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ABSTRACT
This essay elaborates how an imbalanced reciprocity between inhabitants of places of relative safety and places of greater precarity results from pursuing security on the basis of a reactive fear of vulnerability. It analyzes a range of features that shape the complex forms that vulnerability takes with a particular focus on how the constitution of places as rhetorically and corporeally secure or not renders different groups of people secure and/or subject to heightened exposure to harm. This analysis suggests that vulnerability is better conceived as a process than a quality, mediating between conceptions of vulnerability as a universal condition and as a highly specific empirical condition. Finally, by departing from the negative, reactive view of vulnerability that animates the supposition of the boundedness of selves and places, an alternative conception of security that neither equates it with invulnerability nor opposes it to vulnerability can be developed.
Notes
1 Imbalanced reciprocity is intended to highlight the necessary relationship between enhanced safety and exacerbated precarity, and the mutually constitutive but inequitable nature of that relationship. I draw the phrase from terminology introduced by Dotson and Gilbert (2014): “webs of reciprocity” and “affectability imbalances.”
2 The concept of precarity has a complex lineage but the sense I intend here is that in Judith Butler's work (2009), where precarity names the intensification of likelihood of harm and loss due to structural organization.
3 Lorey, State of Insecurity, 21.
4 For example, see Beattie and Schick in international relations; Bergoffen and Butler in feminist philosophy; Fineman and Grear in legal theory; Mackenzie, Rogers, and Dodds in bioethics; and special issues in journals such as Critical Horizons, Feminist Formations, International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics, and SubStance.
5 See Gilson (2014) for a sustained argument on this point.
6 ‘Rethinking Vulnerability and Resistance,’ 19.
7 ‘Rendering the World Unsafe,’ 21, 27.
8 Relatedly, Jackie Leach Scully argues that considering vulnerability through “the theoretical lens of disability” draws needed attention to how structures and institutions and normative social perceptions produce dominant interpretations of some vulnerabilities and dependencies as “normal” and others as “special” and “abnormal.” These interpretations exacerbate harmful dimensions of vulnerability for those whose vulnerabilities are regarded as outside of the norm (‘Disability and Vulnerability,’ 218).
9 See Gilson, ‘The Perils and Privileges of Vulnerability’ for discussion of vulnerability as a property of the privileged.
10 Casey, ‘Body, Self, and Landscape,’ 404.
11 Theory of the Border, 2, 4.
12 Cultural Politics of Emotion, 45.
13 Ibid.
14 Casey, ‘Body, Self, and Landscape,’ 411.
15 These are also the temporal patterns of precarious work, exemplified in the growing labour of independent contractors in on-demand industries: e.g., “ride-sharing” (Uber and Lyft) and burgeoning on-demand delivery services. Such work is touted as flexible, but in practice entails a combination of externally imposed rigidity or inflexibility and utter unpredictability. See Smiley, “Quit Your Job and Go to Work.”
16 Solitary Confinement, 191.
17 Ibid, 196.
18 Ibid.
19 ‘Phenomenology of Whiteness,’ 150.
20 Ibid, 161.
21 Ibid, 162.
22 ‘Not Seeing,’ 26.
23 See Crenshaw, ‘From Private Violence to Mass Incarceration’ and Collins, Black Feminist Thought.
24 ‘Accounts of Injury as Misappropriations of Race,’ 251.
25 Aviv, ‘How Albert Woodfox Survived Solitary.’
26 Ibid.
27 Following Iris Young's account in, Justice and the Politics of Difference of justice as plural, encompassing not only the fair distribution of resources, but also non-oppressive power dynamics and social relations, and the equitable development of capacities, justice and injustice in this context is likewise a matter of relationship.
28 Unbearable Weight, 186.
29 Freedom Is a Constant Struggle, 106.
30 Casey, ‘Body, Self, and Landscape,’ 406.
31 Michel, ‘Accounts of Injury as Misappropriations of Race,’ 250.
32 ‘Rise of the Carceral State,’ 497.
33 Ibid.
34 ‘Playfulness, “World”-Traveling, and Loving Perception.’
35 ‘Precarious Life, Vulnerability, and the Ethics of Cohabitation,’ 145.
36 Ibid, 141.
37 Solitary Confinement, 179.
38 See Manning, ‘Over the River.’
39 On this point, Evelyn Fox Keller's contrast between “static” and “dynamic” autonomy is helpful: whereas “‘dynamic autonomy develops from the capacity to both relate to and differentiate from others’” static autonomy “is centred on the capacity to deny connectedness and enhance separation.” Quoted in MacDonald, ‘Group Autonomy,’ 203.
40 ‘Accounts of Injury as Misappropriations of Race,’ 253.