Care, Oppression, and Marriage

Abstract

This article draws attention to a form of injustice in intimate relationships of care that is largely ignored in discussions about the legal rights and obligations of intimate partners. This form of injustice is connected to a feature of caregiving I call "flexibility," in virtue of which caregiving requires "skills of flexibility." I argue that the demands placed by these skills on caregivers create constraints that amount to "vulnerability to oppression." To lift these constraints, caregivers are entitled to open-ended responses to their work, responses that would enable them to pursue their own projects while providing care. Instead of protecting individual choice of intimate relationships, marriage law should protect these entitlements.

The politics of care

“…Care answers needs and particular needs at particular moments. That has a mental aspect, as needs have to be interpreted, understood in their particular demands, and as they change (Marin, 2014 , pp. 341–342).…”

Cont(r)actualisation: A Politics of Transformative Legal Recognition of Adult Unions

“…In sum, the gist of various queer and critical accounts is that Western family laws tend to govern adult unions through the status-based regulation of the Sexual Family. As we noted at the very outset, the qualification of an adult union as a family depends on its institution as a conjugal couple , that is, of being cumulatively domestic, dyadic and sexual (Brown, 2019; Diduck, 2008b; Fineman, 1995; Marin, 2014; Rosenbury, 2007; Roseneil and Budgeon, 2004; Stoilova et al, 2014; Stychin, 2006; Williams, 2004). The legal conditions concerning the consequences for marriage casu quo registered partnership in many jurisdictions indeed require the adults concerned to cohabit, they prohibit more than one simultaneous union and unions between more than two partners, and restrictions on incestuous unions exist.…”

“…Diduck, 2008a; Herring, 2013). We have reservations about adhering to the latter proposal because of the potentially oppressive effects of entangling care and family (Marin, 2014). More fundamentally, family law’s paradigm is that of reciprocal commitment (see below); non-reciprocal informal care needs redress of another nature.…”