The political limits of ‘Care’ in re-imagining interconnection/community and an ethical future

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Notes

Early versions of this paper were presented at the ‘Re-Imagining Community’ conference (2002) in Lancaster, United Kingdom, and the University of Adelaide Politics Seminar Program (2003). A more developed version was delivered at the ‘Re-imagining Communities and Care: Citizenship and Gender’ (Gender Roundtable) conference, University of Adelaide (2004). We would like to thank members of the Women's Studies Institute at the University of Lancaster, our colleagues in the Politics Discipline, and contributors to the Gender Roundtable, who offered a number of useful suggestions.

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics Australian Social Trends 2003 study, one in five Australians now lives with a disability, ‘an increase of 25 per cent in the past two decades’. Similar trends are evident in developed countries around the world. This increase in disability is associated with improvements in medical and healthcare, as well as with the ageing of such societies. Deirdre Macken, ‘The Disabled Nation’, Weekend Australian Financial Review, 28–29 June 2003.

Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Useless Suffering’ in Entre Nous: On Thinking of the Other, M. Smith and B. Harshav (trans.) (Columbia University Press) New York, 1998, p. 100.

See, for example, the work of the CAVA research group on Care, Values and the Future of Welfare, University of Leeds, United Kingdom. I refer in particular to Sasha Roseneil's work including, ‘Re-imagining Care: Transformations of Intimacy, Sociability and Welfare in the 21st Century (Or, Why We Should Care about Friends)’ on the CAVA website: <www.leeds.ac.uk/cava>, a more recent version of this paper delivered at the University of Adelaide Politics Seminar in September 2003, and the special issue of Feminist Theory, vol. 4, no. 3, 2003, edited by Sasha Roseneil and Linda Hogan.

Beauchamp and Childress note that ‘[t]he care ethic provides a needed corrective’. Tom L. Beauchamp and James F. Childress, Principles of Medical Bioethics, 4th edition (Oxford University Press) New York, 1994, pp. 84–92.

Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice (Harvard University Press) Cambridge, MA, 1982; Virginia Held, Feminist Morality (University of Chicago Press) Chicago, 1993; Joan Tronto, Moral Boundaries: a Political Argument for an Ethic of Care (Routledge) New York, 1993; Iris Marion Young, ‘Pregnant Subjectivity and the Limits of Existential Phenomenology’ in C. Inhde and H. Silverman (eds), Descriptions (SUNY Press), Albany, 1985; Walter A. Davis, Inwardness and Existence: Subjectivity in/and: Hegel, Marx and Freud (Wisconsin University Press) Madison, 1989; L. Odysseos, ‘Radical Phenomenology, Ontology, and Political Theory’, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, vol. 27, 2002; Robert Bernasconi and Simon Critchley (eds), Re-reading Levinas (Indiana University Press) Bloomington, 1991; Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodern Ethics (Blackwell) Oxford and Cambridge, 1993; Jeffrey Weeks, Invented Moralities: Sexual Values in an Age of Uncertainty (Columbia University Press) New York, 1995; Ghassan Hage, Against Paranoid Nationalism: Searching for Hope in a Shrinking Society (Pluto Press) Annandale, Sydney, 2003; Diana T. Meyers (ed.), Feminists Rethink the Self (University of Chicago Press) Chicago, 1995; Eva Fader Kittay, Love's Labor: Essays on Women, Equality and Dependency (Routledge) New York, 1998; Gabriel Josipovici, Touch (Yale University Press) Yale, 1996; Margrit Shildrick, Embodying the Monsters: Encounters with the Vulnerable Self (Sage) London, 2002; Sara Ahmed, Strange Encounters (Routledge) London, 2000; Elisabeth Porter, ‘Interdependence, Parenting and Responsible Citizenship’, Journal of Gender Studies, vol. 1, 2001; Anne Edwards and Susan Magarey (eds), Women in a Restructuring Australia: Work and Welfare (Allen & Unwin) Sydney, 1995; Robert Putnam, ‘The Prosperous Community: Social Capital and Public Life’, American Prospect, vol. 13, 1993; Eva Cox, A Truly Civil Society (ABC) Sydney, 1995; J. Hewitt, ‘Re-conceptualizing the Voluntary Sector: Associative Democracy in the Pluralistic Public Sphere and the Legacy of Tocqueville, Gierke and Durkheim’, Third Sector Review, vol. 3, 1997; Pierre Bourdieu, ‘The Forms of Capital’ in J. Richardson (ed.), The Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education (Greenwood Press) New York, 1986; Simon Szreter, ‘The State of Social Capital: Bringing Back in Power, Politics and History’, Theory and Society, vol. 31, 2002; Peter A. Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: a Factor in Evolution (Heinemann) London, 1915; Richard M. Titmus, The Gift Relationship: from Human Blood to Social Policy (Allen & Unwin) London, 1970; Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, The Newly Born Woman (University of Minnesota Press) Minneapolis, 1985; Pal Ahluwalia, ‘Towards (Re)Conciliation: the Post-colonial Economy of Giving’, Social Identities, vol. 6, 2000; P. Martin, ‘Bioethics and the Whole’, Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics, vol. 27, 1999; Greg Koski, ‘Risks, Benefits, and Conflicts of Interest in Human Research’, Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics, vol. 28, 2000; Royal Commission on New Reproductive Technologies, Proceed with Care, Final Report, vol. 1 (Minister of Government Services) Ottawa, Canada, 1993.

For a much more detailed commentary on the early feminist care ethicists, see Carol Bacchi and Chris Beasley, ‘Biotechnology and the Political Limits of “Care”’ in Margrit Shildrick and Roxanne Mykitiuk (eds), Rethinking Feminist Bioethics: the Challenge of the Postmodern (MIT Press) Cambridge, MA, forthcoming 2005.

See Iris Marion Young, ‘Punishment, Treatment, Empowerment: Three Approaches to Policy for Pregnant Addicts’ in P. Bowling (ed.), Expecting Trouble (Westview Press) Boulder, 1995, p. 116.

Gilligan, In a Different Voice.

Gilligan, In a Different Voice, pp. 11, 71, 135; Held, Feminist Morality, p. 39; Sara Ruddick, Maternal Thinking (Women's Press) London, 1990, pp. 134, 232.

Genevieve Lloyd, ‘Reason, Gender and Morality in the History of Philosophy’, Social Research, vol. 50, 1983.

Will Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy: an Introduction (Clarendon Press) Oxford, 1990, p. 253; Nira Yuval-Davis, Gender and Nation (Sage) London, 1997. See Christine Putland, ‘Feminism and Citizenship: Re-imagining Public and Private Perspectives on Women's Participation’, PhD thesis, Flinders Institute of Public Policy and Management, Flinders University of South Australia, 1999, p. 81.

Gilligan, In a Different Voice, pp. 9, 11; Ruddick, Maternal Thinking, p. 232; Held, Feminist Morality, p. 39.

Susan Hekman, Moral Voices, Moral Selves: Carol Gilligan and Feminist Moral Theory (Polity) Cambridge, 1995, p. 7.

Held, Feminist Morality, p. 74.

Virginia Held, ‘Caring Relations and Principles of Justice’ in J. Sterba (ed.), Controversies in Feminism (Rowman & Littlefield) Lanham, MD, 2001, p. 73.

Held, Feminist Morality, p. 86.

Rosemarie Tong, ‘Feminist Approaches to Bioethics’ in Susan M. Wolf (ed.), Feminism and Bioethics: Beyond Reproduction (Oxford University Press) New York, 1996, p. 89.

Carol Cohn's account of the links between masculinity, sexuality and nuclear strategic thinking provides a disturbing, if sometimes bleakly humorous, instance of the ways in which aspects of the gendered private sphere are embedded in military decision making. Carol Cohn, ‘Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals’, Signs, vol. 12, 1987.

John Howard, Prime Ministers on Prime Ministers Lecture, Old Parliament House, Canberra, 3 September 1997.

Don McMaster, Asylum Seekers: Australia's Response to Refugees (Melbourne University Press) Melbourne, 2001; Carol Johnson, Governing Change: Keating to Howard (University of Queensland in association with the API network) Brisbane, 2000; Carol Johnson, ‘Heteronormative Citizenship: the Howard Government's Views on Gay and Lesbian Issues’, Australian Journal of Political Science, vol. 38, 2003.

Bernasconi and Critchley, Re-reading Levinas; Zygmunt Bauman, The Individualized Society (Polity) Cambridge, 2001; Zygmunt Bauman, Community: Seeking Safety in an Insecure World (Polity) Cambridge, 2001. In return, these approaches have received careful and at times highly critical scrutiny amongst feminists attending to ethics. Luce Irigaray, ‘Question to Emmanuel Levinas on the Divinity of Love’, M. Whitford (trans.) in Robert Bernasconi and Simon Critchley (eds), Re-reading Levinas (Indiana University Press) Bloomington, 1991; Rachel Russell, ‘Ethical Bodies’ in P. Hancock et al., The Body, Culture and Society (Open University Press) Buckingham, 2000; Vikki Bell, ‘On Ethics and Feminism: Reflecting on Levinas’ Ethics of Non-indifference’, Feminist Theory, vol. 2, 2001.

Sara Ahmed, Differences that Matter (Cambridge University Press) New York, 1998, p. 60.

Levinas, ‘Useless Suffering’, p. 93.

Emmanual Levinas, ‘Philosophy, Justice and Love’, in Entre Nous: On Thinking of the Other, M. Smith and B. Harshav (trans.) (Columbia University Press) New York, 1998, p. 103.

Levinas, ‘Useless Suffering’, p. 100.

Levinas, ‘Philosophy, Justice and Love’, p. 103.

Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, The Work of Mourning, and the New International (Routledge) London, 1994; Julia Kristeva, ‘Strangers to Ourselves’ in K. Oliver (ed.), The Portable Kristeva (Columbia University Press) New York, 1997; Anthony Burke, ‘Strangers without Strangeness: Ethics and Difference between Australia and the New Indonesian Order’, Communal/Plural, vol. 8, no. 2, 2000; Floyd Dunphy, ‘Post Deconstructive Humanism: the “New International” as An-Arche’, Theory and Event, vol. 7, no. 2, 2004.

Simon Critchley, Continental Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction (Open University Press) Milton Keynes, 2002, p. 1.

Roy O. Elveton, ‘Introduction’ in Roy O. Elveton (ed.), The Phenomenology of Husserl: Selected Critical Readings (Quadrangle Books) Chicago, 1970, p. 9.

Mary Dietz, Thomas Hobbes and Political Theory (Kansas University Press) Lawrence, 1990, p. 4.

Burke, ‘Strangers without Strangeness’, p. 144.

Dunphy, ‘Post Deconstructive Humanism’.

Burke, ‘Strangers without Strangeness’, p. 146.

In Heidegger's work ‘the other is never properly encountered anew’ as otherness is pervasive, an already given of the self. Odysseos, ‘Radical Phenomenology’.

Alterity is a term commonly adopted in poststructuralist and post-colonial thinking to refer to the state of being other, to otherness, to the state of ‘the alternative’, and is intended to shift often philosophical discussions of ‘the other’ to more concrete concerns located in political/cultural contexts. Although Levinas’ work is highly abstract, it is not devoid of context and his work is now frequently used in relation to particular concrete contexts. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, Key Concepts in Post-colonial Studies (Routledge) London, 1998, pp. 11–12; Richard Osborne, Megawords (Allen & Unwin) Sydney, 2001, pp. 25–6.

Bauman, Postmodern Ethics, pp. 86–8.

Ahmed, Strange Encounters, p. 142.

Ahmed, Differences that Matter, pp. 61–2.

Janet Borgerson, ‘Feminist Ethical Ontology: Contesting “the Bare Givenness of Intersubjectivity’, Feminist Theory, vol. 2, 2001, p. 177.

Bell, ‘On Ethics and Feminism’.

See, for example, Bauman, Postmodern Ethics, 1993, pp. 47–52, 84–7, 92–3.

Bauman, Postmodern Ethics, p. 84, emphasis added.

Mark Lacey, ‘War, Cinema, and Moral Anxiety’, Alternatives, vol. 28, 2003, p. 611.

Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Polity) Cambridge, 1989.

Paul Verilio, War and Cinema (Verso) London, 1989; James Der Darian, Virtuous War (Westview Press) Boulder, 2001; Lacey, ‘War, Cinema, and Moral Anxiety’.

Kristeva's work on the stranger within us offers a similar perspective to that of Bauman. Julia Kristeva, ‘Strangers to Ourselves’ in K. Oliver (ed.), The Portable Kristeva (Columbia University) New York, 1997, pp. 264–94.

Ahmed's point regarding the abstracted and hence fetishised character of the conception of a ‘stranger’ applies here as well. Bauman asserts, for example, that ‘“the other” as an abstract category simply does not communicate with “the other” I know’. Bauman, Postmodern Ethics, 1993, p. 113, emphasis in original.

Tom Shakespeare, ‘The Social Relations of Care’ in Gail Lewis, Sharon Gewirtz and John Clarke (eds), Rethinking Social Policy (Sage) London, 2000. Bauman, Postmodern Ethics, 1993, pp. 82–109. Another version of this analysis may be found in Shildrick's careful enunciation of a similar ethical project that recognises the ambivalence of ‘touch’. Shildrick, Embodying the Monsters, 2002, p. 118.

Bauman, Postmodern Ethics, p. 96; Bauman, The Individualized Society.

Bauman, Community.

Bauman, Postmodern Ethics, p. 92.

Bauman, Postmodern Ethics, pp. 112–16.

It would seem that both feminist care ethicists and postmodern theorists in different ways stumble at the public/private divide.

Tronto, Moral Boundaries; Joan Tronto, ‘Who Cares? Public and Private Caring and the Rethinking of Citizenship’ in Nancy Hirschmann and Ulrike Liebert (eds), Women and Welfare (Rutgers University Press) New Brunswick, 2001; Selma Sevenhuijsen, ‘Feminist Ethics and Public Health Care Policies’ in Patrice DiQuinzio and Iris Marion Young (eds), Feminist Ethics and Social Policy (Indiana University Press) Bloomington, 1997; Selma Sevenhuijsen, Citizenship and the Ethics of Care (Routledge) London, 1998.

Nevertheless, we note Sevenhuijsen's account of care as a viewpoint that requires cultivation of the individual moral actor's virtues. Sevenhuijsen, ‘Feminist Ethics’, p. 64.

Hekman, Moral Voices, p. 23.

Tronto, ‘Who Cares?’, p. 74.

See Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, Bringing Them Home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families (Australian Government Publishing Service) Canberra, 1997.

Discussion of the Australian federal government submission to the Senate Inquiry on the practice of removing children from Aboriginal communities reveals the breadth of divergence over the meaning of ‘care’ in this instance. See Michelle Grattan and D. Jopson, ‘Black Fury Explodes Over Stolen Children’, Sydney Morning Herald, 3 April 2000; Robert Manne, ‘The Removalists’, Melbourne Age, 10 April 2000.

Mary Shanley, ‘Fathers’ Rights, Mothers’ Wrongs? Reflections on Unwed Fathers’ Rights and Sex Equality’ in Patrice DiQuinzio and Iris Marion Young, Feminist Ethics. This interpretation of care has arisen in Canada and Australia. In June 2003, ‘fathers’ rights’ groups were critical in encouraging Australian Prime Minister John Howard to order a parliamentary inquiry into Family Court deliberations concerning custody of children after divorce. The inquiry will investigate making joint custody automatic in a bid to give more room to fathers’ rights, a change that would at least modify the present Family Court principle of the paramount status of the well-being of children in determining custody. Gary Tippet et al., ‘Degrees of Separation’, Melbourne Age, 28 June 2003.

Sevenhuijsen, Citizenship and the Ethics of Care, p. 107.

Sevenhuijsen, Citizenship and the Ethics of Care, p. 22.

For a more extensive analysis of the use of care in biomedical policy documents, see Bacchi and Beasley, ‘Biotechnology and the Political Limits of “Care”’.

Royal Commission, Proceed with Care, pp. 50, 595.

Royal Commission, Proceed with Care, p. xxxi.

Valerie Lehr, Queer Family Values: Debunking the Myth of the Nuclear Family (Temple University Press) Philadelphia, p. 19; Weeks, Invented Moralities. See Shane Phelan, ‘Queer Liberalism?’, American Political Science Review, vol. 2, 2000.

Weeks, Invented Moralities, pp. 155–88.

Hage, Against Paranoid Nationalism, pp. 22–7; Ghassan Hage, ‘On Worrying: the Lost Art of the Well-administered Cuddle’, Borderlands, vol. 2, no. 1, 2003.

Hage plays a similar role with regard to the term care, to that of Szreter (‘The State of Social Capital’) in relation to social capital. Both perceive the state as central to the way in which social bonds are formed, in contrast to the early feminist care ethicists and to Putnam's (‘The Prosperous Community’) communitarian version of social capital, respectively, which privilege small-scale or one-to-one forms of association. For an elaboration of these themes see Carol Bacchi and Chris Beasley, ‘Moving Beyond Care/Trust: an Ethic of Social Flesh’, conference paper, Australasian Political Science Association conference, 29 September–1 October 2004, University of Adelaide.

Hage, Paranoid Nationalism, pp. 26–8. Hage does break at times from employing maternal iconography in relation to a caring nation and occasionally substitutes the term parent. Nevertheless, motherland exemplifies care as against the order of the fatherland in his depiction of national imaginaries. Hage, Paranoid Nationalism, pp. 36–8.

Janet Finch, Family Obligations and Social Change (Polity) Cambridge, 1989; Clare Ungerson, ‘Caring and Citizenship: a Complex Relationship’ in J. Bornat et al. (eds), Community Care: a Reader (Macmillan/Open University Press) Basingstoke, 1993; Sylvia Walby, ‘Is Citizenship Gendered?’, Sociology, vol. 28, 1994.

Nhada Goodfellow, ‘Richest Private Schools Share $8M Funding’, Adelaide Advertiser, 31 May 2003.

Odysseos, ‘Radical Phenomenology’; see also Johnson's analysis of the ways in which some groups are politically constituted as unworthy of care. Carol Johnson, ‘Narratives of Identity: Analysing Race, Class and Sexuality’, unpublished paper presented at the Politics Discipline Seminar Series, University of Adelaide, South Australia, 2004.

Carol Bacchi, The Politics of Affirmative Action: ‘Women’, Equality and Category Politics (Sage) London, 1996.

See for example Virginia Held, ‘Feminism and Moral Theory’ in Eva F. Kittay and Diana Meyers (eds), Women and Moral Theory (Rowman & Littlefield) Totowa, 1987; Elisabeth Porter, ‘Interdependence, Parenting and Responsible Citizenship’, Journal of Gender Studies, vol. 1, 2001.

Royal Commission, Proceed with Care. See discussion above.

Young, ‘Punishment, Treatment, Empowerment’, p. 115.

See, for example, Tronto, ‘Who Cares?’ and Lehr, Queer Family Values.

We suggest that a more useful path, following Lacey's advice, would be to map the many ways in which care is interpreted and enacted in particular contexts. Nicola Lacey, ‘Feminist Legal Theory Beyond Neutrality’, Current Legal Problems, vol. 48, 1995.

Ahmed, Strange Encounters, p. 142.

The visceral, private and feminine connotations of care may be contrasted with the more cognitive, public and masculine bases of trust in social capital thinking. Fran Baum and A.M. Ziersch, ‘Social Capital’, Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health, vol. 57, 2003.

We see links between this account and Shildrick's ethics of vulnerability. However, as is outlined in the last section of the paper, we emphasise a political (rather than philosophical) ethic, which rests more upon collective intersubjective embodiment than upon a common individual vulnerability. Shildrick, Embodying the Monsters.

Chris Beasley and Carol Bacchi, ‘Citizen Bodies: Embodying Citizens—a Feminist Analysis’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, vol. 2, 2000.

Tronto, Moral Boundaries; Weeks, Invented Moralities.

Bacchi and Beasley, ‘Biotechnology and the Political Limits of “Care”’.

Levinas, for example, describes ‘the other’ in terms of the weak, the poor, ‘the widow and the orphan’. Emmanuel Levinas, Time and its Other (Duquesne University Press) Pittsburgh, 1987, p. 83.

Edith Wyschogrod, ‘Towards a Postmodern Ethics: Corporeality and Alterity’ in Edith Wyschogrod and Gerald P. McKenny (eds), The Ethical (Blackwell) Oxford, 2003, p. 63.

Sevenhuijsen, Citizenship and the Ethics of Care, p. 22.