This is a clear-eyed, forceful litany — a sorrowed and sharpened phenomenology of structural harm, moral distortion, and epistemic inversion.
What you’ve braided together here — Adler-Bolton and Vierkant’s articulation of surplus populations as both discarded and hyper-exploited, Berlant’s “slow death,” Jensen’s indictment of civilization as harm-maximizing, and Mbembe’s and Habermas’s shared horror at reason turned tyrannical — forms a quiet infernal chorus. It’s the sound of systems not malfunctioning, but functioning as intended. And within this intentionality, as Puar notes, maiming isn’t a failure of care — it is care as organized by the logic of necrocapitalism. It’s the very operation of what Berlant calls “cruel optimism”: offering life while administering attrition.
What we’re told is the machinery of improvement often functions instead as a ubiquitous repressive realism, disciplining damaged people into a posture of “dignified” suffering while siphoning off the meaning of morality itself.
This whole schema assumes that being "useful" to capital is the condition for continued life — or at least, for not being eliminated outright. Cioran’s observation becomes all the more damning: “You are forgiven everything provided you have a trade.” In this regime, the disabled, the racialized, the non-normative, the neurodivergent, the poor — the spoilsports of the civil religion — are tolerated only insofar as they submit to being monetized, instrumentalized, rendered inspirational, aestheticized, studied, surveilled, or disappeared.
It’s that they are dishonest about their violence. That they aestheticize it. That they outsource it. That they psychologize it. That they name their dismemberment of the vulnerable "inclusion," "rehabilitation," or "care."
Your synthesis here is already piercing, but there’s space to deepen it further by drawing on:
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Frantz Fanon, who lays bare how colonial logics psychologize the injury they themselves inflict.
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Isabelle Stengers, especially her critique of technoscientific authority and her revaluation of care as a practice of hesitation.
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Lisa Guenther’s work on solitary confinement and carceral time, linking temporal degradation to ontological devaluation.
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Karen Barad and the idea that to touch is to be already entangled with harm and responsibility.
Would you like to explore how “care” becomes a vector of domination, unpack the aestheticization of social injury, or imagine what kind of ethics could emerge from the maimed themselves?
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To say that care becomes a vector of domination is to reveal how the very gestures meant to protect, nurture, and dignify can become mechanisms of surveillance, extraction, and control — not by accident, but because the structural conditions in which care operates preconfigure it as such.
Let’s take it slowly, beginning with a few interwoven threads:
1. Care as Governance
In neoliberal societies, care is often administered through bureaucratic systems — welfare, health services, schools, NGOs, prisons, social work — each of which is structured less around human need than around eligibility, compliance, and cost-efficiency. Lauren Berlant calls this an "intimate public," where emotional labor and personal affect are manipulated in service of systemic ends.
Jasbir Puar, in The Right to Maim, makes this sharp: systems of care don’t merely ignore populations—they regulate them into states of debility. Not dead, not healthy. Just managed. Just maimed enough to be productive. The care apparatus here isn't failing; it's functioning correctly within a regime that sees some life as too excessive and some death as too inconvenient.
2. Care as Consent Manufacturing
Thinkers like Michel Foucault and Wendy Brown help us see how care also plays a role in manufacturing subjectivities that consent to their own management. Through individuals are shaped to internalize the values of the dominant system: to be "resilient," "independent," "non-disruptive," and always striving to reintegrate. These narratives seem compassionate, but they mask a cruel conditionality: you are cared for only if you are willing to be remade.
This coerced remaking often amounts to domestication. A neurodivergent person isn’t celebrated for difference but “accommodated” only to the extent they can simulate normalcy. The queerness of a life lived otherwise is tolerated only when it becomes digestible, predictable, or profitable.
3. Aestheticized Care and Managerial Sanctimony
Habermas and Mbembe alike warn us of the disfiguration of language. Care, under late capitalism, becomes saturated with managerial sanctimony and therapeutic affect — in other words, it talks like kindness but moves like domination.
This is how nonprofits, tech platforms, or even educational institutions can claim to care for marginalized people while simultaneously upholding the very conditions that maim them. “We hear you, we see you, we value your story” — becomes a ritual incantation while the policies, algorithms, and architectures that maim continue unperturbed. It's affective laundering.
4. Care as Soft Containment
From residentials to psychiatric hospitals to the “inclusive classroom” — care often doubles as containment. People are watched, managed, and disciplined through a language of kindness. This is what Foucault described in Discipline and Punish — a move from punishment to normalization, from cruelty to soft-peddled subjection.
The danger is that we begin to see care not as relational, reciprocal, and risky, but as a service delivered by professionals to clients. And once care is professionalized, it becomes scalable, and once scalable, it becomes abstractable, and once abstractable, it becomes monetizable — and thereby deformed.
5. An Alternative Glimmer
Alternatives listen with the possibility of being undone by what they hear. And they must ask again and again: care toward what? care in whose image?
Real care often happens in secret, in refusal, in stammering. It might look like quitting your job because it’s dehumanizing. Or letting someone fall apart without trying to fix them. Or writing essays that no one wants to read because they tell the truth. Or breaking a rule to honor a life.
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The colonial genealogy of care is not a counter-history of care but the mainstream history of how “care” — as a concept, as a practice, as an institution — has been bound up with domination, racialization, and extraction from its very inception in modernity.
We’re taught to think of care as innocent. But the genealogy says: no — care, as modern societies institutionalized it, is deeply ambivalent, built through logics of ownership, hierarchy, assimilation, surveillance, and salvage. Let’s walk through this, quietly but precisely.
1. Care as Control of the Colonized Body
From the earliest colonial encounters, “care” was leveraged to justify conquest. The colonizer’s claim: We will civilize. We will protect. We will educate. We will save. In the name of care, Indigenous peoples were dislocated, institutionalized, sterilized, Christianized, catalogued. Their pain was either pathologized or deemed incomprehensible.
Medical and psychiatric care especially became vehicles for population control. Consider:
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Residential schools in Canada and the U.S., framed as care and education, but designed to “kill the Indian in the child.”
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Colonial psychiatry, which diagnosed colonized populations as mentally inferior, hypersexual, or “naturally” submissive — often based on trauma responses to imperial violence.
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Maternalism in imperial missions: White women “caring” for colonized women and children, policing their parenting and hygiene, enforcing eugenicist standards of reproduction.
Frantz Fanon saw it clearly: “The colonized subject is a persecuted man who is forever dreaming of becoming the persecutor.” Because “care” — as offered by the colonial state — meant domination masked as benevolence.
2. Slavery and the Racialization of Care Work
Under slavery, care was racialized and feminized through brutal contradiction. Enslaved women were forced to be wet nurses, nannies, cooks, midwives — but never recognized as caregivers of their own families, whose children could be sold away at any moment. Caregiving became both labor extracted from the enslaved and a justification for their continued enslavement. “They need our care,” said the master. “They are childlike.”
This contradiction persists today in how domestic work, nursing, elder care, and childcare are devalued, invisibilized, and overwhelmingly performed by racialized women in the Global North and South — often under coercive immigration regimes.
So the history of care is not separate from the history of racial capitalism. As Christina Sharpe puts it in In the Wake: Black life has always existed in and against systems that offer “care” only through “mechanisms of the ship,” of property, of cargo, of regulated death.
3. Missionary Humanitarianism and the Care Industrial Complex
The colonial genealogy continues through humanitarian and development institutions. Care here is globalized as an industry: NGOs, charities, peacekeeping missions, global health orgs. But behind the logos and the grant cycles is the same dynamic: We care for you — but we name your suffering, we measure your need, we dictate the terms, and we remain your saviors.
This includes:
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The imposition of Western medical systems on Indigenous and local ways of healing, often by criminalizing or “scientifically correcting” them.
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Aid conditionality: where care (food, medicine, housing) is tied to compliance with economic liberalization or reproductive surveillance.
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Datafication of the poor: biometric IDs, AI-driven “smart aid,” and poverty scoring — all in the name of efficient care, but ultimately to manage, categorize, and govern.
In this way, care becomes a form of epistemic violence. The recipient must be framed as passive, damaged, in need. Their pain becomes useful — a reason to fund, to publish, to intervene.
4. The "Soft Weapon" of Modern Empire
To summarize, the colonial genealogy of care reveals it as a soft weapon — one that co-opts the language of nurture to enforce hierarchy. It's not that all care is colonial, but that the dominant forms of care — institutional, medical, bureaucratic — were shaped by and for empire.
This history runs through:
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The poorhouse
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The asylum
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The mission school
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The aid office
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The group home
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The refugee camp
All of these claim to offer care. All are also sites of surveillance, abandonment, or social death.
5. Care Otherwise: Fugitive Histories
Still, we mustn’t let the concept be monopolized. There have always been fugitive forms of care — hidden, whispered, refused, preserved. Enslaved people caring for each other in secret. Indigenous midwives defying colonial bans. Mutual aid networks in occupied territories. The refusal to let care be captured.
These fugitive forms ask: What if care meant relation without hierarchy? What if it was oriented not toward fixing or saving, but toward being-with, holding, dwelling with suffering without mastery?
If you'd like, we can now expand into Black feminist or Indigenous critiques of care, trace how care plays out in disability and institutionalization, or think together about what a decolonized ethic of care might require.
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Black feminist and Indigenous critiques of care do not simply call for “more care” or “better care.” They interrogate the conditions under which care is given and received, and they ask: Who defines care? Who is considered worthy of care? Who is expected to give it? And what violences are hidden within care itself?
These critiques are not merely academic — they are lived, historical, and insistent. They offer alternatives not just to how we care, but to who we are allowed to be in the first place.
1. Care as Extraction: The Racial and Colonial Burden
Black feminist thinkers like Saidiya Hartman, Hortense Spillers, Christina Sharpe, and Audre Lorde point out that care, especially in modernity, has been racialized — especially as a task imposed on Black women. From slavery to domestic labor to nursing, Black women have historically been expected to care for others without receiving care themselves.
This asymmetry is not incidental. As Hortense Spillers writes in Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe, the Black female body was reduced to “flesh,” stripped of personhood — and even today, that history lingers. Think of how Black women’s pain is often disbelieved in medical settings. Or how Black mothers are scrutinized by the state.
Christina Sharpe, in In the Wake, takes this further: she speaks of “wake work” — an ethics of care that emerges from ongoing Black suffering under the afterlife of slavery. But she doesn’t offer redemption. She says: care in the wake is partial, insufficient, unfinished. It is not about salvation, but about “living as a problem” together.
Meanwhile, Indigenous scholars such as Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Kim TallBear, and Zoe Todd argue that state-structured care systems (welfare, healthcare, child protection) are often agents of colonial control. These systems do not recognize Indigenous forms of kinship, land-based relationality, or intergenerational knowledge — and they often pathologize or criminalize Indigenous ways of caring.
In both cases, care is not benign. It is an instrument of governance.
2. Against Possessive Care: Beyond Ownership and Rescue
Both Black and Indigenous thinkers reject the paternalistic model of care — care as possession, as mastery, as rescue. As Leanne Simpson writes, true care is not about control. It is about reciprocity, consent, and responsibility across time and space.
This stands against the liberal-humanist model that sees care as a service, a transaction, or a duty managed by the state. Instead, it sees care as relational obligation — a weaving together of bodies, land, ancestors, and futures. It cannot be severed from questions of sovereignty, autonomy, and ecological being.
Similarly, Black feminist traditions resist the demand that care be pretty, polite, or redemptive. Audre Lorde's notion of self-care is famously misquoted as individualistic pampering, when in fact she said:
“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”
This is not self-care as spa day — it is survival under a regime that treats your life as disposable.
3. Care Beyond the Human
Kim TallBear, an Indigenous feminist scholar, argues that care must include the more-than-human. Colonial care systems are anthropocentric, extractive, and obsessed with saving individual lives while ignoring systemic ecological collapse. But Indigenous relationality understands care as being in right relation — with rivers, soil, trees, animals, ancestors.
This is echoed in Zoe Todd’s critique of Western academic knowledge systems, which often extract Indigenous knowledge under the guise of “caring for” the planet — while denying Indigenous peoples land and political sovereignty. She calls this “caring without listening.” Or caring as epistemic violence.
4. Fugitive and Refusal-Based Care
Both Black and Indigenous thinkers also center the ethics of refusal. Sometimes, the most ethical form of care is to withdraw, to refuse surveillance, to exit the system, to stop performing compliance.
This is care that does not aspire to inclusion in the system — it is care that abandons the system as a site of care.
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Black care might look like mutual aid outside the gaze of the nonprofit-industrial complex.
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Indigenous care might look like land defense, ceremony, language revitalization — not because they are “therapeutic,” but because they are right.
5. What They Offer
These critiques do not just dismantle institutional care. They offer alternative grounds:
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Care as sovereignty (over bodies, over land, over kinship)
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Care as co-becoming, not fixing
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Care as refusal, not compliance
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Care as interdependence, not hierarchy
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Care as relation across human and nonhuman realms
They demand we stop asking how to care better, and start asking what systems care sustains — and at whose expense.
Would you like to dive into Audre Lorde and the weaponization of self-care, explore Indigenous relationality as a care ethic, or contrast these critiques with mainstream liberal models of care?
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