Performing the Politics of Kindness in Aotearoa New Zealand

This paper takes as its starting point Aotearoa New Zealand Prime Minster Jacinda Ardern's stated politics of kindess. From her response to the 2019 Christchurch mosque attacks to her communicative approach to Covid 19, this rhetoric has been central to Ardern's government's political identity. Such an emphasis on kindness allows us to consider how the affectivities associated with it are deployed as a basis for the instrumentalization of care, and this article examines the relationship between a politics of kindness and the practices of care. From a performance point of view, I examine the distinctions between policies of kindness as either happily (felicitous) performative a practice of meaningful transformation or unhappily performative in the sense meant by Sara Ahmed when she describes the unhappy performativity of statements of anti-racism that fail to enact what they declare (2004). To work through such distinctions, I consider examples of performances of care in Aotearoa that span protest and performance practice. Through these examples, I ask how policies of care might become truly caring in practice and consider how the domains of government, civil society and artistic practice might inform one another in this endeavour. Aotearoa's orientation towards an often-fraught politics of kindness provides an opportunity to reflect on not just the necessary scrutiny of such political language, but also on the openings it provides to think about the performativity of what Donna Haraway calls kin-making in the 21st century.