Issue #153 The Mother Is Dead, Long Live (m)Othercare: Care as Alterity, an Introduction

The Mother Is Dead, Long Live (m)Othercare: Care as Alterity, an Introduction

iLiana Fokianaki

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Forensic Architecture, “The Pylos Shipwreck,” 2023.

Issue #153
April 2025










Notes
1

iLiana Fokianaki, “Narcissistic Authoritarian Statism, Part 1: The Eso and Exo Axis of Contemporary Forms of Power,” e-flux journal, no. 103 (October 2019) ; and “Narcissistic Authoritarian Statism, Part 2: Slow/Fast Violence,” e-flux journal, no. 107 (March 2020) .

2

Judith Butler, Who’s Afraid of Gender? (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024), 13, 6.

3

Édouard Glissant, The Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (University of Michigan Press, 1997), 6.

4

“Greece: One Year on From the Pylos Shipwreck, the Coast Guard’s Role Must Be Investigated,” News, amnesty.org, June 13, 2024 .

5

Stephanie McCarter, “Is Homer’s Calypso a Feminist Icon or a Rapist?” Electric Literature, January 30, 2018 .

6

Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics (Duke University Press, 2019); Sylvia Wynter, Black Metamorphosis: New Natives in a New World, unpublished manuscript .

7

Matina Stevis-Gridneff et al., “Greece Says It Doesn’t Ditch Migrants at Sea. It Was Caught in the Act,” New York Times, May 19, 2023 ; Forensic Architecture, “The Pylos Shipwreck” .

8

Nektaria Stamouli, “Von der Leyen’s Holiday to Greece Prompts Criticism from Top EU Watchdog,” Politico Europe, November 26, 2024 .

9

Butler, Who’s Afraid of Gender?, 6.

10

Butler, Who’s Afraid of Gender?, 6.

11

John Yoon and Zach Montague, “Biden Says He Urged Netanyahu to Accommodate Palestinians’ ‘Legitimate Concerns,’” New York Times, January 17, 2025 .

12

“Iraq Study Estimates War-Related Deaths at 461,000,” BBC News, October 16, 2013 .

13

In a November 2023 video that went viral, Khaled Nabhan, a Palestinian grandfather, mourned the death of his four-year-old granddaughter Reem, calling her “the soul of my soul.” She and her five-year-old brother were killed by an Israeli airstrike in Gaza. In December 2024, Khaled was himself killed by an Israeli tank shell. See Abeer Salman and Nadeen Ebrahim, “Palestinian Grandfather Whose Tribute to Slain Granddaughter Went Viral Is Killed by Israeli Fire in Gaza,” CNN, December 16, 2024 .

14

Lena Obermaier, “‘We Are All Israelis’: The Consequences of Germany’s Staatsräson,” Sada, March 28, 2024 .

15

Very few people I’ve met in my life know of the Nazi atrocities committed outside of Western Europe, maybe because these peripheries inhabited by lesser white people fall into the category of ungrievable life. Frankly, very few Germans I’ve met even know that the Nazis invaded Greece. More information about the invasion can be found in the book The Black Book of Nazi Atrocities in Greece, a product of the colossal research of survivors, available to download for free in Greek and German . The deaths of my family members are noted within the book’s thirty-five pages of documented killings and mass murders (p. 62–97), many of which took place in what Greeks since 1940 have called “holocaust” villages (the word having entered Greek in the 1920s due to the Greek and Armenian genocide of 1915–23).

16

This is a reference to the apparent Nazi salute given by Elon Musk at a rally following Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration in January. See Lauren Aratani, “Elon Musk’s Daughter Says Father’s Rally Gesture Was ‘Definitely a Nazi Salute,” The Guardian, March 20, 2025 .

17

María Puig de la Bellacasa, Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds (University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 18.

18

Selma Selman, “Alchemy at Work,” interview by Miloš Trakilović, Vogue, March 15, 2024 .

19

Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex (William Morrow, 1970), 58.

20

Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (Norton, 1986), 13.

21

bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (Routledge, 1984), 3.

22

hooks, Feminist Theory, 133.

23

Angela Davis, Women, Race and Class (Random House, 1981), 230.

24

Davis, Women, Race and Class, 230.

25

Sophie Lewis, Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family (Verso, 2019), 11.

26

See and .

27

Sophie K. Rosa, Radical Intimacy (Pluto Press, 2023), 7.

The author would like to thank artist Cameron Rowland for directing me to “Womb Abyss,” and Elvia Wilk for her intrepid editing. This text is dedicated to K and other trans activist friends in Berlin and beyond who have been showing me what true love for your fellow human means.