conditions of necessity, repetition and death. One could argue for the natality of feminist
transient ‘counter-publics’, when women are threatened by the social death incurred by
the legal and moral stigma of abortion (see Fraser, 1990; Warner, 2002; Day, 2010).
Accompaniment supports women to find the freedom ‘to move’, as Sofía put it, when
they find themselves on the edges of law, and pressured by the necessity of secrecy at
home. But this movement also entails a return to these same relationships, and all of the
uncertainty that such a return implies. In this sense, accompaniment networks appear less
as a feminist counter-public, and more as a disposition towards the concrete other in the
automatic everyday as much as it might belong to the daily routines of repairing the
world.14 Care, as political action, refers to a way of doing, a quality of attention to what
is important, which often escapes us and is therefore always in tension with the
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possibility that we do not see what is right before our eyes (Cavell, 1984; Das, 2007;
Acknowledgements
Thank you Sofía Garduño and Oriana López Uribe for your guidance and friendship
throughout my time as an acompañante, and for sharing your insights for this article. This
article was first presented at the Affecting Labor Conference at Johns Hopkins
University, Baltimore, Maryland, USA. Thanks are especially due to the organisers –
Swayam Bagaria, Ghazal Asif and Emma McGlennen – and to Serra Hakyemez, William
Stafford and Michael Hardt for their thoughts. Conversations with Veena Das, Deborah
Poole, Clara Han, Hent de Vries, Jennifer Culbert, Peter Redfield and Sylvain Perdigon
made it possible to begin and then keep going with this work. I am grateful to the anon-
ymous reviewers and editors at Feminist Theory for their critical engagement and time.
Funding
Many thanks to the Wenner-Gren Foundation for supporting the research upon which this
article is based.
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Notes
particularly around the right to abortion, tend to preclude thinking about reproduction in
terms of more varied practices of social, political and cultural renewal (see Davis, 1981;
3. I thank Sylvain Perdigon for this articulation of the idea, and for drawing out the relation
between what I refer to as a ‘shared world’ and Arendt’s concept of the ‘space of
appearance’.
4. In these classic Marxist Materialist Feminist debates, the question of reproductive labour
does not just index a struggle for control over the things or products of capitalist
accumulation, but also the struggles over the affective relationships that sustain, and
potentially transform our life with others. In this sense, one can understand Dalla Costa
and James’ description of the emotional labour that relieves men of ‘the social tensions
produced by capitalism’ (1972: 42) as an early analysis of what Michael Hardt, among
5. Linda Zerilli argues that the Arendtian concept of the labouring body symbolises the ‘loss
reconceiving the public sphere not as a bounded arena of individual rational speech, but
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as appearing wherever there is action in concert (1993; See also Hartsock 2004).
6. There are many forms of homo faber, from the utilitarian producer of use-objects who is
7. Arendt goes on to distinguish her conception of the intangible web as distinct from the
Marxist materialist notion of superstructure that supplements the basic material struc-
ture of the world. In other words, material structures are not more fundamental than the
8. I thank Hent de Vries for sharing his work-in-progress on miracles and Arendt, which
9. To illustrate this point, Arendt cites Shakespeare’s Brutus who calls for the assassination
of Julius Caesar on the grounds ‘[t]hat this shall be or we will fall for it’ (1961: 151).
10. Arendt further challenges the humanitarian framework of ‘life’ as an abstract figure of
11. See Paulina del Carmen Ramírez Jacinto v. Mexico, Case 161-02, Report No. 21/07,
12. My interlocutors at Fondo Maria decided to have the name of the organisation, as well as
their own names in print. All other names of places and people have been changed or left
13. In her ethnography of clinical sexual assault intervention, Sameena Mulla (2014) dis-
cusses the peculiar role of forensic nurses hinged between the anticipatory structures of
24
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legal justice and the necessities of care-giving in the present. Following Mulla’s meticu-
lous attention to the ethical tensions that emerge in forensic nursing, we might ask if care-
giving involves a specific set of activities, or rather a quality of attention orientated to the
present?
14. I thank Peter Redfield for the reminder that repair and newness need not be opposed.
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