Relational Vulnerability: The Legal Status of Cohabiting Carers

Abstract

In this article, I examine the legal position of those who perform caregiving work within the context of a cohabiting relationship through a novel relational vulnerability lens. I argue that the state, through privatising and devaluing caregiving labour, situates carers within an unequal and imbalanced relational framework, exposing them economic, emotional, and spatial harms.Unlike universal vulnerability, which is inherent and unavoidable, relational vulnerability can be avoided and reduced if the state were to acknowledge that humans are embodied and relational rather than self-sufficient and rational. Law's treatment of cohabiting carers reflects the state's broader tendency to value economic self-sufficiency, while confining caregiving to the private family. I argue that the state has a duty to respond directly to relational vulnerability and should aim to make cohabiting carers resilient. Resilience must involve the provision of material resources but should also have a normative commitment to achieving autonomy and equality for those marginalised by law and state policies.

Internationalization, community, and pandemic pedagogies: a reflective case study of a highly international university during the COVID-19 pandemic

“…This is not to deny the significance of markers such as ethnicity/race, gender, and class, which are frequently pertinent across different contexts (Peroni and Timmer, 2013;Mansouri, 2020). However, following Bankoff, Frerks, and Hilhorst (2004), the authors approach the concept from a relational standpoint: who is vulnerable depends on environmental, social, and cultural circumstances as well as on specific group markers that, given the circumstances, endanger people possessing them (see Peroni and Timmer, 2013;Gordon-Bouvier, 2019). This approach enables the authors to go beyond the use of vulnerability as merely a descriptor or predictor of experiences.…”

Vulnerable bodies and invisible work: The Covid-19 pandemic and social reproduction

“…Grear (2013, p. 49) has described this person as ‘a human adult (male) standing in a highly selective relation to developmental time and processes – always paradigmatically fully-formed and functional’. The imagined autonomous liberal subject is constantly at the peak of physical power and independence, ‘its powers and capacities never deteriorating, its body never ageing’ (Gordon-Bouvier, 2019b, p. 169). In addition, liberal theories of personhood idealise and promote a restrained or ‘night-watchman’ state, whose role is confined to protecting and upholding the individual freedoms of its citizens.…”

“…One example is in the area of property and trusts law that deals with claiming a beneficial interest in the family home (applicable where the family is unmarried). Here, courts have often dismissed women’s non-financial contributions as being motivated by love and sentiment rather than an ownership intention 4 (Gordon-Bouvier, 2019b; Lawson, 1996). Within the case law, female relational roles appear to be incompatible with the idea of economic value, echoing Silbaugh’s (1996, pp.…”

“…The current government’s new receptiveness to basic income, as seen through the introduction of the furlough scheme in the UK, could be seized upon as a way of valuing unpaid informal social reproduction in the future. The suggestion of a non-means tested state-paid income as a way of meeting the cost of social reproduction and addressing problems of depletion has been made by numerous feminist scholars (Gordon-Bouvier, 2019b; McKay and Vanevery, 2000; Pateman, 2004). The crisis of depletion during the pandemic has helped to reinforce the extent to which paid work depends on unpaid social reproduction in the home.…”

“…However, while this illumination of universal vulnerability has been useful in demonstrating the inadequacies in the liberal theoretical approach that has so long dominated, the global crisis has also had disproportionate adverse effects on those who undertake socially reproductive work. As I argue, it has always been the case that the state’s devaluation and neglect of social reproduction has caused various economic, physical, and emotional harms to those undertaking the work (Gordon-Bouvier, 2019b; Rai et al, 2014). However, the pandemic has had a notably exacerbating effect on these harms, causing intolerable situations that must urgently be redressed by the state.…”