Relational spaces and relational care: Campus sexual violence, intimate geopolitics and topological polis

Abstract

Critical care ethics argues that care's political potential lies in its relationality. This paper draws on geographic scholarship on relationality to develop a spatial relational care approach to care ethics. This approach seeks to bring visibility to the diversity of caring and non-caring relationalities that occur between multiple people, places, events, times and structural underpinnings. In other words, caring agencies occurring in particular places have political reach well beyond the initial sites in which the act of "care" occurred. Geographic relational scholarship on care brings attention to the fallacy that people and places are autonomous. This paper suggests that the frameworks of topological polis and intimate geopolitics can extend our relational understandings of care and offer insights into aspects of social life that care research has yet to explore. Empirically, this paper draws on a high-profile campus sexual assault case to argue that the spaces of care need to be understood beyond the location where the initial care act took place, that responding to care creates relational poleis, and that the site of the body is relationally bound with care and violence. K E Y W O R D S care, caring agency, college campuses, gendered violence, non-care, relationality 1 | INTRODUCTION Sexual assault is not a new phenomenon, but over the past few years, public awareness of sexual violence has been increasing.Recently, a dizzying number of highly influential men have been caught up in sexual harassment and assault scandals across a range of sectors and industries, most notoriously: Hollywood mogul, Harvey Weinstein; Fox News anchor, Bill O'Reilly; and then-presidential candidate, Donald J. Trump. Some of these men resigned or were terminated from their jobs amidst the scandals, while one became President of the USA. In 2017, over a million people globally demonstrated their resistance to misogyny, among other social justice concerns, in solidarity with the Women's March (on Washington, DC). Less than a year later, Time magazine awarded "Person of the Year" to #MeToo, the social media movement that erupted in the wake of accusations of sexual assault by Weinstein. 1 While sexual violence is not new, the countless incidents of women (and, in some instances, men) who have begun to speak out about their experiences surviving sexual violence is unprecedented.A year before #MeToo, a 2016 "Glamour Woman of the Year" was awarded to "Jane Doe," 2 a woman who remains anonymous but whose voice went viral when her court statement made during the People v. Turner trial 3 became public. Turner, a white freshman varsity swimmer at Stanford University, was charged with sexually assaulting Jane behind a campus dumpster while she was unconscious. He faced up to 14 years in prison. The judge in the case, Persky, sentenced Turner to six months and released him after three months for "good behaviour." As of December 2017, Turner is appealing his conviction (Salam, 2017).---

Care as a many‐splendoured topology (including prickles)

“…The concurrent presence of embodiment also informs the paper by Ann E. Bartos (), “Rational spaces and relational care: Campus sexual violence, intimate geopolitics and topological polis.” It engages most explicitly with spatialities of care in this collection, with the core arguments: “care is not practised or received universally, rather it is contextual, and may not necessarily result in ‘good’ care for the caregiver or care‐receiver” (p. 262). By introducing a case of rape that became publicly known throughout the USA as a result of the legal procedure and its politicisation, Bartos () suggests that some theoretical ideas embedded in “topological polis” and “intimate geopolitics” are useful in making better sense of the far‐reaching and multidirectional ramifications of caring and uncaring acts. She encourages us to ask “why and how care happens in the spaces that it does, and who the many actors are that enable or disable that care to take place” (p. 263), to broaden the geographical scope of caring agency and to trace the injustices connected to caring activities.…”

“…Bartos’s () paper raises tricky questions over responsibility. When people's caring acts can be seen as responsible and irresponsible at the same time, as they end up supporting some people in their lives while oppressing others, is caring then something we should be more careful about and should we perhaps care less for the ones we love and the things we appreciate?…”

“…Concurrently, the collection makes new spatial openings to the politics and ethics of care scholarship by underlining the relationality of caring relations and agencies, in a much broader sense than how they are typically considered. The topological approach taken up in the editorial, and one of the individual contributions (Bartos, ), provides a potentially fruitful avenue for the development of theoretical engagements within spatially attuned studies of care. As the editors present, “thinking topologically about the collection forcefully demonstrates that caring actions and practices ripple out into the world beyond the immediate caring relationship or the immediate moment” (Hanrahan & Smith, , p. 244).…”

“…In doing so, each of the papers introduces various elements, actors and environments that are fundamentally important in how care unfolds in and affects our lived realities. They emphasise caring agency as always embodied but concurrently involving “deliberately motivated caring actions” (Bartos, , p. 262) and traverse the human–non‐human nexus without blurring it into a meaningless distinction, as Graddy‐Lovelace (, p. 235) portrays: “A landscape of care framework, infused with political ecology, discloses the matrix of human and beyond‐human care at work in what feminist geographers call geographies of responsibility.” These geographies are explored in the collection through relational theoretical frameworks that explode the traditional conceptions of care, which tend to relate it merely with small, mundane, nearby, present, feminine, cute, private, soft, kind and emotional aspects of life.…”

In the wake: Interpreting care and global health through Black geographies

“…My attention here is on how global health interventions in formerly colonised societies operate in a landscape that knows the conflation of care and violence I discuss above. Building on Ann Bartos’ claim that “responding to care is political” (, p. 2), I argue that, in the wake, a critical spatial exploration of care needs to cautiously engage with places of care to understand practices of care as inherently political. It also needs to understand the effects of these practices.…”