This essay considers the dependency of trans youth by bridging transgender studies with feminist care ethics to emphasize a trans wisdom about solidarity through dependency. The first major section of the essay argues for reworking Sara Ruddick's philosophy of mothering in the context of trans and gender‐creative youth. This requires, first, stressing a more robust interaction among her divisions of preservative love, nurturance for growth, and training for acceptability, and second, creating a more nuanced account of “nature” in relation to (...) nurturance for growth to avoid casting transition as contrary to a trans youth's healthy development. In the second major section of the essay, I depart from Ruddick's framework to emphasize the difference of care for trans youth by trans and/or queer communities and through mutual caregiving, stressing a trans wisdom about dependency and solidarity found in the work of Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson. Turning to Eva Feder Kittay's links between dependency work and equality, I argue that Rivera and Johnson's work contains a distinct knowledge derived from practice necessitating the connection between solidarity and dependency in particular communities. I then call for more work on trans care ethics, trans ethics, and trans wisdom more broadly. (shrink)

Using birth stories as our object of inquiry, this article examines the ways in which normative discourses about gender, disability and Down syndrome construct the birth stories of three mothers of children with Down syndrome. Their stories are composed of the mothers’ recollections of the first hours after birth as a time when their infants are separated from them and their postpartum needs are ignored. Together, their stories illustrate socio-cultural tropes that position Down syndrome as a dangerous form of the (...) “other” and mothers who give birth to children with Down syndrome as implicated in transgressing cultural norms. (shrink)

A longitudinal perspective on motherhood that spans the experience of gestation, birthing, the care of young children, and the mother’s relation to her grown children makes way for a conception of the mother as essentially plural. It shall be argued in this paper that maternity is necessarily tied to surrogacy, that it is divided into a multiplicity of tasks inevitably parceled out to multiple agents. In this essay, the analysis of maternal surrogacy is focused on the phenomenon of mothering from (...) a distance, a maternal practice engendered by the feminization and globalization of labor markets. By both affirming the value of maternal surrogates and questioning the limits of surrogacy, this analysis of motherhood challenges both the economic exploitation that engenders and sustains distant mothering and the gendered division of care labor that supports the global economy of care. (shrink)

This essay seeks to unsettle feminist philosophy through an encounter with Aboriginal artist Tracey Moffatt, whose perspectives on intergenerational relationships between white women and Indigenous women are shaped by her experiences as the Aboriginal child of a white foster mother growing up in Brisbane, Australia during the 1960s. Moffatt's short experimental film Night Cries provides an important glimpse into the violent intersections of gender, race, and power in intimate life and, in so doing, invites us to see how colonial and (...) neocolonial policies are carried out through women's domestic labor. Seeing cross-generational and cross-racial intimacy through Moffatt's lens, I suggest, helps us to unsettle both feminist theories of motherhood and feminist practices of mentoring. (shrink)

Dependency functions as a keyword in care theory. However, care theorists have spelled out the ontological and moral ramifications of dependency in different and often conflicting ways. In this article, I argue that conceptual disputes about dependency betray a fundamental discordance among authors, rooted in the empirical premises of their arguments. Hence, although authors appear to share a vocabulary of dependency, they are not writing about quite the same phenomenon. I seek to elucidate these differences by teasing out and comparing (...) different conceptions of dependency found in the literature. Borrowing a phrase from Eva Kittay, I trace four “paradigm cases” of dependency: the infant, the physically disabled person, the profoundly intellectually disabled person, and the refugee. These paradigm cases serve as the empirical touchstone from which theorists extract their conceptions of dependency. Each paradigm case, moreover, permits a particular ethical sensibility toward care. How we understand and value dependency thus seems to determine how we understand and value care, and vice versa. In this way, I contend, our normative orientation toward care might influence what sorts of dependency we see—and, by extension, which forms of dependency we fail to notice. (shrink)

Using the social interpretation of disability, Foucault's theory of disciplinary power, literary devices, and feminist literature, I write an affective narrative of mothering disabled children. In doing so I illustrate the ways in which the materiality of normalcy, surveillance, and embodiment can produce emotions that create docile mothers ashamed of their contribution to the world, conflicted mothers struggling with dissonant affects, and unruly, angry mothers battling against the architectures of their children's oppression.