Australian Feminist Studies, Vol. 20, No.

46, March 2005

The Political Limits of Care in Re-imagining Interconnection/

Community and an Ethical Future

CHRIS BEASLEY and CAROL BACCHI

Introduction1
Why talk about care? The term care is increasingly invoked as one of the major
languages for recasting community and sociality (others include trust, respect, and
responsibility). Care is invoked because it is concerned with the character of connections
between people */the issue of moral responsibility for others */in the modern world.
Certainly, the significance of care for others in the contemporary international context can
scarcely be overestimated. On the one hand, developed societies, like Australia and the
United States, are experiencing a rapid increase in disability.2 This represents a major
social challenge in terms of care provision. On the other hand, the war on terror and the
predicament of asylum seekers brings home to us all the immediacy and urgency of
considering how we might understand the matter of connectedness or non-indifference
to the plight of strangers.3 In this setting, it is relevant to ask how politically useful an
ethic of care might be in imagining a future better world.
References to an ethic of responsive, altruistic connectedness and to care for others
appear in the writings of feminist care ethicists (including Gilligan, Held, and Tronto), and
political philosophers (for example, in discussions of radical phenomenology in Young;
Davis; Odysseos), as well as in the works of postmodern (Levinas; Bauman), sexuality
(Weeks) and post-colonial theorists (Hage). Care also underpins work on the relational self
(Meyers; Kittay), touch (Josipovici; Shildrick), and embodiment (Ahmed), and is directly
employed in analyses of citizenship (Porter), social welfare4 and civic engagement
(Edwards and Magarey). Relatedly, the term is strongly implicated in various writings on
social solidarity, social capital, trust and democracy (Putnam; Cox; Hewitt; Bourdieu;
Szreter), in anarchist accounts of mutual aid (Kropotkin) and in notions of the gift
(Titmus; Cixous and Clement; Ahluwalia). Moreover, use of the term can increasingly be
found in mainstream ethical debates,5 in bioethical theorising (Martin; Koski), and in
biomedical policy documents (Royal Commission, Canada). This array of contributions
suggests to us that care ethics represents an important site for re-imagining embodiment,
self, community and collective/democratic participation.6
The sheer range of these contributions may appear to signal a kind of triumph for
critiques of neo-liberalism, a source for resisting its limited conceptions of connectedness
and social responsibility. It might suggest cause for celebration amongst those of us seeking
to advance an ethics of interconnection. However, before we break out the champagne, a
ISSN 0816-4649 print/ISSN 1465-3303 online/05/010049-16
DOI: 10.1080/0816464042000334537

2005 Taylor & Francis Group Ltd

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C. Beasley and C. Bacchi

closer examination of these contributions indicates that there are good reasons to be wary
of the turn to care. If we wish to imagine an interconnected and just community
(whether national or international), we might need to think again.
Intimate Care: Individual and Interpersonal Morality7
The main contributors to the development of an ethic of care, at least initially, were social
psychologists and moral philosophers. This background perhaps explains their focus on
individual moral character and interpersonal morality.8 However, the early feminist care
ethicists explicitly linked one-to-one care for intimates with claims about collective social
organisation. Their innovation in terms of political thinking was precisely to reject
dominant assessments of a singular ethical scale that rendered a commitment to particular
relationships, associated with the informal care sector and private domestic sphere, of
limited significance.9
Instead, care in the work of Gilligan, Ruddick and Held became shorthand for
recognising and valuing the specific, particular and affective bases of moral decision
making. Care was intended to counter the covert masculinist bias of mainstream notions
of justice, given that these notions were typically legitimated by reference to universal/
general/abstract and rational/disinterested moral thinking. Moreover, cares affirmation
of the particularistic and affective was not simply celebrated as an attribute of private
(intimate/domestic) life. Rather, care was refreshingly recast as a resource for both private
and public life. The early feminist care ethicists claimed that the kinds of decision making
which go on at the interpersonal level*/the kinds of responsiveness to relationships
typically associated with womens roles and responsibilities */could indeed offer an
alternative ethic or model for political action and community.10
This was certainly a startling departure from the dominant presumptions of political
thought which assume that familial particularity resides alongside narrow self-interest and
is less indicative of social responsibility or less conducive to principles for a just social
life than the supposedly more disinterested interactions of atomistic strangers.11 In
contrast to the public/civil sphere bias of dominant models of ethical interconnection with
others which attend to (non-familial) citizenship, co-operation and altruism,12 these
feminist care ethicists propose that womens maternal practices, for example, could be
mobilised into a broader consideration for those more distant from us. The content of
mothering is therefore seen as a fruitful source for a peace politics in settings beyond the
interpersonal.13
The work of these feminist care ethicists deserves close consideration because it refuses
to grant the public sphere a monopoly on the political imaginary and brings relationships
and activities associated with women into the forefront of this imaginary. Nevertheless,
they outline an approach that is problematic in terms of its political usefulness. Gilligan
has been widely criticised for promoting an essentialist view of women as nicer people
who really care, but such criticisms are only part of the problem. The feminist care
ethicists so far discussed offer an approach that tends to remain within the confines of a
liberal universalist model of ethical theorising. In other words, this approach remains
wedded to the individualist orientation and prescriptive singular understanding of moral
decision making that it precisely criticised in relation to decontextualised, disinterested
notions of justice.
The characteristic emphasis on individual moral character in the work of these feminist
care ethicists suggests that connectedness is much the same in any social sphere: for
example, interconnection between mother and child is much the same as interconnection

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51

in an organisation or in a nation. Despite the apparent emphasis on particularities (on

particular, localised relations), their approach reinstates a universal moral truth.14 They
assume that care is generalisable/transferable from a quite limited range of contexts,
exemplified by the intense specificity of the mother/child dyad. This oversimplification of
care and ironic failure to attend to its context leads to an under-theorised account of
linkage between contexts. Indeed, the mechanisms by which an ethic derived from
interactions between particular others may be transferred to the public and international
domains are taken for granted in the work of Gilligan and Ruddick. Held, more
circumspectly, suggests that this transfer would occur as a result of limited alteration of
individual priorities, which might include diverting money from luxuries for our children
to sending money to Oxfam.15 In more recent work Held again opts for the privileging of
one-to-one flesh-and-blood relationships over consideration for strangers.16 Such a
viewpoint scarcely generates a revised vision of national or international socio-political
life.
The difficulties of the approach adopted by these feminist care ethicists are exacerbated
by the maintenance of a sharp binary distinction between individual ethics and public
policy. Most of them set at odds attention to relations of care and trust as against, as
Annette Baier puts it, the male fixation on the special skill of drafting legislation.17 This
distinction is also evident in Rosemary Tongs work on bioethics.18 Such a perspective
appears to situate the personal against the political, to uphold the personal versus the
political. Accordingly, it seems that feminist care ethicists in the main (exceptions follow
later) have little to say about policy. Their focus on individual moral character arising from
one-to-one interactions produces a limited engagement with or interest in the state and
indeed little attention to power relations in society. Once again it is not evident how care,
understood in these terms, can contribute to a national community, let alone to a world
shaped at least in part by states and marked by massive differences in power and
resources.
We do not suggest here that an ethic of care linked to the private sphere and
interpersonal relations cannot be transferred into other domains as a source for collective
social organisation. In our view these feminist care ethicists rightly highlight the failure of
most socio-political theorising to engage with the private sphere. Their work draws
valuable attention to the political insights that might be associated with deconstructing the
supposedly impermeable barrier between the world of public affairs and that of intimate/
domestic relationships.
By contrast, any political analysis which does not consider the ways in which the
character of interpersonal relationships is translated into the formulations of governance
and public policy will have, for example, a diminished understanding of the gendered
frameworks of Western defence policies, particularly nuclear defence strategies.19
Moreover, such an analysis cannot make sense of the deployment of conceptions of
intimate relationships, of home and (nuclear heterosexual) family as a significant feature of
Western political discourse. Australias Prime Minister, John Howard, for instance, has
made being a family man, a father who can make Australians feel secure by evoking a
concept of home,20 central to his simultaneously hard-line tactics with regard to asylum
seekers amongst other outsiders.21 If a comparative lack of care for distant others can
demonstrate pathways connecting interpersonal relations and public/international
domains, then it certainly seems possible that potentially more progressive rhetorics
and practices like care might also make this journey. To this extent we do not dismiss the
agenda of the feminist care ethicists examined so far.

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However, our concern is that these writers, on the one hand, presume too much. They
assume that care derived from concern for flesh-and-blood others is an unambiguous
moral virtue, a generalisable moral truth which can become a broader concern for those
more distant from us. On the other hand, they presume too little in terms of connections
between the interpersonal and the state. The assertions of these feminist care ethicists
regarding the transfer of care from the interpersonal to other social domains are perhaps
suggestive in national settings. Nevertheless, the mechanisms by which this transfer might
occur remain obscure, particularly given that such analyses appear disengaged from the
state. The application of these feminist care writings to the international arena appears
even more underdeveloped.
Is care ethics more useful when it is less focused on relations between intimates and
pays closer attention to collective sociality, to the issue of distant others and difference?
This question is addressed in the work of Levinas and Bauman. In the process these
writers address the question of an imagined ethical international community.
From Intimate to Distant Others
Both Emmanuel Levinas and Zygmunt Bauman have attempted to take a concern with
interdependence from the realm of the particular into that of distant and different
others.22 Though Levinas does not use the word care, his terms of reference regarding
the trigger for ethical interconnection with others are remarkably similar. Levinas work
shows little awareness of feminism, yet his approach echoes the work of the early feminist
care ethicists in its focus on the face-to-face encounter23 and on responsibility,
responsiveness and compassion, awakened by the others vulnerability. The appeal for
aid, for curative help24 summons what we call love of ones neighbour; love without Eros,
charity.25 This exposition of a form of caritas, of non-indifference,26 which involves the
taking upon oneself of the fate of the other,27 precisely replicates the compassionate
action of care ethics. Levinas work is significant because of its continuing influence in
many postmodern writings, including the work of Jacques Derrida and Julia Kristeva.28
In common with the early feminist care ethicists, Levinas is interested in ethics not for
its own sake but in order to transform understandings of the organisation of social life.29
Nevertheless, for him, human interdependence signals an ethical responsibility, which
precedes politics. This is because the existence of others makes being possible.
Theorising ethical responsibility in this way has meant that Levinas is seen as on the side
of the other. Levinas, like Heidegger before him,30 usefully refuses the paranoid
Hobbesian inside/outside (self/other) dichotomy that prevails in much political and
international theory.31 Levinas work draws attention to the inclination in political and
international theory to construct a dangerous antithesis between the us (our community/
culture/nation) and them (the stranger interpreted as other communities/cultures/
nations/peoples). When the self is set against them and is aligned with collectivities like
culture or nation in this way, we can get a sense of the political stakes involved.32
Such accounts of self/other dichotomy in political and international theorising suggest
fixed, discrete distinctions between stable coherent identities. Furthermore, these accounts
encourage the domestic and foreign policy of states to be conceived in terms either of
emphasising difference between us and them along Realist lines, or focusing upon
dissolving and assimilating this supposed difference (rendering them the same as us).
Both policy projects assume that that the states domestic politics and international
relations are founded in an us and that therefore the states prime responsibility is
promoting our interests and our security as against theirs. Levinas work is directed at

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53

destabilising this self/other distinction, thus putting into question assumptions concerning
fixed community/cultural/national identity and belonging. His thinking highlights the
ways in which these assumptions involve a refusal to see the face of the other */seen, for
example, in the ways in which National Socialism refused the face of the Jew.
For Levinas the other is apprehended in his notion of the face, which he employs to
represent a tactile concept of full humanity beyond particular instances. Levinas himself
endured five years in a forced labour camp under the Nazi regime and saw this as
exemplifying the rational detachment required to perform the erasure of the humanity of
the other.33 His aim, by contrast, is to destabilise the moral distancing, the moral
indifference, he perceives as deriving from the self/other distinction. In particular, Levinas
calls for a community/cultural/transnational ethics that lovingly embraces, but does not
seek to incorporate, the others strangeness. In so doing, he proposes an ethics that can
overcome moral distance. Such an ethics views communities/cultures/nations as
constituted, not by supposed self-interest but by their relations with each other.34
Unlike Heidegger,35 Levinas is concerned to uphold the alterity of the other and
refuse a model of love that suppresses difference.36 Levinas later inclusion of the word
neighbour alongside his earlier term stranger is intended to suggest proximity, but not
in the sense of closeness or knowledge. Proximity refers rather to a state of attention,37 an
ongoing ethical nearness to counter moral distance. Sara Ahmed, however, suggests that
this analysis abstracts the other, the stranger, from actual living people, and produces
the stranger as a fetish.38 In Levinas work the transcendental character of the neighbour,
of the stranger,39 retains otherness as strange. His abstract stranger leaves in place a
presumption of novelty, of being unknown, which effectively re-institutes the others
outsider status.
This problematic reification is also evident in Levinas employment of the mother /
child dyad for reconfiguring our responsibility to others. While the image of the
mother /child bond is apparently intended to lend an anterior status and sense of
necessity to the notion of ethical responsibility, his usage of the mother /child dyad
constitutes the nature of the mother /child relationship as pre-political and tends to glorify
maternal self-sacrifice.40 Levinas asserts a hiatus between ethics and politics, which is
particularly evident in his ethics of (mother) love. The assumption is that politics is always
manipulation.41 Indeed, it can be argued that here as elsewhere Levinas produces a
version of the personal vs political mentioned above in relation to the feminist care
ethicists. This occurs even though they all claim to offer a new vision for a social life, not
just a way of dealing with intimates.
Baumans postmodern ethics makes evident use of Levinas philosophical work.42
Indeed, he specifically states that Levinas is the postmodern ethics.43 However, Bauman
offers a somewhat less abstracted account of social life. Indeed, he develops a sociology of
morality.44 Like Levinas, Bauman is deeply concerned with the problem of moral
indifference. He too draws upon the Holocaust as a means to theorise this problem.45 He
asserts that the violence of the Nazi regime was not a reversion to primitive barbarism, or
to an intrinsic evil at the core of human nature, but rather precisely an outcome of
modern instrumental */that is, detached*/rationality. There are echoes here of feminist
care ethicists concerns regarding the dangers of disinterested rational decision making,
even when employed in the name of justice. For Bauman the Holocaust required its
perpetrators to distance themselves from the face of the victim, to cultivate moral
narcolepsy, and to reconfigure the victim as a matter of organisational management. On
this basis he also discusses moral indifference in recent conflicts such as Bosnia. The work
of Paul Verilio and James Der Darian offers a similar analysis of the problematic effect of

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distancing populations and participants from the consequences of violence in modern

warfare.46
Bauman bases his hope for a postmodern ethics in the ambiguity surrounding
individuals today,47 which he suggests leads to a greater willingness to consider the
stranger within and hence the stranger without.48 In other words, he relates the
capacity to connect with the stranger to a particular historical context or moment, as
against Levinas philosophical inclination to perceive this as a condition of being.
Baumans use of Levinas connects the formers postmodern ethics to an agenda focused
on overcoming moral indifference and re-imagining moral proximity as love of the other.
To his credit, Bauman has been more inclined than the feminist care ethicists or Levinas
to perceive the ambivalent, contextually specific character of love/care (including the
mother /child relation) as not only asymmetrical but as potentially invoking cares other
less attractive synonyms. Care can be caress and control, as Shakespeares account of
relations between disabled people and their carers indicates.49 On these grounds Bauman
has been critical of care talk as paternalistic.50 Yet the language of care remains in his
more recent writings: if there is to be a community in the world of individuals, it can only
be (and it needs to be) a community woven together from sharing and mutual care.51
These laudable sentiments */in common with similar views expressed in the feminist
writings */remain at best vague about what is to generate such a community. How can an
ethic of love/care be simultaneously particularising and generalising52 as Levinas and
Bauman would have us believe? How will care move beyond intimate interpersonal
relations to create community?
For Bauman the ethics of intimacy are admirable but specific, and quite apart from
that of the Social Order, associated with the state, justice, politics, rationality, and
impartiality.53 He assumes a division between an ethics of intimacy and an ethics of
strangers in which the latter is associated with developing institutionalised rules. Bauman,
more than Held and Levinas, appears to see a useful, indeed positive, place for such rules
in developing a society-wide ethic of mutual care. However, in the process he returns
interpersonal care to a limited realm. Intimate love/care may provide an evocative model
but it must somehow be shorn of its personal qualities, and therefore made into something
unlike itself, to be employed at the level of the Social Order. We see here a return to
precisely that which the early feminist care ethicists challenged. The traditional
assumption that moral decision making in intimate relations (and associated with women)
has little to offer an alternative ethic or model for political action and community is
effectively reinstated. The return of the state in Baumans work is at the cost of the
interpersonal.
The feminist care ethicists, including Held, claimed that care for intimates was crucial
to a future model of care for distant others, rejected the public sphere monopoly on the
political, but distrusted politics/the state. Levinas focuses more on the stranger but
invited us to treat the stranger as we would a loved intimate. Like the feminists, Levinas
recasts intimate responsibility as a general matter, as a moral disposition of crucial sociopolitical importance, and he, too, indicates a discomfort with politics/the state. Bauman
follows Levinas account of moral responsibility in many ways but, by contrast, places
greater emphasis on the possible role of politics/the state. However, here the generalisable
value of intimate decision making found in the work of the feminists is reduced to the
merely particular. His proposal for a postmodern ethics is an ethic of love/care, but this is
disengaged from what he calls the ethics of intimacy (the ethics of intimate domestic
care). Unlike the feminist writers, Bauman is inclined to restate a divide between a
broader ethics for the public world and ethical practices predominantly associated with

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55

women that are merely particular. Although Baumans society of mutual care is provoked
by Levinas intimate face-to-face encounter, an encounter the latter identifies with the
mother/child bond, this starting point is oddly disenfranchised along the way. In
consequence, it is once again unclear where the imperative for a caring society will come
from. Cares mechanisms of production and distribution remain disturbingly nebulous.
This is especially concerning if we accept Baumans view that care is a complex
ambivalent moral virtue, capable of complicity in domination.
In this setting, we would concur with Bauman and Held (as against the other early
feminist care ethicists and Levinas) that the ethical stance that may be found in intimate
relationships of care is not necessarily straightforwardly replicable with strangers, nor
can it simply be transferred to other social domains. However, we do not think that this in
any way supports the view, promulgated in different ways by all these writers, that
personal ethics are distinct from (and even opposed to) politics in the sense of systematised
social/public policy and rules.54
A range of writers have linked care to more specific social conditions and mechanisms.
Their works also enable the notion of care to be considered in relation to an imagined
international community. These writers include political, sexuality and post-colonial
theorists.
Political Caring: Connecting Intimate and Distant Others by Engaging the
State
Feminist political theorists Joan Tronto and Selma Sevenhuijsen have attempted to deal
directly with the limitations of a moral philosophy version of the ethic of care.55 They
insist that feminists (and, we suggest, writers like Levinas) need to stop thinking about care
as a moral disposition or moral philosophical question.56 Rather, care ought to be seen as
an important social practice, which should be considered in political deliberations. This
move shifts the discussion from a singular focus on one-to-one caring relationships to
institutional caring arrangements, policy making and so on. In this way Tronto and
Sevenhuijsen do challenge the kind of individual/private ethics vs public rules separation
asserted by early feminist care ethicists,57 as well as by Levinas and Bauman. Tronto states
explicitly that care is a collective, not an individual, responsibility.58
We agree with this analysis. Nevertheless, how this might be put into practice remains
decidedly unclear. After all, many forms of institutional violence have been and continue
to be justified in the language of institutional and state care. For example, the historical
policy of removing some children from Aboriginal communities in Australia with the aim
of supposedly ensuring their rescue from their Aboriginality was constituted as
government delivering care.59 It is a policy still judged as caring in intent by the present
Australian government.60 Similarly, some versions of fathers rights could be and are
often defended in the language of childrens needs, a possible interpretation of care.61
With care as the yardstick of ethical practice, there is considerable latitude for
interpretation, as Sevenhuijsen herself explicitly notes.62 Here, as is the case in the
work of Gilligan and Ruddick, the linchpin of care appears to involve some degree of faith
that it will produce appropriately beneficial outcomes.
Sevenhuijsen notes that all definitions of care contain normative dimensions.63 This
normative component takes a particular shape. It evokes a sense of compassion or
sympathy. Yet the uncertain meaning of care clearly can be associated with a range of
political motivations and effects. An instance of the political difficulties attached to cares
woolly meaning may be found in the arena of reproductive policy. The 1993 Canadian

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Royal Commission on New Reproductive Technologies adopted the title Proceed with
Care for its deliberations, specifically as an indicator of a commitment to the ethic of
care.64 The final report employed a version of the ethic of care to condemn commercial
surrogacy, while supporting regulated altruistic surrogacy.65 Furthermore, the Executive
Summary to the report assumed the value of children and families, and the governments
role in encouraging the production of more of these.66 The Royal Commission also came
down in favour of lesbian and/or single womens access to AI (Assisted Insemination) and
IVF, but stopped short of endorsing access for post-menopausal women. In other words,
the ethic of care was used to bolster a mixed bag of social proposals, some of which
challenged conventional understandings of gender, family and sexuality and some of
which did not. That is, the ethic of care was able to be employed to justify at least some
policies that care ethicists might view as open to debate.
Sexuality theorists Valerie Lehr and Jeffrey Weeks have also employed care as a means
of reconfiguring community and argued for a more public culture of care. Lehr, for
example, specifically locates care in opposition to the language of rights, which in her
view depoliticises and privatises collective issues.67 Here, Lehr follows Trontos work,
while Weeks has been influenced by Bauman. Both queer the heteronormative
assumptions of care ethics and locate care in existing historically constructed social
practices and communities. Where Lehr challenges some of the heterosexual assumptions
about family within feminist care ethics, Weeks grounds the abstraction of mutual care
in Baumans approach within contemporary gay communities and hence usefully
acknowledges care in settings beyond the familial. In Invented Moralities Weeks outlines
the ways in which an ethic of care can forge community in the face of death, in the face of
the devastation wrought by AIDS.68 However, despite their broader and more socially
specific understanding of interconnection, these approaches share with the earlier feminist
analyses a tendency to conceive care in relation to the particular close-up intimacies of
neediness, dependency and vulnerability. Their exemplars largely revolve once again
either around children or sickness/death. As before, we would note the uncertainties of
transferring ethical practices derived from such exemplars to distant others.
Post-colonial theorist Ghassan Hage has, like the political and sexuality theorists just
mentioned, enunciated an account of care that is clearly about political caring based upon
a notion of interconnection as social practice. Hage is concerned about care as indicative
of a particular, more positive imaginary state of the nation, as against focusing upon
individual moral dispositions or one-to-one relationships. He contrasts care as a mode of
national belonging with the fearful insecurity or worrying he sees in present-day
Australian society and beyond. Worrying undermines citizens to the point of disabling
significant forms of sociality. To the extent that citizens feel abandoned or at least not
cared for by their national homes, he argues, they will be uncaring towards each other
(the national community) and towards the international community. Care is generated by
nation-states, by those nation-states providing material social conditions that distribute
hope and which thus activate the inherent disposition of hopefulness in individuals.69
In Hages analysis the call to care is a polemic about the welfare state. Here, as in the
not dissimilar work of Tronto and Sevenhuijsen, there is a different and more broadly
socio-political starting point for care than that proposed by the feminist care ethicists or
postmodern theorists discussed above. Rather than beginning with intimate one-to-one
relations, he starts from the caring community/nation.70 This seems to us to be a very
much more fruitful point of departure. Nonetheless, while care begins in the realm of
political policy in Hages analysis, it then activates an intrinsic property of individuals that
produces certain positive outcomes. The mechanisms enabling this transference from

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57

national policy to particular individuals to a general concern for others, including distant
others, are as confidently presumed (rather than spelt out) as they are in the work of
Gilligan and Ruddick, where transference flows in the opposite direction. The latitude
granted the term care remains. Because Hages account is perhaps the most politically
nuanced of the approaches considered so far, this point requires a little more detail.
Hage, like Levinas, makes use of the mother /child dyad for re-imagining a community
of care. The mothers breast and/or lap is used to symbolise the national subject /national
society relationship, to stand in for a caring motherland in which citizens are nurtured
sufficiently to enable them to go on and nurture others. While this symbolism has the
potential for a sentimental reification of the maternal that mars the writings of Levinas,
Hage does at least acknowledge that the mother /child dyad may not be simply benign.
He notes that the inter-subjective and reciprocal ethics he envisages resides in an open
parental embrace.71 Nevertheless, the socio-political analysis that strengthens his account
of the beginnings of care */that is, his account of where it comes from*/does not extend
to its impact.
Hage, like Bauman, is aware that care (by mothers or the state) can be less than benign,
but he does not appear to recognise that the outcome of receiving care is not predictable
and may not result in giving care to others. There are numerous analyses of the politics
of giving care which strongly suggest that receiving society-wide forms of care does not
inevitably produce voluntary (unpaid) generosity, especially generosity to marginalised
others. For example, whatever their individual circumstances regarding receiving care,
men have a significantly lesser involvement in giving care than women. Womens
comparatively far greater involvement in unpaid care duties and the resultant
asymmetrical character of personal care is well established in many studies.72 As this
instance indicates, no straightforward relationship between receiving care and giving it
can be assumed. The gift does not necessarily go on, let alone go on to those who are
positioned in an asymmetrical relationship to the receivers of care. The latter may simply
perceive such care as their due.
To illustrate this point we note that, while the Howard government has diminished
public caring available to all, higher socio-economic groups in Australia have been the
subject of government care */for instance in terms of increased assistance to wealthy
private schools*/since 2001.73 Yet there is no evidence that the recipients of this
assistance are appreciably more inclined to give care to others. This suggests that we
cannot assume in advance that receiving public care will necessarily result in giving care,
as Hage anticipates. In particular, we cannot assume that public care will necessarily
overcome patterns of refusing altruistic exchange such as occur in relation to gender and
heterophobia (fear of the other).74 In Hages analysis, like those of previous writers, what
care means, including what it does, remains in the realm of faith.
Summary
In the light of the previous discussion, does adding care to the range of rhetorics about
re-imagining community expand the debate in useful ways? Overall, we suggest
considerable caution. Because care is a vague precept open to interpretation and
deployment,75 we have to consider just what is risked by wedding our ethical proposals to
it.
Firstly, cares relationship to any specific politics, let alone a beneficent or effective one,
is uncertain. Care ethics theorising is often associated with conventional understandings of
gender, family and sexuality.76 In application the ethic of care may be decidedly

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ambiguous in relation to these understandings.77 Yet writers employing care ethics

typically presume that care has effects that will produce beneficial and far-reaching
normative outcomes, whether or not they conceive care in intimate or public terms. This
optimistic confidence in cares capacity to engender a progressive politics, based on
appeals to compassion or sympathy for less fortunate/dependent others, may, however,
lend support to problematic, even conservative agendas. Such possibilities are by no
means unimaginable, as we have seen in the case of the Howard governments rationale
for the removal of Aboriginal children from their parents and in the rhetoric of fathers
rights. Moreover, rather than generating far-reaching outcomes, the notion of care may
simply not work politically. In this context we note mainstream Australias recent rejection
of care/compassion for the plight of asylum seekers stranded on a Norwegian vessel, the
Tampa .
Secondly, rather than being an approach that avoids a disinterested universalistic stance
and fosters sensitivity to difference and context (as Gilligan and Ruddick claim), care
ethicists in the main pay heed only to particular particularities. Care ethicists in general
usually associate care with their interpretations of dependency78 and often only with
certain aspects of interconnection */those to do with intimate bodily maintenance and
nurture.79 In other words, they frequently pay attention only to a specific kind of context
from which they generalise, thus ironically replicating the universalist pretensions of
liberal moral philosophy that care ethicists are supposedly concerned to reject.
When writers employing an ethic of care/love do not provide this kind of context, they
tend to move into abstractions.80 In common with Ahmed,81 we are not sure that the
decontextualised theorising associated with the work of Levinas and Bauman, for instance,
does enable recognition of the social materiality of distant others and hence any greater
sensitivity to actual socially concrete particularities. The early feminist care ethics writings
challenged decontextualised, emotionally detached and universalised moral thinking.
Similarly, the versions of care ethics developed in the work of Levinas and Bauman have
been taken up in postmodern thought as a means to counter universalised modernist
conceptions of disinterested moral decision making. Yet instead of the focus on particular
particularities that can be associated with the former, we find in Levinas and Bauman a
tendency to reify or disavow these intimate particularities while largely speaking in highly
abstract terms.
Some of the themes associated with the ethic of care */the challenge to impartiality and
to notions of a singular moral scale; the visceral sensitivity to human embodiment and
interconnection with its acknowledgement of the claims of dependency and welfare; the
place of emotion and intimacies associated with both women and the private sphere in
human decision making, including in national/international public policy */are politically useful.82 To our mind, however, care does try to find a simple solution to the
problem of imagining and shaping an ethical future. This signals its most notable failing.
So long as care is associated with attempts to install a particular value often framed by a
particular conception of interpersonal relations as a guide to political action, so long as it
is assumed to produce self-evidently benevolent predictable outcomes, it is open to abuse
and its applicability is necessarily limited.
Where to from Care?
Nevertheless, the possibilities raised by the several accounts of care are evocative and
suggest to us some future modes of inquiry. We are, for example, considering a new mode
of ethics which holds at its centre a notion of social flesh83 as a way to talk about the

The Political Limits of Care

59

complex nature of the interaction between subjectivity, embodiment, intimacy, social

institutions and social interconnection.84 This mode of analysis, which cannot be more
than briefly outlined here, necessarily draws upon the thinking associated with various
terms including care, touch and trust. Care may yet have more space in it for a new
political imaginary.
Care provides a suggestive field of thought, but nevertheless our intention is to develop
an ethic that is less problematic than an ethic of care. Importantly, social flesh retains the
intimacy and visceral associations of care, as well as the notion central to care ethics that
these embodied associations have much to offer the realm of public politics. Yet, on the
other hand, an ethic of social flesh reconsiders these associations. As indicated above, the
early feminist care ethicists put embodiment on the political agenda but they, like the later
feminist political theory and sexuality writers who further develop an embodied care
ethics,85 deal only with quite specific aspects of embodiment.86 The inclination of these
care ethics writers is to focus almost exclusively on only two aspects */those to do with
bodily maintenance/nurture and the amelioration of distress/suffering, to be found in
elder care, childcare, and palliative care. Those writers who have contributed towards the
development of a postmodern version of love/care ethics (for example, Levinas and
Bauman) offer, by comparison, an approach that is abstract and thinly physical, but they
too share the tendency to conceive this ethics in terms of overcoming distress/suffering.87
Hages post-colonial analysis, though it is less narrowly restricted to bodily care than the
feminist and sexuality analyses and less abstract than the postmodern ones, also
understands care as a means to counter the distress/suffering of the marginalised.
Despite the value and power of their insights, all of the care ethics accounts tend to
reaffirm a dichotomy between those who care and those cared for, invoking an asymmetry
we find concerning. The ethic of care, in whatever guise, appears to retain a focus on the
fragility of the other and the radical generosity of altruistic existence,88 reinstating
asymmetry at the core of the relationship. In our view, no matter how sharply cognisant of
the requirement to destabilise us/them distinctions, care ethics writings rest upon an
asymmetry that threatens to return such distinctions under the name of deeply felt
compassion and open-hearted generosity. The emphasis on feelings (for the other) */
rather than on notions of dispassionate impartial moral justice */invokes an apparently
self-evident authenticity that may precisely make this re-mobilisation of us/them
distinctions more difficult to recognise and challenge. Visions of a future ethical
community are likely to draw upon such feelings but require, in our view, a broader
conception of embodied (inter)subjectivity. The aim is to move away from the moral
philosophy orientation of most care ethics writings towards a political ethic concerned
with collective intersubjective sociality along lines similar to Hages analysis, even if not so
firmly tied to national belonging (or gendered constructions of a caring motherland).
We suggest that recognition of our shared intersubjective embodiment marks a different
ethical moment. It shifts the focus from individuals or groups constituted as dependent to
human interdependence and the political means by which this might be recognised. The
challenge theoretically is to maintain this crucial observation regarding interdependence
and not lapse into versions of sociality that construct some as needy and others as
beneficent.
As noted previously, all uses of the term care contain a normative component that
takes a particular form.89 Care evokes a sense of altruism and compassion, connected with
its twin concerns regarding nurture and suffering. The term social flesh, by contrast, is
less prescriptive in that it does not require characterisation of some human subjects as
needy to generate a general responsiveness to others, and is also less reliant on moral

60

C. Beasley and C. Bacchi

disposition. This politically framed ethic does not presume in advance that forms of social
recognition that flow from it are laudable or predictable. Rather, it creates a point of
departure for imagining and debating responsive interconnection, without abandoning
certain insights that the care literature offers.
NOTES
1.

2.

3.
4.

5.

6.

Early versions of this paper were presented at the Re-Imagining Community conference (2002) in
Lancaster, United Kingdom, and the University of Adelaide Politics Seminar Program (2003). A more
developed version was delivered at the Re-imagining Communities and Care: Citizenship and Gender
(Gender Roundtable) conference, University of Adelaide (2004). We would like to thank members of the
Womens Studies Institute at the University of Lancaster, our colleagues in the Politics Discipline, and
contributors to the Gender Roundtable, who offered a number of useful suggestions.
According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics Australian Social Trends 2003 study, one in five
Australians now lives with a disability, an increase of 25 per cent in the past two decades. Similar trends
are evident in developed countries around the world. This increase in disability is associated with
improvements in medical and healthcare, as well as with the ageing of such societies. Deirdre Macken,
The Disabled Nation, Weekend Australian Financial Review, 28 /29 June 2003.
Emmanuel Levinas, Useless Suffering in Entre Nous: On Thinking of the Other, M. Smith and B. Harshav
(trans.) (Columbia University Press) New York, 1998, p. 100.
See, for example, the work of the CAVA research group on Care, Values and the Future of Welfare,
University of Leeds, United Kingdom. I refer in particular to Sasha Roseneils work including, Reimagining Care: Transformations of Intimacy, Sociability and Welfare in the 21st Century (Or, Why We
Should Care about Friends) on the CAVA website: B/www.leeds.ac.uk/cava/, a more recent version of
this paper delivered at the University of Adelaide Politics Seminar in September 2003, and the special issue
of Feminist Theory, vol. 4, no. 3, 2003, edited by Sasha Roseneil and Linda Hogan.
Beauchamp and Childress note that [t]he care ethic provides a needed corrective. Tom L. Beauchamp
and James F. Childress, Principles of Medical Bioethics , 4th edition (Oxford University Press) New York, 1994,
pp. 84 /92.
Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice (Harvard University Press) Cambridge, MA, 1982; Virginia Held, Feminist
Morality (University of Chicago Press) Chicago, 1993; Joan Tronto, Moral Boundaries: a Political Argument for an
Ethic of Care (Routledge) New York, 1993; Iris Marion Young, Pregnant Subjectivity and the Limits of
Existential Phenomenology in C. Inhde and H. Silverman (eds), Descriptions (SUNY Press), Albany, 1985;
Walter A. Davis, Inwardness and Existence: Subjectivity in/and: Hegel, Marx and Freud (Wisconsin University Press)
Madison, 1989; L. Odysseos, Radical Phenomenology, Ontology, and Political Theory, Alternatives: Global,
Local, Political , vol. 27, 2002; Robert Bernasconi and Simon Critchley (eds), Re-reading Levinas (Indiana
University Press) Bloomington, 1991; Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodern Ethics (Blackwell) Oxford and
Cambridge, 1993; Jeffrey Weeks, Invented Moralities: Sexual Values in an Age of Uncertainty (Columbia
University Press) New York, 1995; Ghassan Hage, Against Paranoid Nationalism: Searching for Hope in a Shrinking
Society (Pluto Press) Annandale, Sydney, 2003; Diana T. Meyers (ed.), Feminists Rethink the Self (University of
Chicago Press) Chicago, 1995; Eva Fader Kittay, Loves Labor: Essays on Women, Equality and Dependency
(Routledge) New York, 1998; Gabriel Josipovici, Touch (Yale University Press) Yale, 1996; Margrit Shildrick,
Embodying the Monsters: Encounters with the Vulnerable Self (Sage) London, 2002; Sara Ahmed, Strange Encounters
(Routledge) London, 2000; Elisabeth Porter, Interdependence, Parenting and Responsible Citizenship,
Journal of Gender Studies , vol. 1, 2001; Anne Edwards and Susan Magarey (eds), Women in a Restructuring
Australia: Work and Welfare (Allen & Unwin) Sydney, 1995; Robert Putnam, The Prosperous Community:
Social Capital and Public Life, American Prospect , vol. 13, 1993; Eva Cox, A Truly Civil Society (ABC) Sydney,
1995; J. Hewitt, Re-conceptualizing the Voluntary Sector: Associative Democracy in the Pluralistic Public
Sphere and the Legacy of Tocqueville, Gierke and Durkheim, Third Sector Review, vol. 3, 1997; Pierre
Bourdieu, The Forms of Capital in J. Richardson (ed.), The Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of
Education (Greenwood Press) New York, 1986; Simon Szreter, The State of Social Capital: Bringing Back
in Power, Politics and History, Theory and Society, vol. 31, 2002; Peter A. Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: a Factor in
Evolution (Heinemann) London, 1915; Richard M. Titmus, The Gift Relationship: from Human Blood to Social
Policy (Allen & Unwin) London, 1970; Hele`ne Cixous and Catherine Clement, The Newly Born Woman
(University of Minnesota Press) Minneapolis, 1985; Pal Ahluwalia, Towards (Re)Conciliation: the Postcolonial Economy of Giving, Social Identities , vol. 6, 2000; P. Martin, Bioethics and the Whole, Journal of

The Political Limits of Care

7.

8.
9.
10.
11.
12.

13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.

20.
21.

22.

23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.

61

Law, Medicine & Ethics , vol. 27, 1999; Greg Koski, Risks, Benefits, and Conflicts of Interest in Human
Research, Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics , vol. 28, 2000; Royal Commission on New Reproductive
Technologies, Proceed with Care , Final Report, vol. 1 (Minister of Government Services) Ottawa, Canada,
1993.
For a much more detailed commentary on the early feminist care ethicists, see Carol Bacchi and Chris
Beasley, Biotechnology and the Political Limits of Care in Margrit Shildrick and Roxanne Mykitiuk
(eds), Rethinking Feminist Bioethics: the Challenge of the Postmodern (MIT Press) Cambridge, MA, forthcoming
2005.
See Iris Marion Young, Punishment, Treatment, Empowerment: Three Approaches to Policy for Pregnant
Addicts in P. Bowling (ed.), Expecting Trouble (Westview Press) Boulder, 1995, p. 116.
Gilligan, In a Different Voice .
Gilligan, In a Different Voice , pp. 11, 71, 135; Held, Feminist Morality, p. 39; Sara Ruddick, Maternal Thinking
(Womens Press) London, 1990, pp. 134, 232.
Genevieve Lloyd, Reason, Gender and Morality in the History of Philosophy, Social Research , vol. 50,
1983.
Will Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy: an Introduction (Clarendon Press) Oxford, 1990, p. 253; Nira
Yuval-Davis, Gender and Nation (Sage) London, 1997. See Christine Putland, Feminism and Citizenship: Reimagining Public and Private Perspectives on Womens Participation, PhD thesis, Flinders Institute of
Public Policy and Management, Flinders University of South Australia, 1999, p. 81.
Gilligan, In a Different Voice , pp. 9, 11; Ruddick, Maternal Thinking, p. 232; Held, Feminist Morality, p. 39.
Susan Hekman, Moral Voices, Moral Selves: Carol Gilligan and Feminist Moral Theory (Polity) Cambridge, 1995,
p. 7.
Held, Feminist Morality, p. 74.
Virginia Held, Caring Relations and Principles of Justice in J. Sterba (ed.), Controversies in Feminism
(Rowman & Littlefield) Lanham, MD, 2001, p. 73.
Held, Feminist Morality, p. 86.
Rosemarie Tong, Feminist Approaches to Bioethics in Susan M. Wolf (ed.), Feminism and Bioethics: Beyond
Reproduction (Oxford University Press) New York, 1996, p. 89.
Carol Cohns account of the links between masculinity, sexuality and nuclear strategic thinking provides a
disturbing, if sometimes bleakly humorous, instance of the ways in which aspects of the gendered private
sphere are embedded in military decision making. Carol Cohn, Sex and Death in the Rational World of
Defense Intellectuals, Signs , vol. 12, 1987.
John Howard, Prime Ministers on Prime Ministers Lecture, Old Parliament House, Canberra, 3
September 1997.
Don McMaster, Asylum Seekers: Australias Response to Refugees (Melbourne University Press) Melbourne, 2001;
Carol Johnson, Governing Change: Keating to Howard (University of Queensland in association with the API
network) Brisbane, 2000; Carol Johnson, Heteronormative Citizenship: the Howard Governments Views
on Gay and Lesbian Issues, Australian Journal of Political Science , vol. 38, 2003.
Bernasconi and Critchley, Re-reading Levinas ; Zygmunt Bauman, The Individualized Society (Polity) Cambridge,
2001; Zygmunt Bauman, Community: Seeking Safety in an Insecure World (Polity) Cambridge, 2001. In return,
these approaches have received careful and at times highly critical scrutiny amongst feminists attending to
ethics. Luce Irigaray, Question to Emmanuel Levinas on the Divinity of Love, M. Whitford (trans.) in
Robert Bernasconi and Simon Critchley (eds), Re-reading Levinas (Indiana University Press) Bloomington,
1991; Rachel Russell, Ethical Bodies in P. Hancock et al. , The Body, Culture and Society (Open University
Press) Buckingham, 2000; Vikki Bell, On Ethics and Feminism: Reflecting on Levinas Ethics of Nonindifference, Feminist Theory, vol. 2, 2001.
Sara Ahmed, Differences that Matter (Cambridge University Press) New York, 1998, p. 60.
Levinas, Useless Suffering, p. 93.
Emmanual Levinas, Philosophy, Justice and Love, in Entre Nous: On Thinking of the Other, M. Smith and B.
Harshav (trans.) (Columbia University Press) New York, 1998, p. 103.
Levinas, Useless Suffering, p. 100.
Levinas, Philosophy, Justice and Love, p. 103.
Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, The Work of Mourning, and the New International
(Routledge) London, 1994; Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves in K. Oliver (ed.), The Portable Kristeva
(Columbia University Press) New York, 1997; Anthony Burke, Strangers without Strangeness: Ethics and
Difference between Australia and the New Indonesian Order, Communal/Plural , vol. 8, no. 2, 2000; Floyd
Dunphy, Post Deconstructive Humanism: the New International as An-Arche, Theory and Event , vol. 7,
no. 2, 2004.

62
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.

37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
42.
43.
44.
45.
46.
47.

48.

49.

50.
51.
52.
53.
54.
55.

56.
57.
58.
59.

C. Beasley and C. Bacchi

Simon Critchley, Continental Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction (Open University Press) Milton Keynes, 2002,
p. 1.
Roy O. Elveton, Introduction in Roy O. Elveton (ed.), The Phenomenology of Husserl: Selected Critical Readings
(Quadrangle Books) Chicago, 1970, p. 9.
Mary Dietz, Thomas Hobbes and Political Theory (Kansas University Press) Lawrence, 1990, p. 4.
Burke, Strangers without Strangeness, p. 144.
Dunphy, Post Deconstructive Humanism.
Burke, Strangers without Strangeness, p. 146.
In Heideggers work the other is never properly encountered anew as otherness is pervasive, an already
given of the self. Odysseos, Radical Phenomenology.
Alterity is a term commonly adopted in poststructuralist and post-colonial thinking to refer to the state of
being other, to otherness, to the state of the alternative, and is intended to shift often philosophical
discussions of the other to more concrete concerns located in political/cultural contexts. Although
Levinas work is highly abstract, it is not devoid of context and his work is now frequently used in relation
to particular concrete contexts. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, Key Concepts in Post-colonial
Studies (Routledge) London, 1998, pp. 11 /12; Richard Osborne, Megawords (Allen & Unwin) Sydney, 2001,
pp. 25 /6.
Bauman, Postmodern Ethics , pp. 86 /8.
Ahmed, Strange Encounters, p. 142.
Ahmed, Differences that Matter, pp. 61 /2.
Janet Borgerson, Feminist Ethical Ontology: Contesting the Bare Givenness of Intersubjectivity, Feminist
Theory, vol. 2, 2001, p. 177.
Bell, On Ethics and Feminism.
See, for example, Bauman, Postmodern Ethics , 1993, pp. 47 /52, 84 /7, 92 /3.
Bauman, Postmodern Ethics , p. 84, emphasis added.
Mark Lacey, War, Cinema, and Moral Anxiety, Alternatives , vol. 28, 2003, p. 611.
Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Polity) Cambridge, 1989.
Paul Verilio, War and Cinema (Verso) London, 1989; James Der Darian, Virtuous War (Westview Press)
Boulder, 2001; Lacey, War, Cinema, and Moral Anxiety.
Kristevas work on the stranger within us offers a similar perspective to that of Bauman. Julia Kristeva,
Strangers to Ourselves in K. Oliver (ed.), The Portable Kristeva (Columbia University) New York, 1997, pp.
264 /94.
Ahmeds point regarding the abstracted and hence fetishised character of the conception of a stranger
applies here as well. Bauman asserts, for example, that the other as an abstract category simply does not
communicate with the other I know. Bauman, Postmodern Ethics , 1993, p. 113, emphasis in original.
Tom Shakespeare, The Social Relations of Care in Gail Lewis, Sharon Gewirtz and John Clarke (eds),
Rethinking Social Policy (Sage) London, 2000. Bauman, Postmodern Ethics , 1993, pp. 82 /109. Another version
of this analysis may be found in Shildricks careful enunciation of a similar ethical project that recognises
the ambivalence of touch. Shildrick, Embodying the Monsters , 2002, p. 118.
Bauman, Postmodern Ethics, p. 96; Bauman, The Individualized Society.
Bauman, Community.
Bauman, Postmodern Ethics , p. 92.
Bauman, Postmodern Ethics , pp. 112 /16.
It would seem that both feminist care ethicists and postmodern theorists in different ways stumble at the
public/private divide.
Tronto, Moral Boundaries ; Joan Tronto, Who Cares? Public and Private Caring and the Rethinking of
Citizenship in Nancy Hirschmann and Ulrike Liebert (eds), Women and Welfare (Rutgers University Press)
New Brunswick, 2001; Selma Sevenhuijsen, Feminist Ethics and Public Health Care Policies in Patrice
DiQuinzio and Iris Marion Young (eds), Feminist Ethics and Social Policy (Indiana University Press)
Bloomington, 1997; Selma Sevenhuijsen, Citizenship and the Ethics of Care (Routledge) London, 1998.
Nevertheless, we note Sevenhuijsens account of care as a viewpoint that requires cultivation of the
individual moral actors virtues. Sevenhuijsen, Feminist Ethics, p. 64.
Hekman, Moral Voices , p. 23.
Tronto, Who Cares?, p. 74.
See Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, Bringing Them Home: Report of the National Inquiry
into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families (Australian Government
Publishing Service) Canberra, 1997.

The Political Limits of Care

60.

61.

62.
63.
64.
65.
66.
67.

68.
69.
70.

71.

72.

73.
74.

75.
76.

77.
78.
79.
80.

81.
82.

63

Discussion of the Australian federal government submission to the Senate Inquiry on the practice of
removing children from Aboriginal communities reveals the breadth of divergence over the meaning of
care in this instance. See Michelle Grattan and D. Jopson, Black Fury Explodes Over Stolen Children,
Sydney Morning Herald , 3 April 2000; Robert Manne, The Removalists, Melbourne Age , 10 April 2000.
Mary Shanley, Fathers Rights, Mothers Wrongs? Reflections on Unwed Fathers Rights and Sex
Equality in Patrice DiQuinzio and Iris Marion Young, Feminist Ethics . This interpretation of care has arisen
in Canada and Australia. In June 2003, fathers rights groups were critical in encouraging Australian
Prime Minister John Howard to order a parliamentary inquiry into Family Court deliberations concerning
custody of children after divorce. The inquiry will investigate making joint custody automatic in a bid to
give more room to fathers rights, a change that would at least modify the present Family Court principle of
the paramount status of the well-being of children in determining custody. Gary Tippet et al ., Degrees of
Separation, Melbourne Age , 28 June 2003.
Sevenhuijsen, Citizenship and the Ethics of Care , p. 107.
Sevenhuijsen, Citizenship and the Ethics of Care , p. 22.
For a more extensive analysis of the use of care in biomedical policy documents, see Bacchi and Beasley,
Biotechnology and the Political Limits of Care.
Royal Commission, Proceed with Care , pp. 50, 595.
Royal Commission, Proceed with Care , p. xxxi.
Valerie Lehr, Queer Family Values: Debunking the Myth of the Nuclear Family (Temple University Press)
Philadelphia, p. 19; Weeks, Invented Moralities . See Shane Phelan, Queer Liberalism?, American Political
Science Review, vol. 2, 2000.
Weeks, Invented Moralities , pp. 155 /88.
Hage, Against Paranoid Nationalism , pp. 22 /7; Ghassan Hage, On Worrying: the Lost Art of the Welladministered Cuddle, Borderlands , vol. 2, no. 1, 2003.
Hage plays a similar role with regard to the term care, to that of Szreter (The State of Social Capital) in
relation to social capital. Both perceive the state as central to the way in which social bonds are formed, in
contrast to the early feminist care ethicists and to Putnams (The Prosperous Community) communitarian
version of social capital, respectively, which privilege small-scale or one-to-one forms of association. For an
elaboration of these themes see Carol Bacchi and Chris Beasley, Moving Beyond Care/Trust: an Ethic of
Social Flesh, conference paper, Australasian Political Science Association conference, 29 September /1
October 2004, University of Adelaide.
Hage, Paranoid Nationalism , pp. 26 /8. Hage does break at times from employing maternal iconography in
relation to a caring nation and occasionally substitutes the term parent. Nevertheless, motherland
exemplifies care as against the order of the fatherland in his depiction of national imaginaries. Hage,
Paranoid Nationalism , pp. 36 /8.
Janet Finch, Family Obligations and Social Change (Polity) Cambridge, 1989; Clare Ungerson, Caring and
Citizenship: a Complex Relationship in J. Bornat et al. (eds), Community Care: a Reader (Macmillan/Open
University Press) Basingstoke, 1993; Sylvia Walby, Is Citizenship Gendered?, Sociology, vol. 28, 1994.
Nhada Goodfellow, Richest Private Schools Share $8M Funding, Adelaide Advertiser, 31 May 2003.
Odysseos, Radical Phenomenology; see also Johnsons analysis of the ways in which some groups are
politically constituted as unworthy of care. Carol Johnson, Narratives of Identity: Analysing Race, Class
and Sexuality, unpublished paper presented at the Politics Discipline Seminar Series, University of
Adelaide, South Australia, 2004.
Carol Bacchi, The Politics of Affirmative Action: Women, Equality and Category Politics (Sage) London, 1996.
See for example Virginia Held, Feminism and Moral Theory in Eva F. Kittay and Diana Meyers (eds),
Women and Moral Theory (Rowman & Littlefield) Totowa, 1987; Elisabeth Porter, Interdependence,
Parenting and Responsible Citizenship, Journal of Gender Studies , vol. 1, 2001.
Royal Commission, Proceed with Care . See discussion above.
Young, Punishment, Treatment, Empowerment, p. 115.
See, for example, Tronto, Who Cares? and Lehr, Queer Family Values .
We suggest that a more useful path, following Laceys advice, would be to map the many ways in which
care is interpreted and enacted in particular contexts. Nicola Lacey, Feminist Legal Theory Beyond
Neutrality, Current Legal Problems , vol. 48, 1995.
Ahmed, Strange Encounters , p. 142.
The visceral, private and feminine connotations of care may be contrasted with the more cognitive, public
and masculine bases of trust in social capital thinking. Fran Baum and A.M. Ziersch, Social Capital,
Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health , vol. 57, 2003.

64
83.

84.
85.
86.
87.
88.
89.

C. Beasley and C. Bacchi

We see links between this account and Shildricks ethics of vulnerability. However, as is outlined in the last
section of the paper, we emphasise a political (rather than philosophical) ethic, which rests more upon
collective intersubjective embodiment than upon a common individual vulnerability. Shildrick, Embodying
the Monsters .
Chris Beasley and Carol Bacchi, Citizen Bodies: Embodying Citizens */a Feminist Analysis, International
Feminist Journal of Politics , vol. 2, 2000.
Tronto, Moral Boundaries ; Weeks, Invented Moralities .
Bacchi and Beasley, Biotechnology and the Political Limits of Care.
Levinas, for example, describes the other in terms of the weak, the poor, the widow and the orphan.
Emmanuel Levinas, Time and its Other (Duquesne University Press) Pittsburgh, 1987, p. 83.
Edith Wyschogrod, Towards a Postmodern Ethics: Corporeality and Alterity in Edith Wyschogrod and
Gerald P. McKenny (eds), The Ethical (Blackwell) Oxford, 2003, p. 63.
Sevenhuijsen, Citizenship and the Ethics of Care , p. 22.