Year: 2012
Type: article
Abstract: The identification of care with women comes from so deep within our view of the world that it dominates our thinking.No matter how radical the changes have been for women in the past decades, care is what women give.This statement can be accepted on two conditions: firstly, that care is stripped of its connotations of self-sacrifice which have come to be associated with the feminine.In this respect we may follow Gilligan and other (female) care theorists who suggest that we valorize feminine difference, and who argue that rehabilitating care implies thinking of a subject in relation.This would allow us to transcend the dichotomy between prioritizing either the self or the other, since care, like the gift, simultaneously involves autonomy and dependency, freedom and vulnerability.The second condition is that we remove care from the limited sphere of the private and extend it to the masculine subject, to public space, and beyond, to take into account its global dimensions.This implies questioning the motivations and the emotional sources of care (the passion for others).On this renewed basis women may be able to transform their traditional condition of being enslaved to caring (and to giving) by acting willingly and voluntarily as givers of care (and of gifts). IEven today, the claim that women are essentially caregivers would be met with general agreement.The identification between care and women is so deeply engrained in our world view that it involuntarily dominates our thinking, despite the radical transformations that the feminine subject has undergone over the last few decades.II This kind of identification has an ambivalent effect.On the one hand, it evokes the traditional, and fundamentally maternal and self-sacrificing image of women that has confined them to the secondary role of attentive guardians of the needs and expectations of others, relegated them to the private sphere, and excluded them from the public sphere.On the other hand, it is viewed as a precious heritage that deserves to be valued in order to recover dimensions banished from Western thought, restore dignity to women's "difference," and imagine another kind of subjectivity: as we shall see, this is what contemporary feminist theorists are now doing.This ambivalence requires us to examine the very notion of care in more detail.In other words, what do we mean when we talk about care?Unexpectedly, this theme emerges several times in both classical and modern thought.Already in Virgil and Seneca there is a reflection on the two aspects of care: as a constraint and a source of anxiety, as well as a form of vigilant attention, in the tradition of the Socratic care of the soul.Kierkegaard sees in it a way of counteracting the excessively abstract nature of philosophy, while Heidegger makes it the fundamental basis of Dasein and proposes an ontology of care to take into account the unity and authenticity of the Self while underscoring the two aspects of care (as in "careworn") and caring (as in solicitude); and, more recently, Hans Jonas, who sees care as the basis for an ethics of responsibility capable of dealing with the transformations brought about by technological civilization.There is even an original myth of care, although one little-known, whereby it becomes that which preserves and binds together all that is human 1 .However, in our tradition, admittedly, we have only rarely paid attention to care, and this has not been significantly developed.Above all, however, it is undeniable that ever since "caring" has come to be seen as an eminently feminine quality-particularly in English, unlike the French "souci"-there has been a process of devaluation and marginalization that mirrors the fate reserved for women.1. Paolo Fabbri refers to this myth in his contribution to Preta and Donghi (eds) (1995).
Source: Revue du MAUSS
Author: Elena Pulcini
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Gender equality
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4411017109