What's wrong with care work anyways? (let her cook)
Some time ago, I found myself in a discussion with an acquaintance who had moved from the Netherlands to South Africa. At some point, he mentioned that he - a white Dutch guy - currently employed a Black nanny for most of the week to look after his newborn son. With Arun Kundnani's What Is Antiracism? And Why It Means Anticapitalism fresh in mind, I reacted almost instinctively, picturing a Black woman from the townships in their gated community in Johannesburg while leaving her own children behind. I couldn't help but place this picture within a broader history of unequal development, racial capitalism, and the global chain of care work. Trying to point at a systemic issue, that is, the way comfort in the Global North and among expat elites in the Global South are often sustained by unequal racialized and gendered divisions of labor, I had to ask: WTF?
"But in South Africa it’s completely normal to have a nanny," he responded somewhat irritated. "And you know," he continued later on, "this is a job for that woman. What’s wrong with being a nanny anyway?"
I remember feeling strangely troubled by that comment. Not because I thought he had made a good point, but because I sensed that something had deliberately short-circuited in the conversation. Obviously, I wasn't criticizing domestic labor as such, more so the historical and structural conditions under which care work tends to be concentrated among poor Black women serving wealthier, often white(r) households. And all that in a country still largely shaped by a recent history of apartheid. Besides, this acquaintance of mine was introduced to me as someone who is usually aware of these structures, and had always advocated against social injustices in The Netherlands, including anti-Black racism. I couldn't help but wonder why this was a point of discussion in the first place, and couldn't wrap my head around the kind of initiation that must have taken place in South Africa for him (and all the other white folks moving from Europe to South Africa) to suddenly live a lifestyle that requires a nanny five days a week. Yet suddenly I was forced into the position of defending myself against the accusation that I somehow looked down on nannies.
The discussion became almost impossible without having to zoom out entirely onto colonial history, racial capitalism, care chains, gendered labor, and the global economy of social reproduction. Of course, I wasn't going to reconstruct an entire structural analysis just to undo a bad-faith reframing that the other person likely understands perfectly well already. So, I left the conversation unsettled.
More than a year later, I watched a documentary series about the assassinated Dutch populist politician Pim Fortuyn. In the final episode, I noticed something remarkably similar to what I had experienced before. In one archival clip, after a female journalist asked him several critical questions, he snapped and told her to "go home and cook, that'd be much better." When he was later confronted about this statement, he responded with feigned innocence that he doesn't see what’s wrong with cooking anyways. "Cooking is wonderful. Why do people look down on that?"
Clearly, the issue was never whether cooking itself is a good or bad. The issue was the historical organization of cooking, care, and domestic labor along gendered lines. Fortuyn repeatedly framed himself as a defender of women's rights, and had built his entire political campaign on the idea that Muslim women needed to be protected and emancipated from their patriarchal cultures. Meanwhile, I had noticed him making several sexist remarks about women in general, including in politics where he deemed female politicians "just not good enough," and now, also very plainly, toward a female journalist who he felt would be better off at home in the kitchen. But he deceptively recoded a structural critique as some sort of elitist disdain by rhetorically transforming criticism of patriarchal division into a contempt for the very practice of cooking itself.
Seeing these two moments side by side in my head clarified that what I had experienced before - with that acquaintance of mine - was not an ordinary disagreement, but a recurring discursive maneuver. I fell for a psychological trick... a strategic reversal in which criticism of structural inequality is re-presented as an attack on the very people performing subordinated labor. It's a mechanism that has been studied across feminist theory, discourse analysis, and psychoanalysis under different names. I didn't want to zoom all the way out back then, but I will do it here, albeit in a different way. Just so whoever reads this is better prepared and equipped than I was to deal with such trickery in the future.
As a scholar who has worked with Critical Discourse Analysis a lot, I think it's useful to unpack what exactly is happening in these encounters on a discursive level. What is said, what remains unsaid, and what is implied reveals something about why things are said the way they are. In a conversation about women being disproportionately assigned domestic labor, there is no objective reason to ask "so you think cooking is beneath women?" When someone critiques the racialized organization of care work, there is no objective reason to respond with: "so you think being a nanny is shameful?" These aren't logically situated questions or serious input, but carefully selected elements morphed into a strategic literalism that insists on a flattened interpretation of a critique in order to evade it. In other words: the literal surface of the statement is isolated from the social relations it was actually addressing, so it becomes a strategy to deflect or reverse.
This resembles what critical discourse theorist Teun van Dijk analyzes in his work on racism denial. His work shows how dominant groups routinely bend structural critiques of racism into self-serving accusations of incivility, hypersensitivity, or, the classic: reverse discrimination! The conversation is then derailed to focus on, for instance, "tone" (Black feminist have referred to this as tone-policing) or interpersonal morality. What that may look like is that the person addressing racism is not seriously considered, but shoved aside and labeled as an aggressor who undermines some moral code of conduct. Just like in my conversation with that acquaintance, or in Fortuyn's misplaced revaluing of "cooking," the problem lies with those thinking ill of women choosing to perform domestic labor, whether that is babysitting or cooking.
Perhaps the most emotionally precise account of this dynamic comes from feminist thinker Sara Ahmed. She has repeatedly described how those who point out structural problems are often seen as the problem themselves. The feminist, anti-racist, or otherwise critical subject is framed as creating negativity. This, in turn, creates a form of political labor that is extremely exhausting. You end up having to explain entire systems only to defend the legitimacy of noticing them.
The mechanism at play also strongly resembles what the philosopher and psychoanalyst Slavoj Žižek refers to as "fetishistic disavowal." Such disavowal occurs in instances where social actors simultaneously recognize and refuse structural realities. One knows perfectly well that domestic labor is historically stratified by gender and race, but nevertheless insists on treating the arrangement as an isolated individual choice, or a case that is - due to current cultural norms - stripped of any serious historical meaning. This is what causes that "mind-fuck" in encounters where you find yourself wanting to over-explain a common fact that you know the person in question is perfectly aware of. The person, however, chooses to focus on a very particular "fetish" object to manage the contradiction in their own actions. It is not genuine ignorance, but a managed splitting of consciousness so that one's narrative or sense of self doesn't crumble.
What makes these reversals particularly effective is that they exploit an existing moral consensus, namely, that domestic labor, cooking, caregiving, and working-class labor are (or at least should be) dignified forms or work. The critic can then be portrayed as the real snob, sexist, elitist, or racist. That leaves no room for structural critique, because that is now converted into symbolic disrespect.
Feminist scholars of social reproduction have analyzed this tension for decades. Silvia Federici repeatedly noted that patriarchal culture sentimentalizes care while simultaneously exploiting those who perform it. Thus, care work is idealized rhetorically whenever it suits, but it remains materially devalued. Angela Davis, in Women, Race & Class, traces how domestic labor in the United States was historically redistributed from white middle-class women onto Black women, even after slavery, creating a racialized hierarchy of care work rather than abolishing unequal labor itself. In fact, racialized care work becomes possible only because racial inequalities are maintained. And one can only justify such maintenance by normalizing these power dynamics, which comes with claims that "having a nanny in South Africa is normal" or that there is "nothing wrong with cooking" or that "being a nanny is a job like any other."
What makes it all particularly frustrating, is the way injustice seems to be very well understood in its "reversed" form, but not in its default state. For example, some folks seems to find it much easier to point out so-called "reverse racism" or "anti-white racism" while heaven and earth must be moved in order to convince them of the slightest structure behind a racist act against racialized minorities (not to say that anti-white racism is actually a thing...). My acquaintance seems to be very aware of the structural stigmatization of care work, but somehow doesn't see how power operates in the very dynamic of hiring a full-time nanny in South Africa. Fortuyn, too, has appropriated the emancipatory language of feminism in his anti-muslim rhetoric, but suddenly doesn't see the issue with delegating a professional female journalist to the kitchen.
That cognitive dissonance becomes more common in a time where emancipatory language is increasingly stripped off its structural analysis. As pointed out by feminist thinker Nancy Fraser in her essay collection Fortunes of Feminism, neoliberalism individualizes social problems and repackages them as matters of personal choice, empowerment, and lifestyle. And so, the nanny becomes an emancipated worker (she gets paid slightly more than her peers and gets to bring her own child too, hooray!), and we, as a society, must revalue the art of cooking so women don't have to feel offended when being sent to the kitchen by men. Really, the structural organization of labor disappears behind the moral sanctification of individual "choices" (and white male saviorism, of course).
And no, there is nothing inherently wrong with cooking, and having a woman do it. And yes, ideally, being a nanny is a job like any other. But saying that in the context that it was, is to disavow the harsh reality in which reproductive labor (e.g. cooking, cleaning, caregiving, childrearing) is structurally relegated to the private realm of women, framed as natural in order to obscure its economic centrality in a capitalist-white-supremacist-patriarchal world. The annoying part is, though, that no matter how strong your analysis, your interlocutor has probably already decided not to listen anyway. That's how such poor ideologies survive. Through petty inversions in which power presents itself as innocence, structural critique is translated into personal offense, historical arrangements appear as personal choices, and those who attempt to name the structure become the ones disrespecting the very people whose exploitation they are trying to describe. It is a discourse that already knows how to evade critique before the critique fully arrives.
In the spirit of GloRilla, I suggest we flip the patriarchal script through contemporary slang where "cooking" means to expose certain bullshit unapologetically and to dominate the scene intellectually, brillianty, confidently, truthfully, and so on. In that respect, I wish Fortyn had let that journalist cook for real. To let her continue roasting him because she did a damn good job. All bystanders (male journalists, of course) should have told him to let her cook. It should have become an anthem right there and then. And also, I wish people like him were cooked more often — publicly and beyond recovery (well... not like that) — just so we could finally be done with this exhausting performance of ignorance and innocence. Let the kitchen cease to be a site of feminine containment and instead become a site of rhetorical power.