The 'Queer' Ethics of Care

Reinventing an ethic of care and love should be one of the central revolutionary tasks of our time. Our understanding of friendship, romance and companionship remains anchored in a social world that no longer exists: the isolated nuclear family, the monogamous couple, the ideal of exclusive romantic fulfilment, the marginalisation of friendship as a secondary and largely recreational bond, the rigid zoning of human relationships, and the privileging of biological parenthood. These forms were shaped by a historical order centred on industrial production, the privatised household and the reproduction of labour. They are increasingly out of step with a society characterised by fluid identities, mobile lives and ever-shifting social and economic relations.

Yet while the material conditions of life have changed, the insecurity produced by late capitalism has not liberated us from these inherited forms. On the contrary, precarity often drives people to cling more tightly to outdated and exclusionary institutions, not because they are inherently fulfilling but because they promise stability in an increasingly unstable world. Economic insecurity therefore creates fertile ground for the reaffirmation, rather than the transcendence, of oppressive hierarchies.

The alternative is not simply to celebrate fluidity. It is to embrace the complexity and multiplicity of human relationships while eliminating the material insecurity that makes people dependent on restrictive forms of intimacy. Liberation requires both economic and cultural transformation.

This transformation is necessarily dual. It demands a socialist economy that guarantees the material conditions for freedom, alongside a new ethic of care grounded in the plurality of human relationships. Rather than expecting one person or one family to satisfy every emotional, practical and existential need, people should be free to build diverse forms of connection that fulfil them in different ways. Love, friendship, care and solidarity should cease to be organised around compulsory exclusivity and instead become networks of freely chosen commitments.

Equally important is moving beyond the biological family as the primary refuge in a heartless world. In its place, we should cultivate voluntary kinship: communities of care formed not through blood or obligation but through mutual choice. Freed from material dependence, people would come together not out of necessity but out of a shared desire for personal development, enjoyment, affection and collective flourishing. Such a society would not abolish families or romantic partnerships, but it would dethrone them as the only legitimate foundations of intimacy, replacing them with a richer ecology of human relationships.

In such a society, friendship could become what Michel Foucault described as "a way of life", one capable of yielding "intense relations not resembling those that are institutionalized", and of giving rise to "a culture and an ethics". This vision resonates with my own understanding of queerness. That is why I embrace a queer identity despite being predominantly heterosexual and cisgender.  As Foucault also suggested, to be "gay" is not merely to identify with "the psychological traits and the visible masks of the homosexual", but to "try and define and develop a way of life". In that broader sense, queerness represents not simply a sexual identity but an ethical and political project: the creation of new forms of intimacy, solidarity and freedom that transcend inherited social norms.