Care, politics, and the political: the case of the COVID-19 global pandemic

ABSTRACT

Mobilizing a distinction between “politics,” understood as the socio-symbolic reality as it is already acknowledged, and “the political,” which instead has to do with the establishment of a particular social order that delineates what counts as politics in the first place, this article considers the COVID-19 global pandemic to assert that care is not only about politics or doing politics differently. Rather, following the work of Estelle Ferrarese, Tiina Vaittinen, Hanna-Kaisa Hoppania, and Kristin Cloyes, the article highlights three aspects of care that are political in the most robust sense: (1) the ways in which care is always implicated in a social order, (2) the ongoing challenge posed to any order by the vulnerability of our material being, and (3) the agonizing and iterative process of disagreeing over different versions of care. This article then considers these three points in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic to argue that this global health crisis has clearly revealed these aspects of care and to conclude that care is, therefore, undeniably political.

KEYWORDS:

• Care
• politics
• political
• vulnerability
• COVID-19 pandemic

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank the three peer reviewers for invaluable feedback on this manuscript, and Ben Woolhead and Marysia Zalewski for exceptional editorial support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The term “Western neoliberalism” is quite broad, and while there is certainly a great deal of variation between countries, institutions, and social arrangements that can fall under the “Western neoliberal” umbrella, I here employ the term to refer to societies that are fundamentally structured by notions of individualism, individual responsibility, and a valuation of the market over other aspects of social life (Miller 2021). This use of “neoliberalism” also corresponds to the work of Hoppania and Vaittinen (2015), on which I draw heavily in this article.

2 Ferrarese (2016b) makes the related point that vulnerability seems to be decidedly unpolitical. Her argument complements the points developed here, given that care, as defined above, is that which responds and tends to our vulnerability.

3 For example, in Canada,

the COVID-19 mortality rate was significantly higher for racialized populations (31 deaths per 100,000 population) compared to the non-racialized and non-Indigenous population (22 deaths per 100,000 population) … Black people had the highest age-standardized COVID-19 mortality rate (49 deaths per 100,000 population), followed by South Asians (31 deaths per 100,000 population), and Chinese (22 deaths per 100,000 population). The mortality rate ratio between Black people and the non-racialized and non-Indigenous population was more than two times higher (2.2 times) (Gupta and Aitken 2022).

Similar trends were seen in the United States (CDC 2021).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Maggie FitzGerald

Maggie FitzGerald is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Studies at the University of Saskatchewan, Canada.