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Peter sits on a chaise lounge with a clear vessel full of a shake he\u2019s about to drink. He holds it up to show its brownish-red color and thick consistency, plugs his nose, and drinks the shake, emptying the vessel. From offscreen, the viewer can hear the cameraperson, presumably Peter\u2019s girlfriend-donor, say \u201cWow.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
By reading the comments on the video\u2014posted to a gastrointestinal disorder support group on Facebook\u2014one learns that Peter\u2019s shake is made of his healthy girlfriend\u2019s feces, distilled water, and a mix of berries. He explains in his interactions with commentators that his radical approach to fecal microbial transplantation (FMT) is motivated by his understanding that his gut health and his mental health are intimately linked. Fighting depression, Peter has embraced a practice of drinking his excremental shakes and fasting in the hopes that the infusion of microbial agents will displace the microbes that lead to his imbalances of health.<\/p>\n
Peter is caring for his microbes and his whole-body health, through a practice of stewardship: he is targeting nonhuman actors with the goal of improving the ecology of his body, which I write about in\u00a0American Disgust<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n As often as I dwell on Peter, I return to the Suskind family and their practice of communicating with their son, Owen, as recounted in\u00a0Life, Animated<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n Diagnosed with nonverbal autism at an early age, Owen consumed Disney media with editorial detail. Playing VHS tapes of Disney films, he would rewind scenes and dialogue repeatedly, to his family\u2019s chagrin. Only later would they realize that Owen was learning to talk through his Disney film consumption. Their first inkling of this is when Owen repeatedly says \u201cjuicervose\u201d and his family pieces together that he is echoing the phrase \u201cjust your voice\u201d from\u00a0The Little Mermaid<\/em>\u2014the cost Ariel pays to be able to walk on land. Initially dismissed by Owen\u2019s psychiatrist as mere echolalia, Ron, his father, is undeterred.<\/p>\n Hiding, but with his puppet-adorned hand visible, Ron engages Owen in conversation as Iago, the villain\u2019s sidekick from\u00a0Aladdin<\/em>, which he recounts in their family memoir:\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cSo,\u00a0Owen,\u00a0how\u00a0ya\u2019\u00a0doin\u2019?\u201d\u00a0I\u00a0say,\u00a0doing my best Gilbert\u00a0Gottfried.\u00a0\u201cI\u00a0mean,\u00a0how\u00a0does it feel to be\u00a0you!?\u201d<\/p>\n Through\u00a0the\u00a0crease\u00a0[in\u00a0Owen\u2019s\u00a0bedsheet],\u00a0I\u00a0can\u00a0see\u00a0him\u00a0turn\u00a0toward\u00a0Iago.\u00a0It\u2019s\u00a0like he was bumping into an old friend.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m\u00a0not\u00a0happy.\u00a0I\u00a0don\u2019t\u00a0have\u00a0friends.\u00a0I\u00a0can\u2019t\u00a0understand what\u00a0people\u00a0say.\u201d<\/p>\n I\u00a0have\u00a0not\u00a0heard\u00a0this\u00a0voice,\u00a0natural and\u00a0easy,\u00a0with the traditional\u00a0rhythm of\u00a0commonspeech,\u00a0since he was\u00a0two.<\/p>\n I\u2019m\u00a0talking\u00a0to\u00a0my\u00a0son\u00a0for the\u00a0first\u00a0time\u00a0in\u00a0five\u00a0years.\u00a0Or\u00a0Iago\u00a0is.<\/p>\n (Suskind 2014, 55)<\/cite><\/p><\/blockquote>\n The Suskinds find that they can communicate with Owen in an increasingly open manner, once he has been unlocked through the shared media of Disney films. In the early years, their communication involves voice-acting and role-playing\u2014sometimes recreating whole scenes to communicate a message\u2014and eventually it comes to involve a shared understanding of the media that is so vital for Owen.<\/p>\n I came to conceptualize this form of care for Owen as animation, which I write about in\u00a0Unraveling<\/em><\/a>: Owen is animated into speech through his affection for the Disney films and their characters and his family is animated into their novel communication practices through their affection for Owen.<\/p>\n Both stewardship and animation are kinds of care yet I worry that only describing them as \u201ccare\u201d loses too much in its imprecision. It feels like biting the hand that has fed me, but I have increasingly become skeptical of subsuming all of the activities that comprise care under that umbrella; care describes too much, its vagueness has become a liability in advancing the mission of making a more caring society. When we subsume all care activities as \u201ccare\u201d we draw attention away from the diversity of practices that need support as caring. Describing the multiplicity of caring activities in their specificity helps to flesh out what people and institutions do to make livable lives and helps to focus on the people, technologies, and policies that make diverse forms of care possible.<\/p>\n It\u2019s time to forget care.<\/p>\n I came to this position because of the debates about Facilitated Communication (FC). FC first became popular in the 1990s, when caregivers for disabled people drew attention to the practice as means to enable nonverbal people to communicate. Carers would support the arm or hand of a communicator, allowing them to type out a message on a keyboard or point to an image on a communication board. FC quickly became subject to public scrutiny and debate, as debunkers demonstrated that it was the carer and not the communicator who was communicating, as the carer moved the communicator\u2019s hand to create a message. These debates were recently resurfaced in\u00a0Tell Them You Love Me<\/em><\/a>, a Netflix documentary about the abusive relationship between a professor and a disabled person.<\/p>\n But many people use FC and\u00a0Augmentative and Alternative Communication<\/a>\u00a0(AAC) and don\u2019t draw attention to it, for fear that they will be disallowed from its use because of the controversies about it. There is a simple test to prove the individual use of FC and AAC as valid: show the communicator a message or set of images without the carer; show the carer a different message or set of images without the communicator; bring them together and ask them to reproduce the message or set of images. If it matches the carer\u2019s message or set of images, the use of FC or AAC is tainted and might not work for that communicator. To sweep away all uses of FC and AAC as tainted ignores that for some people, these systems of care work.<\/p>\n Drawing attention to the specifics of care practices\u2014like FC and AAC\u2014allows for the development of caring practices, policies, and institutions that support those forms of care and their specificities. When we ignore or avoid those practices, we run the risk of endangering their positive uses and existence altogether.<\/p>\n Feminist ethics and\u00a0political theories of care and caring institutions<\/a>\u00a0have succeeding in shaping scholarly trends in the early twenty-first century, evident in the dominance of care in scholarship across the social sciences and humanities. This attention to care served as a corrective to prior attention to masculinized, public-facing institutions, and was integrated into ethnographic interest in what Michel Trouillot referred to as \u201cthe suffering slot<\/a>,\u201d which offered the opportunity to consider who is involved in the suffering of others, the social contexts of care, and how caring might be done otherwise. Care has been wildly successful as an addition to the social scientific lexicon and it\u2019s critical to recognize this success as a necessary threshold for what should come next.<\/p>\n It is often difficult to do much with \u201ccare.\u201d At once,\u00a0care means everything and nothing<\/a>: the provision of food and shelter, aid in toileting and daily hygiene, support for everyday activities, systems of solidarity and mutual support, sustainable agricultural practices, bureaucratic processes\u2014even, in some cases, the provision of addictive drugs and violent abuses are cast as forms of care. This work grew out of feminist ethics and political theories of care and added nuance, as ethnography often does, to particularize what care can comprise, its varieties, and limits. That work has been vital, but when its contributions are subsumed under \u201ccare,\u201d we lose the opportunity to draw attention to these micro-practices of care, both as life sustaining and theory generating.<\/p>\n Stewardship, animation, and facilitation are examples of \u201cmiddle theories\u201d of care. They intercede as descriptions of specific, everyday practices that can be generalized toward an umbrella conception of care. Consider these other examples and the middle theories they point toward:<\/p>\n Don Kulick and Jens Rynstrom<\/a>\u00a0described the practices associated with supporting disabled people in forging intimate connections, including sex acts, in Swedish and Danish residential facilities. This included the need to help disabled people use contraceptives, position their bodies in comfortable poses, and the creative use of furniture and mobility aids. Kulick and Ryndstrom passingly refer to this collection of practices as \u201cfacilitation,\u201d which captures the ends-driven aspect of what care-providers seek to do for their clients.<\/p>\n Elana Buch<\/a>\u00a0describes the ways that in-home care-providers smell and taste foods for their elderly clients, whose senses have become impaired with age. By smelling and tasting for their clients, the care-providers seek to make sure that people aren\u2019t inadvertently poisoning themselves by consuming spoiled food. Buch describes this as a form of embodiment, extending the corporeal senses of the clients through their caregivers.<\/p>\n Focus on human-to-human forms of caring cast care as a relational prosthetic, a way that what we can\u2019t do for ourselves can be done by someone else who acts as a surrogate for our limitations of capacity. The agencies of one person are substituted for the agencies of another person, often with institutional support; when this support is failing or unavailable, care becomes a hardship and a scarcity, subject to economistic thinking that can impact caregivers and recipients of care alike. Care-focused scholars rightly demonstrated how impingements on the provision of care led to the limitations of recipients of care and the outcomes of their lives.\u00a0<\/p>\n Moving into more-than-human contexts\u2014like Peter\u2019s stewardship of his gut microbes\u2014raises questions about the impacts of human agency and shifts the parameters of what care is and does.<\/p>\n Katy Overstreet<\/a>\u00a0provides a parallel example to Buch\u2019s, albeit rather than in-home caregivers tasting for their clients, farmers, nutritionists, and veterinarians substitute their sense of taste for that of the cows they care for. Rather than merely substituting their capacities for their bovine charges\u2014one human\u2019s sense of taste substituting for another\u2019s\u2014humans impose their capacity for taste on those they care for, imagining what is good for cows. These acts of substitution also seek to aid bovine gut flora, who, in turn, care for their bovine hosts by digesting food materials that cows couldn\u2019t do without microbial aid. Caring for cow nutrition is also caring for microbial well-being, which enters both into complex, more-than-human chains of relation that support human and nonhuman lives.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n