Care (work) is in crisis. In fact, within our current system, social vulnerabilities of differential kinds are pushed to the fringes of society, while self-responsibility prevails. Yet recently, vulnerability has become a fashionable concept in (feminist) theory. It owes this popularity not least to Judith Butler’s work. This paper analyses the political potential of her conceptualization. More precisely, it argues for the need to assume political responsibility for vulnerability. This is not a connection that Butler makes explicitly. Instead, and contrary to her previous ambivalence to ethics more broadly, she tries to formulate a critical ethics based on vulnerability. Against the abstract nature of ethics, this paper turns to activist voices and Iris Marion Young’s theorisations on responsibility to develop a structural, historically contextualised and collective account of political responsibility. The example of care work and the crisis of care elucidates both theoretical and practical insights throughout the paper.
This paper contends that relations of property and propriety of “western modernity” engender and articulate different forms of violence, crucially including sexualised violence. Going beyond the limits of dominant frameworks and liberal feminism’s approaches to violence, this paper takes seriously the need to trace how modern ways of relating are intimately connected to colonial modes of dispossession and propertisation. Therefore, I draw on historical resources and present a constellation history with fragments from the context of relations of intimacy in German colonial rule. This shows how hegemonic family relations and marriage laws were used to control access to land and resources, as well as workers and their bodies. Logics of imperial intervention in sexuality and the use of sexualised violence extend beyond this specific spatio-temporal context into the present. This highlights how categories of race, gender and sexuality develop with, through and for, proprietary relations. The ambiguous role of white women vis-à-vis colonial relations of ownership reinforces a critique of limited approaches of liberal feminism and stresses the importance of anti-colonial organizing against violence.
Hannah Vögele und Julian Pietzko widmen sich in ihrem Beitrag dem transnationalen Frauenstreik und arbeiten politische Praktiken und Möglichkeiten der Organisierung der Bewegung heraus. Im Fokus steht dabei das transformative Potenzial zeitgenössischer feministischer Kämpfe um eine anders gestaltete Gesellschaft. Sozialer Wandel, so die These, vollzieht sich nicht ruckartig durch einen Bruch in und mit dem Bestehenden, sondern muss als ein langanhaltender Prozess widerständiger Praktiken begriffen werden. Zentrale Praktiken der Streikbewegung drehen sich dabei um das Herstellen translokaler Solidarität, das Erfahren von widerständiger (feministischer) Geschichte und um einen erweiterten Arbeitsbegriff um Reproduktion von Gesellschaft und Bewegung. Anhand dieses konkreten Beispiels zeigen ihre theoretischen Überlegungen auf, wie »exposures«, konzeptualisiert als relational und aktiv, eine bewusste soziale Praxis der Politisierung kollektiver Verletzlichkeit und den sie bedingenden gesellschaftlichen Macht- und Herrschaftsverhältnissen ausleuchten können.
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