As long as care is attached to gender, there is no justice An interview with Joan C. Tronto

Transcription

1 Uitgave: Amsterdam University Press As long as care is attached to gender, there is no justice An interview with Joan C. Tronto Bernhard Weicht TVGEND17 (3): DOI: /TVGEND WEIC Abstract Care has long been a key field of struggle and discourse for feminist interventions and movements. The significance of gendered assumptions, attitudes, and practices about caring tasks and those who care has led critics to specifically focus on this crucial task of human reproduction that has previously largely been considered a private matter. Starting in the late 1980s, the tensions and conflicts between dominant moral theories and questions of care has been a crucial concern for theorists. Joan C. Tronto, Professor of Political Science at the University of Minnesota, US, has been one of the key thinkers who have developed the ethics of care approach that puts care at the centre of the construction of a new morality. In this interview, Tronto recalls some of the main steps in the development of her own thinking and the formulation of different aspects of a theory of justice that starts with human relationships rather than abstract, completely independent individuals. The interview links Tronto s personal intellectual journey with the development of a theoretical and ethical perspective that has had strong influences on feminist discourses for several decades. Important contemporary questions such as the relationship between the concept of care and the discursive reproduction of gender are explored and put into a broader context of a feminist theory of justice. Tronto also speaks of her latest attempts to link processes of care and relating with questions of global democratic challenges. Keywords: ethics of care, justice, distribution of care, relationships, theory and practice I read Moral Boundaries 1 at the beginning of my PhD and it had, together with other ethics of care literature, an enormous impact on my work and on my intellectual mindset. In an interview you once said that reading Carol Gilli- VOL. 17, NO. 3,

2 gan s In a Different Voice 2 in the 1980s had had a similar effect on you. Could you describe how reading this book and, subsequently, developing your concept and approach has affected your own work? This is so interesting because in one way in the past 25 years we won a victory. When I began, the only way to do philosophical work was to start from Kantian universalism, like Rawls did. And then proceed from there to discuss whatever aspect of social life, social justice, political life we go to. I had actually finished my PhD in the 80s, the year before I read Gilligan s book and one of the things I wrote about in my dissertation was Adam Smith. The Scottish Enlightenment thinkers have a very different take on moral life because they precede Kant and so, when I read In a Different Voice, I realised that this debate has actually occurred before, in the late 18 th century between the Scots and Kant. Kant, of course, thought he had the last word. And Rawls thought he had the last word. Then I understood that that framework for thinking of justice as one universal principle, which we arrive at either through Kantian reasoning or Habermasian communicative action, is absolutely wrong; there is no principle we can lay down and then simply apply. Moral life starts with human beings, living their daily lives. We confront moral problems constantly and work from the ground back up to the level of principles rather than starting with principles and move down. This idea of bottom-up moral reasoning I also found in Gilligan. It was very persuasive to me that people s moral lives are beginning from where they find themselves. That includes not only some abstract conception of morality, but, more importantly, finding themselves enmeshed in a set of power relations, social relations over which they have very little control. Of course, they have to somehow negotiate to come to the best possible action. Yes, it was really very important. I was already a feminist by then and I knew there was something I didn t like about the way feminists were basically accepting a structure of society by saying but let us in. Because when someone else gets let in, the landscape changes and then we have to ask the question: what else has been brought in, besides just new people -the people who were excluded? I would like to continue with the question about feminism because the ethics of care has been an explicitly feminist concept and has shaped discussions within feminism. Yes, but not everyone who subscribes to the ethics of care is a feminist and not all feminists subscribe to the ethics of care. 260 VOL. 17, NO. 3, 2014

3 As long as care is attached to gender, there is no Justice Yes, and I think there is some kind of tension between feminism and the ethics of care. You have often argued against using care for reproducing gender stereotypes. Empirically, access to paid work (and thus freeing yourself from caring duties) has been an important issue of many women s movements in history and more women have actually gained the possibility of what you, with reference to Waerness 3, called privileged irresponsibility 4. How do you see the tension between embracing care on one hand and at the same time freeing yourself of the burden of care that has also been a feminist issue? It s a very complicated question because care does not just disappear from human life simply because some people decide they don t want to do it anymore. The problem is that care work is unequally distributed among women and men, among people who are well to do and people who are poor; the burden of care is carried disproportionally by women and poor people and servants and slaves. The way to organise society is to start with caring duties, and to guarantee the dignity of those who have to carry out these important tasks. I have argued that the task isn t to eliminate care but it is to equalise both the burdens and the joys that come with care work for everyone, not just women. The first essay I published on care in 1987 was called Beyond Gender Difference: To a theory of care 5. And there I argued that, as long as care is attached to gender, there is no justice. But if we think of care on its own terms, then we can solve some issues. There are some feminists who are very hostile to care and I tried to figure out why. I think it was because of a mistake made in the 80s and 90s as people began to think about how feminism should move forward. The framework of cultural feminism valorises the experiences of women and somehow care got put into that little box. I think that s wrong, but that s how it happened. After that, any time you talked about care, other feminists said: Oh the cultural feminists, just leave them alone, we re onto something much more important: we re talking about the economy. In most mainstream women s movements, attachment to the labour force is indeed the way to make oneself free. If everything is measured in terms of money, there s some truth in that, but that is not the way we should think about it. We should think differently about what constitutes a good human life. And that includes care as well as the economy and the freedom that comes from it. All of these aspects of human life have got to be shared equally among people. Have you seen links between the ethics of care and, let s say, queer feminism, or anti-heteronormative feminism, simply because there is a kind of questioning of these gender structures in the first place? Certainly. By the time Judith Butler came along in the early 90s and wrote Weicht 261

4 Gender Trouble 6, care had already been put in the little box of strange things cultural feminists do. I agree with you, it challenges heteronormativity, it challenges gender roles, it challenges assumptions about constructions of masculinity and femininity, very profoundly. I have talked about this in some of the work I have done over the years. Stephen Leonard and I published an article, interestingly in the American Political Science Review very rarely that I go to my home discipline called the Genders of Citizenship 7. We argued that the language denoting what is masculine and what feminine shifted in the late eighteenth century. To call a man effeminate in the 1740s meant he cared more for his private life than his public duties. The conceptions of gender are always switching but I do think we will discover in the history of gender that a reaction against or away from care and all these responsibilities has always been a part of what defines masculinity. One commonly expressed criticism, in particular also from people who admire your work, is that your concept of care is too broad and can thus mean many different, often self-contradictory practices. You have yourself also argued that care has a different meaning within different theoretical and societal contexts. How would you see this potential tension between a broad conceptualisation of care and the need for a narrower definition, for example for interventions in political discourses? The way I thought about this from the beginning and still do is that there are nested practices of care. So there is good care for the elderly, there is good child care, there is good care for people dying, and they are all different. A physical therapist who, with a dying patient, acted the same way as with an 18 years old healthy person who has broken his leg, would be a bad physical therapist. Care is always contextual. We can find very precise terms for what it means to care well in particular circumstances. I have no objection to do that and it s one of the things we have to do in the studies on care. But on the other hand, there is a broader context of care and if we don t come back, at least occasionally, to this broader concept of care as a conception according to which we organise what matters, then we are likely to fall victim to other prevailing notions without recognising the ways in which they construct care. I first learned about this when I was giving a talk at a panel in Uma Narayan published a paper about colonialism as a discourse of care 8. She points out that, when the British went to India, they didn t say we are coming to steal all your resources. What they said was we are coming to Christianise and civilise you. That way, the home audience could think that what they were doing was good. But the frame was care, you can t say it wasn t. If care discourses can be used to legitimise 262 VOL. 17, NO. 3, 2014

5 As long as care is attached to gender, there is no Justice such horrifying principles and ends, then care by itself means nothing and we have to always bring the conception of care back to the broad concept. In the end, though, care is only a concept, and it took me 20 years to figure this out. Care is only a concept! Concepts have a logic of their own, but concepts need also to be placed in a larger theoretical framework. There is such a thing as feudal care, slave-based care, and colonial care, and we can t call those not care. But in a democratic society, if we want to care in a way that furthers the ends of democracy, then we need something else to make it democratic care, to take seriously the premises of democratic life, where people live dignified lives. If we start from there, we end up with a very different conception of care than when we start from the premise that some people are naturally slaves. I was thinking about the concept in a particular political discussion that takes place in the Netherlands the discussion on euthanasia and the end of life. It was interesting to notice that different sides embraced the concept of care. On the one hand, it is argued that people s wish to receive euthanasia is related to a lack of proper care. And the other side argues that actually providing the possibility of euthanasia is care in itself because it enables people to determine their own death. So what you see is that care is somehow used by both sides. I think that s inevitable because, in fact, people do have different conceptions of what good care is, for themselves, for others, for society. Would you say in these kinds of situations, there needs to be a definition that decides this is care and this is not? No, I think there has to be a fight about it. This is the kind of thing that politically and morally has to be resolved and will be resolved in different societies, by different individuals, in different ways. The best principle to guide this, I think, is pluralism. There should be plural opportunities for people to frame care in a way that is meaningful to them. So, in societies that are unjust, where many adults say, I don t want to be a burden to my family and decide to have euthanasia, I would think that this is not a good decision myself, but it s their decision. On the other hand, if someone comes and says I have always lived a life that s vigorous but the pain and the suffering are so great and make me vulnerable, so that I would like to end my life, that seems to me to be a reasonable decision that someone might make. How do we know from the outside whether one is making a decision for this reason or that reason? We don t. So it seems to me that all we can do is try to make it possible that those decisions are being made for good reasons. Not simply in response to social pressures but for themselves. In this regard, care Weicht 263

6 is not opposed to autonomy. Actually, rather than being a starting premise of human lives, autonomy is a state where we can arrive at a point in our lives, when we can make good decisions for ourselves. Part of what care does in a society is to create conditions so that people can make choices for themselves. But at some level, you step back and let people make their autonomous decisions. Some people may decide that they want to resist the responsibility to help care for their elder parents. Perhaps they have a very bad relationship with a parent who was abusive. That may not be the decision that I think is best for anyone to make, but at some point society needs to allow people to make such decisions. Related to this discussion of autonomy, one important criticism about the concept of care has come from the disability movement, which has argued, at least in the beginning, against care as a concept and favoured rather support, empowerment, and removing disabling structures. How do you see this discussion? I followed the disability discussions somewhat closely and I think the pendulum has swung back a little bit from that extreme position of care as confining and limiting and harmful to people. Against the medical model, which is inherently paternalistic, it made sense to say that there is something wrong with care. But in truth, as I read in the most recent books on disability, there is also a move back to understand that, actually, it is not only social institutions and social structures that make disabled people disabled. To live a life in pain, to live a life in which certain physical capacities or mental capacities are not available, is also a life that has characteristics that are different from the lives of others. What good care would look like there is to create the conditions that make people live as fully as possible and that s not the same as paternalism. In Moral Boundaries, I made the argument that there are always two dangers in care. Intrinsically there is the danger of paternalism, that is that the caregiver knows better than the care receiver. The second is parochialism, that our focus on care becomes narrowed to those closest to us. I still think that s true, those are insolvable problems in care, because they are insolvable problems of human life. There will always be some people who are older, some people who are younger, some people who are more experienced and some who are less experienced. The urge to paternalism, the urge to correct the others is great. And there will always be this distinction between those who are closest to us, and probably we have the most affection for and those who are more distant, whose needs we may not even see, or understand, or realise. Those problems can t be eliminated we need to make them part of the theory. As 264 VOL. 17, NO. 3, 2014

7 As long as care is attached to gender, there is no Justice opposed to saying we have a perfect theory of justice and there are disabled people so let s apply our theory to them. There s no perfection, there are always problems, there is always tension. So there should always be political fights about the proper meaning of care. And ideally we would live in a society where everyone can find some place in which their burden of care and receiving care is ok and acceptable to them. You mentioned the importance of the economic, also for feminism, before. That s a question that all critical theory always had to deal with, the relationship between the economic, power, and the status order, or as Nancy Fraser put it, between redistribution and recognition 9. In your book Moral Boundaries, you wrote the sentence: It is difficult to know whether the least well off are less well off because they care and caring is devalued, or because in order to devalue people, they are forced to do the caring work (Tronto, 1993: 113). Have you since found a solution to this problem? No, I haven t. Except that increasingly I am thinking that it is time for us to take the concept of care and place it into a political and social theory. And to look at other social and political theories and judge them by how well they make sense of care. Now, once you start to take care seriously, other social theories begin to look very different. I wrote this little book that was published in French on the risk society 10, and in there I argue that the very social scientific foundation of the text Risk Society 11 is that we act then there are unintended consequences that is sad so let s do something Weicht 265

8 about it. What sociologists study are those unintended consequences. But if you call them unintended consequences at the first instance, you already set boundaries about responsibility. As they are unintended, people are not really responsible. That s often the structure of the argument in sociology. As opposed to saying: if there are unintended consequences, I think you have to go back to the beginning and ask again whether this is the right way to do this. But this very rarely happens. That s not an answer to the question, it doesn t solve that problem, but it does suggest that there is something wrong in the social theory that requires us to think about those terms. Another question that came up while thinking about care and the economic was that one of the most important arguments of the ethics of care approach is the importance of replacing a traditional liberal notion of justice with a relational concept, where relationships are the starting point of the analysis. But what happens when, as Arlie Hochschild for example describes it 12, close, intimate relations become goods themselves? Yes, that is pretty sad, isn t it? It s a very scary moment in time when everything is turned into a commodity, even relationships. But to turn relationships into a commodity already presumes that there is an individual actor who wishes to possess these relationships. It s this idea of possession that is at the heart of the problem. There is some research and I am convinced that the desire to possess is partly substitute for a traumatic form of dispossession. Carol Gilligan has been doing this really fantastic and interesting work about justice as resistance 13. She wrote a paper back in about what she called the fundamental trauma that for humans happens when they are told they can no longer be attached to their mothers. (...) And this comes at a different point in life for boys and girls in Western cultures. And this idea of crisis of separation, of the pain of dispossession, which then has to be met by possession, is over and over again repeated in society, especially in contemporary market economies. And our real relationships with other humans have become so meaningless that we then hire a personal trainer and a shopper and this and that to try to make up for the crisis of the meaninglessness of our relationships. It seems to me that, to think of human beings as always in relation to others, such as family or friends and as being vulnerable to what chance and life is throwing at us, affects who we are. Realising that goes against the logic of capital that presupposes intentionality. To be able to accept that makes one less craving to constantly possess. I see this as the major kind of trope of most of what Western culture has been about. This is interesting, for example, in the context of imperial- 266 VOL. 17, NO. 3, 2014

9 As long as care is attached to gender, there is no Justice ism, which is about the modern self having separated itself from place to be able to go and take others places. How can you do that if you were attached to place? Utopia, perhaps the first modern book, Thomas More s Utopia 15, starts with the description of the enclosure (i.e. the process of enclosing/ fencing land so that uses become restricted to the owners; B.W.) and the order that creates the English society. There is a saying sheep eat men 16, as the land gets dispossessed. I think there is something deeply wrong with dispossession. This is just another symptom of the much deeper problem. When you try to organise life around possession and money and economic life as if they are only meaningful and as if only our intentional actions produce the things that make us real, then life is ultimately disappointing. In your recent book Caring Democracy 17, you advertise to give all people a voice in the allocation of caring responsibilities. The book also deals with possible tensions between local and global understandings of care. While I can possibly imagine a re-imagination or re-configuration of democracy in order to allocate caring responsibilities, I find it more difficult to imagine this ideal on a global level. Can you maybe sketch what this process might look like globally? The first step to develop that is to dismantle the conception of citizenship as being attached to national identity. Instead citizenship could be assigned on the basis of being part of caring relationships. What does that mean for states like the US, the UK, or the Netherlands, which are now importing considerable amounts of care labour as a world commodity, the new commodity of the Third World as Rhacel Parreñas argues 18? By virtue of being in a care relationship with a Dutch citizen, those would become Dutch citizens. So this person has now become a Dutch citizen, this person s family have become Dutch citizens. And this person who is now a Dutch citizen leaves her small children in the Philippines with an aunt who is caring for them because their mother lives in Amsterdam, so her aunt becomes a Dutch citizen, by virtue and insofar as the caring decisions made abroad also affect her life. Citizenship would then become spread through caring relationships. People tell me this is crazy! But I really think it would work, if we were to recognise how immersed in other people s lives all of us are. We are not as responsible for this auntie as we are for our neighbour here, but there is a level of responsibility. To be able to see it outside of the national boundaries seems to me a key to begin to move forward towards talking on a global level about care ethics. We can put it the other way too, as my colleague Zenzele Isoke has done in conversations: remittances are the private form of reparation for imperialism and colonialism. And as you know, more Weicht 267

10 than any other source of income to the Third World, more than direct capital investment, more than foreign aid, are remittances from the people who have left to go somewhere else, to go to other parts of the world to do really difficult care work, construction work, farming work as well. The remittances they send home are the largest source of income of additional wealth coming into this part of the world. We are not willing to recognise that because it is a private economic activity, we don t think about it in terms of its structural aspect, but in fact the world has already become a place where the spending on a dog walker in this part of the world is affecting a family in Mexico. So there is already an economic relation, why should there not also be a political relation? I was indeed also thinking about migrant care work, what would you say are then the consequences for our conception of citizenship if we indeed think about it in that way? If we come back to Marshall s dominant definition of citizenship, that to work is to be a citizen, it follows automatically that migrant care workers should be citizens. But that still stays within the economic frame. To break that frame you would say that to be in a relationship with a citizen makes you a citizen. And care relationships go both ways, receiving and giving care. So if you are a care giver or a care receiver then those who are in the caring relationship with you should also be citizens. And people who don t like that, well, ok, then let s take all the care work away. Some years ago, a Texas legislator sponsored a bill that, if you hired an illegal migrant to the United States, you are immediately fined 10,000 dollars and spend time in prison. Except if you hire someone to clean, to help you with your lawn work, or housework, because we need them. That s what he said: because we need them! Isn t that an astonishing public statement? One striking aspect about migrant care work for me is also the tension between a focus on professionalisation on the one hand, raising status and income also for migrant care workers, and the dangers coming from exclusively focusing on professionalisation when we talk about care on the other. How do you see these perspectives? I think there is a real tension between those; this idea that, if we only professionalise care more, that we would improve the status. Professionalisation means specialisation and hierarchicalisation. What it means to be professional is to supervise others and tell them what to do, and then we need inspectors, and then, increasingly, we have more layers of hierarchy. That seems to me the wrong way to go in a democratic society. It s much better 268 VOL. 17, NO. 3, 2014

11 As long as care is attached to gender, there is no Justice to say all work has dignity, all work needs to be better paid. I would even go so far as to say that people deserve a basic income, regardless of the work they do. Some people arrived at that from a theory of justice but I arrived at it from the perspective of how to arrange status for those people who are most marginalised in society. A book published a few years ago about European manpower policies with regards to care argued that there are not enough men in care to make the wages go up. So you need to attract more men to care and the way to do that is to provide more steps on the ladder so that you can have more professional titles so that you can go from the one to the next. That seems to me to go completely backwards. There is enough wealth in the world right now for every human being to live a decent life. The redistribution of wealth is key to what we have to do, the market can t just be itself and on itself. For more than 20 years you have written on care, the ethics of care and the importance of this paradigm shift for theories of justice, power and politics. Referring to the important feminist slogan that the personal is political, I would like to ask you which impact your work on care has had on your own life, on your own care practices and caring relations? That s a good question. I do try to live up to my standards, thinking about what care means in my own life and the people affected. My partner and I clean our own place. In the professional class that I m in, most people don t, they hire someone to clean. But I can t say to someone else to do my laundry. So yes, I do my own care work. The other thing I think about in relation to care are the relations at university. It s very difficult in hierarchical universities, to engage in caring practices towards the people around you. But, in any given moment, we have decisions to make about how we treat others and how to conduct our daily work. To do that in the most caring manner seems to me the practice of care. (...) The standard of the university is what the other businesses are doing that s what the university should do. My standard is: what is the care we can give? I have not much freedom to do that, but I have some. And when I have some freedom, I always try to think about care in the way I affect someone s life. In relation to academia, care has been used as a theory, as an ontological and epistemological concept, as methodology. I was interested in how you see care and the ethics of care in relation to teaching? I think it does inform how I teach. Students say to me that I m very respectful of their opinions and their struggles. Well, I guess that s the care perspective coming to bear. When I conduct a class, I think of it as a communal Weicht 269

12 exercise in coming to knowledge and as a result I make all the students put away their phones and their computers. In Alone Together 19, Sherry Turkle argues that people lose the capacity to be in relationships with others that are deep, meaningful, and genuine and about creating new thoughts and new ideas. Putting students in the classroom, in a system creating the atmosphere where they can do that, really has a good effect on them. So yes, I think it does affect how I teach and how I do my work as an administrator. Maybe as a nice final question: If we think about care and all these responsibilities, is there a tension between care for the self and care for others and how can you solve that, how do you solve that? That s an ongoing process, that s one of those ongoing problems of being human. To figure out how much to care for the self and how much to care for others. (...) It s a constant negotiation and if you are aware of it that there is a constant negotiation, you have to be thinking about it. I think people who don t recognise that there is a tension, have probably less rich lives. Some authors have written about and praised the idea of self-sacrifice, the idea of care being for the other. And especially in the context of caring professions, we know that people additionally also care in households, for family and that that can have very dangerous consequences. That s right. Once again, the best thing would be to live in a society where individuals are at least aware of the choices that they have made or that they are forced to make. I never force somebody to care for someone, which is what increasingly happens within the neoliberal health care context. Okay, your spouse has been in the hospital for two days, we need the bed so we need to send him home, here is how to do things. That doesn t seem to be an ideal solution. People are different and there is a huge diversity of experiences in people s lives. Some do not feel that they can clean up after someone else, some people think that s horrifying. Others think you just do it. It seems to me that there will always be variations of people, how much they can do or want to do. And society has to find a way to match what needs to be done with who can do it, and if everyone were committed to what they can do, then things are more balanced. It s all about balancing, constantly balancing. Thank you so much. It s my pleasure. Utrecht, 29 th January VOL. 17, NO. 3, 2014

13 As long as care is attached to gender, there is no Justice Notes 1. Tronto, J.C. (1993). Moral boundaries: A political argument for an ethics of care. New York: Routledge. 2. Gilligan, C. (1982). In a different voice: Psychological theory and women s development. Harvard: Harvard University Press. 3. Waerness, K. (1984). The rationality of caring. Economic and Industrial Democracy, 5(2), Tronto, J.C. (2006). Vicious circles of privatized caring. In Hamington, M. and Miller D. (Eds.), Socializing care (pp. 3-25). Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield. 5. Tronto, J.C. (1987). Beyond gender difference: To a theory of care. Signs, 12(4), Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York: Routledge. 7. Leonard, S.T. and Tronto, J.C. (2007). The genders of citizenship. American Political Science Review, 101(1), Narayan, U. (1995). Colonialism and its others: Considerations on rights and care discourses. Hypatia, 10(2), Fraser, N. (1995). From redistribution to recognition? Dilemmas of justice in a post-socialist age. New Left Review, 212, Tronto, J.C. (2012). Le risque ou le care? Paris: PUF. 11. Beck, U. (1992). Risk society: Towards a new modernity. London: Sage Publications. 12. Hochschild, A.R. (2012). The outsourced self: Intimate life in market times. New York: Metropolitan Books. 13. Gilligan, C. (2011). Joining the resistance. Cambridge: Polity Press. 14. Brown, L.M. & Gilligan, C. (1993). Meeting at the crossroads: Women s psychology and girls development. Feminism & Psychology, 3(1), More, T. (1997). Utopia. London: Routledge. 16. The expression sheep eat men from More s Utopia refers to the dispossession of collectively owned land used for raising food to private property used for farming sheep. 17. Tronto, J.C. (2013). Caring democracy: Markets, equality, and justice. New York: New York University Press. 18. Parreñas, R.S. (2001). Servants of globalization: Women, migration, and domestic work. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 19. Turkle, S. (2011) Alone together: Why we expect more from technology and less from each other. New York: Basic Books. About the author Bernhard Weicht has studied Economics and Social Policy in Austria and the UK and he received his PhD in Sociology from The University of Nottingham. He is currently based at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Bernhard has published on the construction of care, ideas of dependency, migrant care workers, the intersection of migration, and care regimes and the construction of ageing and older people. He is vice-chair of the ESA Research Network Ageing in Europe and member of the editorial board of the Journal of International and Comparative Social Policy. b.weicht@uu.nl Weicht 271