ChoreoCare · Choreographies of vulnerability :towards a new public ethics of care

Choreographies of vulnerability :towards a new public ethics of care

My research grounds a public ethics of care in a phenomenological understanding of vulnerability by constructing a historical trajectory that extends from ancient Greek drama to contemporary feminist theory. Its development is articulated on the grounds of three fundamental research questions: (a) How can we narrate vulnerability as an embodied condition and practices of care in their situatedness? (b) How is care instituted, based on vulnerability and interdependency as the fundamental traits of (not only human) life? (c) How is care performed as a collective practice able to transform the socio-political context? My claim is that, if a collectivity recognizes vulnerability as a condition that all individuals embody, although each one does so in a different way and with different resources, it will also promote practices of care as a necessarily shared task. In the final period of this research, I have addressed the different critiques regarding the use of vulnerability in legal studies. Some concern its understanding as an ontological concept (namely vulnerability as a shared human condition) and others its use as a political and legal identification of specific groups or individuals as being “vulnerable subjects.” The first type of critique points out that the universalistic account of the notion fails to bear witness to the unequal distribution of precarity in the lives of certain subjectivities and groups, who therefore end up not being represented in the juridical realm. As for the particularistic account of vulnerability as characterizing specific groups and/or identities, the claim is that this categorization reproduces and even fosters the isolation and marginality of groups and individuals identified as needing protection. It can even lead to the opposite of care when the very system (the police or legal and judiciary institutions) that is supposed to protect a community in fact reinforces and reproduces the same discrimination it allegedly counters. Judith Butler embraces the latter critique, highlighting that by defining groups or individuals as ‘vulnerable’ we essentialize a condition of vulnerability that is rather produced by socio-political factors. Their claim is that vulnerability, in its embodied and relational connotation, is only helpful if it allows us to see how forms of resistance emerge. Although I share Butler’s concern about possible developments of the concept, especially in legal theory, I still consider the vulnerability framework a productive way to understand politics and to actively initiate political mobilizations, groups, and even institutions. Some of these may gather many bodies, like feminist assemblies, mobilizations for environmental justice, or strikes. Others might be small gatherings, like those organized by nonprofit organizations to raise awareness on certain topics. Some of them are institutionally framed, others are entirely bottom-up. I propose reading care as a key notion for understanding the inaugural character of these kinds of gatherings and demonstrations. Indeed, they are not solely a reaction to pervasive conditions of inequality, discrimination, and violence, but rather they initiate something by performatively influencing the socio-political context in which they are enacted and perhaps transforming it.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union