Bernadette Mayer’s Utopia as a model for care during crisis

Abstract

This article proposes that Bernadette Mayer’s Utopia, published in 1984, offers a model for thinking about care during the Covid-19 crisis. Against regimes of austerity, which regard care as a cost, Utopia considers care to be world-making. Mayer’s book, which I read as anti-work and family abolitionist, imagines motherhood as a public activity and organises this social care around pleasure rather than discipline or self-possession. Utopia imagines freedom through, not in spite of, interdependent bonds of compulsion. Today, feminists are once again criticising the nuclear family’s role in privatising care, and Utopia reminds us of similar, often overlooked utopian elements in 1970s feminism. In the present crisis, when care is both vital and elusive, it is particularly essential to assert the pleasures of care and to claim this care as freedom.