Conditions of radical care: a response to Asha Bhandary’s Freedom to Care

ABSTRACT

This article claims that Asha Bhandary’s theory of justice in Freedom to Care: Liberalism, Dependency Care, and Culture is right to stress the interdependency of justice and care in addressing structural oppressions, but wrong in upholding liberalism’s capacity for doing so. Against her procedural mechanism of education for caregiving skills in particular, I point to the critical and generative methods of social reproduction feminism and Transformative Justice as models of radical praxis in the collective work of politically centering and radically transforming cultures of care.

KEYWORDS:

• Radical care
• social reproduction
• transformative justice
• care ethics
• dependency
• autonomy

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

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Notes on contributors

Kelly Gawel

Kelly Gawel is a feminist philosopher and activist living in New York. Her political and intellectual work centers on radical care, social reproduction and embodied ethics. She is completing her PhD at the New School and teaches philosophy and gender studies at Pratt Institute and Hunter College.