Spectrality and Thanatic Ethics of Care in Atlantique and Biutiful

Abstract

Although the gendered response to moral problems articulated by Carol Gilligan in her 1982 book In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development – which heralded the area of study that came to be known as care ethics – has become passé, the binary approach to moral problems where one response is based on emotion and connection, whereas the other is based on autonomy from others and justice and fairness, has remained. While some scholars have called for the integration of these approaches, others have come to question dominant liberal forms of political care such as humanitarianism and welfare. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, Brown and Woodly have called for a new politics of care for the twenty-first century. This kind of refashioning dismantles the care–justice binary and even troubles the meaning of justice by thinking care and justice together. My purpose in this essay is to see what this binary at the heart of care ethics and the new ways of looking at care ethics have to offer to migration studies. Through a reading of two films, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s 2010 film Biutiful and Mati Diop’s 2019 film Atlantique, I suggest that both these films use spectrality to provide a critique of regimes of care in migration and offer alternative models which I call a thanatic ethics of care. By proposing an alternative, “thanatic” ethics of migrant care through the use of spectrality, both films offer newer models of care not based on feminine virtue or racial hierarchies but rather on dismantling care–justice binaries and seeing the world in new ways through relationality and responsiveness.

Keywords:

• Atlantique
• Biutiful
• Diop
• Mati
• ethics of care
• Iñárritu
• Alejandro González
• spectrality

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Yuka Kato for her valuable assistance with this project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In his 2019 essay “Bodies as Borders,” Mbembe identifies three “mega processes” that are transforming our world. These are the power of finance and tech corporations; “technological escalation” which is altering our experience of time; and finally, the contradiction of living in a time of unprecedented mobility and interconnectedness but also of the proliferation of borders and securitization that separate us.

2 Diop’s film underscores Senegalese patriarchal society in a number of ways. Ada is asked to have a virginity test before her marriage; her mother urges her to call “Omar” and chastises her for not speaking “sweetly” to him; “otherwise he’ll take a second wife before you’re pregnant,” she says.