by Katherine Davies
On any given day, approximately 400,000 children are active recipients of the U.S. welfare program known as the foster care system. There are nearly as many different kinds of stories that intersect with foster care as there are children implicated in it. Common themes emerge repeatedly in many of these stories pertaining to trauma, poverty, racism, and abuse, many of which are unfortunately only amplified once a child enters care. The relevant complexities of this system are too many to enumerate here. Of particular importance are those pertaining to its peculiar legislative history in the U.S. and increasingly sinister deployments of what I call Foster Care-as-Surveillance in particular poor communities of color, Foster Care-as-Discipline as evidenced in the recent Pennsylvania case where families with outstanding school lunch debt were threatened with foster care, and Foster Care-as-Deterrence as it has been mobilized in family separations on the U.S. southern border for arriving immigrant families. Though the diversity of the stories of those whose lives collide with this system is incredible, at least one feature is shared by all; their existential sense of the possibility of being-at-home has been obliterated.
As a feminist philosopher, I have found myself wondering what (if anything) my work might accomplish in terms of addressing this particular terrain of suffering. Many other academic disciplines are already deeply engaged with tracking and ameliorating the pitfalls and dangers associated with this system. What might philosophy do?
The scholarship on foster care tends to share one glaring feature: the absence of the voices of (current) foster care recipients. As historian Catherine Rymph notes in her book Raising Government Children: A History of Foster Care and the American Welfare State, social workers are the primary source of information about the system and the children in it, followed by foster parents and then families of origin. Rymph writes, “although the protection of their interests and their welfare was presumably at the heart of the entire system, children’s voices are unfortunately marginalized.” Shielding radically vulnerable children from further exploitation is paramount. However, this means that current scholarship privileges adult perspectives on the system. Sometimes (but rarely, often for fear of further stigmatization) former foster recipients’ voices are represented in this work, but only after they have come of legal age and choose to self-identify as recipients of this welfare program. In this case, their perspectives cannot directly benefit them. While children are in care, the fulfillment of their needs is entirely dependent upon the determinations of others.
Feminist phenomenology, which theorizes home as contested and threatened, can play a role here, particularly to help give voice to the absent lived experience of current foster care recipients. The feminist phenomenologies of home to which I turn insist that we cannot abandon this deeply needed sense of being-at-home. To this aim, they work to resituate our conception of home, inviting us to think of home as constructed in part by others, as a set of practices in which we engage rather than fixed locations, and as a temporally situated lived experience.
For all foster care recipients, home has become—or shows itself as always having been—a temporary phenomenon. Cris Beam, in her book To the End of June: The Intimate Life of American Foster Care, writes, “the basic tenet of foster care, and its core complication, is that foster care is meant to be a temporary solution.” Though we can talk about a possible placement in a foster ‘home’ (though this form of foster care is much rarer than often thought), the fact of the matter is that almost all recipients are moved so often during their time in the system that the necessary resources, time, and interest on the part of caregivers are rarely if ever available to cultivate a sense of being-at-home. And this is by design. Foster care is built to keep everyone’s expectations in limbo—to avoid any formation of secure physical or emotional attachments to particular places or people—while cases move through family or criminal court proceedings which will result either in reunification or termination of parental rights. The carceral dimensions of foster care recipients’ experiences are exacerbated by this indeterminacy and precarity of their ‘sentence’ which depends entirely on the actions of their families of origin (and interpretations of those actions by institutions of judicial power).
The meaning of being-at-home has been compromised for those in foster care. Their former home was already precarious. This could have been due to abuse or neglect on the part of caregivers or to intervention into the lives of communities already more vulnerable to state power which produces and enforces structural oppression. Social and political philosophical critique is needed to address these issues. In particular, we must develop an intersectional analysis which demonstrates how race, gender, class, ability, age, etcetera are mobilized to maintain the structural oppression which fuels the foster care system at every level (including which families are or are not implicated by the system, who works within the system either providing care or as a social worker, and how particular children within the system are provided certain tiers of care, etcetera).
Existing feminist phenomenological theories of lived experiences of home are both useful and not yet useful enough in thinking through the complexities of foster care recipients’ lived experiences of home which are literally nowhere to be found in the current scholarship. Can home be temporary and even fit the definition of home anymore? Though foster children are ostensibly removed from the home of their (often) biological family and placed in the home of a foster family or other institution, the very interruption (and often multiple and repeated interruptions) of the experiential phenomenon of being-at-home calls its definitional force into question. Might foster care recipients not only suffer from the effects of this system which often fails to meet their needs, but also suffer from a deeper, existential homelessness which the foster care system reproduces in its management of these lives?
Trauma—and its effects on conceptions of the self—has received much of its philosophical attention from feminist theorists. Susan Brison in Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of the Self argues that one’s embodiment fulfills a vital role in revealing “the ways in which one’s ability to feel at home in the world is as much a physical as an epistemological accomplishment.” A physical sense of being-at-home is made possible by others, drawing from a feminist model of relational selfhood which acknowledges the essential intertwining of social dependence and individual autonomy in “the extent to which the self is created and sustained by others and, thus, is able to be destroyed by them.” In listening to and empathetically receiving narratives of trauma survivors, Brison claims that socially supported healing is a critical avenue for survivors of trauma, especially survivors of physical and sexual assault, to regain a new sense of being-at-home which is acknowledged to be vulnerable (and perhaps even ultimately illusory) but nevertheless necessary for healing.
This description of the healing process entails at least two requirements. First, others must be involved who are supportive and empathetic. Second, the discreet “before” and “after” that Brison delineates are tied directly to a sense of the world-as-home which preceded the event, was profoundly lost in the wake of the trauma, but is then regained in the healing process. Brison concludes, “survivors of trauma recover to a greater or lesser extent depending on others’ responses to them after the trauma. These aspects of trauma and recovery reveal the deeply social nature of one’s sense of self and underscore the limits of the individual’s capacity to control her own self-definition.”
But what of those who never had a discreet “before” to their trauma? What of those who have never found in the world the possibility of a safe, supportive home such as foster care recipients? They lack both a “before” to calibrate their healing toward and a supportive social community to narrate their experiences to which persists stably across time, beyond a string of foster homes and case workers. Foster care recipients suffer from PTSD at some of the highest rates of any group, at a rate of almost double that of returning veterans and experience other medically labeled mental illnesses resulting from trauma at similarly higher rates. Brison’s work on philosophizing the stakes of experiencing trauma, and healing from it, are clearly a rich resource for application to this particular group in very high need. However, the grounding of her theory on a sense of the external world as a supportive, stable home is unavailable to foster care recipients who have sustained repeated traumatizing events that preclude any pre-extant belief in such a notion of world-as-home.
For those who find themselves living “in-between worlds,” as Mariana Ortega in her book In-Between: Latina Feminist Phenomenology, Multiplicity, and the Self puts it, home never is or can be a single location offering stability and security. For many, being-at-home is already a fractured and fracturing experience. Ortega admits to finding herself in a romance with bell hooks’ definition of home as “the safe place…the place where the me of me mattered” which nevertheless remains fantastical for her. As a “multiplicitous self” who cannot articulate a univocal belonging to any single place, this self instead pieces together many experiences of home(s) through a concrete set of practices. Drawing from work by feminist theorists such as Mohanty, Rowe, and Anzaldúa which criticizes exclusionary articulations of home which fail to acknowledge their political situatedness, Ortega does not find it possible for such a self to return to a lost, unified sense of world-as-home as Brison does.
Instead, Ortega develops a praxis she calls “hometactics” which enacts a toleration of the disjunct between fantasy and reality. The personal, relational practices she discusses perform “a sense of familiarity, ease, or sense of belonging in a space or location, even though that space is a new or foreign one, or in a social gathering or community, despite the fact that a community might be made up of members claiming different identities.” Some concrete examples of her own hometactics or “microtechniques of lived experience” include painting the walls of her apartment with bright colors from her childhood in Nicaragua, making and sharing foods imbued with meaning of a personal history, and developing close, family-like relationships with neighbors, and code-meshing or switching languages in different contexts. Ortega’s hometactics, while remaining sensitive to sites of home connected to locations and social relations, incorporate an active, verbal sense of home as home-making practices the multiplicitous self performs.
This philosophy of home also offers resources to thinking through the particular lived experience of home or homes of foster care recipients. Ortega makes theoretical room for a multiplicitous self to create and enact its own practices of home rather than relying on the world to provide an experience of being-at-home. However, foster care recipients often are not free to paint the walls of the room where they sleep or make other choices dependent upon at least some measure of autonomy and stable relations to their physical and social environment. Children are human beings who most people feel comfortable and justified in limiting their rights and autonomy. These justifications are often accompanied by the assumption that these children are legal dependents upon some caregiver who acts in those children’s best interests. Unfortunately, we cannot assume this concern with children’s best interest is at work for foster care recipients. They were either previously dependent upon inadequate caregivers or are currently dependent upon an inadequate governmental welfare program which is as least as complicit in the incarceration of recipients as it is in providing care.
Neither Brison’s sense of recovering from trauma by reconstructing the world-as-home nor Ortega’s practice of hometactics provide sufficient conceptual resources for foster care recipients. These children often never feel safe or cared for by their physical or social environments, suffering what I call an existential homelessness grounded in the lack of any experience of what being-at-home could mean. I suspect that one of the missing philosophical considerations is a proper understanding of the temporality informing the foster care experience. Brison’s theory requires a discreet past that lies before the relational self in its future as the standard which informs the recalibration of being-at-home in the world. Ortega’s phenomenology seems to be grounded in the present, in the current actions available to a multiplicitous self who is obviously constructed by and out of its multiple (and often conflicting) histories, but who enjoys at least enough autonomy to bring those historically-imbued experiences to bear on present practices.
The lack of non-traumatic past experiences of being-at-home directly contributes to a condition of existential homelessness. This existential condition dramatically reveals itself in what phenomenology might call the “existentiell” or material conditions of homelessness. By some counts, 30-40% of youth who age out of the system immediately join the homeless population in the United States and another 20% are incarcerated before they are thirty. A staggering number of former foster care recipients remain without stable access to the fulfillment of their basic needs throughout their lifetimes. Beam summarizes one study aimed at tracking those who age out of the system; “these kids were twenty-four, and more than half weren’t employed – and half of those who did work had earned less than $8,000 in the past year; nearly 40 percent had been homeless. Five percent of the men and 7 percent of the women had earned an associate’s degree – a tiny fraction of the general population their age who had graduated from college.”
These former recipients lack an existential sense of being-at-home. The care they received through this welfare program is structured by what we might understand at best as a sterile conception of safety figured in the present tense, at worst as maintaining a carceral deployment of state power under the guise of safety as we see in the housing of foster care recipients in psychiatric facilities, juvenile detention facilities, and immigration detention facilities when alternatives are not readily available. The ideal of bare physical safety (which is often not realized) in the present precludes determining a form of care that would respond to the needs of an inherently temporal self which articulates its future possibilities as informed and often limited by past experience.
A theoretical explanation for why this “care” is not enough is desperately needed to justify the needed substantial overhauls which would challenge the presumed dominance of safety as an ideal of care. Feminist phenomenology provides a theoretical grounding which can help articulate alternative lived experiences of home on behalf of currently silenced recipients which mount such a challenge. There is hope that these descriptions can help identify and protect certain hometactics current recipients are almost certainly already engaging or attempting to engage in facing the absence of home. For instance, current foster care recipients’ relationships to technology and virtual social networks are possible sites where temporally continuous practices of home-making might be situated. Further, we might turn to feminist and queer theory’s accounts of kinship relations instituted beyond the heterosexual matrix as models we might call upon to articulate, protect, and enable the formation of stable attachments to non-genetically related others for current and former foster care recipients. Concrete policy recommendations could follow from these phenomenological analyses to protect such practices. Feminist philosophy has so many resources for joining the cross-disciplinary effort to address the lives touched and produced by this system. It is high time we joined in.
Dr. Katherine Davies is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Dallas. Her areas of specialization are Continental Philosophy, Feminist Philosophy, and the History of Philosophy. She teaches courses for the undergraduate Philosophy B.A. and the graduate M.A. and Ph.D. programs in the History of Ideas.
