Centring Care as a Practice of Politics
This dossier on care comprises a series of short posts from speakers at our Roundtable on Care, co-badged with the Centre for Research on Families and Relationships (CRFR) and convened during the visit we hosted for members of UGEN.
By Katrin Meyer
My approach to gender and care is inspired by the perspectives of feminist epistemology. I explore this question from Philosophy and especially in the context of feminist theory, from the perspective of situated knowledges. I'm also very grateful for important thoughts from my colleague Helena Rust who helped me inspire this contribution. I understand care as it is used in gender studies and beyond as an epistemic standpoint. My claim would be to strengthen this approach and make care the starting point, the central focus, for thinking about justice, democracy and the good life. Care as an epistemic and epistemological standpoint could be extremely relevant in the current times of anti-genderism, and the attacks on critical research such as gender studies, post-colonial studies, trans studies or critical race studies, to name but a few points of threat. I will briefly explain what I mean by care as an epistemic standpoint. In doing so, I am referring to a very broad definition of care from Berenice Fisher and Joan Tronto: they understand care as “species activity, that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our world so that we can live in it as well as possible”.
However, what makes care not only a practice but also a social situation is the fact that the practice of caring is linked to a specific individual or collective consciousness of those who care. It is the consciousness that living beings are relational, vulnerable, and dependent on others. Joan Tronto identifies the standpoint of care with an anthropological understanding or self-understanding of the human being as vulnerable and fragile, as needy, as in need for care. This consciousness that human beings need care is not trivial. Following Judith Butler's reflections on war and the politics of mourning after 9/11, the opposite of the standpoint of care is the fantasy of sovereignty. Fantasies of sovereignty are based on the idea that a person can live independently of others, in total control and power, without being vulnerable. When we combine Tronto’s concept of care with Butler's politics of precariousness and critique of sovereignty, it becomes clear that care is not only an object of research, but also a standpoint that structures the way research is conducted. Care as an object of research is important, but care as a standpoint for scientific research is also important, and makes the field of research on care even more fundamental. I believe that we should recognise care as the standpoint from which knowledge production must start. Only in this perspective are we able to critically reflect on the traditional way we think about truth, objectivity, and knowledge. It could also change the fields of research that become important and relevant, and it could help to ask what Joan Tronto calls “the central democratic question”, and that is: who is responsible for care?
When we think about democracy, justice, and the good life from the standpoint of care, we must recognise that we live in a non-ideal world characterised by inequality, systemic harm, and violence. From the point of view of care, reflection on political ideals begins in the context of a non-ideal world that's also in a non-ideal theory – this is important for philosophy, of course. From this perspective, one can see that care practices are embedded in structures that generate many of the needs that care work is supposed to fulfil.
In conclusion, I would like to pose the following question for us to ponder. How can care, understood as an epistemic standpoint, help to strengthen action and resistance against war, authoritarianism, anti-genderism, and violence? This is the question that seems to me to be the question of our time.
Author Bio
Katrin Meyer is Titular Professor of Philosophy at the University of Basel and senior lecturer for Gender Studies at the University of Zurich. She works on theories of radical democracy, philosophy of care and security from a feminist perspective. She was a guest member of UGEN at the UGEN meeting at the University of Edinburgh in March 2024.