Feminist Ethics Research Articles

Pedro Almodóvar’s Communities of Circumstance

This article engages in a close analysis of community across the films of Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar. What emerges from this is that while Almodóvar has a strong subversive streak, his films are deeply concerned with questions about how we might live together in the best way possible. Drawing on the feminist ethics of care—with its emphasis on the maternal as an ethical model—and the work of Jean-Luc Nancy, I argue that Almodóvar’s preferred communities are “communities of circumstance,” best conceptualized as dynamic networks of relations that respond directly to the varied needs of their members. Rather than fitting any fixed social boundaries, they emerge organically from lived experience. Ultimately, I conclude that Almodóvar’s films not only offer screen representations of communities of circumstance, but might contribute to our understanding of what it means to live in community in the “real world.”

청소년 시에 나타나는 정치적 지향과 여성주의 윤리의 관련성 연구 - 김선우의 청소년 시집을 중심으로 -

본고는 김선우의 청소년 시를 중심으로 청소년 시의 서정성이 정치성을 내포한다는 사실을 보이고자 했다. 그의 시에서 청소년은 통제되고 억눌린 자아 정체성을 해방하고, 다양한 개성과 가치가 어우러질 수 있는 세상을 꿈꾼다. 김선우의 청소년 시에 나타나는 정치적 서정성은 ‘여성주의 윤리’와 맞닿아 있다. ‘여성주의 윤리’는 ‘남성’과 ‘여성’이 각각 ‘남성성’과 ‘여성성’을 가져야 한다고 강조하는 것을 비판한다. 이는 한 개인이 지닐 수 있는 다성적인 측면을 무시한다는 점에서 개인의 자아 정체성을 병들게 만들기 때문이다. 김선우는 외부에서 설정한 가치기준에 따라 자아정체성을 억압하지 않고, 자신의 ‘근원적 자아감’에 따르는 진정한 ‘자기성실성’을 추구하고 있다.<BR> 김선우의 시에서 청소년의 진정한 자아정체성을 자유롭게 표현할 수 있는 세상을 꿈꾸는 것은 ‘민주주의’의 가치와 연결되어 있다. 그의 시는 청소년 시의 서정성에 정치적 영역으로의 확장 가능성을 제시했다는 점에서 의미가 있다.

Surrender: Feminist Rhetoric and Ethics in Love andIllness

Surrender: Feminist Rhetoric and Ethics in Love andIllness

“A Heat Pump Needs a Bit of Care”: On Maintainability and Repairing Gender–Technology Relations

As part of current energy transitions in the Global North, households have begun adopting renewable energy technologies, such as heat pumps and solar power systems, in significant numbers. These changes give rise to the following question: how are technology and gender configured when new technologies enter everyday life? Based upon ethnographic fieldwork on interactions between households, technologies, and technicians and interviews with sales technicians, installers, and service mechanics, I demonstrate how both stable and fragile variants of renewable energy technologies are enacted during prepurchase consultations and postpurchase installations, respectively. I employ science and technology studies scholarship, feminist ethics, and repair and maintenance studies—captured through the analytical lens of care—to analyze how technicians mobilize and tinker with gendered affection, knowledge, and action in households to effectuate adoption of renewable energy technologies. I clarify how, in this process, openings are created to configure both hegemonic and heterogeneous gender–technology relations. Finally, I advance discussion beyond gender issues by arguing that acknowledging the role of maintainability and the repair of user–technology relations in current energy transitions opens pathways not only for exploring gender in new and exciting ways in relation to technology but technician–user relationships as well.

Lessons from Beauvoir for a Transnational Feminist Ethics

Abstract The prospect of a transnational feminist coalition is one of the most challenging questions that feminism faces today. The author analyzes Beauvoir’s involvement with the Algerian decolonization movement and her own self-critique as instructive tools for forming better ways for feminists to engage transnationally. Beauvoir’s existentialist ethics, political writings, and activism continue to offer models for developing an anticolonial and anti-imperialist transnational feminist ethics and are an underexplored resource in transnational feminist scholarship.

Transformative change through events business: a feminist ethic of care analysis of building the purpose economy

As we confront social, ecological and economic challenges, some look to a new model described as the purpose economy as a pathway to more sustainable and just futures. Responsible and sustainable events are increasingly of interest to both academics and practitioners. However, little work has explored the capacities for social entrepreneurship in events management and ways that events can build socio-cultural well-being. This article presents a case study of an unusual events business known as GOGO Events located in Adelaide, South Australia. For some eight years, GOGO has offered a social enterprise initiative training and supporting teams of marginalised people to create and install event installations. To accomplish this, GOGO’s founder has built a web of stakeholders, including: corporate clients; not for profit organisations supporting homeless and vulnerable people; and these vulnerable people themselves. Together they build networks of care and social change. Using the lens of feminist care ethics, we analyse how such work contributes to building the purpose economy. These efforts move beyond corporate social responsibility and suggest events businesses can help build community, create relationships of care and contribute to more sustainable and fair futures. After COVID-19, such socially committed work has become even more imperative.

Dividing Responsibility for Care: Tracing the Ethics of Care in Local Care Strategies

This article analyses local care policies through the lens of the feminist ethics of care. The focus is on the normative understandings regarding care that emerge in local care strategy documents and how these understandings relate with the concept of ‘responsibility’. In this article, strategies published by the municipality of Jyväskylä, Finland, between the years 2008 and 2016, are analysed using Trace analysis. The research questions are: How is the division of responsibility regarding care among different actors constructed in the strategies? How do the roles assigned to these different actors accord with the principles of ethics of care? The findings show that the documents emphasise individual responsibility in managing risks related to old age, as the norms of local societal institutions are largely detached from the principles of ethics of care. The analysis also reveals the absence of gender and human frailty from the care strategy documents. Rethinking the strategies through the lens of the ethic of care would mean reconceptualising responsibility as relational.

Designing Quantum Bodies: A New Calculus of Responsibility

Critical Design has embraced Karen Barad's theory of agential realism for rethinking design as a discipline, an artifact, and a profession. This article meditates on an exploratory question: what if we consider Barad to be in some way ‘doing design’? The article draws attention to the fact that Barad's 2007 book, Meeting the Universe Halfway, does not begin with physics or feminism, but rather, with a close reading of a play. I suggest that Barad situates literature and fiction as central features in her analysis of historical experiments in physics, that she doesn't treat these experiments as historical events or even conceptual questions, but entangles them with a type of ‘experimental’ physics. Barad confronts the unsatisfactory ethical conclusions in the play, and thereby isolates a pressing design problem: how to loosen the hold of individualism on feminist ethics? This article proposes a provocation: that Barad engages in a project to ‘design away’ the classical body that stands in the way of more ethical quantum futures. The article highlights the need for speculative design methods because they transcend disciplinary divisions and help to overcome design problems as enduring as individualism. Engaging with fictional worlds that touch upon our contemporary technoscientific present, Barad's science fictional story, I argue, asks us to ponder our relations, imagine new ones, and open pathways to more ethical and equitable futures.

Is the Feminist Ethics of Care framework a useful lens for GM crop risk appraisal in the global south?

The risk assessment of genetically modified (GM) crops is assumed to be a benign regulatory tool due to its perceived objectivity and freedom from the morals and values that pervade society. Yet, against the current backdrop of ecological, social and political volatility, issues that cannot be resolved using the existing framework in South Africa are consistently emerging. This paper calls for a reformation of regulatory procedures by exploring the potential of Feminist Care Ethics to illuminate an alternative approach to the assessment of GM crops. While fresh thinking is welcome into the entangled field of biotechnology governance, there remains little understanding of how to accommodate such approaches in the context of the Global South. Twenty three interviews with participants from governmental, non-governmental and academic bodies were carried out in order to explore the potential of a Feminist Ethic of Care as an alternative framework. By examining the current appraisal procedures and tracing their evolution, problems with the current system were illuminated. To assess the suitability of the care ethic framework and ensure reflexivity, a hybrid approach to thematic analysis was applied. Using themes derived from feminist literature such as relationships, context, power, narrative and emotion, new ‘ways of seeing’ risk emerged and illuminated salient issues that are habitually ignored by the current science-based risk approach to assessment. The current approach was found to be flawed, stemming from a neoliberal, productivist perception of our socio-ecological environment. Feminist perspectives instead ask us to broaden the framing of risk, to consider different knowledges, to re-imagine ourselves as social, rather than economic beings, to tap into the capacity of socio-ecological relations and to recognize and dismantle power structures. The research concludes that although the care ethics themes offer a new approach to GM crop regulation, meaningful change will not arise from simply adding these elements to the current system. Rather, a call must be made for a re-imagining, and redesigning, both institutionally and politically-economically.

Counteracting Populist Anti-Immigrant Sentiments: Is Government’s Action Legitimate?

Right-wing populist parties often resort to a xenophobic rhetoric which both exploits and fuels existing illiberal anti-immigrant sentiments. Since populist anti-immigrant sentiments are at odds with fundamental liberal values and challenge the implementation of any liberal ethics of migration, this essay argues that states should adopt civic education policies to counter such sentiments and persuade citizens to develop liberal attitudes towards immigrants. Empirical evidence suggests that sentiments may be malleable, and there are already examples of local governments devising or supporting initiatives aimed at dispelling prejudices and promoting positive interactions. It might be objected that a government’s involvement in shaping sentiments and opinions conflicts with liberal democratic states’ commitment to individual autonomy and electoral fairness. However, I argue that civic education policies are not necessarily incompatible with such values and I provide five criteria to identify policies that liberal democratic governments may legitimately adopt to counteract anti-immigrant sentiments.

Navigating Reconceptualist and Feminist Ethics of Care Scholarship to Find a Conceptual Space for Rethinking Children’s Needs in Early Childhood Education

The aim of this article is to navigate through differing perspectives on the concept of children’s needs in early childhood education. Reconceptualist scholars critique the developmental narrative of the needy and dependent child. In contrast, feminist ethics of care scholars regard having needs and dependencies as ontologically what it means to be human. The article proposes a potential in-between space that recognizes that children have needs and dependencies, as do all entities. At the same time, this recognition is complicated through entangled ideas about subjectivity, needs interpretation, relationality, ethics, and politics.

Towards a feminist parental ethics

AbstractDrawing on our experiences of parenting during the global COVID‐19 pandemic of 2020, we explore the potential for a feminist parental ethics through which parenting can be rethought, reclaimed, and so brought forth as a vital and valuable assemblage of collective articulation work, shared “motherings,” and embodied interconnectivities of caring for and caring with the other. A feminist parental ethics is particularly important in the neoliberal academic context, where the responsibilities of caregiving that lockdown has thrust upon many workers in higher education have been largely downplayed, dismissed, or even ignored across the sector in the interest of maintaining “business as usual.” In response, we ask: “who is caring for the parents?” and we call for an extended idea of parenting beyond the familial as a means of differently organizing our societies, workplaces, and institutions around a shared locus of care.

Organising in defence of life: The emergence and dynamics of a territorial movement in Southern Chile

The aim of this paper is to examine how territorial movements, as distinct forms of place-based social movements, organise in defence of life against the threat of resource extraction on their land. Based on the experiences of Indigenous Lafkenche-Mapuche members of a protracted struggle against a pulp mill in southern Chile, the study seeks to address the following research questions: (1) How do territorial movements emerge and organise the defence of their threatened lives? and (2) How do diverging (Indigenous and non-Indigenous) territorial relations shape the dynamics of the struggle? Combining insights from Enrique Dussel’s ‘ethics of liberation’ with that of Indigenous ontologies, this study suggests that territorial movements emerge out of the awakening of a critical consciousness of the threat of death and the collective ‘desire to live’ that define the dynamics of the struggle. The findings demonstrate how the diverging territorial relations, the societally embedded ‘coloniality of power’, and the state and corporate induced violence shape the movement dynamics. Changes in the movement dynamics also occur as a result of the struggle itself, as the movement actors’ unified desire to live continuously transforms the people and shapes the territory they inhabit.

‘Damn, Channing Tatum can move!’: Women’s accounts of men’s bodies and objectification in post-feminist times

This paper explores how women think about men’s bodies as objects of desire. It reports on one part of a larger qualitative study on men’s bodywork practices in contemporary Australia. Drawing on material from three focus groups with 24 Australian women of varying ages, sexual orientations and backgrounds, the paper considers how women experience, understand and reflect on their desire for men and men’s bodies. It also explores themes such as the connection women draw between what a man’s body looks like and what it can do, how attraction is experienced, the meaning making women engage in as they think about men and men’s bodies, and the broader politics of sexuality and objectification that inform their perceptions and ideas. These experiences are set against ideas in post-feminist thinking on women’s sexual desire and debates on their sexual empowerment. The paper argues that these women are grappling with tensions between their personal experiences of sexual objectification and a feminist ethics relating to their active and reflexive projects of sexuality.

Family care across diverse cultures: Re-envisioning using a transnational lens

In an increasingly globalized world, the importance of developing a more culturally complex understanding of family care has been clearly identified. This study explored family care across three different cultural groups - Chinese, South Asian, and Latin American - living in a metropolitan, Pacific-West, Canadian city. In-depth qualitative interviews were conducted with 29 family members from one of the three family groups exploring how they practiced ‘care’ for their aging, often frail, relatives. The importance of conceptualizing family care as a transnational, collective undertaking emerged from the outset as critical for understanding care practices in all three cultural communities. Three themes identified contributed to this conceptualization: the need to broaden the understanding of family care; the centrality of geographic mobility, and the need to rethink the location of aging and consider its relationship to mobility; and the use of technology by extended family networks to facilitate continuity and connection. An over-riding notion of ‘flow’ or fluid movement, rather than a fixed, static arrangement, emerged as critical for understanding family care. This perspective challenges the dominant approach to studying family care in gerontology that generally conceptualizes family care practice as one local primary caregiver, often female, with some support from other family members. Understanding family care from a transnational lens builds support for the importance of a feminist Ethics of Care lens and has important implications for policy and service delivery practices.

Friendship, intimacy, and power in research on conflict: implications for feminist ethics

Agnes speaks about what she has seen. She repeats the story about the child running with her little brother in a basket on her back, and the little brother being dead. This is the second time she t...

‘More Power to the Women’: Gender and Australia’s Animal Justice Party

ABSTRACT Scholars have long noted the strong presence of women in animal advocacy movements. The twenty-first century has seen the rise of political parties devoted to animal issues across the western world. We do not yet know to what extent the gender dynamics of animal advocacy movements will carry over to these political parties, and the few scholars who have studied animal parties have not yet paid attention to the issue of gender. As a way of identifying and exploring the question of gender, this article reports the findings of an interview-based study of members of Australia’s Animal Justice Party (AJP), exploring their views on gender in the context of animal advocacy. In addition to being the first study of the role of gender in animal parties, this is the first to use interviews as a way of probing the motivations of those who support such parties. It shows the feminist ethics of care to be a central part of these motivations. The article engages with the issue of women’s presence in animal advocacy as well as men’s absence. It also considers animal parties as a potential avenue for women to exercise political leadership.

Liquid home? Financialisation of the built environment in the UK’s “hotel‐style” care homes

This paper combines the political economy of financialisation with feminist care ethics and sociocultural geographies of home. Together, these perspectives explain why and how real estate is converted into liquid financial assets, and expose the implications for embedded relationships. The argument is developed through a case study of UK care homes, with particular attention to the role of real estate investment trusts. Investors in care companies have sought to render their real estate assets more calculable and profitable, by standardising the assets themselves into hotel‐like spaces. In effect, the work of translating between liquid finance and particular homes is transferred – from investors to those creating relationships in hotel‐like spaces. Yet the fundamental illiquidity of residents, relationships, and “home” constrain and destabilise financialisation. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of “liquid home” for economic, urban, and welfare geographies, and recommends that policy pay more attention to the financing of spaces for care.

Teaching leadership the “Day After”, with care

PurposeThis paper aims to share the author’s thoughts and reflections on teaching leadership in “pandemic times”. The author has been teaching leadership for nearly 20 years, both to undergraduate and graduate students, always stressing the importance of humility and compassion, traits that were often doubted and questioned vis-à-vis more traditional, masculine, perceptions of leadership. Yet, local and international leadership during the pandemic brought to surface the need and effectiveness of such characteristics, or what the author calls “the need for a feminist ethics of care” in leadership.Design/methodology/approachThis paper is a thought piece stemming from the author’s experiences and reflections.FindingsThe paper discusses the fact that the most successful handling of the pandemic was largely carried out by female leaders, while also asking “why did so many male leaders do badly?”Research limitations/implicationsWith this thought piece, the author hopes to not only engage the readers in a discussion about effective leadership but also on how to teach leadership in today’s schools of management.Originality/valueThe paper hopes to serve as a springboard for opening the discussion around traditional masculinist modes of leadership that have proven to be detrimental in managing the COVID-19 pandemic while also proposing that feminist leadership embedded in an ethics of care is what the world needs today.

Capacitating care: Activist anthropology in ethnographies of gender‐based violence

AbstractIn ethnographic analyses of gender‐based violence (GBV), anthropologists working on the front‐lines of advocacy and service delivery have increasingly adopted dual roles as activists and researchers. While these positionings have allowed for alternative fields of vision in the ethnographic process, less attention has been dedicated to what these roles do ethnographically, and the kinds of skills and core competencies advocacy roles teach us as feminist anthropologists. If front‐line work has become a tacit best practice of ethnographies in contexts of GBV, then we must ask what kinds of training and preparation is necessary for contemporary anthropologists who want to pursue research among survivors or care providers responding to conditions of violence. I propose that we need to develop capacity‐building strategies that more transparently address these implicit best practices as part of our feminist ethics of care. This investment in capacitating care would acknowledge the moral compulsion to research the experiences and needs of survivor populations, while also considering how we equip ourselves to respond to the specialized needs of survivors, and the forms of care work with survivors necessitates.