Care, Self-Development and Community Building
Looking after ourselves, each other, and making new worlds in the ashes of the old
The subtitle of this book has been through many iterations. Originally, I used the term ‘self-care’, as the first two-thirds of the book are an introduction to the holistic care of the self required in order to prepare for the building of community. The use of self-care in this sense was in the Lordean tradition of self-care as resistance to oppression, an ‘act of political warfare.’ In adulthood, the practice of self-care is the bedrock of engagement with the world, which is fundamental for anyone seeking to improve and transform it. But I disagree with the white neoliberal capitalist co-optation of feminine self-care into what was once red wine or champagne, but is now herb-infused gin o’clock, Lush bath bombs and retail therapy. I reject this distorted notion. Although I wholly endorse massages and acupuncture, currently constructed as middle-class indulgences, as useful and traditionally democratic practices that support personal wellness, and I love having my nails done and soaking in a hot tub as much as the next person, I do not see the treat-yourself, day-spa, mani-pedi service industry as a source of systemic liberation. While self-care under capitalism is full of contradictions that must be navigated with integrity, if it is championed without community in mind it is incomplete, for cultivating nourishing relationships with others is a fundamental part of creating conditions that make survival possible, and thriving imaginable.
To signal this, I decided to retain the word care and indicate the orienting focus on the self with the use of ‘self-development’ instead. I understand self-development as the first step on the journey of care, which can be seen as scalar, rippling out from the self, one’s core, to others. This begins with the recognition of how damaged and damaging are the normative, structurally racist, heteropatriarchal, capitalist (neo)colonialist ways of engaging and relating with the world. It also encompasses the explicit, continual choice to relate to ourselves and others in ways that reduce rather than cause harm, and affirm life rather than destroy it. As philosopher and Professor Donna Haraway reminds us, we must not be thoughtless, but we must think: of ways we can engage our full humanity, its capacities and its fallibilities, to shape the world alongside others, while acknowledging and pressing against the limitations of societies that reduce us to shells of ourselves. This exercise of individual agency, when channelled into community building, becomes collective agency, facilitated through collective care. Our tendrils together form threads; woven into lattice structures they generate the fabric of a movement; the infusion of energy into the turning over of the new leaf. These processes require for their existence both engineering and emergence, concepts which are constantly in conversation in my thinking, art and activism, and for me comprise two of many poles of a creative universe.
Building community is, for me, about creating the psychic, emotional, and intellectual conditions for new social possibilities and then working with others to bring about presents and futures that reflect our aims and intentions. This is a transformative process by which society may be reimagined and remade. To theorise this process of building, I turn to the expert builders: the engineers. The discipline of engineering is focused upon the construction of human worlds, both physical and digital, whether that be buildings, bridges, dams or databases. Notably, it was student engineers who were first sent from the colonies to be trained in the metropole, and returned to develop the colonial infrastructure (1). It is this same educational history, experienced by thousands of colonised subjects, that I now subvert by using engineering concepts in an attempt to undo the legacy of colonial harm.
Community building is an active orientation towards the world through which people collaboratively generate or channel life-affirming energy and direct it upon a pathway oriented towards collective survival. If the desired pathway does not yet exist, it can be constructed by engineering conditions for the emergence of the affective environments in which meaningful human relationships thrive – places where we feel safe, seen, heard, connected, valued and cared for. It is the process of building containers in which magic – which facilitator, activist and doula adrienne maree brown defines as the way the world influences us, and in turn, how we influence the world – can happen, whether small as a single conversation, or as large as a social movement.
As human beings, we are naturally inclined towards structuring our communities in particular ways – through social conditioning, use of language, and tendencies to create customs, norms, social structures, rituals and rites of passage. These are the ways in which we engineer – that is, give form to – not only our built environment, but also our lived realities. We can continually affirm and rededicate ourselves to such commitments in both explicit and implicit ways. What this book aims to do is to call attention to such processes, so that we may be more intentional about the structures we create in our everyday lives, beginning with the smallest, most subtle aspects of our bodies and selves, and moving outwards, towards relationships and how we interact with the world.
At the same time, a significant portion of these efforts is not focused on planning or building, but instead on the process of bringing new realities into being. Therefore, the metaphor of engineering seemed inadequate to illustrate this more organic, looser, less structured and more unpredictable activity. Not all of our plans will be implemented, and there are some things for which no blueprints are sufficient. Thus enters the notion of emergence. Social movements for liberation have historically taught us great things about the emergent power of people on the margins, those who not only do not benefit from, but are violently excluded from and targeted by, mainstream social engineering. While their liberation was deliberately denied and thus theoretically foreclosed by what existed at the time, by using all tools at hand, and making new ones, they brought themselves ever closer to self-determination, and opened new possibilities for us all.
We now have names for, and some emergent tools to resist and challenge, the effects of oppressive social hierarchies of all kinds: authoritarian nationalism, racism, sexism, hetero and cis-sexism, ableism, ageism, and many more. Human existence has never been idyllic or safe, and there has never been a time when danger was not nearby, though we have grown quite good at convincing ourselves otherwise. However, the world that we live in today is especially broken. By now, in the Information Age, we should have the capacity to learn from history - but instead, we wilfully ignore it.
Intersectional mystic teachers, such as Dr Clarissa Pinkola Estés, ask us to recall a time when, like wolves, we walked at the pace of the wounded, the old and the sick, so as not to leave anybody behind. Yet, instead of romanticising a past that didn’t exist, we can draw this imagined memory together with the contemporary teachings of people who reject any and all supremacist traditions. The call to imagine revolutionary futures, and bring them into being through individual and collective practice, is one to which today’s liberatory social movements are responding. It is the end to which this book is but one of many means.
This is the story of my maternal great-grandfather, Angel Martinez, a pensionado sent by the American colonial government from the Philippines to UC Berkeley to study civil engineering, which he returned to practice in Ilocos Norte. He eventually moved to Manila and became Dean of the University of the Philippines Diliman College of Civil Engineering. My grandfather Ernesto Isidro Martinez was his oldest child, and my mother is his first daughter.
Further Reading
brown, a.m. (2017) Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds. Chico: AK Press.
Haraway, D. (2016) Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Ibarra Colado, E. (2005) ‘Origen de la empresarialización de la universidad: El pasado de la gestión de los negocios en el presente del manejo de la universidad’, Revista de la Educación Superior, 34(134), pp. 13–37.
Lorde, A (1988) A Burst of Light. Ithaca: Firebrand Books.
Pinkola Estés, C. (1992/2008) Women Who Run with the Wolves: Contacting the Power of the Wild Woman. London: Rider.