Paternalistic Carelessness and the Making of the “Sacrificial Mother”: Disability, Gender, and Care in Kerala’s Endosulfan Episode

This paper draws on feminist disability scholarship on care to examine the figure of a sacrificial mother located within the moral unit of family, which is identified as central to the public discourse of disability around the Kasargod-endosulfan episode. It is an instance of pesticide poisoning that resulted in the acquisition of disabilities by the populations living in the region. The paper argues that the figure of the sacrificial mother who forsakes her job and social life is discursively constructed by feminised notions of care, absence of formal care structures, and the state’s imagination of care as a packageable/givable product. Caregiving has often been thought of as a linear process or mobilised as a moral force to organise familial structures or care containments. By reflecting on the ethnographic fieldnotes and interviews with mothers of endosulfan-affected people at a private care home in the Indian state of Kerala, the study attempts to locate ways in which disability-care destabilises these containments. It also deliberates on the possibilities of socialities and solidarities enabled by disability-care, forming newer spatialities.