Love’s Labours Lost? Feminism, the Disabled People’s Movement and an Ethic of Care

Abstract

The Disabled People's Movement (DPM) and the Feminist Movement appeal to incompatible meanings of 'care'. For the DPM the word 'care' is to be resisted.The emotional connotations implicit in the concept and experience of care inhibit the emancipatory project for independence and self-determination. Feminist theorists value the concept of care, and the emotional aspect of 'caring about' in 'caring for'. Given that independence can be interpreted as an ideological distortion of 'malestream' public policy, feminists argue that it should be replaced by the concept of interdependence. Furthermore, feminists express concern that the DPM's pragmatic solution to the problem of 'care' is a form of discursive alignment with 'malestream' public policy that constitutes both disabled people and women as 'other' subjects of modern welfare state economies.Drawing on the work of Irigaray, we propose that a post-feminist analysis of the constitution of the parties in the caring dyad can help to make the case for a mutually beneficial ethics of care. We support the feminist voice in disability studies, particularly its call for an embodied, experiential, emotional and political view of the caring relationship. We articulate a post-structuralist feminist critique of waste and want as the discursive terrain upon which both disabled people and women are constituted as marginalized subjects in caring relationships. Irigaray's claim that women's immersion in the pleasure of 'the other' marginalizes her from her embodied experience, dims her sense of self, and locates her and her caring practices in a liminal, abject space on the margins of phallocentric culture, ground this analysis. We claim that disabled people are similarly disembodied, and constituted as waste, and that their passionate fight for dispassionate goals might be working against their demands for a dignified and inclusive existence. Finally, we make a plea to disability activists and feminists to make common cause in the struggle for an ethics of care that is founded upon embodied interdependence.

“Daring to Care”: Challenging Corporate Environmentalism

“…For example, critiques levelled at care ethics include claims that it constitutes some individuals or groups as dependent and fragile and others as beneficent and altruistic and glosses over the possibilities for exploitation and the idealizations, both good and bad, of others in care relationships (Hughes et al 2005). It has also been pointed out that institutional and state violence has been and continues to be justified by a rhetoric of care that, for Narayan (1995, p. 135) sometimes functions ''ideologically to justify or conceal relationships of power and domination''.…”

Ageing and Caring as Couples with Disabilities

“…Relevant to this study is that care can not only mean different things depending on actors and situations (Thomas, 1993), but is also a strongly ideological concept (Fine & Glendinning, 2005). Care research and disability studies have had different points of emphasis when discussing care, and also identify different problems for different stakeholders (Hughes, McKie, Hopkins & Watson, 2005). The carer with her often unacknowledged care work, and the person with disabilities at risk of being reified in a position of dependence could, it seems, represent opposing sides in the struggle to acknowledge or reject care.…”

“…A number of scholars suggest a possibility for dialogue between these two research areas through revisiting the care concept and broadening discussions of care (Watson, McKie, Hughes, Hopkins & Gregory, 2004;Hughes et al, 2005). Considering care as a boundary concept, as I have tried to do in this thesis, may be useful in this respect.…”

Rethinking responsibility and care for a postcolonial world

“…Concerns over people and place in care-giving practices are central to this strand of work (Milligan, 2003). There is a 6 large emphasis on caring for the elderly (Milligan, 2003), ill, disabled (Hughes et al, 2005), homeless (Johnsen et al, 2005) and children, and on care-giving in a number of sites such as the home, community drop-in centres (Conradson, 2003), hospices (Brown, 2003) and hospitals (Fannin, 2003). This view of care draws on, and contributes to, insights in health geographies (Parr, 2003) as detailed ethnographic work explores how such care is mediated in particular socio-economic settings.…”