“Cancer cells are “immortal”: they replicate incessantly, refusing to obey signals to moderate their speed or to die. They are, in fact, death-defying cells that kill.”
“Immortality cannot survive in our bodies. From a cancer cell’s perspective, debility, that condition most associated with aging, is for other cells, cells that do not know how to adapt, how to beat death, how to live forever. That cancer cells produce debility because they are immortal speaks to one of the central contradictions of aging: increases in life expectancy are heralded as signs of progress, even as debility inevitably accompanies such increase. The bonus is tainted.”
“According to cancer researcher Siddhartha Mukherjee, rates of cancer will increase as life expectancy increases, moving from one in four to, possibly, one in two. The bonus is tainted.”
“Cancer shrinks worlds and expands them (one in four, one in three, one in two—cancer builds populations, cancer populates itself).”
“Each story shrinks the world — cancer feels like an ever-expanding web, extending everywhere, touching everyone, binding us to what feels like its inevitability, forming us by what feels like its inevitability.”
“Cancer is a different kind of breaking: homeostasis, a word I learned in Standard 5, explains it in terms I can understand. Properly functioning bodies are systems in balance. They make sure we don’t get too hot or too cold, for instance. Cells are policed and policing structures.
Cancer refuses regulation. It embraces and creates unregulated growth.”
“Unregulated growth: a neoliberal wet dream.”
“Carework: a feminist attempt to describe the economics of care, to refuse to privatize care.”
“It’s easier to ask how care works than it is to ask how work cares.”
““Easier” is a gendered and gendering term: care is more approachable, more gendered as approachable, more gendering as approachable.”
“Work, on the other hand, feels impersonal. It is children in primary school who, when asked what their fathers did, answered “business,” a response that I never understood. Mothers taught and nursed and cooked and traded and farmed — their work could be named and seen. Fathers did “business”; fathers worked. Work was meant to be difficult and opaque; work was gendered as masculine”
“A crude binary, sure, but crude binaries have force. To ask how care works permits us to imagine human action in a way that foregrounding how work might care does not: work is alienating, the idea of work is alienating.”
“Yet, to position work as alienating, to expect it to be alienating, is to begin accepting that care should not be part of work, to accept that work should be unpleasant.”
“I want to shield care from work’s unpleasantness, even as work provides the best language to describe how my body feels after lifting and carrying and washing and cleaning.”
“Writing is not self-care — it cannot be. Each word, each phrase, each sentence, each paragraph costs too much, demands too much, extracts too much, stretches too much, beyond what a bonus-imagination can imagine. Too much, approaching exhaustion, where debility meets immortality.”
“One tries to occupy the interval of care(:/-.)work. To write not only in the interval, but also as the interval, as what seeps across care and work, what slices across, what cleaves, what lingers.”