Care, self-care and Good Living. The experience of women from the periphery of Córdoba

Abstract

This article takes words, stories and experiences from a group of women from popular sectors of the city of Córdoba, Argentina, who organize themselves around a soup kitchen located in a poor neighborhood. We seek to problematize the categories of sustainability of life, care, self-care and good living, as well as to reflect, through situated narratives and a feminist epistemology of emotions. As for the methodology, the text is based on extensionist fieldwork carried out from participatory action research, incorporating the look and contributions of the epistemology of emotions, in which we obtained stories and memories, experiences of work and of themselves, views on the territory as a space for communal action and encounters, as well as the implications of feminisms in their ways of seeing/being and being in the world. To expose the results of our extensionist intervention work, we have resorted to the development and discussion of three categories: 1) care work - bodies for others; 2) self-care and time for personal wellbeing; and 3) good living: desires of life’s possibilities. The article concludes that the notion of sustainability of life implies an analytical potential to rethink the necessary transformation of the global paradigm in relation to care, incorporating co-responsibility and self-care as fundamental dimensions.