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 On the contrary, precarity often drives people to cling more tightly to outdated and exclusionary institutions, not because they are inherently fulfilling but because they promise stability in an increasingly unstable world.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.

The Sea, Always Enough

 

The sea is beautiful, whether calm or lightly stirred by waves, because whenever you’re in it, it feels like enough. Whether for a quick dip or for hours in the middle of a day of coming and going, you emerge sun-drained yet certain of it—certain it will always be there to cool and refresh you.

And in the evening, the sea turns into a witchy realm, where colours and reflections merge and dissolve, deepening the silence under the gaze of the moon. 

The sea, along the beaches, is both communist and anarchist. It gives to everyone and takes nothing from anyone. It invites you in, but you enter only when you choose. 

It belongs to everyone, at least until they sell that too. 

It is also a place where you can be alone, or among anonymous multitudes whose voices merge into a collective hum that recedes as you drift further away. Yet it can also be a place of encounter and breezy conversation, where lightness and depth meet. 

The sea has a smell, a sound, and a touch that reach you everywhere—body and soul, material and spiritual at once.  

And though it moves to its own rhythm, in an eternal dance with the wind, within it you find silence. Because there, it is easy to stop wanting more. 

Whether you are in it for a moment or for a long while, it is always enough—so much so that even when stormy, you can feel the urge to dissolve into it completely, to lose yourself in its raw force. 

But on calm days it is gentle with the soul. At least while you are beside it or within it. Even when you're far from it, you know it's still there—ready to welcome you inside it, always.

Two-liners

1. The good moments in life are light, pleasant, a bit random,  and come without any need to process them.  They become memories which evoke gentle melancholy. 

4. History is both random and subject to over-determinations dictated by objective material realities.  So a random subjective  act  can only alter history at a particular and unique juncture, or, to put it more mystically, when the stars (conflicting over-determinations) align or collide.  

7. “If I can’t dance, it’s not my revolution” (even if I am a terrible dancer). The self-appointed prophets of wrath, fire, and brimstone—the Savonarolas of the world—are always counter-revolutionary, no matter how fiercely they denounce corruption.

10: In-yun: Encounters can feel already known from countless past lives, that fleeting déjà vu at first meeting,  but it is the later choices that give those crossings their meaning.  Kismet: Encounters are serendipity with intention, unlikely paths briefly intersecting as if inevitable, asking us to surrender to life’s absurd choreography.

11. The pessimism of the intellect against the optimism of the will: an eternal struggle between the realm of the possible, burdened by its contradictions, and utopia, haunted by its fanatics.

15.  People exist independently in the minds of others. The way we are lived and  experienced in other people’s minds defines who we are—Unsettling but awesome.

18.  Sometimes all you have to do is to change perspective. Things then start floating in the gentle lightness of being.

Magical Realism at the Polls

The Maltese elections provided a surreal backdrop to more important things happening in my personal space. The intersection between timelines was interesting, with the circus I had to follow as a journalist and commentator bordering on magical realism. Some of the proposals were worthy of a José Saramago or Gabriel García Márquez novel. Unfortunately, it was not like in Seeing, where a sham democracy collapses under the weight of an abstention epidemic, but more like the gypsies selling extraordinary wares in Macondo. In such circumstances, although I am probably voting for the Greens, I am appalled by platitudes about the virtues of voting, and it is worth recalling Saramago’s line in Seeing that “by casting a blank vote, you're saying you have a political conscience but you don't agree with any of the existing parties.”  

The reality is that real social battles are rarely won in elections but through communities, unions, activists, and everyday struggles. The rest of politics is an amusement park. Still, unlike the gypsies in Macondo, our politicians are here to stay and, to win favour, they insist on restricting the goodies to the natives. But wait for the shit to hit the fan. Eventually, at this rate, like the dictator in The Autumn of the Patriarch, they will have to sell the sea to a consortium of foreign businessmen.

Moving Trains / Crossing Timelines

You can never cross the same river twice because it's not the same river and you are not the same person. So it follows that you can never meet the same person twice. Of course there is familiarity, character traits, ideology, heritage, roots, accumulated knowledge, ephemeral impressions, and looks, but whenever people meet they are like moving trains. Even faces change. So does the gaze. Sometimes the trains move so fast that meeting someone the next time could  feel like meeting another person. Intersections and collisions can happen in different timelines. 

The senior journalist

At work today, a colleague asked for my designation to put under a caption and another colleague loudly replied: senior journalist. I could not help but laugh at the sound of it. I have been designated as “senior” for the past decade or so, but today it came across as a reminder that I am in the autumn of my life.

Well, since last year some gentle Indian souls have started offering me their seat on the bus, I guess out of respect for my not-so-venerable age of 51.

I am not the type to worry about age. In many aspects of life I feel younger than I was twenty years ago. In many other aspects nothing much has changed since I was 16. Teenage Kicks by The Undertones remains a sort of anthem.

Of course, back in my younger days I imagined myself ageing gracefully, surrounded by loved ones and respected for my wisdom.  

Now, on most days, I sleep and wake up alone, spend a lot of time talking to and being with myself and, of course, still have loved ones with whom I like to share time.

Perhaps I am still wise, but perhaps a bit cranky too. In a number of situations I get confused about how I am supposed to act, which creates a certain awkwardness even in pretty normal exchanges.  

Funny that this reminder of my biological ageing process came after a sort of awakening from two or three years of emotional numbness.  Fuck! I could have made better use of that time.

I do not want to process, plan and zone everything. I am in between places, in a present carrying a lot of past and a little less future. I want to let my multitudes run amok a bit, simply for the sake of celebrating my presence here.

Let’s see how that goes — and how many pineapple cans I buy before they expire.

Schrödinger's wallet

One of the persistent thoughts I had as a child was that reality did not exist but was merely conjured up either by my brain — which I found distasteful and egocentric — or that I might just be part of someone else’s dream, which was even more problematic because the person dreaming might suddenly wake up and my life would simply vanish.

I eventually grew out of this and evolved into a materialist, albeit one who still believes in magical realism. Extraordinary things happen in the here and now, not elsewhere. But by my late teens I had developed another fantasy: that I could somehow slip from one timeline or universe into another. Once I even felt I experienced this. I was about to kiss a girl I was certain wanted to be kissed and the next thing I remember was her telling me not to stare at her. Heaven had been so close that it simply slipped away. Hardly the best example to prove the theory. I later experienced a similar sensation when I actually did kiss someone some months later.

In truth, the thought itself is pointless and can even become dangerous, because it can legitimise wrong choices by imagining they might have been the right ones in another realm. Still, sometimes the feeling of existing between worlds is intoxicatingly real, especially when it feels like being sucked into the void.  I still find the theme fascinating and am currently re-reading Murakami's Sputnik Sweetheart.  I love this quote from that book: “We're both looking at the same moon, in the same world. We're connected to reality by the same line. All I have to do is quietly draw it towards me.”

A few hours after writing this,  a curve ball was thrown at me by the universe.  Just before sleeping, I realised I might have left my wallet — with all my cards inside — at the office, but I could not be 100 per cent sure. This triggered my anxiety.  I had a panic attack because I had to wait until morning to know. It felt like a Schrödinger’s cat scenario: the wallet was both lost and safely on my desk until reality revealed itself.

What made it worse was that I had a radio show to face before I could even go to the office to check. I tried distracting myself, but my fallback  was another loop. Eventually, I stopped trying to solve the uncertainty and reminded myself instead of the good things already present in my life. I slept soundly.

I woke up at six without any hint of doubt that the wallet was 'alive', had a joyful breakfast with my son, enjoyed the radio programme, and later discovered the wallet sitting safely on my desk.

Maybe that is the answer to these loops. Reality is anchored less by certainty than by the small rituals and people that pull us back into the world. And the magical part is that uncertainty and failures are just part of living — not departures from it.  As Bob Dylan wrote "there is no success like failure and failure is no success at all."