I was always amazed by and envious of the aloof effect conjured effortlessly by my peers when I was younger. I longed to master such a cool, collected demeanor. What grace and intrigue one must have to move about the world as if untouched by the existential weight of its (our) materiality! As I aged, plenty of relationships with such people caused me to question my initial interest in apathy. Relating to someone who tries so hard to care so little is exhausting! Maybe, it’s not so cool to care about nothing.
As I became politically roused from the anesthetized slumber of my white midwestern suburban upbringing, I swapped perspectives. Suddenly, it became very important to care about political injustice, violence, and harm. Such harms are dependent upon the cultivation of non-caring attitudes in those who directly witness cruelty and degradation. Care appeared to be the antidote to political violence; if only people were simply informed about these matters, the human inclination to care would take over and we could all work together to confront the harms perpetuated by the dominating and exploitative modes of social organization which imperil us today. I noticed that as a woman and queer person, my caring sensibilities seemed more fine-tuned than my cis-het male friends. Maybe, caring wasn’t as intuitive as I had initially thought.
Like many feminist academics before me, I decided to make my personal political problems the primary analytical axis of my philosophical investigations. Thanks to the help of an incredible group of interdisciplinary scholars at the 2022 National Endowment for the Humanities summer study at Reed College called “Philosophies of Care,” care became a central theme in the research that has become foundational for my dissertation. Though I won’t be able to share the breadth of the project here (I am working diligently on my snappy elevator pitch), I will share some insights I have gained regarding how the discipline of feminist philosophy has conceptualized care through the field of care ethics. Even though this rich literature speaks to a number of prominent philosophical concerns about women’s experiences, societal expectations, and gendered labor, I suggest there is room to grow our analysis of care, which is necessary to meet our contemporary historical moment. Specifically, I am concerned about the increasing commodification of care practices and the subsequent de-politicization of the embodied labor of caring. Within this short excerpt, I highlight in particular the work of one care ethicist, Eva Kittay, and demonstrate how her work fails to offer an adequate basis for a politics of care despite her compelling critiques of Western moral theory. In summarizing and critiquing Kittay, I demonstrate that the ambiguity of care is more pernicious than care ethics can conceptualize and is productive of harm and oppression. Dealing with this ambiguity requires an oppositional and confrontational feminist politics of care.
A prominent sub-discipline of Western feminist philosophy known as care ethics tends to put forward a view of care as a social good that is currently, but not necessarily, devalued within Western democracy. Care ethics opposes a dominant view in moral philosophy that relies on Kant’s work to elaborate universal, rational principles; instead, care ethics offers relationality and embodiment as essential features of effective moral reasoning. Initially presented as a distinctly feminine aspect of moral reasoning in Carol Gilligan’s provocation of an “ethics of care,” there are now many distinct applications and developments to the idea of care as an ethical, social ideal. Maurice Hamington distinguishes four important subthemes in his overview of the field: “care as (1) a feminine value, (2) a virtue, (3) an alternative to justice, or (4) something more than an ethical theory” (16). Within all these different themes, there is a shared emphasis on the relationality and necessity of caring relations as a consequence of human embodiment. Often, this results in a conception of care that involves but goes beyond a particular social formation, which I think is empirically accurate. We need to care for each other in order to survive. But in acknowledging this fact, which we might call ontological, or a quality of our being human beings, care ethicists underemphasize the way a specific social formation organizes and captures the work of care.
The primary argument of Eva Kittay’s influential work in care ethics claims that some morally valid claims around the need for care are not founded completely on either “free” choice or coercion. This false binary between freely chosen obligations and coercion is a major problem with classical Western ethics. Outside of the historical and contemporary experience of enslavement or servitude, a majority of unpaid dependency relations occur outside of contractual labor relations. The particularities of paid dependency work are addressed in my dissertation research and complicate a lot of the political conclusions drawn from care ethics research. For the unpaid dependency worker, however, the binaristic model of choice does not accurately reflect which caring obligations are considered valid and morally permissible. It is a matter of historical injustice that women have been assigned a large portion of dependency work, but it is not merely this division of labor that needs rectification. Even though this forced gendered division of labor is unjust, Kittay does not think that women can or should simply refuse this societal expectation, since it is a universal feature of human embodiment, meaning that harm will be caused if morally permissible dependency work is refused. She wants to articulate the possibility of an ethic that can deal with the complexity of a moral relation that is neither chosen nor entirely coerced. Therefore, Kittay wants to flip the typical agent of concern to the dependency worker (Kittay’s term for a care worker) because discourses that naturalize the vulnerability of workers who are disproportionally feminized subjects (e.g. women, but in particular women of color and colonized women and people more broadly) create unjust living and caring conditions for these carers.
Though care ethics seeks to elevate the reality of human connectedness through acknowledging our material dependency on one another and the way this has become gendered throughout human history, there is little to no discussion about the way our physical, material needs that persist at all stages of life are privatized, commodified, and, thusly, hoarded within our social systems. These processes of commodification and accumulation demonstrate that care is not simply a social good necessary for human survival, but that this survival is politically saturated based on social systems of inequality and exploitation. Sarah Clark Miller makes a distinction between the material and ontological precariousness of human existence, e.g. that we can at any moment suffer a fatal injury as mortal creatures, and the precarity of social systems that build on this precariousness through social categorization and deprivation. Other care ethicists propose building a caring imagination through extending one’s experiences of care as a youth out toward a multiplicity of known and unknown others. Though there is acknowledgment of the unequal expectations of care based on racial and gendered categories, most care ethicists fail to elaborate on the ways in which building a caring imagination from caring habits might rely upon submissive features of feminine comportment that are only allowed to certain kinds of women that fit the ideological norm (e.g. white, cisgender, middle-class, able-bodied, and straight). How the expectation of a giving, or caring, self might be informed by racial, class, ability, and gendered hierarchies is not sufficiently addressed in this literature. Eva Kittay’s account of existing care relations as partially coercive and partially chosen provides a more dynamic approach to the ambiguities of care. However, she too fails to adequately address the intensity of the coercive socialization of women of color and white women into caring attitudes and practices that perpetuate racial hierarchies. In this way, care is taken as a de facto good, when in reality many historical moments of oppression and domination are justified by discourses of caring for those who cannot care for themselves.
Since many practices of care involve labor processes, we experience them through mediating processes of alienation. This alienating feature of dependency work is more clearly visible through Black feminist accounts of care, which attend to the power and the burden of caring for a community constantly under attack by the state and individual racist actors. When we consider care as a labor—in the Marxist sense of mixing our human capacities with the world around us to fulfill our needs and impact or influence our environment—it is clear that simply valuing these processes more or even creating social mechanisms for state-sponsored care fail to confront the product of our caring labor: the special commodity of human labor power. Cisgender and transgender women, white women and women of color, queer women and straight women, do not care endlessly for the sake of their own moral superiority. We care because we have to, because someone has to take the responsibility of keeping us alive. And for those of us in any way marginalized by race, class, sexuality, citizen status, ability, or gender presentation, the state relies upon the spectacle of our death as a tool of discipline and a counter-revolutionary strategy. For one of many historical examples, one need only think about the FBI’s counter-insurgency program aimed at the Black Panthers, COINTELPRO, which covertly murdered hundreds of Black radical leaders in the name of national security. One of the primary objectives of the Black Panther Party was community care.
The failures of care ethics lie in an overdetermined positive association with caring affects and attitudes as the corrective to liberal social orders instead of understanding how the ambiguity of care reveals that it is productive and not antithetical to the liberal social order. Even though care theorists acknowledge that care is partially coerced and, therefore, often performed under oppressive conditions, the orientation of the self which produces good care within these unideal conditions is not being challenged. The transparent self is Kittay’s notion that in order to perform good care, a care worker must in some sense see past their own needs, as if through a transparent glass, to the needs of the person for whom they are caring. As I read and researched Kittay for my dissertation, I was hoping to find a way to think about care as oppositional political work. I had a visceral reaction to the idea that the transparent self was morally neutral. I thought about how much of my life had been oriented around validation from others, how I only began to form a relationship with myself in my late twenties, how I was angered at the idea that Kittay seemed to indicate that morally good care meant not just sacrifice, but diminishment. This is a feature of femininity that has immobilized me time and time again and did not seem like an alluring place from which to reintroduce opposition and antagonism into feminist philosophies of care.
Care does not occur within a vacuum. It does not fall from the sky nor emerge from the sea. While it might feel “natural” for some of us, capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism benefit from such affective attachments. Even though care unites us in our relationality, as care ethics helpfully asserts, it also divides us based on race, class, nationality, ability, and gender. These divisions are not transhistorical. They were created and maintained by people who benefit from them. Such persons don’t wish for us to care freely, deeply, and transformatively, and yet we do. I explore this tension more deeply in my research than I was able to here. A variety of research methods are required for such a disparate set of practices. Even though care ethics has difficulty understanding the divisions created by care, I am drawn toward the affective dimensions that are highlighted philosophically and felt materially when we care for the people we love. I am still learning when to care and, much more slowly and painfully, when not to care. We need more spaces for the political or moral imperative to be a refusal of the work which reproduces the world. Even if this refusal is partial, within the “no,” we may find a different way to say “yes” to ourselves. For example, we may engage in radical community organizing to create free or minimal-pay childcare collectives in which we refuse the commodification of caring labor and find new relationality that is egalitarian and not based on biological familial ties. Or we may support a unionizing campaign for our local childcare workers as a responsibility of being a parent in a given community. In such activities, we might remake even the very ways we experience and know ourselves. By illuminating the differential categories of the mediation of care by capitalism, I hope to articulate unique strategies for incorporating and raising radical political consciousness around care and love.
The Women in Philosophy series publishes posts on those excluded in the history of philosophy on the basis of gender injustice, issues of gender injustice in the field of philosophy, and issues of gender injustice in the wider world that philosophy can be useful in addressing. If you are interested in writing for the series, please contact the Series Editor Alida Liberman or the Associate Editor Elisabeth Paquette.
Rhiannon Lindgren
Rhiannon Lindgren is a PhD candidate in the Philosophy Department at the University of Oregon. Her research in social and political philosophy seeks to put emancipatory political struggles in conversation with feminist political theory. Currently, her research project highlights the historical and contemporary instances of Black women, queer people, and colonized people practicing and performing care against the disciplinary dictates of capital to categorize care as a dimension of international working-class struggle. Rhiannon is a committed political organizer alongside her academic pursuits.
