Exploring Webs of Care: Social Love Within Women’s Movements

Drawing on 13 women’s struggles in Bangladesh, India, Nepal and Pakistan, this paper conceptualises care as social love underpinning the everyday work of organising and movement-building. The paper explores who provides social love, for whom, and under what conditions, revealing infrastructures that sustain collective action. Moving beyond care as a unidirectional or dyadic relationship between giver and receiver, the paper shows how care as social love reveals fluid, nested dynamics, with actors continuously shifting roles and often occupying both positions. Engaging with Tronto’s phases of care, the paper highlights that these phases rarely unfold sequentially; instead, they overlap, collapse into one another, or reappear in response to changing needs. The paper also demonstrates how care is spatially dispersed within movements, across digital platforms, informal gatherings and interpersonal relationships. These three dimensions (fluidity of care roles; non-linearity of care; spatially dispersed care) constitute the ‘webs of care’, which function as ongoing, overlapping networks that build and sustain movements in times of backlash, fragmentation, or fatigue. In so doing, the paper argues that care as social love brings out messy, fluid and collectively situated processes. It contributes to feminist social movement theory by positioning social love as central to organising and sustainability and to care ethics by expanding the temporal, spatial and relational dimensions through which it is practised.