I've said before that my core philosophy is care ethics. I think if I want to get serious about representing that, especially alongside my transfeminism, then I'm going to start theorizing about care systems.
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So much noise and uncertainty, from personal choices through world politics, disappear when when we remember that our first and most vital duty to one another use the duty of care. Doesn't say to be a doormat or a saint, just that all you do/say bears a duty to care for the other being(s).
Care systems are so deeply built into all discussion of politics and ethics that we're always at least brushing up against them in some way; they're extremely vital to how gendered labor is organized from the ground up.
I want to expand this into its own larger disciplinary field.
The term I've been liking for my philosophy is "liberation care ethics," which will be one of the next big things I write about in additional to dialectical feminism. A major point of interest is developing an ethic of liberatory organization, which I tend to see as a big gap in leftist environments
So what is a care system? The short and sweet is "the way care distribution is organized in a particular context." But of course, that needs a lot of unpacking.
Most intra-community disputes I tend to see within marginalized communities are in some way attempts to renegotiate the existing care system. These conflicts center around themes of where responsibility should flow toward and flow from, and to what degree.
But the tendency I see often is for this to be expressed almost entirely through the dimension of politics, and therefore to get funneled into disputes about oppression hierarchy that often lack clear, agreed-on frameworks as to what the conclusions mean.
The simple fact is that if you can reason that a person or group is less marginalized than another one, this doesn't necessarily mean that the flow of care should necessarily be less to that first person or group. Or that all forms of care should follow the same distribution priority.
yeah as a motherless person i am amazed how many people don't get this, and frankly it makes me wonder how the other feminists and queer activists i know deal with the role of their own mothers within their own families of origin.
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I want to expand this into its own larger disciplinary field.