Abstract
Using affect theory and disability theory, this article theorizes relationality as it emerges between disabled people who require daily assistance and their paid care providers. In response to the question of how people relate when not only their social identities but also their embodied capacities are different, the concept of affective relationality is developed. Using the work of Deleuze and Guattari, Spinoza, as well as Harney and Moten, I describe how such relationality emerges based on the ontological, haptic connection of bodies that develops through recursive practices of a task co-conducted by and between those bodies, and is co-capacitative. As this study takes place in the U.S. neoliberal public healthcare assemblage—which involves mainly lower- or no-income disabled beneficiaries and their paid workers who are disproportionately lower-income, non/immigrant women of color—the concept of affective relationality is brought into the political arena by contemplating what the relationality does in such assemblage.
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Notes
Receiving and providing long-term care means that care recipients and providers spend time together almost every day of the week to conduct the care-based tasks assigned by care agencies (e.g., assistance in bathing, dressing, cooking). Hours of care provision assigned to care providers and recipients I interviewed vary from 4 to 12 h a day, five to seven days a week. (In cases where a disabled person requires care every day, a few care providers rotate throughout a week.) Therefore, care providers and recipients of long-term care often spend most of their waking time together and co-experience daily events.
I use the term learning to emphasize its connotation to how the synchronization of bodies is gradually achieved through accumulated and repeated practices.
While Spinoza’s notion of body entails “the actual existence of a human body and the formal essence of a human body,” (Garrett 2009, p. 286) in this article I bring up his work to think about the actual existence of and ontology of human body.
The study this article is based on was conducted prior to the application of the Fair Labor Standards Act to domestic service under the U.S. Department of Labor (n.d.) which brings minimum wage and overtime protection among other labor protections.
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Nishida, A. Relating through differences: disability, affective relationality, and the U.S. public healthcare assemblage. Subjectivity 10, 89–103 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41286-016-0018-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41286-016-0018-2