Sabr: A care collaborative

This article originates from thinking through both the script of heteronormative love and friendship in Indian society, especially in the backdrop of COVID-19, to reimagine the relationship between friendship and care work. Through select contributions from Yaari: An Anthology on Friendship  by Women and Queer Folx (Phadke &  Kanagasabi 2023) along with feminist frameworks of care, the article reflects on care as labor in friendship. Though indispensable for survival, friendship as care work is often devalued and invisibilized in everyday life as it stands outside the legitimate forms of institutions. The article attempts to highlight friendship as exceptionally embodied, political, and emotional labor. Friendships create space for not only solidarities but transformative growth and resistance (Hooks 2000). 

Within the South Asian context, Yaari holds the conversations and discussions of more than a hundred women and queer folx on friendship, rooted in their lived and felt experiences, specifically at a time when COVID-19 virus entered the body politics and brought to the surface the myriad ways in which things fell apart for women and gender queer folx. Violence against women and gender queer folx surged across the globe. During such a time, “centering narratives” of friendships at the heart of feminist inquiry is significant to shed light on, as Phadke and Kanagasabi state in the Introduction, not only how the world is but what we aspire it to be in the future. These narratives highlight friendships that seek transformation; build and sustain movements; fight for hope from the place of despair; ensure survival in the times of crisis. 

Assuring and striving for each other’s survival in crisis through feminist practice is not a new phenomenon. Subha Wijesiriwardena, in her contribution titled ‘South Asian Feminisms, or How I Learned to Make Friends,’ wrote about how during communal tensions and national crisis, feminist friendships made everything possible. South Asian feminists through their commitment to each other’s work forged everlasting bonds to a point that they “cared for each other’s children, they took each other into their homes, they were there whenever personal tragedy, or indeed political tragedy, struck in the lives of one another” (Wijesiriwardena 2023). Wijesiriwardena’s contribution considers friendship as care work, as an ethical strategy, for survival of not just the present generation but also a political practice (Gilligan 1982; Tronto 1993) to care for the future by caring for each other’s children. This transnational care work that traverses borders and generations placed acts of grieving, cooking, caring, accompaniment, and joy, at the heart of feminist resistance. Cleaning up after each other, showing up for each other, feeding each other and children of one another becomes the transformative political practice. What Wijesiriwardena called “home of South Asian feminists” in which her mother Sunila Abeysekera found care during her final months, stands for an intergenerational metaphor of labor that is life-affirming and radical. 

This political practice encompasses responsiveness, competence, responsibility and attentiveness as labor that goes into sustaining friendship. The stories in Yaari reflect on these roles that are often performed by women and queer folx and are undervalued and unrecognized by institutions. Ameya Nagarajan’s essay titled ‘If  We Privileged Friendship’ is an account which brings to the surface how for years, single women maintain multiple intimate friendships as support system, which often comes with exhaustion due to asymmetry between heteronormative kinship and friendship (Phadke & Kanagasabai 2023).  

While friendships are considered to be spaces for comfort, it is also a relationship that must hold space for discomfort as part of its care logic. ‘Notes on Difficult Friendship’  (Bhattacharya et al. 2023) is interesting to understand that friendships at the intersection of caste, class, gender and ability embody power-dynamics much like any other relationship. It is in this context that recognizing it as labor opens up space to think and work through notions of consent, repair and accountability towards each other to advocate for and practice transformative justice; foregrounding presence and witnessing over performance. Seerat Fatima in her contribution highlights how friendships are often determined by financial and social capital, thus there is a need- however tricky or uncomfortable- to acknowledge privilege for more “inclusive intersectional friendships and collectives to exist” (Fatima 2023).     

“Even the Little Things: Feminist Friendships and Enacting Care in Academia” by Sheema Khawar et al resonated with me the most. This article is a roadmap that reflects how women in academia often enact “feminist friendships”- “capacious and generous and bighearted”- rooted in caretaking.  The authors document their lives were inspired by feminist frameworks of “dissident friendship,” “yaariyan”, and “epistemic friendships” articulated by contributing authors in Dissident Friendships : Feminism, Imperialism, and Transnational Solidarity (Chowdhury and Philipose 2016). 

While “dissident friendship” is defined by Elora Halim Chowdhury as a commitment to go beyond the bounds of caste, class, gender and nationality, “yaariyan” as a term puts emphasis on reciprocity among women and queer folx based on commitment to recognizing privilege in friendships to hold space for each other. What’s interesting about this piece by Sheema Khawar et al is the enactment of carework as pedagogical praxis during the pandemic through sharing lesson plans, voice notes, holding silences, checking in and exercising emotional labour. Depicting that a pedagogy is as feminist as the collaborative effort that goes into making it through political practice against patriarchal constraints marked by competition and neoliberal individualism. Zainab Najeeb’s piece titled “Sister, Insider: Pedagogical Friendships in the Time of Feminist Activism” too reflects on challenging yet fulfilling experience of teaching  a course on women’s  movements and feminist struggles in Pakistan for a year through online mode of teaching during the pandemic held for her and her students. She highlights that students were able to hold space for each other not only in vulnerability, care and mutual recognition but through “tangential exchanges of political, social, economic and intellectual capital.”  

_{Image: From Yaari. (p. 201)}

In another beautiful piece titled “On Friendship, Fungi and Resistance”, illustrator and theatre practitioner Alia Sinha, under the section Pandemic, Protest, Resilience, speaks of her feelings about her sense of friendships and the potential of internet during a crisis such as COVID-19 when a sense of connectivity without the internet was unimaginable, through the metaphor of fungi. She reflects on friendships as an ecosystem of mycelial networks with radical implications on day-to-day functionality. The radicality of such fungi-like mycelial networks of friendships lies in reiterating the interdependence of beings on each other. Her piece took me back to the understanding of Ubuntu, as explained by Jacqueline Rose. She iterates that Ubuntu is related to the idea of identification with the other rather than a self-same and narcissistic idea of western individualism. Specifically, it implies that, “you are not who you are- in fact you are not at all- except through the Other” (Lerman et al. 2018, p.103). 

In my opinion, notions of friendship as care work- political labor- as captured in Yaari also refute the notion of western individualism. Yaari brings to the surface how women and queer folk blurred the boundaries between love and labour, personal and political, self and other by ensuring survival of each other. For Sabr and other feminist collectives whose politics revolves around the ethics of care, specifically within South Asian context, the stories in this anthology serve as a critical addition to the social-anthropological literature that center the perspective and experiences of women and queer folx within the larger discourse on carework. 

Bibliography 

Bhattacharya et al. (2023) “Notes on Difficult Friendships.” In Phadke & Kanagasabai (Eds.), Yaari: An Anthology on Friendship by Women and Queer Folx. Yoda Press. 

Chowdhury, E. H. (2016). “Friendship.” In Gender: Love, Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks. Jennifer Nash, Editor. Farmington Hills, MI: Macmillan Reference USA, pp. 17–26. 

​​Chowdhury, E., & Philipose, L. (2016). Dissident Friendships : Feminism, Imperialism, and Transnational Solidarity. University of Illinois Press.

Fatima, S. (2023). “The Barbie from Ichra Bazaar.” In Phadke & Kanagasabai (Eds.), Yaari: An Anthology on Friendship by Women and Queer Folx. Yoda Press. 

Gilligan, C. (1982). In a Different Voice. Harvard University Press. 

Hooks, B. (2000). All About Love: New Visions. New York: William Morrow. 

Lerman, A., Chaudhuri, S., Bechler, R., Sen, A., & Rose, J. (2018). Conversations with Jacqueline Rose. Seagull Books. 

Phadke, S., & Kanagasabai, N. (Eds.). (2023). Yaari: An Anthology on Friendship by Women and Queer Folx. Yoda Press. 

Tronto, J. (1993). Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care. Routledge. 

Wijesiriwardena, S. (2023).  “South Asian Feminism, or How I Learned to Make Friends.” In Phadke & Kanagasabai (Eds.), Yaari: An Anthology on Friendship by Women and Queer Folx. Yoda Press. 

Author bio

Mishika Chauhan is a researcher based in Bangalore, India. Her research interests are violence, gender, apathy, necropolitics, indifference, state-sponsored violence, and accountability with a regional focus in Northeast India, within the larger context of South Asia. She has worked with institutions such as French Institute of Pondicherry, Centre for Community Knowledge, Ambedkar University Delhi and Centre for Equity Studies. Her writings have appeared in Social Scientist, The Polis Project, Countercurrents.org and Newslaundry.