Drawing upon the practice of caregiving and the insights of feminist care ethics, I offer a phenomenology of caregiving through the work of Eva Feder Kittay and Emmanuel Lévinas. I argue that caregiving is a material dialectic of embodied response involving moments of leveling, attention, and interruption. In this light, the Levinasian opposition between responding to another's singularity and leveling it via parity-based principles is belied in the experience of care. Contra much of response ethics’ and care ethics’ respective literatures, (...) this dialectic suggests that they are complementary in ways that productively illuminate themes of each. I conclude by suggesting that when response and care ethics are thought together through the experience of caregiving, such labors produce finite responsibility with infinite hope. (shrink)

This article uses the surprising bodily effects of a period following birth to unsettle the reproductive narrative that circumscribes the maternal relation. Drawing on scholarship on skin and touch within philosophy and feminist and queer theory, ‘Beside myself’ demonstrates how an intensely intimate relationship can throw into relief modes of embodiment that trouble the temporality and space presumed of reproduction. Doing so, it calls attention to the limits of materialist discourses of embodiment. With reference to Gayle Salamon’s Assuming a Body, (...) it describes an embodied subjectivity that exceeds the material contours of the body. A sense of being ‘beside’ oneself and ‘beside’ another stretches the time and space of the body, not only creating fractures within the reproductive frame, but also putting pressure on matter and possession as conditions for subjectivity. (shrink)