Handle with Care

Abstract

At a moment when public support for care cannot be assumed to have social value, close attention should be paid to the particulars of affective labor that are the (im)material support of care. Tracing a deliberately false etymology of the term “precarity,” a reading of six “scenes” of care considers how it might be possible to reframe the question of deathcare through an ethical practice of “intimate distance,” and to enable the vital “as if” labor of imagining support for a good death.