An exposé of flaws in American policies regarding the self-reliance of families argues that policymakers have compromised the well-being of everyday individuals by limiting the definition of acceptable family units and placing unrealistic responsibilities on contemporary families, presenting a model for "caretaking relationships" that provides extra support for children and the elderly. Reprint.

The essays of this volume consider how acknowledgement of the fact of dependency changes our conceptions of law, political theory, and morality, as well as our very conceptions of self.

First Published in 1993. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The Rejected Body argues that feminist theorizing has been skewed toward non-disabled experience, and that the knowledge of people with disabilities must be integrated into feminist ethics, discussions of bodily life, and criticism of the cognitive and social authority of medicine. Among the topics it addresses are who should be identified as disabled; whether disability is biomedical, social or both; what causes disability and what could 'cure' it; and whether scientific efforts to eliminate disabling physical conditions are morally justified. Wendell (...) provides a remarkable look at how cultural attitudes towards the body contribute to the stigma of disability and to widespread unwillingness to accept and provide for the body's inevitable weakness. (shrink)

This paper explores the interconnectedness of persons with disabilities, technologies and the environment by problematizing Western notions of the independent, autonomous subject. Drawing from Deleuze and Guattari’s reconfiguration of the static subject as active becoming, prevailing discourses valorizing independence are critiqued as contributing to the marginalization of bodies marked as disabled. Three examples of disability “dependencies”—man-dog, man-machine, and woman-woman connectivities—are used to illustrate that subjectivity is partial and transitory. Disability connectivity thus serves a signpost for an expanded understanding of subjectivity (...) and suggests a radically altered ethics that is no longer premised on individual rights. (shrink)

This article offers the critical concept misfit in an effort to further think through the lived identity and experience of disability as it is situated in place and time. The idea of a misfit and the situation of misfitting that I offer here elaborate a materialist feminist understanding of disability by extending a consideration of how the particularities of embodiment interact with the environment in its broadest sense, to include both its spatial and temporal aspects. The interrelated dynamics of fitting (...) and misfitting constitute a particular aspect of world-making involved in material-discursive becoming. The essay makes three arguments: the concept of misfit emphasizes the particularity of varying lived embodiments and avoids a theoretical generic disabled body; the concept of misfit clarifies the current feminist critical conversation about universal vulnerability and dependence; the concept of misfitting as a shifting spatial and perpetually temporal relationship confers agency and value on disabled subjects. (shrink)

Where society is viewed as an association of equal and autonomous persons, the work of caring for dependents, "love's labors", figure neither in political ...

Newcomers and more experienced feminist theorists will welcome this even-handed survey of the care/justice debate within feminist ethics. Grace Clement clarifies the key terms, examines the arguments and assumptions of all sides to the debate, and explores the broader implications for both practical and applied ethics. Readers will appreciate her generous treatment of the feminine, feminist, and justice-based perspectives that have dominated the debate.Clement also goes well beyond description and criticism, advancing the discussion through the incorporation of a broad range (...) of insights into a new integration of the values of care and justice. Care, Autonomy, and Justice marks a major step forward in our understanding of feminist ethics. It is both direct and helpful enough to work as an introduction for students and insightful and original enough to make it necessary reading for scholars. (shrink)

'Manning successfully argues that theory and ethics should once again be reunited...thorough and provocative...'—THE MIDWEST BOOK REVIEW.

Nancy Naples provides an overview of different theories of feminist methodology, linked to Naples' experiences of activist research.

This paper argues that most conceptualizations of citizenship limit the purview of the discourse to static categories. ‘Citizenship’ is commonly seen as an ideal type, presuming a largely legal relationship between an inidividual and a single nation-state – more precisely only one type of nation-state, the advanced capitalist post-war model. Alternatively, we suggest a re-conceptualization of citizenship as a negotiated relationship, one which is subject therefore to change, and acted upon collectively within social, political and economic relations of conflict. This (...) dynamic process of negotiation takes place within a context which is shaped by gendered, racial and class structures and ideologies; it also involves international hierarchies among states. Citizenship is therefore negotiated on global as well as national levels. This conceptualization is demonstrated by way of identifying one particular set of experiences of negotiated citizenship, involving foreign domestic workers in Canada. As non-citizens originating from Third World conditions, this is a case involving women of colour workers, highly prone to abusive conditions, and under the direction of employers who are more affluent First World citizens and predominantly white women. Original survey data based on interviews with Caribbean and Filipino domestic workers in Canada are used to demonstrate the varied, creative and effective strategies of two distinctive groups of non-citizens as they attempt to negotiate citizenship rights in restrictive national and international conditions. (shrink)

This book marks a new and significant contribution to the debates surrounding the whole nature of care and citizenship. A new political concept of an ethics of care that will integrate themes from feminist ethics and gender theories is proposed.

The author uses census data to assess the consequences of two alternative theoretical formulations of care work for understanding the intersections of gender, race, and economic inequalities in paid care. The nurturance conceptualization focuses on care as relationship while the reproductive labor framework includes both relational and nonrelational jobs that maintain and reproduce the labor force. An empirical application of both models to the labor market shows that placing increasing theoretical emphasis on nurturant care privileges the experiences of white women (...) and excludes large numbers of very-low-wage workers from consideration. (shrink)

The social model of disability gives us the tools not only to challenge the discrimination and prejudice we face, but also to articulate the personal experience of impairment. Recognition of difference is therefore a key part of the assertion of our common humanity and of an ethics of care that promotes our human rights.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing SolidaritySunera Thobani (bio)Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. By Chandra Talpade Mohanty. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. 2003.The publication of Chandra Talpade Mohanty's germinal essay, "Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses," made her a much admired and respected scholar, deeply influencing the thinking of many feminists, including myself. The essay, which quickly became part of the Women's Studies canon, (...) is reprinted in Mohanty's latest book, Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity.In this book, Mohanty identifies three "problematic directions within U.S.-based feminisms." The first is the growing, largely class-based rift between activist feminism and university-based feminist theorizing, the latter being susceptible to careerism and a narrow professionalism. The second is the deepening of consumerist and corporatist values, fuelling a rise of "neo-liberal" and "free market" feminism, concerned only with "women's advancement up the corporate and nation-state ladder." Last is the "narrowing of feminist politics and theory," which she defines to be a result of the "critique of essentialist identity politics and the hegemony of postmodern skepticism about identity" (6). Mohanty argues the case for a materialist analysis that addresses issues of identity, agency, community, home, and nation within the context of the institutions of the global political economy. Divided into three sections, the book addresses the major themes that have consistently occupied Mohanty's writings: decolonizing feminism; demystifying capitalism; and reorienting feminism. [End Page 221]The first section of the book, "Decolonizing Feminism," is vintage Mohanty. Her critique of the textual strategies deployed by Western feminists in cross-cultural studies to construct a monolithic image of third world women as always and everywhere victimized, unrelentingly oppressed by "their" patriarchal cultures, remains as pertinent today as when she first wrote her classic essay. The textual strategies she identified at that time included the assumption that the category of 'woman' is a discrete, unitary formation, constituted prior to women's entry into social relations and institutions, such as the family; and the uncritical use of descriptive generalizations and disjointed examples as "proof" of the universality of the oppression of women in all Third World societies. The result of such flawed analytic and methodological approaches distort the understanding of the various types of agency of Third World women, particularly the forms of resistance they develop, and thwarts the potential for cross-cultural feminist alliances. Simultaneously, Western feminists constitute themselves as active agents of history—liberated, educated and free—through the object status they impose upon their downtrodden "sisters." Mohanty argues that the power exercised through such constructs is not unlike that exercised by other Western colonialist discourses. Unfortunately, the book does not carry this analysis forward to examine the current situation of Muslim women (in Muslim and non-Muslim societies) in the midst of the aggressively militarist empire-building of the U.S. regime in its invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq. The ubiquity of the image of Muslim women as desperately in need of rescue by the "West" reveals how strong are the current forces that antiracist feminists have to contend with in the United States as elsewhere.Mohanty has long argued that Third World feminism is distinguished from liberal feminism by its refusal to elevate gender as the primary axis of power, insisting instead on the salience of race, class, sexuality, and nationality, along with gender, in shaping the lives of women. The book reiterates Mohanty's persuasive case, as well as her argument that the commonality of interests shared by Third World women is based not in biology, color, or geography, but in a shared history and experience of struggles against racist and colonial domination. Mohanty is critical of feminists who have adopted her ideas on difference, but ignored her insistence on situating these differences within the context of commonalities between the various feminisms she studies. Surprisingly, then, Mohanty unceremoniously dismisses deconstructions of the unitary category of gender undertaken by postmodern feminists. A substantive engagement with the particular postmodern feminist theories she is critical of, which she defines as hegemonic and representing a "problematic direction[s] within U.S.-based feminisms" (6), would... (shrink)

Care work straddles the divide between activities performed out of love and those performed for pay. The tensions created for workers by this divide raise questions concerning connections between recognition and redistribution. Through an analysis of mobilization among childcare workers, we argue that care workers can address redistribution and recognition simultaneously through vocabularies of both skill and virtue. We conclude with a discussion of strategies to overcome the false dichotomy between recognition and redistribution.

Disabled women's issues, experiences, and embodiments have been misunderstood, if not largely ignored, by feminist as well as mainstream disability theorists. The reason for this, I argue, is embedded in the use of materialist and constructivist approaches to bodies that do not recognize the interaction between “sex” and “gender” and “impairment” and “disability” as material-semiotic. Until an interactionist paradigm is taken up, we will not be able to uncover fully the intersection between sexist and ableist biases that form disabled women's (...) oppressions. Relying on the understanding that sexuality is one such material-semiotic phenomenon, I examine the operation of interwoven biases in two disabled women's narratives. (shrink)