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Love’s Labours Lost? Feminism, the Disabled People’s Movement and an Ethic of CareGlasgow Caledonian University, w.hughes{at}gcal.ac.uk
Glasgow Caledonian University, l.mckie{at}gcal.ac.uk
University of Glasgow, d.hopkins{at}socsci.gla.ac.uk
University of Glasgow, n.watson{at}socsci.gla.ac.uk 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.
Key Words: care • disability • ethics • feminism • waste
Sociology, Vol. 39, No. 2,
259-275 (2005) This article has been cited by other articles:
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