Tag Archives: caregiving

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Valuing Care

A review of Susan Forest and Lucas K. Law’s The Sum of Us: Tales of the Bonded and Bound (Laksa Media Group, 2017)
By Derek Newman-Stille

As a society, we undervalue care and undervalue care workers. We tend to assume that people who do care work are doing it because they like helping people and we assume that the job is compensation enough. Even in the home, we de-value family members who provide care, viewing their care work as something that doesn’t need compensation. Care work is consistently treated as though it is not real labour and isn’t valued or compensated for. 

Part of this lack of value for care work stems from patriarchal beliefs that position care work as a feminine labour and therefore de-value it the same way that patriarchy de-values anything viewed as feminine. 

Care work has been in need to reimagining for some time. It has needed a fundamental disruption of social assumptions and a re-evaluating of the meaning of this labour. Using the medium of speculative fiction, a genre devoted to asking questions, Susan Forest and Lucas K. Law’s The Sum of Us: Tales of the Bonded and Bound brings together stories that critically interrogate the way that we imagine care and care-giving. These stories take a broad exploration of what care can mean, looking at parental care, long term care homes, social responsibilities for care, foster care, maternal care, elder care, medical care by doctors and nurses, the care relationships of pets, and even the care roles of insectile species’ (since care isn’t just a human trait). These stories examine complexities of care that are critical to this culture moment such as what is the value of care?, what difference does quality care make?, what is quality of life?, is care the role of home or the state?, what are the gendered dynamics of care-giving?, why do we de-value care-givers?, how much responsibility should parents have in the care of their children?, and what is the role of robotics in care? These are all critical questions that are in need of complex and creative answers and The Sum of Us invites readers to think critically about them. It doesn’t introduce easy answers about care-giving, but instead invites readers to explore often contrary ideas about care, asking readers to come up with their own critical questions and creative answers to the meaning of care.

These are tales of robots, aliens, insects, future wars, supervillains, nanites, other worlds, plagues, and mutants, but at their core, these are all tales about what caring means, and these are real, human questions. They may be explored through the lens of the alien, but they are fundamentally about human values and what care means to us. Sometimes the only way to get us to ask critical questions about the way that we value (or de-value) caring labour is to project our modes of care onto another, onto the future, onto another society, onto the inhuman so that we ask ourselves “if this makes us upset when we see an alien doing it, what does it mean that we are doing the same thing?”

To read some of the reviews of individual stories in this collection, see my review of:

Claire Humphrey’s “Number One Draft Pick”

https://speculatingcanada.ca/2017/07/25/skating-on-the-thin-ice-of-sports-masculinity/

Juliet Marillier’s “The Gatekeeper”

https://disabledembodiment.wordpress.com/2017/06/09/the-reaper-cat/

Edward Willett’s “The Mother’s Keeper”

https://speculatingcanada.ca/2017/07/08/insectile-intimacies/

Sandra Kasturi’s “The Beautiful Gears of Dying”

https://speculatingcanada.ca/2017/07/06/exposing-the-caregiver-within-the-human-suit/

A.M. Dellamonica’s “Bottleneck” 

https://speculatingcanada.ca/2017/06/10/caregiving-at-war/

Caroline M. Yoachim’s “Dreams as Fragile as Glass” 

https://disabledembodiment.wordpress.com/2017/07/27/breakable/ 

Kate Story’s “Am I Not A Proud Outlier”

https://speculatingcanada.ca/2017/07/28/what-is-means-to-be-an-outsider/
To find out more about The Sum of Us: Tales of the Bonded and Bound, visit http://laksamedia.com/the-sum-of-us-an-anthology-for-a-cause-2/ 

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What is Means to Be An Outsider

A review of Kate Story’s “Am I Not A Proud Outlier” in Sum of Us: Tales of the Bonded and Bound (Laksa Media Group, 2017)
By Derek Newman-Stille

In a hive, dance is crucial. Dance is the way that decisions are made, but dance is also a way of expressing dissent. Kate Story’s “Am I Not A Proud Outlier” is a tale of a space hive with typical bee like characteristics. This hive is moving from planet to planet, and colonizing as they move, but something has gone wrong in the hive. A space that is supposed to be unified has become disrupted and violence has broken out between different factions leaving a Queen without support. This hive has a caste system like most bee hives do, with certain members specialized to fulfill certain roles like building, nursing, and cleaning. But, this hive also has a role that is meant to present alternatives, the Outlier caste, a small group of isolated people who bring up ideas and perspectives that the harmony of the hive hasn’t considered. They are built to be contrarians and to be introverts.

Outlier 31’s role is to resist that sense of security and safety that comes with belonging, to counter the uniformity of the rest of the hive to open up questions about the status quo and challenge unilateral thinking. In Outlier 31, Kate Story creates the quintessential image of the artist. She points out that the role of the artist is to live in a state of intellectual curiosity and uncertainty, always willing to push boundaries into alternatives that others may not think of. She reminds the audience that art has an important role to disrupt easy answers and ask new, more potent questions. But, perhaps more importantly, Story connects art to the act of care-giving, the focus of the “Sum of Us” anthology, pointing out that artists provide an important caring role in their acts of critical questioning. 

Outlier 31 thinks of words that have not been used before, brining the power of language to the task of re-assessing meaning in her hive, she dances histories that the hive prefers to keep secret in their desire to present one unified historical narrative. Outlier 31 is an essential part of a community, but is forever kept separate from it. Yet, things change in times of crisis. Outlier 31 must simultaneously take on care-giving roles (roles that are suited for other members of the hive like the Nurses), changing her fundamental make-up, while still being true to her need to be contrarian. 

To find out more about the work of Kate Story, visit http://www.katestory.com

To discover more about Sum of Us: Tales of the Bonded and Bound, visit http://laksamedia.com/the-sum-of-us-an-anthology-for-a-cause-2

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Insectile Intimacies

A review of Edward Willett’s “The Mother’s Keeper” in The Sum of Us by Susan Forest and Lucas Law (Laksa Media Group, 2017)
By Derek Newman-Stille

Edward Willett takes a different perspective than many of the authors in the collection “The Sum of Us”, a collection about caregiving, and, instead LITERALLY dehumanizes caregiving. Instead of focusing on caregiving among humans, Willett focuses on the idea of insectile care, specifically that of a sentient alien race that has insectile characteristics. 

Care is an important part of most colony insects that have a queen. In these colonies, various insects specialize in certain duties to ensure that the queen is able to continue reproducing and providing new members for the hive. These roles can be varied from protecting the hive from intruders, bringing food, removing waste, carrying larvae, cooling eggs, and maintaining the queen’s needs. 

Willett’s “The Mother’s Keeper” centres around the growth of a young member of a hive society named Praella, whose caring role changes as she ages, but centres around the care she needs to provide for the Mother (who takes on an insect queen role). The Mother of this hive has a body that extends throughout all parts of the colony, and is needed for all aspects of life in the colony. The only problem is that Praella is witnessing the end of the Mother’s long life, something that her hive is unprepared to deal with. The Mother is gradually rotting throughout the city and the hive begins to dissipate, but Praella maintains her adherence to the Mother, staying with her through all of her changes even though she does not speak to Praella. 

Although “The Mother’s Keeper” focusses on an insectile relationship, an adherence and total dependency on the hive queen and her total dependence on her children, Willett explores very human relationships, examining the way that our relationship to caregiving changes as we age, and the complexities involved in caring and, particularly, in being a sole caregiver. His narrative involves more than a civic duty to offer care, but, rather, a biological impulse, a fundamental NEED to offer care, which allows the reader to interrogate ideologies of caregiving in our society and contemplate what care could mean. 

To discover more about Edward Willett, visit http://edwardwillett.com/
To discover more about The Sum of Us, visit http://laksamedia.com/the-sum-of-us-an-anthology-for-a-cause-2/

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Caregiving at War

A review of A.M. Dellamonica’s “Bottleneck” in The Sum of Us edited by Susan Forest and Lucas K. Law (Laksa Media Group, 2017).By Derek Newman-Stille

Caregiving is about trust. It is about placing your trust in another person. A.M. Dellamonica’s “Bottleneck”, part of the collection The Sum of Us (a collection about caregivers), opens up unexpected possibilities for giving care. Rather than focusing on ideas of care in hospitals, nursing homes, and other institutions like many of the stories do, Dellamonica’s tale focuses on caregiving for children and the complexities of child care in war. 

“Bottleneck” explores ideas of soldiers as care givers, examining an Earth at war and it is a war fuelled by alien intervention (its own sort of misplaced paternalism). The protagonist, Ruthless, is a solider who has been asked bring a general’s children to him across hostile territory. The general placed the responsibility for the care of his children in this soldier’s hands. Even though she is considered a ruthless soldier (which influenced her name), she also has experience with care, having looked after her younger brother when they were growing up. She knows the burden of care that is placed on older siblings and she brings her knowledge and experience into her care for these two young people. 

But, Ruthless comes across a man who claims that he has important information for the soldiers and she has to trust him to be around the children even though he has signs of being an enemy combatant. When she is forced to leave one of the children in his care, she ends up extending the trust inherent in a care position to a person who she wouldn’t trust in any other scenario. 

Dellamonica brings attention to the complexities of care during a war, the dangers and unlikely alliances that come from the protection of children. 

To find more about A.M. Dellamonica, visit http://alyxdellamonica.com 

To find out more about The Sum of Us, visit http://laksamedia.com/the-sum-of-us-an-anthology-for-a-cause-2