Cuadernos de Teoría Social

The Community of Care

2025-12-23T01:11:46+00:00

This article proposes a theoretical reconceptualisation of care, shifting its understanding from an individualised, feminised, and depoliticised practice towards its recognition as the foundation for a transformative political community. In contrast to reductionist approaches, it is argued that care is a complex social praxis with intrinsically linked practical, ethical, and political dimensions. The analysis reveals how these dimensions, when articulated dialectically, allow for care to be understood as a communal act of sustaining life. The notion of a "community of care" is developed by conceptualising it not as a substantial identity, but as a shared duty or burden born from the recognition of common vulnerability. This community is thus erected as a form of political resistance to the neoliberal logic of individuation and commodification, prefiguring an alternative horizon where reciprocal care is instituted as the core of a new social bond based on mutuality, solidarity, and justice.

Grammars of Care

2025-12-23T00:14:46+00:00

This article proposes a dialogue between the ethics of care and Boltanski and Thévenot’s theory of grammars of justification, with the aim of exploring new ways of understanding how notions of justice are constructed in social life. It starts from the premise that the ethics of care and the ethics of justice are not poles opposing, but rather dimensions in complementary tension that express different conceptions of moral responsibility and legitimacy. Within this framework, feminisms have played a decisive role in making visible the centrality of care and the reproduction of life, revealing how abstract notions of justice rest upon a foundational division between the public and the private that obscures the material and affective conditions of common life. Building on these discussions, the article introduces the notion of grammars of care –an original proposal that seeks to challenge the classical construction of grammars of justification by incorporating the affective, embodied, and situated relations that sustain moral action. These grammars make it possible to analyze how meanings of justice are negotiated in concrete contexts, where recognition

Political Utopias for the Communization of Care

2025-12-23T00:39:12+00:00

This article traces the historical genealogy of family abolition as a radical emancipatory project, inscribing it within the strategic horizon of the communization of care. Abolition, understood as Aufhebung (positive supersession), does not seek to annihilate affective bonds but to dismantle the capitalist nuclear family: a specific historical institution that privatizes and feminizes reproductive labor, guarantees the inheritance of private property, and reproduces the labor force. Through an examination spanning from Plato to contemporary abolitionism, passing through Fourier, Marx and Engels, the Soviet and Chinese experiences, Firestone's radical feminism, and current transmarxism (Gleeson, Griffiths, O'Brien, Lewis), it is demonstrated that this critique responds to material transformations in social organization. The article analyzes how the neoliberal care crisis has pushed progressive sectors toward "domestic realism," paradoxically reinforcing the very institution that should be questioned. Finally, it examines the central strategic debate within contemporary abolitionism: the tension between conceiving revolution as generalized insurrection (O'Brien) or as prefiguration (Lewis, anarchism). A synthesis is proposed that understands both perspectives as a division of strategic labor necessary for building communism without State or families.

Unpaid Work and the Distribution of Care in Old Age

2025-11-05T21:05:59+00:00

This study analyzes the economic value of unpaid care work directed at people aged 60 and over in Mexico, using microdata from the National Survey for the Care System (ENASIC 2022). From a quantitative and feminist economics perspective, the study estimates the number of older adults who require support in domestic and health-related activities, as well as the economic valuation of the hours of care provided to this population. Through a Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA), the results show that women bear the greatest burden of care work within households, evidencing the persistence of structural gender gaps. The study highlights the need to recognize this work as a central component of social well-being and to incorporate it into public policies aimed at protection and redistribution. It further argues that strengthening the national care system is essential to harness the demographic dividend without deepening inequalities. Finally, it proposes that gender boundaries in the market–family–state triad must be rethought from an ethic of co-responsibility, in which care is assumed as a social right and a condition for the sustainability of life.

Making Space

2025-12-22T23:58:24+00:00

This article examines the collective laSal (Barcelona, 1977–1990) as a key feminist infrastructure within the post-dictatorial Spanish state Drawing on the notion of infrastructure as a network of relations, knowledge, and care practices, it analyses how LaSal—both a feminist library-bar and publishing house—articulated collective forms of organisation that connected art, activism, and knowledge production. Its editorial work created spaces for the circulation of feminist and transfeminist thought within a context marked by censorship and institutional fragility. The article also explores its later reception at the Museo Reina Sofía, where the patrimonialisation of its materials exposes the tension between recognition and political deactivation. Through laSal, the text proposes understanding the building of feminist infrastructures as a labour of care that sustains collective life and repairs the fractures of democratic memory.

From Crisis to a Care Society

2026-01-27T22:14:26+00:00

This interview addresses the crisis of care and the political horizon of a “care society” through a conversation between Camilo Sembler and Francisca Gallegos, Chile’s Undersecretary of Social Services. Drawing on the intersection between social sciences and public policy, the dialogue examines the specific features of the care crisis in the Chilean context, shaped by familism, the feminization of reproductive labor, and institutional fragmentation. It further explores the scope, achievements, and tensions involved in the development of the National System of Support and Care under President Gabriel Boric’s administration, as well as the cultural, economic, and political challenges facing this paradigm amid contemporary ideological disputes. The interview conceptualizes care as a need, a form of work, and a social right, emphasizing its transformative potential for social organization and welfare regimes.

Feminist Reflections on Care

2026-01-26T21:03:08+00:00

This review discusses Reflexiones feministas sobre los cuidados (Alegría & Vivaldi, eds., 2024) as a key contribution to contemporary care debates in Latin America. The volume brings together interdisciplinary perspectives that combine theoretical reflection, normative analysis, and situated approaches to care practices. The review highlights the book’s effort to clarify the conceptual ambiguities surrounding care, engaging feminist ethics, social reproduction theory, and the notion of interdependence. It also emphasizes the political relevance of the collection within the recent Chilean context, shaped by the crisis of social reproduction and by emerging institutional frameworks that recognize care as a social right.

Universal Interdependence and Promiscuous Care

2026-01-26T20:43:34+00:00

This review examines The Care Manifesto (The Care Collective, 2021) as a political and theoretical intervention that frames the “care crisis” as a structural outcome of neoliberal capitalism. Grounded in an ethic of interdependence, the book calls for a reconfiguration of affective, communal, state, and global relations that sustain life. The review highlights the analytical strength of concepts such as “organized abandonment” and the “banality of carelessness,” placing them in dialogue with the Chilean context. It also explores the tensions between the proposal of a caring state, persistent social inequalities, and the rise of authoritarian responses to social precarity.

The Last Human Job de A. J. Pugh

2026-01-27T22:09:46+00:00

This review examines The Last Human Job: The Work of Connecting in a Disconnected World by Allison J. Pugh, a book that introduces the concept of connective labor to account for the relational and emotional work that sustains contemporary social life and the world of work. Through a critical reading, the review highlights the book’s empirical and analytical contributions to debates on care, recognition, and automation. At the same time, it problematizes the ethical ambivalence of connective labor, emphasizing that the very capacities that enable care and humanize interactions may also operate as techniques of power, control, and discipline.

Vital Cultures and Ethics of Care

2026-01-27T22:20:09+00:00

Issue 22 of Cuadernos de Teoría Social, Vital Cultures and Ethics of Care, is dedicated to examining care as both a central problem of contemporary societies and an organising principle of social life. From a critical and interdisciplinary perspective, the contributions address the crisis of care in dialogue with the ethics of care, feminist economics, moral sociology, and social history, with a particular emphasis on Latin American and Spanish-speaking contexts. The dossier introduces concepts such as communities of care, grammars of care, and the communization of care, bringing together theoretical reflection, empirical analysis, and political-institutional debates to rethink interdependence, social justice, and contemporary ways of sustaining life.