Double-Edged Care: Toward a Politics of Care Justice

Abstract

In American political culture, care is double-edged. In everyday struggles over power, some political actors deploy care in ways that advance social justice, while others mobilize care in ways that hinder it. Feminist scholarship itself grapples with this double-edged-ness: Some scholars argue for care (Joan Tronto, Martha Fineman), while others push against it, asserting that care ideology is oppressive and should be “troubled” (Michelle Murphy, Lisa Lowe). I suggest that a discerning politics of care justice helps to resolve this tension. My study is comparative: I uphold Black Lives Matter, Black feminism, and the Domestic Workers Alliance as advancing varying forms of transformative politics that join care with justice. I also show that deployments of care by white political actors often counter or constrain social justice progress. To discern and analyze care’s double-edged-ness, I delineate three meanings of care—moral value, emotion, and labor—and I trace these meanings in political-cultural moments from the Trump era.