Assemblages of care: Moral economies, classed labor, and affective exhaustion among Karachi's working middle‐class women

Abstract

This article explores how working middle‐class women in Karachi navigate the intersecting burdens of care and self‐care within the affective, infrastructural, and ideological conditions of urban precarity. Drawing on twelve semi‐structured interviews conducted across homes, workplaces, and cafés in the city, seven of which anchor the primary analysis presented here, it employs a feminist political economy lens and interpretivist methodology to foreground care as a contested terrain rather than a normative moral duty. The analysis reveals how women's labor is organized through moral economies, gendered spatialities, and temporal dispossession, producing forms of exhaustion that are routinized and affectively sanctioned. It situates self‐care not as commodified wellness but as a relational act of micro‐resistance, theorized through decolonial and affective feminist frameworks. By centering participant testimony, this article reorients care from moral virtue to political struggle, calling for a reconfiguration of care ethics rooted in collective infrastructures that refuse neoliberal logics of self‐responsibilities and opening new epistemological imaginaries for feminist urban anthropology.