Recognizing care, caring recognition

Abstract

In this paper, I discuss the idea of democratic love from the perspective of gender equality. More precisely, I argue that a particular form of gender inequality, namely a gender-specific division of care labour, jeopardizes democratic love. In the first two sections of the article, I introduce Anthony Giddens’ original idea of a ‘democratization of the personal’ and show how Axel Honneth has developed it by relying on the Hegelian notion of social freedom. In the third section, I discuss how the problem of care work affects democratic love relationships and depict the solution to this problem advocated by recognition theory, namely economic recognition. After having reconstructed some possible affinities between socialist-feminist arguments and Honneth’s suggestions, as well as criticisms against them, I outline another recognition-theoretic strategy for recognizing care work. I argue that the recognition paradigm conveys a view of the love relationship as inherently implying a caring recognition of human beings’ dependencies and vulnerabilities. I conclude by hinting at the idea that caring recognition may be extended beyond the social sphere of love, as constituent of social relations in general.