Friday Care Package
The Strange Aliveness of Queer Care
Dear Substack Community: I am once again sitting down to write about care and the politics of care. I have committed to writing each Friday on the word care. It feels to me that we need more care right now and we have always needed more care. Every one of us needs care. I’m writing on care, because of my conviction on the emergence of a nurturance culture. Our cultural practices here in the US are harming us individually and collectively. We often don’t know or can see the harm. Can you imagine with me a fold of nurturance that emerges with us and between us, so that we can dance together?
Friday Care Package | The Strange Aliveness of Queer Care
Beloveds,
This week, I’ve been thinking about the strangeness of care.
Not care as duty.
Not care as obligation.
But care as a cracked-open practice of being-with.
Care as a queer entanglement with what resists fixing.
I’ve been returning to the words of Bayo Akomolafe:
“The times are urgent, let us slow down.”
This is the paradox of our moment. The world is burning, and still, we must move at the speed of soul.
Because urgency without reflection becomes violence.
Because care, real care, requires slowness.
It asks us to linger. To unlearn. To sit with the messy, the broken, the unfinished.
Care, in this queer frame, is not about making things tidy.
It is about staying with the trouble.
Drawing from New Materialist thinkers, I’ve come to understand care not as linear or hierarchical, but as relational, sensuous, and wildly unpredictable. Care leaks. It lingers. It moves through bodies, ecosystems, language, and stone. Care is not something we do so much as something we participate in—something that happens through us.
Queering care means disrupting the neat roles of “giver” and “receiver.”
It means making space for care that is mutual, shapeshifting, co-created.
It honors the ways trans and queer communities have always cared for one another—not because systems made space for us, but because we made space for each other.
Bayo teaches that care is not just response—it’s relationship with uncertainty.
It’s letting ourselves be undone by proximity to another’s pain.
It’s daring to believe that slowness, softness, and surrender might be forms of intelligence.
So this weekend, I’m wondering:
• What if care is not about fixing—but about fellowship in the unfixable?
• What if to care is to stay a little longer in the room of discomfort?
• What if care is not an answer, but a door?
Care, in the wisdom economy, is how we resist collapse.
It is the hush between breath and word.
It is the ritual of returning to one another, again and again.
So take your time.
Care for what doesn’t make sense.
Let your tenderness be strange and inconvenient and holy.
This, too, is part of our becoming.
With you in the unknowing,
Roberto Che Espinoza+