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Gender, Place & Culture
A Journal of Feminist Geography
ISSN: 0966-369X (Print) 1360-0524 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cgpc20
Race and feminist care ethics: intersectionality as
method
Parvati Raghuram
To cite this article: Parvati Raghuram (2019) Race and feminist care ethics: intersectionality as
method, Gender, Place & Culture, 26:5, 613-637, DOI: 10.1080/0966369X.2019.1567471
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2019.1567471
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INVITED ARTICLE
Race and feminist care ethics: intersectionality
as method
Parvati Raghuram
The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK
ABSTRACT
Gender has been the privileged optic through which care
ethics has been theorised. However, a long line of theorists
has argued that gender intersects with other vectors such as
race, class and disability in the social world, including in caring
practices. This paper contributes to the emergent literature
on intersectionality and care ethics by focusing on how
racialised difference affects care practices and therefore care
ethics. It focuses on competence and alterity, and recognition
and communication, as two elements that point to how
racialised care is risky. It argues that slavery and colonialism
have underpinned racial hierarchies marking contemporary
racialised care encounters. As a result, racially marked people’s
skills are often undervalued and their competency questioned
even as race becomes an increasingly important
difference between who cares and who receives care.
Secondly, racial hierarchies in who gets care and what that
care looks like can make care so distinctive as to be unrecognisable
both to the care giver and those who need care. Lack
of care is as productive of subjectivities as care so that care
needs simply may not be articulated. Finally, given these differences
in what care means, caring can become risky. The
paper concludes by suggesting that thinking through intersectionality
as method allows us to focus on moments and
events where care can become unsettled. Care ethics should
learn not only from its successes but also from instances
when care has failed. We need a feminist care ethics that
responds to the distance and difference that race brings to
care. That is the promise of good care.
ARTICLE HISTORY
Received 3 February 2018
Accepted 30 October 2018
KEYWORDS
Care ethics; competence;
intersectionality; race;
recognition; risk
Introduction
Care has been defined as ‘a species of activity that includes everything we
do to maintain, contain, and repair our “world” so that we can live in it as
well as possible. That world includes our bodies, ourselves, and our environment’
(Tronto and Fisher 1996 36, 40). In doing so it spans between an ethics,
(based on) a practice and a process. It has become one of the keystones
for shaping normative thinking for feminists. Feminists writing in varied fields
CONTACT Parvati Raghuram Parvati.Raghuram@open.ac.uk
ß 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
GENDER, PLACE & CULTURE
2019, VOL. 26, NO. 5, 613–637
https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2019.1567471
– education (Noddings 1984), philosophy (Held 2005), political science
(Tronto 1994) and psychology (Gilligan 1982) – have utilised care ethics as a
way of thinking relationally, arguing that humans (and later non-humans),
were ontologically relational. Moreover, and despite some differences
between those theorising care ethics, they have also suggested that it
involves close attention to the specificities of particular caring interactions
rather than a pallet of pre-defined notions about what is virtuous or just.
Feminist care ethics has drawn on women’s caring roles as the basis for
thinking of care as a universal good. While feminists have varied in the
extent to which they view care as a disposition intrinsic to women, the fact
that most care work globally is done by women, and that care is also inherent
to mothering (Ruddick 1989), has meant that women and care are
closely tied together. Besides, as they have argued, the experience of being
cared for as a child is a foundational experience for most people globally,
irrespective of their gender, extending the relevance of gendered care
beyond women to encompass everyone (Gilligan 1982, Hollway 2006). It is
thus, inspired by the experiences of women and the desire to use these
experiences to theorise for, and on behalf of, women (feminist care ethics).
One of the fundamental questions raised by feminist care ethics is whether
care is gender neutral or feminine. Although Carol Gilligan (1982) began by
inserting gendered difference as the basis for a new ethic, this has subsequently
been challenged, including by herself (1995), in her explorations of
care ethics and justice. Gilligan argued in 1995 that justice can sometimes be
seen as universal and male while care is equated with self-sacrifice and with
‘ethics’ on the terms of others (see also Laugier 2015). This has led to a complex
debate on the relation between ethics (of various kinds), justice and masculinity
and femininity through, for instance, an exploration of injustice
(Robinson 2013). This paper primarily focuses on racialised women and care
ethics before concluding with how and why black masculinity and care
requires its’ own exposition. It uses gender to refer to unequal structures of
power which women experience at the cross sections of race and class.
In the years that have passed since care ethics was first theorised, there has
been a large literature on the differences between women, based on class
(McDowell 2006), race (Collins 2000), sexuality (Butler 1999), ability (Thomas 2006)
and location amongst others (Mohanty 1984). As the power hierarchies between
women are seen to be as important as those between men and women, the politics
around feminism has multiplied and differentiated (Combahee River Collective
1977, Crenshaw 1991, Collins 2000). We now talk of feminisms, rather than feminism.
These variations are political and based on the embodied experiences of
women, as evidenced in debates in a wide variety of disciplines.
The differences between women have also been addressed within care
ethics (Barker 2012, Boyd 2013, Conradi 2015a). One set of interventions
614 P. RAGHURAM
highlight the need to think about how gendered care intersects with identity
categories – axes of diversity which have become such an important part of
contemporary feminisms. Thus, a number of authors argue for the need to
adopt an intersectional approach to the ethics of care (Hankivsky 2014,
Hamington 2015, Ward 2015; and for early interventions see Collins 1995,
Nicholson 1993), one which goes beyond the a priori use of gender as the
privileged analytic through which care is analysed. They insist on the importance
of the relations between gender and other identity categories as significant
to reshaping care. Implicit in this discussion of the dominance of
gender is the recognition that race and class make a difference to how gendered
care is practised, and hence, to how care should be theorised.
Another set of differences relate to the multiple ways in which women
are implicated in care practices, such as the distinctions and overlaps
between care-giving and care-receiving (Tronto 1994, Kittay 1999). It has led
to important debates between scholars working in disability studies and care
ethics (Kr€oger 2009, Kelly 2013), for instance, as one’s position within a caring
relationship differs depending on whether they are care receivers or care
givers. These arguments are neatly summarised by Hamington (2015) who
suggests performativity as a way of thinking intersectionally. Similarly, Ward
(2015) introduces the cared for and carer into the scope of the identities
that need consideration in intersectional thinking, while Hane (2017) extends
these arguments to include those who are employed in non-caring activities
in the global South. In doing so, these authors also make space for thinking
about how the identity categories through which Hankivsky (2014) interrogates
care ethics can be brought together with the practice-based differences
discussed by Hamington (2015).
Another set of differences arises from different forms of feminism. These
are neatly summarised by Sander-Staudt (2006, 34): ‘Liberal feminists might
emphasize care as a gender-neutral virtue of an individual that should be
chosen autonomously, while radical feminists might emphasize care as a
social and individual virtue that partakes in dichotomous understandings of
sex and gender and that requires revision. Radical and liberal feminisms also
tend to stress different forms of political and moral agency. Liberal feminists
highlight formal agency and individual autonomy against a background of
social relations (which may or may not include care), while radical feminists
highlight informal agency and misogynist social relations against a background
of socially embedded individuals.’ However, the differences between
these feminists across the world as it relates to racialised care are important
too but they are yet to be explored.
The differences between feminine and masculine care have also been
studied. For instance, Hanlon (2012) points to how men ‘care-about’ rather
than ‘care-for’, with care being recast as protection – financial or personal
GENDER, PLACE & CULTURE 615
(Montes 2013). Caring-for, especially by fathers, is widely seen within the
context of new masculinities although these new masculinities take novel
forms in migrant households. For instance, care and emotion have to be provided
by men in households where women have migrated (Asis et al. 2004),
while men both lack care and have to rewrite their care as wage earning
when it is the men who move (Zelizer 2000). Men are also enrolled into caring
waged work – as workers in the socially reproductive sectors of the
labour market (Kilkey et al. 2013). For instance, over half of all male migrant
domestic workers are in the Arab States where over 10% of all domestic
workers are men (ILO 2015). However, there has been little sustained
thought into how masculinity intersects with care ethics.
One notable exception is the work of Karla Elliott (2016) who suggests a
normative framework for rethinking masculinities and care. She identifies
domination as a key characteristic that has to be traded-in by men who care
but points to the potential for caring masculinities (Jordan 2018). Crucially,
Elliott argues for thinking about caring practices as a way of undoing and
redoing masculinity.
This paper contributes to this practice-based way of thinking intersectionality in
care ethics, focusing specifically on racialised women. It elaborates on how race
reshapes care as practice, and therefore it’s ethics. Methodologically, it unpicks
some key moments as examples of caring practices that are central to care ethics
and highlights how racialised care throws up conundrums which are important
for care ethics to consider (Narayan 1995, Siddle Walker and Snarey 2004).
The rest of this essay is divided into four sections. The next (first) section
introduces how and why race matters to care practices and hence to care
ethics (and for an extended discussion of the relations between care practice
and ethics, see Raghuram 2012, 2016). In the following three sections I
explore some ways in which these racial differences are played out. In the
second section I focus on competence and alterity and how race leads to different
valuations of skills. Competence is the least studied of the four core
elements of care ethics set out by White and Tronto (2004) but care competence
is deeply racialised in multiple ways as I will show. The following section
outlines the difficulties in recognition and dialogue across difference. It
suggests that those who have had little access to care have little recognition
of their care needs or their right to care and even if these are recognised
they are incompletely and inadequately communicated. It thus focuses on
how the assumption of a sovereign rights-bearing person who knows they
need care and can articulate this need can come unstuck when dealing with
populations that have received so little care. The final section suggests that
given the lack of coherence of care as a set of activities, care is risky. By
pointing to these three aspects, the paper prises open care as a set of practices
to which race makes a difference in order to highlight what this means
616 P. RAGHURAM
for care ethics. The paper suggests that the instability of care requires that
we disassemble the ethics of care into some of its’ constituent care practices
and see how each involves power relations that need to be carefully
addressed if care is to be ethical.
The paper draws on examples from varied contexts, in each of which both
race and care have very specific historical and spatial connotations. Race and
gender therefore matter differently in these examples. Given the many differences
between women, including between racialised women, who is the
‘(black) woman’ of feminist theory? This is a question for feminist care ethics
too. Yet, feminists see repetitive patterns of sexism and gendered oppression,
albeit varied by race and class, including in care practices (Hankivsky
2014). How can these variations be squared with this repetition?
Toril Moi (2015) draws on the writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1960) to
address this conundrum. She argues that feminists need to move beyond
the search for generality suggesting instead that thinking through examples
‘shows us how to escape from the logic of representation – the logic of
inclusion/exclusion – that dominates feminist theory today’ (191). She contends
that examples are descriptions of particular cases, not representations
of a concept. Thus, using one example of a particular racialised incident, or
indeed a pattern of racism (as evidenced, say in labour market statistics),
does not invalidate the existence of other examples. Rather, examples are
used in place, for particular purposes, not to generalise or to suggest a
necessary relationship. Nor are these examples complete. Further examples
may add, alter or challenge the findings of one set of examples.
Following Moi, I too use examples to do provide the ground from which
to theorise. The examples neither claim to point to the essence of race and
gender, nor indeed all instances of this intersectionality. This is where philosophy
begins – to raise questions which are tentative and whose grounds
may need to be rewritten. I use these examples as a method to think intersectionally
about care ethics. Intersectionality has become a much repeated
phrase across the social sciences (Crenshaw 1991) but how can intersectionality
be applied to care ethics? I use race as one example to explore
this question.
Race and care
Race has been central to the division of caring labour in the postcolonial
world. In many societies, slavery and colonialism defined who cared and
who received care (Stoler 2001; and for an excellent discussion see Glenn
2010). Slavery in the US, for instance, restructured care globally by relocating
and fracturing caring units and by demanding new heightened levels of care
from some while relegating their own care as inconsequential (Morrison
GENDER, PLACE & CULTURE 617
1987, Smith 2011). It led to the removal of care from racialised and enslaved
bodies in previously unknown ways. Colonialism too led to new racialised
divisions of care globally with a rich literature describing both the horrors
and the pleasures that accompanied this (see for instance, Stoler 2001).
Moreover, welfare systems and economies were structured around the care
that was coerced from racialised people (Glenn 2010). That is the history of
race and care on which current narratives of the two are scripted.
The dimensions of race and care today are shaped by past and ongoing
histories of mobility (van Riemsdijk 2013) that bring together differently
racialised people (Kofman and Raghuram 2015). There at least four ways in
which these racialised encounters are being played out today:
1. mobility of racialised carers: migrants who move as domestic workers,
social workers, nurses and doctors (Pratt 1999, Graham 2007).
2. racialised minorities as carers: the long as well as more recent histories of
migration mean that there is a significant population of racialised minorities
(Gunaratnam 2008) who require care.
3. moving to access care from racialised majority populations: rich, and usually
racially dominant populations, have moved historically (Cock 1989)
and are still moving and depending on numerically large racialised populations
for their care. More recently they have moved specifically in
search of caring labours of those who are racially hierarchised – sometimes
through this labour (Bender et al. 2014). This may include short
term medical care (Whitmore, Crooks, and Snyder 2015) or relocation of
white populations to countries where women are racially ascribed as
inherently caring (Howard 2008).
4. carers racialised as different groups of migrants move: the globalisation of
the care industry brings together different groups of carers whose caring
abilities are valued differently because of how their care is racialised.
They have to work in highly racialised environments where racial differences
are negotiated while giving (and receiving) care (Batnitzky and
McDowell 2011; Gunaratnam 2008).
These are some of the different permutations of race and care that exist
today. Care practices are therefore deeply imbued with racial politics present
and past. Moreover, the gendered ascriptions of care are always being written
and rewritten in these racialised settings. Some men are taking on, intensifying
or simply continuing with caring activities, as women migrate leaving
behind caring roles. Others are entering the care sector as the increasing globalisation
of care provision provides new employment opportunities for
women as well as men (Locke 2017) in both the paid and unpaid sectors of
the labour market (Kofman and Raghuram 2015).
618 P. RAGHURAM
Geographers have made significant contributions to debates in care ethics.
One body of work discusses how care ethics contributes to debates on ethics
in geography (Popke 2006, Lawson 2007). Another focuses on sites of care as
varied as hospices (Brown 2003), homes (Cloutier et al. 2015), markets (Daya
2016) and the university (Lopez and Gillespie 2016) and their implications for
care ethics. Moreover, the implicit location of care ethics in the global North
(Raghuram 2016) and the importance of local definitions of care and how
they get incorporated into a globalising discourse around care ethics
(Raghuram 2012) have also been discussed. Care is deeply contextualised by
cultural factors, the political economies which underpin care delivery and the
geohistories that have shaped care but the specificities of care practices
mean that care ethics too may need to be nuanced for different locales.
These interventions highlight the importance of place not only in care practices
but also in reshaping care ethics. A third set of writings within geography help
to reposition who is, should or could be the object of care, from animals (Taylor
and Carter 2018) to the environment (McEwan and Goodman 2010). Finally, as
in some of the feminist literature, the carer is the focus of many studies. The
carer is helpfully seen at the intersection of multiple identities including gender
(Johnson 2017), age (Ansell 2009), sexuality (Radicioni and Weicht 2018), ability
(Chouinard 2000) and migration status (Raghuram 2016). However, race has
received much less attention in geographical discussions on care ethics even
though it is so crucial to shaping care practices. Moreover, even though there is
work on racialisation and care practices, the difference this makes to care ethics
has not been explored, i.e. the particular activities and frameworks of care ethics
have not been explicitly considered in this literature.
Race not only shapes care practices but must also be seen to reflect back
on care ethics because racialised differences in care practices have implications
for care ethics (Narayan 1995, Siddle Walker and Snarey 2004). Siddle
Walker and Snarey’s (2004) edited collection brings together a number of
scholar activists, especially those in the skilled caring professions such as
education, to explore how care is enacted differently in strongly racialised
settings. They dislocate care from the unnamed white body through which
much care ethics is theorised. They point out that for feminists writing about
care ethics the divide between those who care and the cared for has largely
been drawn across gender lines. However, gender differences also intersect
with, and are complicated by, differences across class and race, in particular,
so that some versions and visions of care are much more likely to be reproduced.
Similarly, Uma Narayan (1995) has argued that the ideological purposes
for which moral theory has been utilised needs attention. She
suggests that care and justice were both handmaidens of colonialism. Racial
difference and coloniality were produced and justified using the language of
care. For her, this is an important, but often ignored, part of care ethics.
GENDER, PLACE & CULTURE 619
On the other hand, some care ethicists have also attempted to reclaim
the promise of care including for racialised populations. For instance,
Maurice Hamington (2015) suggests that embodiment provides one basis on
which to share and communicate about care needs. He unsettles the notion
that such care simply exists or can be known a priori; it must be learnt.
The rest of this paper takes a step back from this position to shine light
on what it is that might need to be learnt. Where are some of the fault lines
that trouble racialised caring practices and what are the challenges they
pose? This paper addresses this by suggesting that race operates in and
through care practices and focusing on these practices has implications for
the core terms and concepts that have been used to understand care ethics.
Competence and alterity
Care is seen to require a combination of: attentiveness (what are the care
needs in any context?); responsibility (who should be responsible for meeting
the needs for care?) responsiveness (how far does care meet the needs
of the cared for and the carer?) and competence (does the carer have the
skills required to care?) (White and Tronto 2004). Each of these is contextually
specific but as they are performed across difference there will be limits
to how attentiveness, responsiveness, responsibility and competence are calibrated
and understood (Raghuram 2012, 2016). How do we reframe the analytical
frameworks of care to take account of incommensurable distance and
difference? This is the question I first turn to, focusing specifically on care
competence. In particular, I emphasise how care competence is recognised
and the embodied valuations and uneven geohistories of care that these calibrations
draw upon in the skilled sectors of the labour market. Focusing on
professionalised skilled caring sectors brings a set of challenges which are
often missed when care and care ethics are primarily viewed in the private
sphere, and particularly through mothering (Kofman and Raghuram 2015).
Questions of competence become particularly crucial when addressed
across difference. While care ethics has focused on attentiveness, responsibility
and responsiveness there is much less recognition in discussions of care
ethics of the competence required to care (but see van Poser 2017,
Hamington 2017). This competence is not natural or obvious but is diverse
because care itself is defined differently in different parts of the world.
Secondly, it also circulates in a world where skills are geopolitically coded
and ascribed differentially based on colour. Finally, these racialised notions
of skills have geographical referents that hierarchise people, places and credentials.
Caring therefore comes with a set of preconceptions and of structural
frameworks whereby competence comes to be racially marked. It does
not exist in a vacuum; nor is it an empty category. It is these racialised and
620 P. RAGHURAM
politicised versions of difference that pose interesting questions for care
ethics as I explore below.
An excellent example of racialised difference in caring is offered by
Yasmin Gunaratnam (2008). She uses the case of death and dying among
migrants in the UK and the limits of professional competence in negotiating
racial difference. She suggests that cultural awareness courses and the professionalisation
of this difference does not adequately take account of individual
variations in care needs. When care is defined differently, then how
competence in care-giving should be calibrated is itself unsettled. Similarly,
Catherine Locke (2017) too points to the ethnocentrism of defining care content
and competence while van Poser’s analysis of care giving in Papua New
Guinea reminds us of the extent to which care is culturally defined and how
different competence can look for different groups and over time (2017). All
these authors highlight the multiplicity of the notion of competence in a
diverse world.
Secondly, these differences in notions of care competence are hierarchical
with some people’s competencies valued more highly than that of others.
Underpinning valuations of caring skills are complex geopolitical histories
which operate to complicate the value placed on care (Kofman and
Raghuram 2015). For instance, whiteness operates along with colonial history
to differentiate white Europeans and Filipinas providing childcare in Canada
(Pratt 1999). Filipinas were deemed to be servants while white Europeans
undertaking the same tasks were portrayed and remunerated more highly as
nannies. For Geraldine Pratt this difference can, at least in part, be ascribed
to colonial discourses that have led to the ‘the production of borders that
define workers as worthy or unworthy, competent or incompetent, skilled or
unskilled’ (Pratt 1999, 234).
Historical relations not only produce divides between races but also racialises
categories in very specific ways. Micheline van Riemsdijk (2013) found
that Polish migrant nurses in Norway, who may be deemed white, have their
knowledge devalued because of the history of how Poland has been viewed
in Norway, as part of a ‘less advanced’ Eastern Europe. The embodied value
of whiteness was tarnished because of this history, making whiteness too a
complex category. The importance of geopolitical formations in the valuing
of skills takes skills outside the individual alone and places it centrally within
the politics surrounding the reproduction of societies (Kofman and
Raghuram 2015).
As Pratt (1999) has argued the privileging of nurturance as a core element
of care resonates more closely with the experiences of white women. Using
the Canadian case, she argues that when care is provided by upper-middleclass,
ethnically European woman, it is cast as pure and as embodying the
qualities (skills such as attentiveness and affect such as love and empathy)
GENDER, PLACE & CULTURE 621
cited by care ethicists (Tronto 1993). However, this excludes the experiences
of poor women and women of colour (Duffy 2011, 2005), many of whom are
engaged in backroom, menial and manual tasks of care (Barker and Feiner
2009). The distinctive qualities that define care as paid work also need to be
redefined if it is to take cognisance of racialised women.
Colonialism has sedimented, contorted and reframed existing social divisions
through which care was organised and received but it has also left a
legacy in how it is remembered and accounted for. When care is not reciprocal
the value of the caring task is reinscribed and redefined. For example,
Stoler and Strassler (2000) invoke and counterpose the memories of families
of Dutch colonisers in Java and those who had cared for the children in these
families. The stark differences between the memories of the domestic workers
and those who had employed them lay bare some of the complexities of care
as practice, as memory and the ensuing responsibilities for interpretation by
those who undertake such research (and for a recent example of care from
South Africa, see Swartz 2012). The caring memories (marked by feelings of
belonging and warmth) of the employers who remember loving servants differed
from, and were sometimes at odds with, the more prosaic memories of
servants who remember duties and salaries more easily than acts of kindness
and unkindness. Clearly, the caring activities inhabited different worlds of valuation.
These differences mean that care can be unrecognised or misunderstood
but can also then become a site of struggle (Noxolo et al. 2012) as it is practised
on a deeply politicised terrain. It is denied as often as it is claimed.
Finally, these notions of competence and skill also have their own histories
which draw together different places which are themselves implicated in
the hierarchisation of skills. Place matters when considering competence.
This short but incredibly rich extract from Coolie Doctor (1991), the autobiography
of a South African Tamil doctor Dr. K.G. Naidoo (1906–1997, also
known as Goonam) provides a short, sharp reminder of how race, place and
skills come to matter in the caring professions. She relates the story of her
imprisonment after she led the 1946 Passive Resistance Campaign against
the anti-Indian Land Act. The warden of the prison asks her:
‘What work do you do?’
‘I am a medical practitioner. I do gynecology and obstetrics.’
‘You what?’
‘I am a doctor.’
‘A witchdoctor?’
‘They don’t teach witchcraft in Scotland’
622 P. RAGHURAM
Clearly race is central to both medical skills and her citations of it (Burton
2011). The warden attempts to situate the medical knowledge of this nonwhite
woman in less credible caring practices and to belittle her skills. But
Goonam counters this by drawing upon the global authority of medical education
from Scotland, as she did in her political career. These skills are valued
by the white interlocutor. Being a witchdoctor, on the other hand, does not
have the power of spatial referents such as attachment to the UK (the apex
of medical hierarchies in the Commonwealth countries) or the authority that
Western medical knowledge accrued in Scotland has (Raghuram 2009). The
spatial stretch and authority of this selective Western medicine, produced
through colonial histories of medical knowledge, provides the framework for
assessing competence and skills for caring. Thus, competence is imbued with
geohistories not only of care but of what good care looks like. Notions of
care are imbricated in global patterns of power that go beyond ‘who cares’
to ‘how care is defined and validated’ (see below).
This excerpt touches upon very different notions of skills. It points to the
need to theorise care as ethic across radically different notions of competence.
There are groups for whom ‘witch doctor’ is a perfectly competent
way of caring but these are erased and downgraded by both the warden
and Dr. Goonam, cast into the outer world of this multiracial society.
Moreover, England had its own history of witchcraft which too never
attained the authority associated with, and imparted through, Empire. Race
is not dyadic here but scored with the hierarchies of colour as they cut
across class. Access to a Scottish education enables Goonam to align on the
same side, momentarily, as the white warden in marking out some forms of
caring as competent.
Difference and distinction can be troubling for caring practice, but it also
needs to be put to work to trouble care ethics (Bartos 2018). Although several
care theorists writing about the ethics of care argue for the recognition
of particulars, and for contingent mutually agreed definitions of care (Held
2006, Noddings 2013) many assume that the differences in the definitions,
motives and outcomes of care can be agreed. Thus, Held (2006) suggests
that ‘with the ethics of care, global suspicions of Western claims about universal
reason may be circumvented’ (p. 157-158). But care also involves alterity,
even radical alterity. Can engagement with the practices or philosophies
of non-Western care or indeed of global feminist thinking beyond the West
(see Mahadevan 2014) really leave the ethics of care untroubled? As Cooper
says ‘(m)oral reasoning, tending, attachment, therapeutic labour and repairing
the world all require teasing apart through application of an extended
lexicon, as much to explore the connections as the disjunctions’ (2007, 258).
Care is ‘situated and non-innocent’ (Cuomo 1997, 14).
GENDER, PLACE & CULTURE 623
Hannah Stark (2014) poses these as problems of recognition of care and
caring skills in the context of alterity and the risk that ‘what is at risk of erasure
is actually difference, contradiction, and incoherence’ (p. 96). The challenge
of looking through the optic of race is the possibility of radical alterity
in definitions (and ethics) of care. These different notions of competence are
not only sites where inequalities of power come to light but also where new
coalitions around care can be formed (Keller 2010). That is why these
variations (should be made to) matter (Conradi 2015b).
Recognition and communication
This section begins with examples of caring but where the content of care
may be so different as to be unrecognisable to others or to oneself. I then
move on to highlight the ability to articulate care needs as a right that those
without a history of receiving care find difficult. Underpinning these arguments
is the removal of care that racism has wrought and how it rewrites
care practices and the questions this then raises for ethics.
Mothering has been a central anchor for thinking about care and its constitutive
quality in producing the subject (Holloway 2006). Maternal affect
and the ensuing care practices are therefore core to care ethics (Ruddick
1989). However, as Keller (2010) argues, this thinking is often based on the
experiences of a particular group of unnamed white women. This is mothering
in the abstract or at least where there is some degree of certainty of
care. Mothers who are raising children in highly racialised, on the other
hand, must teach their children to deal with the unjust racialised world outside.
Mothering is preparation for the lack of care. As Noah (2016) remembers
mothering consisted of familiarising him with the pain just around the
corner for being born the wrong colour. ‘They’re trying to discipline you
before the system does.’ (p. 267). It was always tough love!
This recognition of the differential definition of care also seeps into the
skilled caring professions. Thus, Audrey Thompson (2004) illustrates how
teachers make different assumptions about what constitutes care. In her
example, only Black teachers recognised the different care needs of children
of colour and they use ‘colourtalk’ to assist Black students in combating
racism. Colour talk ‘decentres and denormalises Whiteness’ (Thompson 2004,
33). These different requirements of care are most stark in writings on
enslaved families, where ‘caring for’ may involve killing the child who is born
into slavery (Noxolo et al. 2008). Race and racism redefine care in the most
intense and painful ways imaginable.
Just as caring activities are racially marked so too are there variations in
who cares. For instance, the role of community in helping to combat the
effects of racism can be crucial. As Siddle Walker and Snarey (2004) argue, a
624 P. RAGHURAM
wide variety of social networks are essential to buffering African Americans
from racism. As a result, children are cared for ‘by other mothers’ and not
only birth parents, in a practice called allomothering. Looking through the
lens of racialised and disadvantaged, but also socially varied groups beyond
the West, shows us that not only what care constitutes, but also who cares
and how care is arranged, is much more varied than is often presumed in
care ethics (Otto and Keller 2014). What may appear careless parenting
involves different, perhaps not very easily recognisable forms of caring.
Care patterns and processes may be unrecognisable across difference but
this also means that the talk of care may be unrecognisable to those for
whom care is only a task. White and Tronto (2004) argue that middle class
parenting is based around ‘privileged irresponsibility’ whereby some groups
– men, the upper class and racialised majorities – do not expect to care as
they are seen as undertaking more important tasks. By implication there will
also be a group of the unprivileged responsible whose labour is not only
necessary but also must be made invisible in order to facilitate privileged
responsibility. This care is sometimes not even visible to those who provide
it – it is naturalised, so that they may not see themselves as either possible
beneficiaries or as potential claimants of care (see Butler 2012).
Because care stretches across both public and private spheres, neither
care-receiving capacities nor care-expecting ones are wholly self-generated.
The state, welfare regimes and domestic life all have huge effects on subject
formation, our ability to recognise and enunciate care needs and to recognise
our entitlements to care. Although care ethicists recognise that care recognition
is crucial to good care, most existing debates centre on recognition
of the needs of the other, not self-recognition. However, lack of recognition
also undermines self-care. Amartya Sen (1987) found that rural Indian women
who were asked about their welfare found the question unintelligible as
they think and respond with the family as their basic unit. This unintelligibility
may be multi-layered – a lack of recognition of rights, a recognition of
how familialism is the route to rights, a refusal to understand rights through
individualism and so on. However, this lack of recognition of the need for
self-care draws on and can reinforce gendered familalism in care policy and
public discourses. The intersection of gender and class then leads to stratified
care (Palriwala and Neetha 2011). Thinking through (and about) the family
could, in effect, make it difficult, even where desirable, to formulate any
clear notion of individual care needs. The autonomy of the individual and
the necessity of protecting that autonomy is not what is at stake here – that
is a notion much critiqued by those writing about care, particularly in Global
South contexts (Evans and Atim 2011). Rather, what I want to highlight is
the extent to which this lack of recognition is itself a condition of subjugation.
Care-less practices are as productive of subjectivity as careful ones.
GENDER, PLACE & CULTURE 625
Similarly, Michelle Murphy (2015) discusses this productive capacity within
the context of negative experiences of care, arguing that fear and anxiety
are also productive of affect (Ahmed 2010). Appropriation and exploitation
are productive of subjectivities and hence limit the claim making and the
claim recognition of subjects. When discussing caring relationships between
able-bodied people care ethics may presume a knowing subject who has a
sense of care entitlements. However, looking through the lens of those who
have been disadvantaged, including racialised populations disenfranchised
through colonial and postcolonial violence, poses the issue of how one
might entitle care givers to recognise their own care needs. How do we
ensure that care is not defined by those who have been privileged enough
to have received care? This is an important question because as Murphy suggests
‘feminist projects of care are within a skein of appropriation and reappropriation,
of antagonistic and yet enabling relations, of uneasy animations
that are not merely political, economic, and complicit, and yet also not
merely reparative or oppositional or better. Projects of care, feminist and
otherwise, are full of romantic temptations that disconnect acts that feel
good from their geopolitical implications’ (Murphy 2015, 724-25).
Thus, care entitlements are socially, culturally and politically contingent and
are not easily universalisable (Raghuram 2012, 2016). If care is theorised as a
practice, then we should also recognise that practices are indelibly inflected
by these complex geohistories of existing practices of care. The definition of
care does not precede its practice but arises from geographically variegated
practices of care. And these go beyond individual definitions of care and
instead encompass the ambit of social relations through which the entitlements
to care enable a recognition of the need for care. However, this is not
to uphold methodological relativism, theoretical attachment to post-modernism
(see Hallstein 1999 for the latter), or to suggest that all different understandings
of care should necessarily be defended. Rather, it is to recognise the
need to engage difference with all that this implies – including radical alterity.
Secondly, these care needs are not necessarily readily or easily communicable.
We do not all have the modes of sharing what care means to us. What
happens when the meanings are not shared? Barnett (2005) emphasises the
importance of the circumstance within which decisions about care are taken,
i.e. the process of caring involves a communicative process. But these circumstances
not only influence decisions about care for the other but also
the ability to articulate the need for self-care. The racialised migrant body
suggests that care entitlements are generated differently in different places.
Can we then adequately express our care needs to others even if they are
recognised by the self?
Calder (2015) discusses deliberation in the context of a set of workshops
where care was discussed amongst a mix of care-givers, receivers,
626 P. RAGHURAM
professionals and academics. He points out that spaces were created for dialogue
and engagement and that multiple voices were heard. Nevertheless,
professionals’ voices carried extra weight and their language was more likely
to be adopted. Public validation of competence counted. What is not clear
in his example is how factors such as race, age and gender too may have
influenced the deliberation. Moreover, this discussion focused on a formal
setting (see also Barnes 2011); what happens in everyday care practices,
domestic spaces and where the power differentials are more acute? What
are the processes through which care needs are communicated, deliberated,
decided?
Unsurprisingly, it is care practitioners, in this case those researching nursing
studies, who address this best. Cloyes (2002) suggests that in order to
address issues of power we need to think of care as a particular form of political
agency within a productive context of power (p. 210). For Cloyes, the
multiplicity of ethical systems and the diversity of contexts and principles
through which care is defined means that disagreement about the nature of
care is fundamental to its definition. She, therefore, argues that caring is a
political process. However, if the politics of communication and of deliberation
are weighted against the subaltern (Spivak 1988), then how can their
care needs be recognised and acted upon?
Postcolonial theory offers some suggestions. For instance, Bhabha (1994)
argues that although the communication of needs occurs within an overarching
hegemony this hegemony is always fractured and hence offers
spaces for intervention. Spivak (1988) on the other hand, emphasises the
need to sensitise those who are more powerful while they in turn need to
make extra efforts to listen. Engaging with these insights on communication
and dialogue, I would suggest, complicates the politics of recognition and
communication that are central to care (Noxolo et al. 2012).
Care as risk
So far, we have seen that the bundle of activities, emotions and responses
that constitute care as an ethic can’t always be held together through care
as practice. Moreover, differences within the qualities that make up care
become amplified in the context of race and class. Care for the other is also
always fractured or distorted by ‘feelings of obligation, burden and frustration’
(Chakravarti 2008, 359). Globally this instability of care arises from its
performance across the intimate boundaries of race, class and gender.
Moreover, care involves a varied set of practices which articulate with the
political, economic and social in geo-historically distinct ways.
Noxolo et al. (2012) theorise the importance of difference for notions of
responsibility. For them ‘responsible, caring action therefore involves an
GENDER, PLACE & CULTURE 627
openness and vulnerability to that which most resists European thought:
those aspects of the “other” that are not shared and are not comfortable’ (p.
424). Responsibility is therefore risky. Similarly, care too is risky as I
explore below.
Care is open ended and therefore risky because its quality can’t be known
in advance. Lisa Bass (2012) writes about how Black teachers in a school in
an urban conurbation in the American mid-West recognise and validate the
forms of marginality that their Black students have experienced by drawing
on their own experiences of discrimination. Questionnaires and focus group
interviews with five educational leaders who are faced with challenging situations
in educational settings demonstrate the ways in which these African
American women draw on historical notions and ways of caring, which were
developed to cope with the starkness of slavery. Crucially, in adopting this
form of caring, what Baas calls Black Feminist Caring, they also expose themselves
to risks to their professional status and reputation as also to the law,
which has been framed in universalising ways. In one case her interviewees,
the Black teachers, talk about how they bend institutional rules about reporting
finds of marijuana amongst students as an act of care. Bass points out
that the ethics of care are also, in this context, an ethics of risk because for
Bass this risk may involve foregoing the demands of justice:
‘Breaking the rules in an educational setting involves tremendous risk; the
risk of damaging one’s professional reputation, the risk of losing job security,
and, in some cases, the risk of litigation. Despite the high stakes, risk-taking
often accompanies care because the ethic of care is based on the best interest
of the child, and demands corrective action – regardless of personal cost
(Gilligan 1982; Noddings 1984; Thompson 1998). Further, the ethic of risk
often presses caring educators to implement nontraditional or creative teaching
and leading strategies in order to effectively educate disenfranchised students.
Therefore, caring teachers and administrators are willing to take
radical measures to provide a secure, fair, and productive learning environment
for their students’ (p. 81).
This risk to themselves is fraught with ambivalences, as explored by
Deevia Bhana (2015) in the context of the highly racialised sexual politics of
South Africa. One of colonialism and apartheid’s legacies is a history of violence
and of crumbling family structures, which together manifest in high
rates of sexual violence, especially against black girls and women. The government,
in an attempt to address this, has made it mandatory for teachers
to report incidences of violence against their girl students. On the other
hand, faced with the threat of violent retribution for reporting, teachers are
left with little option but to be silent (Bhana 2015), a silence which is, however,
policed by the state. Care involves finding intermediaries such as social
workers to report the sexual violence. For ‘teachers, managing care in the
628 P. RAGHURAM
context of sexual violence is also about managing silences’ (p. 266). Deevia
Bhana tellingly titles her essay on this ‘When caring is not enough’!
In care ethics care is calibrated at the point of care completion but if we
privilege care as practice, then the outcomes of caring practices are always
emergent and can therefore be open to risk. For Conradi (2015a), care is
learnt by doing. However, this means that despite the best of intentions the
fact that caring will result in ‘care’ can’t be known in advance; nor can it be
guaranteed. Care as practice and care as outcome can, therefore, be wedged
apart (and see Noxolo et al. 2012 for a similar discussion on responsibility).
Care is risky.
Conclusions
Geographers have an inherent interest in care as it appeals to two foundational
elements of geographical thinking – relationality and sensitivity to
context, particularly to the difference that place makes to identities.
Moreover, geographers have also adopted care ethics as a route to place
based normative thinking. Thus, the ways through which caring lives are
enacted have come to be explored through a wide variety of case studies.
Locating care in diverse places provides us with the opportunity of opening
up care ethics to this diversity.
However, care not only requires locating. It also requires dislocating from
the normative white body through which much care is theorised. Colonial
‘caring’ encounters have shaped transnational hierarchies but also ordered
postcolonial racialised violence (Stoler 2001). The meaning, nature and value
of care are all deeply racialised. That is why care ethics must also be (dis)located
and viewed through the racialised body. While care practices have
been considered as deeply racialised, how can care ethics be reconstituted
to take on insights from racialised bodies? What challenges do these bodies
throw up for care ethics? This paper has explored these issues by focusing
on specific components of care ethics. Moreover, in this instance, the body is
used figuratively to disturb the anaemic landscape of feminist care ethics,
but further research should also focus on the disruptive potential of that
physical presence.
Locating care in racialised bodies, I argue, raises new questions for care.
How will care ethics deal with alterity? How do we provide care when both
recognition and dialogue occur across difference? Finally, given that care is a
bundle of activities and dispositions whose outcomes cannot be known in
advance how far is care risky? This paper has explored these elements of
care – competence, recognition and dialogue, and risk – as inherent to care
in a racially unequal (and not simply diverse) world. The embodied nature of
care and the different ways in which bodies are evaluated influence what we
GENDER, PLACE & CULTURE 629
define as good care. Hence, recognising the racialised nature of care makes
clear the inequalities inherent in how care competence is calibrated and the
embodied valuations and uneven geohistories of care that care ethics necessarily
draws upon. Similarly, care cannot always be recognised either by
those who provide care or even those who require it. Poor care and lack of
care constitutes subjects whose care demands and needs may be unrecognisable
or un-articulable. All these mean that caring across difference, in this
case, racial difference, can be risky.
The examples in the paper aim to draw us into the challenges in caring in
a racialised world. In doing so the paper seeks to focus on care as a set of
intimate practices played out across racial difference and as experienced primarily
by black women in caring roles. It suggests that both care and race
are produced inter-subjectively, but to get a glimpse into this we need to
think of particular events and moments in caring practices as it is experienced
and valued. Such moments provide a place to stop and interrogate
(racialised) care (Moi 2015). They offer a method for thinking intersectionally.
They also provide an invitation for others writing on care ethics to ‘stake
themselves’ – to think through examples, but also to look at what is at stake
– in this case, to think of care ethics as it intersects with race (and
other identities).
Focusing on race and care highlights one instance where social differences
are composed and recomposed through intimate performances. These
differences are performed across race and gender. In this paper I have
focused on racialised bodies but have looked primarily at care relating to
women. The black male body situates itself somewhat differently within care
ethics. First is the question of ethics. As suggested earlier, theories of justice,
which have, in part, been seen as masculine, have often been produced by
and for white men. Does justice as ethic hold differential value for black
men? Secondly, masculinities also vary across men. The experiences of black
men differ from those of white men as well as from women in different parts
of the world. In countries like the US and UK where colonialism wrought
havoc in societies, black men play a very particular part in care giving and
receiving, situated as they are, within hegemonic white masculinities which
push not only white and black women into particular positions but also
leaves very little space for caring black men. The infantilization of black
carers who were employed as domestic workers in white households in colonial
Zambia (Hansen 1989) alongside their representation as sexual threats
speaks to the complexity of men and care. Moreover, male domination
(Elliott 2016) is both more acute and more contingent for black men in
racialised societies. They are both dominated within white dominated societies
and perceived as dominating as there is a projection of hypermasculinity
on to some black bodies. Other black bodies do caring work while
630 P. RAGHURAM
simultaneously having care ripped from their bodies. What can the experiences
of black men tell us about care as feminist ethic? Thirdly, seeing care as
inherent to, and important for exposing injustice (Robinson 2013), becomes
particularly poignant when applied to black men as evidenced by slavery
and its’ ongoing presence in racialised labour markets.
This subject of black masculinities and care ethics is an area which needs
further research and reflection. But it also asks for greater thinking about
how the normativity of injustice – whereby injustice begets further injustice
– produced particular gendered subjectivities and gendered violence. It
points to the complexities of normative thinking whereby ethics and experiences
are both produced in practice at the intersection of class, race and
gender in specific geographical locations through its’ own histories.
It is not only gendered subjectivities that are place sensitive, but also
ideas of good care, of how care is provided and hence the ethic of care (see
Raghuram 2016 for an extended discussion of the geographies of care ethics).
Variations in care (Laugier 2015) emanating from the experiences of gendered
subjects situated in different parts of the world have to inflect ethics
in order to prevent it from situating itself in either cosmopolitan or communitarian
claims to generalisability (Robinson 2013). So it requires that care is
disassembled as well as put together as a critical practice in order to shape
care ethics.
However, in doing so, it is important to retain care as hopeful, what
Cooper (2013) calls an everyday utopia. In tracing the uneven terrain of care
practices and its implications for care ethics, it does not aim to fall back into
critique; rather it suggests narrating care as a set of practices that can
engage and re-engage with the questions that care across different groups
raises. Racial identities arise in and through action.
Race and care can be done differently but this requires an openness to
the politics and ethics of care (Hamington 2015). As Okano (2016) suggests
‘the ethic of care does not teach us how to heal wounded people effectively
but rather teaches us how difficult it is to do so. To heal the wounded
requires an unpredictably long time, for their sufferings are caused not only
by direct injuries but also by the structural violence inflicted on their historical
and political situation’ (95). It requires that we are mindful of the hard
work that is required to achieve a re-acting of care and the fact that its outcomes
are not guaranteed (Spivak 1988).
That is the promise of care as a relational ethic. But we also need to ask:
how do we accommodate the failed promise of good care into these theories
of care? That is, how do we take on the ethical imperative of racialised
caring bodies across the globe as academics and researchers? I hope I have
taken one step towards this in this paper.
GENDER, PLACE & CULTURE 631
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the editors of ACME for inviting me to present the plenary lecture
at the RGS-IBG conference in 2014 in which a small part of this paper was presented. I
would also like to thank the Feminist Discussion Group and members of the OpenSpace
research centre at The Open University, Nick Bingham, Sophie Bowlby, Nigel Clark, Davina
Cooper, Maurice Hamington, Victoria Lawson, Jane McCarthy, Fiona Robinson and the
reviewers and editors at Gender, Place and Culture for their generous comments on versions
of this paper. Finally, particular thanks to Eleonore Kofman, Clare Madge and Pat
Noxolo with whom I have engaged on issues around care for many years. All errors
remain my own.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Parvati Raghuram is Professor in Geography and Migration at the Open University. She
has published widely on gender, migration and development and on postcolonial theory.
Her most recent ESRC funded projects are Gender, skilled migration and the IT sector: a
comparative study of India and the UK and Facilitating equitable access and quality education
for development: South African International Distance Education. She has co-authored
Gender, Migration and Social Reproduction (Palgrave), The Practice of Cultural Studies
(Sage), Gender and International Migration in Europe (Routledge) and co-edited South
Asian women in the diaspora (Berg) and Tracing Indian diaspora: Contexts, Memories,
Representations (Sage). She has written for policy audiences having co-authored research
papers for a number of think-tanks such as IPPR, UNRISD, the Hamburg Institute of
International Economics and Heinrich B€oll Stiftung and co-edited a special issue of the
journal Diversities for UNESCO. She co-edits the Palgrave Pivot series Mobility and Politics
with Martin Geiger and William Walters, both at Ottawa.
ORCID
Parvati Raghuram http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1841-5613
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