Abstract

This article juxtaposes different and conflicting temporalities as configured in the context of care and caring. Weaving together (1) an autobiographical narrative in which I share parts of my own breast cancer journey with (2) research with men employed as care workers in Australia, I attempt to get at how differentially experienced temporal densities, trajectories, and orientations can be found when receiving and giving care. The slow and deep time of experiencing sickness, and the protective, forgetful time induced by medical trauma – both often perceived as nonlinear time –, clash with the neoliberal, sped-up, linear temporality of the late-capitalist medical industrial complex; leaving care workers and cared-for squeezed between temporalities that can be, and are, at odds with each other. The theoretical framing holding my consideration of these different ‘kinds’ of time, is a composite of feminist care ethics scholarship, critical time studies and the literary work by the Aboriginal author and scholar Mykaela Saunders. Specifically, I draw on Saunders’s short story ‘Buried time’, in which she connects with Aboriginal deep time and writes the abolition of colonial clock time into being. Taking a cue from Saunders narrative, I maintain that the temporalities of colonial/racial capitalism evince segmentation, fragmentation, and, ultimately, destruction. This is a mechanistic time not suitable for human and more-than-human life’s flourishing (that includes living and dying as well as possible); as such, it is a temporality that stands against the relational paradigms of care theory.