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Abstract
This paper raises several concerns about vulnerability as an alternative language to conceptualize injustice and politicize its attendant injuries. First, the project of resignifying “vulnerability” by emphasizing its universality and amplifying its generative capacity, I suggest, might dilute perceptions of inequality and muddle important distinctions among specific vulnerabilities, as well as differences between those who are injurable and those who are already injured. Vulnerability scholars, moreover, have yet to elaborate the path from acknowledging constitutive vulnerability to addressing concrete injustices. Second, vulnerability studies respond to, and have been shaped by, debates in the 1980s and 1990s over oppression, identity and agency. This genealogy needs to be acknowledged and evaluated. As I demonstrate, prominent theorists define vulnerability in contradistinction to victimization, adopting neo-liberal formulations of victims and victimhood. Finally, I turn to address the politics of vulnerability. At issue are not simply matters of utility or programmes for implementation, but the fraught relationship among ontology, ethics and politics, which I address through an engagement with Rancière's conception of the political and the case of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Acknowledgements
An earlier version of this paper was presented at “Risquer la Vulnérabilité: Risking Vulnerability” (Graduate Center, CUNY, NY, April 23, 2015). I would like to thank Oz Frankel, Estelle Ferrarese, George Shulman, Stephen Steinberg and the anonymous reviewers for Critical Horizons for their comments on various iterations. Thanks also to Elizabeth Newcomer for her bibliographic assistance.
Notes
1 Alicia DeBrincat, “Kris Grey in Conversation with Alicia DeBrincat,” Artfile Magazine, n.d., http://www.artfilemagazine.com/Kris-Grey.
2 Robert Castel, “Grand résumé de La Montée des incertitudes. Travail, protections, statut de l’individu, Paris, Éditions du Seuil, La couleur des idées, 2009,” SociologieS (2010).
3 For example, Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2013); Janet Staiger, Ann Cvetkovich and Ann Reynolds, eds., Political Emotions (New York: Routledge, 2011).
4 Erinn C. Gilson, The Ethics of Vulnerability: A Feminist Analysis of Social Life and Practice (New York: Routledge, 2014); Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (New York: Verso, 2006); Judith Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (New York: Verso, 2009); Anna Grear, “Vulnerability, Advanced Global Capitalism and Co-Symptomatic Injustice: Locating the Vulnerable Subject,” in Vulnerability: Reflections on a New Ethical Foundation for Law and Politics, ed. M. A. Fineman and A. Grear (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013); Eva Feder Kittay, Love's Labor: Essays on Women, Equality and Dependency (New York: Routledge, 2013).
5 Robert E. Goodin, Protecting the Vulnerable: A Reanalysis of Our Social Responsibilities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985); Martha Albertson Fineman, “The Vulnerable Subject: Anchoring Equality in the Human Condition,” Emory Public Law Research Paper No. 8-40, Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 20.1 (2008): Kelly Oliver, Witnessing: Beyond Recognition (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2001).
6 Joel Anderson and Axel Honneth, “Autonomy, Vulnerability, Recognition, and Justice,” in Autonomy and the Challenges to Liberalism: New Essays, ed. J. Christman and J. Anderson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Catriona Mackenzie, “The Importance of Relational Autonomy and Capabilities for an Ethics of Vulnerability,” in Vulnerability: New Essays in Ethics and Feminist Philosophy, ed. Catriona Mackenzie, Wendy Rogers and Susan Dodds (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014) 33–59.
7 Grear, “Vulnerability,” 50.
8 Susan Dodds, “Dependence, Care, and Vulnerability,” in Vulnerability: New Essays in Ethics and Feminist Philosophy, ed. C. Mackenzie et al. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); Bryan S. Turner, Vulnerability and Human Rights (University Park, PA: Penn State Press, 2006); Catriona Mackenzie, Wendy Rogers and Susan Dodds, eds., “Introduction: What is Vulnerability and Why Does It Matter for Moral Theory?,” in Vulnerability: New Essays in Ethics and Feminist Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); Noémi Michel, “Accounts of Vulnerability as Misappropriations of Race,” paper presented at “Risquer la Vulnérabilité: Risking Vulnerability,” Graduate Center, City University of New York, April 23, 2015; Guy Standing, The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2011); Erinn C. Gilson, “Vulnerability, Ignorance, and Oppression,” Hypatia 26.2 (2011): 308–32; Amanda Russell Beattie and Kate Schick, eds., The Vulnerable Subject: Beyond Rationalism in International Relations (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 62–85; Grear, “Vulnerability;” Margaret Urban Walker, “Moral Vulnerability and the Task of Reparations,” in Vulnerability: New Essays in Ethics and Feminist Philosophy, ed. C. Mackenzie et al. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 110–33.
9 Kimberly Hutchings, “A Place of Greater Safety? Securing Judgment in International Ethics,” in The Vulnerable Subject: Beyond Rationalism in International Relations, ed. A. R. Beattie and K. Schick (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Fineman, “The Vulnerable Subject.”
10 For example, UNESCO's “The Principle of Respect for Human Vulnerability and Personal Integrity,” Report of the International Bioethics Committee of UNESCO (IBC), (2013); the University of South Carolina's Hazards and Vulnerability Research Institute “Social Vulnerability Index for the United States—2006–10” (2013); the Council for International Organizations of Medical Sciences' “International Ethical Guidelines for Biomedical Research Involving Human Subjects,” prepared in collaboration with the World Health Organization, (2002); and the NIH's “The Belmont Report: Ethical Principles and Guidelines for the Protection of Human Subjects of Research,” (1979).
11 Margrit Shildrick, Embodying the Monster: Encounters with the Vulnerable Self (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2002), 71.
12 Dan Schawbel, “Brené Brown: How Vulnerability Can Make Our Lives Better,” Forbes, April 21, 2013, http://www.forbes.com/sites/danschawbel/2013/04/21/brenebrownhowvulnerabilitycanmakeourlivesbetter.
13 Brené Brown, Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead (New York: Avery, 2012).
14 Ann V. Murphy, Violence and the Philosophical Imaginary (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2012), 86.
15 Gilson, “Vulnerability, Ignorance, and Oppression,” 310.
16 Adriana Cavarero, Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 20 [emphasis added].
17 Murphy, Violence and the Philosophical Imaginary, 86.
18 Gilson, “Vulnerability, Ignorance, and Oppression,” 310.
19 Martha Albertson Fineman, “‘Elderly’ as Vulnerable: Rethinking the Nature of Individual and Societal Responsibility,” Emory Legal Studies Research Paper 12-224 (2012a): 126.
20 Cavarero, Horrorism, 31; Fineman, “‘Elderly’ as Vulnerable,” 126.
21 Gilson, The Ethics of Vulnerability, 75.
22 Gilson, The Ethics of Vulnerability, 93.
23 Gilson, The Ethics of Vulnerability, 113.
24 Gilson, The Ethics of Vulnerability, 121, 129.
25 Derek Sellman, “Towards an Understanding of Nursing as a Response to Human Vulnerability,” Nursing Philosophy 6.1 (2005): 4–5.
26 Butler, Precarious Life, 19.
27 Mackenzie et al., “Introduction,” 1–32.
28 Fineman, “The Vulnerable Subject,” 32–3.
29 Martha Albertson Fineman, “Beyond Identities: The Limits of an Antidiscrimination Approach to Equality,” Boston University Law Review 92 (2012b): 1750.
30 Fineman, “Beyond Identities,” 1751.
31 Murphy, Violence and the Philosophical Imaginary, 74.
32 Gilson, “Vulnerability, Ignorance, and Oppression,” 323.
33 Carine M. Mardorossian, Framing the Rape Victim: Gender and Agency Reconsidered (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2014), 15.
34 William Ryan, Blaming the Victim (New York: Vintage, 1976), 11.
35 Ryan, Blaming the Victim, 27. For an analysis of changing meanings of victim blame, see Alyson Cole, “Verbicide. D'une Vulnérabilité Qui N'ose Dire Son Nom,” trans. M. Boidy, Cahiers du Genre 58.1 (2015): 135–62.
36 Fineman, “The Vulnerable Subject,” 13. See also, Fineman, “‘Elderly’ as Vulnerable.”
37 Lourdes Peroni and Alexandra Timmer, “Vulnerable Groups: The Promise of an Emerging Concept in European Human Rights Convention Law,” International Journal of Constitutional Law 11.4 (2013): 1056–85; Alexandra Timmer, “A Quiet Revolution: Vulnerability in the European Court of Human Rights,” in Vulnerability: Reflections on a New Ethical Foundation for Law and Politics, ed. M. A. Fineman and A. Grear (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013). See also, Sean Coyle, “Vulnerability and the Liberal Order,” in Vulnerability: Reflections on a New Ethical Foundation for Law and Politics, ed. M. A. Fineman and A. Grear, (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013), 61–75, who worries that Fineman places too much faith in the state; and Turner, Vulnerability and Human Rights, 36–7, who suggests that the vulnerability heuristic works better when addressing socioeconomic rights than civil-political ones.
38 Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995); Nancy Fraser, Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the “Postsocialist” Condition (New York: Routledge, 1997).
39 Resilience is the “corresponding companion concept” of vulnerability in Fineman's work. Cf. Fineman, “‘Elderly’ as Vulnerable,” for example.
40 Martha Albertson Fineman, “Equality, Autonomy, and the Vulnerable Subject in Law and Politics,” in Vulnerability: Reflections on a New Ethical Foundation for Law and Politics, ed. M. A. Fineman and A. Grear (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013), 20; Fineman “The Vulnerable Subject,” 8.
41 Butler, Precarious Life, 4, 6, 10, 11, 103, 150.
42 Butler, Frames of War, 179.
43 Butler, Frames of War, 147.
44 Brown, Daring Greatly, 151–5.
45 Martha Albertson Fineman and Anna Grear, eds., “Introduction: Vulnerability as Heuristic – An Invitation to Future Exploration,” in Vulnerability: Reflections on a New Ethical Foundation for Law and Politics (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013), 3.
46 Gilson, “Vulnerability, Ignorance, and Oppression,” 310 [emphasis added].
47 Gilson, The Ethics of Vulnerability, 131 [emphasis added].
48 Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 14–15.
49 Even therapeutic inflected strategies that seek to restore victims do so through the idiom of “survivorship,” thereby opting for an alternative term, also constructed in contradistinction to “victim.” For more on the victim/survivor binary see Alyson Cole, The Cult of True Victimhood: From the War on Welfare to the War on Terror (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 2–3, 137–40.
50 See Cole, The Cult of True Victimhood.
51 Butler, Precarious Life, 19.
52 Butler, Frames of War, 26.
53 Judith Butler, “Precarious Life, Vulnerability, and the Ethics of Cohabitation,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 26.2 (2012): 148; Butler, Frames of War, 5.
54 Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. J. Rose (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 21–43. Note that Rancière asserts: “nothing is political in itself merely because power relations are at work in it. For a thing to be political it must give rise to a meeting to of police logic and egalitarian logic,” 32.
55 Bonnie Honig, “Antigone's Two Laws: Greek Tragedy and the Politics of Humanism,” New Literary History 41.1 (2010): 1–33.
56 Jacques Rancière, “The Ethical Turn in Politics and Aesthetics,” in Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, ed. and trans. S. Corcoran (New York: Continuum Publishing Group, 2010), 188.
57 Judith N. Shklar, The Faces of Injustice (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990).
58 Jacques Rancière, “Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man?,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 103.2 (2004): 303.
59 Jacques Rancière, “The Ethical Turn of Aesthetics and Politics,” Critical Horizons 7.1 (2006): 2.
60 Rancière, Disagreement, 39.
61 Rancière, Disagreement, x.
62 Michael Eric Dyson, “Racial Terror, Fast and Slow,” New York Times, April 17, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/17/opinion/racial-terror-fast-and-slow.html.
63 James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (New York: Random House, 1993), 69 [emphasis added].
64 Donna Brazile, “Why ‘All Lives Matter’ Misses the Point,” CNN, July 22, 2015, http://www.cnn.com/2015/07/22/opinions/brazile-black-lives-matter-slogan.
65 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. C. Borde and S. Malovany-Chevallier (New York: Random House, [1949] 2011), 5; Catherine A. MacKinnon, “Intersectionality as Method: A Note,” Signs 38.4 (2013): 1026.
66 On political responsibility, see Iris Marion Young, Responsibility for Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). Note that Young distinguishes political from legal or moral responsibility.
67 Lauren Berlant, “The Subject of True Feeling: Pain, Privacy, and Politics,” in Cultural Pluralism, Identity Politics, and the Law, ed. A. Sarat and T. R. Kearns (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 132.
68 Jacques Rancière, “Ten Theses on Politics,” Theory & Event 5.3 (2001): 5.
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Alyson Cole
Alyson Cole is a professor of Political Science, Gender and American Studies at Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where she serves as the Executive Officer of the MA/PhD Political Science programme. She is the author of The Cult of True Victimhood: From the War on Welfare to the War on Terror (Stanford University Press, 2007), as well as numerous articles that have appeared in journals such as Signs, American Studies, Feminist Studies and the Michigan Law Review. Cole serves on the editorial boards of Women's Studies Quarterly and the International Journal of Criminology and Sociological Theory.