Suddenly, seeing care everywhere

Feminists often talk about the moment they became feminists, when they first recognised gender inequality, and the enduring sense that once seen, it could never be unseen (see for example, hooks, 2000). Once a feminist, everyday experiences, big ‘P’ politics and everything between are refracted through a lens which bridles at the gender injustice winding through our lives.  

I’ve been having a similar experience on the CareVisions project. Care is everywhere. It always has been, only now I am ready to see it.  

Before joining this project, I had worked in policy and advocacy roles in large health, disability and women’s NGOs and in the Irish health service. I worked on campaigns crossing policy and service areas: for stroke rehabilitation services, for gender-sensitive mental health care, voting rights for people with disabilities, integrated healthcare, women’s reproductive rights, care in the community. At the time, I thought these campaigns were linked as social justice issues, all symptoms of the inadequate Irish welfare state, which created inequalities for all those it placed at the margins, including older people, disabled people, and women. What I’ve come to see is that care – the need to receive and give it - was at the centre of this advocacy. Experiences of ‘care poverty’ (Kröger, 2022), where we cannot access the care we need, or when the social and political systems are not in place to recognise and fulfil our caring needs (Kittay, 2020; Tronto, 2013), have been at the root of the injustices I have been drawn to in my work.  

And, just like gender inequality, when you start to see care you can’t unsee it.  

As ethics of care theorist Joan Tronto (2015: 38) has written:  

Once we start to see caring, we will see it everywhere: in the stories we tell about our lives, in the movies we watch, in the books we read, even in the disagreements we have with friends and family. We will demand that politicians stop talking about inconsequential matters and focus instead on how to improve our capacity to care for ourselves and others.  

Just as Tronto predicts, I’m seeing now care everywhere. Not just in my working life but in how I’ve always sought to understand the world, in my reading life.  

As I’ve been working with the feminist ethics of care in my reading and writing for the CareVisions project, I’ve been reflecting about how much of my own downtime reading is also about care means in our lives. Always a keen reader-for-pleasure, I ping from one book to another: the ‘hot’ literary fiction, a Classic I once half-read, this year’s thriller. I always thought I read without purpose, simply trying to escape into another’s imagination or life story. Yet, reflecting Tronto, I now see a teasing out of care in the books I am drawn to pick up and stay with.  

I have chosen to read about women who run headlong towards caring roles, such as poet Doireann NíGhríofa (2021) and writer Sophie White (2020) charting the joy and horrors of mothering in 21st century Ireland. Or women like editor Diana Athill (2011), unmarried and child-free, who seemed to relinquish caring but who provided life-long practical (and textual) support to her authors. In particular, she aided genius Jean Rhys birth Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), itself a rage against the abandonment of women judged to have passed their caring best. I have been drawn to books about the severing of familial care ties, as in Angie Cruz’s novel, Dominicana in which 15-year-old Ana is pressured into a marriage bringing her from the Dominican countryside to 1960’s New York. And to books about how people meet their care needs, such as Derek Jarman’s Modern Nature (2018). While in the throes of his own HIV illness, Jarman documents his creation and care for a spikily beautiful new garden in the shadow of a nuclear reactor on the South coast of England. Despite the shoddy care of the NHS, his diary shows him enveloped in the love and care of his created family.  

Just as the feminist ethics of care is helping me in my CareVisions work to understand how and why caring and care work are degraded and to challenge the absence of care from political debates, it has also recalibrated my ordinary reading pleasure. Free-time reading, I have come to see, is just one other way I am troubling out how care works, why and when it doesn’t, and what caring means in real (and fictional) lives.  

Dr. Cliona Loughnane is a postdoctoral researcher on the CareVisions project.  

References 

• Athill, D. (2011) Stet: An Editor’s Life. London: Granta Books.  

• Cruz, A. (2019) Dominicana: A Novel. New York: Flatiron Books.  

• hooks, b. (2000) Feminism is for Everybody. Cambridge, MA: South End Press.  

• Jarman, D. (2018) Modern Nature: Journals, 1989 – 1990. London: Penguin Vintage Publishing.  

• Kittay, E. (2020) Love’s Labor, London: Routledge. 2nd Edition. 1999 

• Kröger, T. (2022) Care Poverty - When Older People’s Needs Remain Unmet. Sustainable Development Goals Series, Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97243-1_3 

• Ní Ghríofa, D. (2021) A Ghost in the Throat. Dublin: Tramp Press.  

• Rhys, J. (1966) Wide Sargasso Sea.  

• Tronto (2015) Who Cares? How to Reshape a Democratic Politics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.  

• Tronto, J. (2013) Caring Democracy – markets, equality, and justice. New York: New York University Press. 

• White, S. (2020) Corpsing: my body and other horror shows. Dublin: Tramp Press.