Love is a Line that Doesn't End: A Rumination on Ghosts and Unreason in Search of Care Without Violence

This body of work contemplates and explores the question, how can care be practiced without replicating violence? Methodologically, it can be understood as an arts-based, multi-site project that focuses on service systems that claim to care, including mental health, social service, and education settings. This work unfolds through five storytelling and arts-making projects, each created with a collaborator who, along with me, brings to this process the experiences of providing services and accessing services, of perpetrating violence and being violated as racialized, femininized, and/or queer people in the care work systems that produce the very privileges we benefit from. At its heart, this body of work is a practice of unforgetting. It is compelled by the lives and deaths of the people we have worked with and the violence we have witnessed. Drawing on the collaborative arts-making projects as well as scholarships in disability and transformative justice, critical feminist and race theories, and feminist ethics of care, this work unpacks the discourse of trauma as a dominant story about violence through the concept of ghosts: the colonial ghosts that live in the bones of people who are labelled with trauma as well as people who provide care for trauma; the ghosts rendered as such through the casting out of belonging from the category of human but persist in appearing; the ghosts about whom tales of horror are constructed as warnings to protect the boundaries of the norm. Ghost stories led this work to a contemplation of grievability as a way of love and the basis of transformative, interdependent relationships, with those who are living and the ghosts we do not forget and remain accountable for – those already dead from colonial, ableist, racist, gender-based violence, from whom we learn to build a less violent future for those not yet born.