Race and feminist care ethics: intersectionality as method

Abstract

Gender has been the privileged optic through which care ethics has been theorised. However, a long line of theorists has argued that gender intersects with other vectors such as race, class and disability in the social world, including in caring practices. This paper contributes to the emergent literature on intersectionality and care ethics by focusing on how racialised difference affects care practices and therefore care ethics. It focuses on competence and alterity, and recognition and communication, as two elements that point to how racialised care is risky. It argues that slavery and colonialism have underpinned racial hierarchies marking contemporary racialised care encounters. As a result, racially marked people’s skills are often undervalued and their competency questioned even as race becomes an increasingly important difference between who cares and who receives care. Secondly, racial hierarchies in who gets care and what that care looks like can make care so distinctive as to be unrecognisable both to the care giver and those who need care. Lack of care is as productive of subjectivities as care so that care needs simply may not be articulated. Finally, given these differences in what care means, caring can become risky. The paper concludes by suggesting that thinking through intersectionality as method allows us to focus on moments and events where care can become unsettled. Care ethics should learn not only from its successes but also from instances when care has failed. We need a feminist care ethics that responds to the distance and difference that race brings to care. That is the promise of good care.

Keywords:

• Care ethics
• competence
• intersectionality
• race
• recognition
• risk

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the editors of ACME for inviting me to present the plenary lecture at the RGS-IBG conference in 2014 in which a small part of this paper was presented. I would also like to thank the Feminist Discussion Group and members of the OpenSpace research centre at The Open University, Nick Bingham, Sophie Bowlby, Nigel Clark, Davina Cooper, Maurice Hamington, Victoria Lawson, Jane McCarthy, Fiona Robinson and the reviewers and editors at Gender, Place and Culture for their generous comments on versions of this paper. Finally, particular thanks to Eleonore Kofman, Clare Madge and Pat Noxolo with whom I have engaged on issues around care for many years. All errors remain my own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Parvati Raghuram is Professor in Geography and Migration at the Open University. She has published widely on gender, migration and development and on postcolonial theory. Her most recent ESRC funded projects are Gender, skilled migration and the IT sector: a comparative study of India and the UK and Facilitating equitable access and quality education for development: South African International Distance Education. She has co-authored Gender, Migration and Social Reproduction (Palgrave), The Practice of Cultural Studies (Sage), Gender and International Migration in Europe (Routledge) and co-edited South Asian women in the diaspora (Berg) and Tracing Indian diaspora: Contexts, Memories, Representations (Sage). She has written for policy audiences having co-authored research papers for a number of think-tanks such as IPPR, UNRISD, the Hamburg Institute of International Economics and Heinrich Böll Stiftung and co-edited a special issue of the journal Diversities for UNESCO. She co-edits the Palgrave Pivot series Mobility and Politics with Martin Geiger and William Walters, both at Ottawa.