feminist ethics of care

Through a critical auto-ethnographic account of miscarriage and grief, I explore what it means to inherit Islam as a tradition through care-based modes of knowing. Through Muslim-feminist theorizing, I blend Quranic narratives of care with maternal lineages of Islam I have inherited through care, that not only guide how I think about care Islamically, but also, how I practice care in my relations as a Muslim. I also illustrate the value of intertextuality of care as it is experienced across lived time, and across generations, within systems of kin and the need to let go of monolithic senses of tradition, and moral epistemology, within our practice of comparative care ethics. I draw a parallel between colonial, and white-orientated modes of knowing Muslims, and Islam, and grounded care-based modes of knowing by which we come to know and inhabit our practices of Islam in caring as, and being cared for , as Muslims.

This article juxtaposes different and conflicting temporalities as configured in the context of care and caring. Weaving together (1) an autobiographical narrative in which I share parts of my own breast cancer journey with (2) research with men employed as care workers in Australia, I attempt to get at how differentially experienced temporal densities, trajectories, and orientations can be found when receiving and giving care. The slow and deep time of experiencing sickness, and the protective, forgetful time induced by medical trauma – both often perceived as nonlinear time –, clash with the neoliberal, sped-up, linear temporality of the late-capitalist medical industrial complex; leaving care workers and cared-for squeezed between temporalities that can be, and are, at odds with each other. The theoretical framing holding my consideration of these different ‘kinds’ of time, is a composite of feminist care ethics scholarship, critical time studies and the literary work by the Aboriginal author and scholar Mykaela Saunders. Specifically, I draw on Saunders’s short story ‘Buried time’, in which she connects with Aboriginal deep time and writes the abolition of colonial clock time into being. Taking a cue from Saunders narrative, I maintain that the temporalities of colonial/racial capitalism evince segmentation, fragmentation, and, ultimately, destruction. This is a mechanistic time not suitable for human and more-than-human life’s flourishing (that includes living and dying as well as possible); as such, it is a temporality that stands against the relational paradigms of care theory.