Joan Tronto’s new paradigm of caring democracy bases citizenship on the need to ensure that all people receive and provide care equitably. But how exactly are citizens motivated to take up these caring responsibilities? The writings of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) co-founder William ‘Bill’ Wilson provide one answer: he pathologizes the alcoholic – dooming him to inevitable relapse and death – to compel AA members to accept shared vulnerability and mutual care as the bedrock of sobriety and AA society. Wilson returns (...) repeatedly to the threat of death to convince AA members to carry out their newfound caring and democratic responsibilities. We use Wilson’s thinking, as well as Michel Foucault’s work on biopower, to forward the concept of biocaring democracy, in which the acceptance of shared pathology compels people to care for each other but also limits their democratic responsibilities. More broadly, our analysis suggests how hinging democracy to shared vulnerability may constrain the radical possibilities that Tronto envisions. (shrink)

This article examines 17 substance-abusing women's perceptions of their mothering practices in the context of a residential substance-abuse treatment program for women with children and pregnant women. Using in-depth semistructured interviews and observations of treatment groups, the participants' cultural knowledge about mothering is explored. Although the women in this study described how their substance-abusing lifestyle had a negative impact on their children, they also detailed practices that illustrated that they felt capable as parents. The women were silent about how race, (...) gender, or class arrangements affected their lives; their stories, however, showed active avoidance and manipulation of the contemporary ideology of mothering. (shrink)

This article examines arguments concerning the right of an unwed biological father to consent to the adoption of his offspring, and to take custody of the child even against the mother's wishes. The understanding of gender-neutrality that supposedly supports many such arguments is false, and risks diminishing women's decision-making authority under the guise of sex equality. Laws governing unwed parent's rights must emphasize the centrality of parental responsibility in establishing parental rights.

This paper argues that cyborg perspectives offer real possibilities for the debate around enforced caesareans and the search for a language to encompass embodied maternal subjectivity. It is suggested, with reference to the fictional narrative of Star Trek, that cyborg figures have the power to disrupt the liberal subject and the body in legal discourse, not least because the plethora of cyborgs challenges simple conceptions of connections/disconnections between bodies. Feminist readings of case law relating to enforced caesarean sections have raised (...) questions about the notion of autonomy at the heart of liberal legalism, have argued that law is complicit with white male techno-medicine's approach to childbirth and focused upon the pregnant woman's lived experience of pregnancy. The recent Court of Appeal decision in St George's Healthcare N.H.S Trust v. S., Regina v. Collins and Others, ex parte S., where the pregnant woman's self-determination was upheld, provides a good opportunity to confront both the liberal story and the idea of connectedness between mother and unborn child. (shrink)

Using ethnographic data gathered at a mandated, community-based drug treatment program for women offenders, this article analyzes how gendered notions of the self and of autonomy shape penal governance. This study examines how psychological models of women's deviance, racialized visions of motherhood, and therapeutic techniques of the self come into tension with expectations of responsible, autonomous citizenship. The program prioritized therapeutic ways of governing its clients over those that emphasized economic self-reliance, rational decision making, and normalizing gender. This is because (...) staff attributed criminal and addictive behaviors to women's inadequate self-understanding and lack of emotional autonomy in personal relations. Staff discouraged women's motherhood and paid labor because they saw these external obligations as a threat to women's autonomous selfhood. This research complicates claims that contemporary forms of penal treatment manage offenders through rational incentives and personal responsibility by pointing to the ways that subject formation is a gendered process. (shrink)

The harmful effects of alcohol use during pregnancy have been well documented. Fetal alcohol spectrum disorder is the collective term encompassing the various clinical diagnoses that can occur in a child who was exposed to alcohol prenatally. The affected child suffers a range of lifelong primary and secondary disabilities. There is no cure for FASD, but it is preventable if women do not drink during pregnancy. Should women be banned from, and/or punished for drinking during pregnancy for the sake of (...) preventing fetal harm? This article considers the appropriateness of criminalising drinking during pregnancy as a means of preventing fetal harm and consequently FASD in children, and concludes that criminal approaches are unjustified, potentially discriminatory and likely to be ineffective. (shrink)