Feminist Reflections on Vulnerability: Disrespect, Obligation, Action (original) (raw)
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Review of "Vulnerability: New Essays in Ethics and Feminist Philosophy"
Vulnerability: New Essays in Ethics and Feminist Philosophy is arguably the first collection of philosophical essays to be published on the topic. As such, it invites a moment of reflection on the state of scholarly discourse surrounding vulnerability and its analogues, such as care, dependency, and need. To begin with a series of expansive questions to foster deeper consideration: How has the discourse on vulnerability and associated concepts transformed the philosophical terrain? To what extent has this discourse risen to the level of significance and visibility enjoyed by other leading concepts in moral and political philosophy, such as justice, equality, independence, and autonomy? Does vulnerability have a fitting place alongside these concepts? And finally, and perhaps the boldest question of the group: Are we experiencing a pivotal moment in the discipline, in which the centrality of vulnerability to the human condition will finally receive appropriate philosophical attention? The twelve new essays in Vulnerability start us well on the path to answering these and related pressing questions.
Critical Horizons, 2016
Vulnerability is a concept with fleeting contours as much as it is an idea with assured academic success; its topicality in Europe and the United States, however, refers to different histories. In the United States, what we see is the expression of a polyform reflection on torturable, "mutilatable" and killable bodies, especially after September 11 and the ensuing bellicosity. In this way, Judith Butler points to the irreducible dimensions of human sociality, violability and affectability, on which she founds an ethics of non-violence and imagines a new form of community. The centrality that she confers to the possibility of bodily destruction is such that she reflects the unequal distribution of vulnerability through a contrast between lives that are worth mourning and those that are not. From a wholly other perspective, one developed on the basis of ethnographic surveys on mass violence and collective rapes in India after the Partition, 1 Veena Das takes up the task of thinking through the way in which forms of life are also forms of violent death, in which a form of death is born in the matrix of everyday life. Reciprocally, she considers how the distribution of violence, torture and massacres can haunt and shape everyday relations.
Vulnerability: possible uses of a philosophical, legal, political and social concept
2016
The essay presents a discussion of vulnerability theory from a philosophical and a sociological perspective. The success of this new paradigm in the social sciences and even in the public discourse appears justified by the need to rethink the institutions and social ties of late modernity, also from a gender perspective. It is undoubtedly a fascinating prospect, but one that conceals numerous pitfalls. In particular, ideas of agency, conflict, emancipation and solidarity, which are closely connected with fundamental rights theory and the development of constitutionalism may lose importance. The vulnerability paradigm, rather than eclipsing the language of rights, could then be used to interpret these rights, to define them with increasing accuracy and reinforce their effectiveness. In particular, the bottom-up construction of an emancipatory notion of vulnerability may well lead to an auspicious update of the interpretation of the principles of dignity, equality and solidarity, prin...
What's Critical about Vulnerability? Rethinking Interdependence, Recognition, and Power
Hypatia, 2016
Images of vulnerability have populated the philosophical landscape from Hobbes to Hegel, Levinas to Foucault, often designating a sense of corporeal susceptibility to injury, or of being threatened or wounded and therefore have been predominantly associated with violence, finitude, or mortality. More recently, feminist theorists such as Judith Butler and Adriana Cavarero have begun to rethink corporeal vulnerability as a critical or ethical category, one based on our primary interdependence and intercorporeality. However, many contemporary theorists continue to associate vulnerability with violence and finitude rather than providing an account of the normative theory that might underpin vulnerability as a critical category. In this article, I explore an alternative notion of vulnerability in relation to both a theory of power and a normative account that draws on recognition theory. My aim in this article is twofold: first, to examine the complexity of vulnerability and how it relat...
Vulnerability as a political language
The Power of Vulnerability: mobilising affect in feminist, queer and anti-racist media cultures. Eds. Anu Koivunen, Katariina Kyrölä & Ingrid Ryberg. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018
This introductory chapter introduces the main questions addressed in the book The Power of Vulnerability, and thoroughly accounts for the concept of vulnerability, its various theoretical legacies and uses in feminist, anti-racist and queer scholarship, and key role in present day discussions about power, agency, and the media. Vulnerability is addressed both as a concept and as a political language. The authors highlight four aspects of how this language operates: as a human rights discourse, as a language easily appropriated by dominant groups, as a contested language invoking long-running debates in queer, feminist, and anti-racist media cultures, and as a language translated into cultural policymaking. The #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter campaigns exemplify how the public articulation of experiences of injury, trauma, and hurt can turn into powerful movements. However, in neo-liberal media culture, vulnerability operates as a political language not only for disadvantaged, but also for privileged groups. Claims of vulnerability can translate to claims to agency and voice, but these claims can have completely oppositional political consequences, depending on who is making them. Drawing from Lauren Berlant and Judith Butler, the chapter sheds light on this and other paradoxes that the concept of vulnerability evokes, and asks: what does the language of vulnerability do?
Politics, Justice and the Vulnerable Subject: The Contribution of Feminist Thought
Gênero & Direito, 2016
The present article argues that the main contribution of contemporary feminist theory on vulnerability stems from the distinction of two possible kinds of vulnerability: an ontological vulnerability and a vulnerability linked to various processes (social, cultural, economic and juridical) of vulnerabilisation. This contribution is not limited to the critical and deconstructive level. As a positive proposal, it advances in the direction of an individual which, recovering its own relational, embodied, "fleshy" and situated dimension, abandons the illusion of its own sovereignty, accepts its vulnerability like an opening up to others, and thus also accepts the responsibility for an open and democratic dialogue and the need for institutions inspired by an "enabling" conception of justice (cf. Young 1990).
Vulnerability and the Feminist Politics of Sexual Violence
2019
This thesis asks: how does understanding vulnerability enable feminists to engage with sexual violence? Whilst there has been a 'return to vulnerability' (Murphy 2012: 70) in the recent feminist literature, sexual violence is notably absent. These contributions to the field emphasise the shared character of vulnerability, focusing on it as an ambiguous ontological condition (Gilson 2014). This is in contrast to activist antiviolence movements of the 1970s that articulated a 'structural' account of vulnerability, where women's disproportionate vulnerability to sexual violence was a point of departure. The thesis will argue that an intersectional feminist politics of sexual violence needs to take a two-dimensional approach to vulnerability and incorporate insights from both the structural and ontological perspectives. It begins with a historiographical argument, which is that the affective and institutional legacy of the sex wars, debates on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1980s that saw discussions about women's sexuality polarise into 'pro-sex' and 'antipornography' positions, has resulted in the academic aversion to thinking vulnerability and sexual violence together. By considering in detail the contributions of Andrea Dworkin and Judith Butler on the questions of vulnerability and sexual violence, thinkers associated with anti-pornography and pro-sex perspectives respectively, I disrupt this oppositional narrative. In the process, I pave the way for my own perspective, which argues that sexual violence politics must be able to both i) counter the weaponisation of gendered vulnerability by reactionary movements and ii) challenge sexual violence, as an endemic social issue. I contrast the mainstream #MeToo movement with Tarana Burke's grassroots, black feminist, original Me Too movement in order to draw out the intersectional implications of my argument. Burke's Me Too demonstrated the radical potential for a sexual violence activism that begins with vulnerability in both its ontological and structural dimensions. Chapter four Judith Butler, vulnerability and livable lives: from performativity to precarity 4.1 Judith Butler, the philosopher's feminist 4.2 Butler's positive spectral presence 4.3 Contextualising Butler's focus: gender, vulnerability and violence 4.4 The relationship between vulnerability and violence 4.6 Linguistic vulnerability 4.7 Corporeal vulnerability 4.8 Vulnerability and sexual violence in Judith Butler 4.9 Conclusion Chapter five Mobilising vulnerability in sexual violence discourses 5.1 The political purchase of gendered vulnerability 5.2 Feminism and anti-feminism in vulnerability discourses 5.3 Reactionary mobilisations #1: racialising vulnerability 5.4 Oppositional vulnerability in racialised sexual violence discourses 5.5 Reactionary mobilisations #2: the vulnerable cisgender woman 5.6 Two-dimensional vulnerability and victims of sexual violence 5.7 Conclusion Chapter six Vulnerability, Me Too and feminist sexual violence activisms 6.1 Introduction: The return of sexual politics 6.2 Tarana Burke's Me Too movement: A movement of survivors 6.3 Intersectional activism and the problem of prisons 6.4 The viral #MeToo movement 6.5 Oppositional vulnerability and the viral #MeToo movement 6.6 Vulnerability and sexual violence activisms 6.7 Conclusion Chapter seven Conclusion: Vulnerability and bodily autonomy 7.1 Bringing sexual violence into vulnerability studies 7.2 Collating the contributions of the thesis by way of bodily autonomy 7.3 Vulnerability: what now and where next? Reference List 10 In the 'self-help-terrain' Ewa Ziarek writes how 'from books to talk shows, vulnerability signifies a risk that has to be managed by individuals themselves or is reclaimed as a new virtue to be cultivated' (2013: 67)
International Journal Of Philosophy And Social-Psychological Sciences
Vulnerability is an inalienable aspect of human existence. In spite of the fact that sufficient groundwork has been done on the notion of vulnerability, it is to be noted that until now, vulnerability has typically been conceived as a negative condition relating to dependency, weakness, fragility, passivity and exploitation. Contrary to this, this paper attempts to re-consider the concept of vulnerability along positive lines by principally focusing upon the moral and ontological roots of vulnerability by employing the Feminist Ethics of Care model. The exponents of Care Ethics extend a normative version of vulnerability with prime emphasis on two aspects, namely, vulnerability as a compositional form of relationality and responsibility. The question that will be addressed in this paper is, ‘How can we construct a progressive and value-laden approach to vulnerability by employing the principles of an Ethic of Care?’ Fundamentally, it will be argued that between the individual and the universal, lies relationships that have been overlooked while discussing the notion of vulnerability. This study therefore, aims to unlock the moral dynamic of vulnerability with ontological implications. Subsequently, an idea of Shared human vulnerability will be authentically introduced in the paper which will help us to think about the power of vulnerability with the existential genesis of Care Ethics. Keywords: Ethic of Care; Feminist Ethics; Relational Ontology; Shared Human Vulnerability; Vulnerability; Vulnerable Subject.