An Afterword: Thinking through Care

This afterword looks back at the articles in this special issue to synthesize and complicate their arguments. It begins by acknowledging that care and protection have dominated the last fifty years of rhetoric around disability in the West, often directly in the face of protests for rights and equality. Thus, we think through care to consider not just who cares or how much but how that care gets implemented, to interrogate care from human rights and social policy perspectives, and to reconcile disability studies' denunciation of care with feminist reconsiderations of the topic. Finally, we grapple with more literal meanings of care by focusing on, per Lennard J. Davis, the language that often accompanies this term. We reconsider care of the body, care for the body, and care about the body to propose some alternate terminology: caring from and caring through. In other words, our afterword takes aim at the notion of care itself, asking whether care—and its attendant language—might provoke rather than preclude desire, love, and other positive associations that suggest transformation toward disability, not away from it.