Politics, Human Flourishing, and Bodily Knowing: a Critical Theory of Embodied Care

Politics, Human Flourishing, and Bodily Knowing: A Critical Theory of Embodied Care Hollie Sue Mann A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Political Science. Chapel Hill 2010 Approved by: Susan Bickford Maxine Eichner Jeff Spinner-Halev Michael Linenesch Andrew Perrin Joan Tronto “The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day." --David Foster Wallace For my parents, Sue and Steve Mann. And for Brendan. ii ABSTRACT Hollie Mann: Politics, Human Flourishing, and Bodily Knowing: A Critical Theory of Embodied Care (Under the direction of Susan Bickford and Jeff Spinner-Halev) This project investigates the relationship between human flourishing, politics and care. I consider how politics can stifle or foster citizens‟ potential to attain and practice the virtue of care and why this matters for politics. In this work, I make three principal contributions to our study of care: First, we must begin to see care as more than a means to other ends. Care not only helps us achieve political ends like autonomy, justice, and equality, but it is also an activity that should be done for its own sake. Second, the best citizen is a caring one, a claim that contrasts deeply with conventional understandings of citizenship, both ancient and modern. Others have articulated care‟s importance to democratic citizenship, but what we need now is a more capacious understanding of what it takes to create a caring subject and what political work is required to sustain citizens‟ practices of care. This requires reimagining ourselves, as well as thinking through the civic structures, institutions, and policies that are most compatible with an understanding of a caring self. Third, my conception of care as an embodied practice illuminates the relationship between bodies, inequality, and carework. I consider how a particular kind of embodied politics can activate and sustain an ethic that cultivates citizens‟ capacities and desires to care. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter I. CARING AND THE WORK OF POLITICS…………………………………...1 Connecting Care to Politics…………………………………………………….1 Conceptualizing Care…………………………………………………………10 A Critical Theory of Embodied Care…………………………………………17 II. ARISTOTLE, POLITICS, AND THE WORK OF CARE………………...…23 Why Aristotle?………………………………………………………….….…27 Aristotle and Traditional Care Ethics……………………………….………..32 Structures of Care in Aristotle………………………………………..………39 Embodied Care and Human Flourishing……………………………………..59 III. DOES EVERYBODY CARE? CULTIVATING A CRITICAL PRACTICE OF CARE…………………………………………………………………….78 Connecting Corporeality to Care…………………………………………......80 The Phenomenlogy of Embodied Care…………………………………..…...87 Rethinking Embodied Care: Is Every Body Built to Care?…………………..99 Towards Care as Critical Practice…………………………………….……..104 IV. FASHIONING CAREGIVING BODIES: INEQUALITY, BODYWORK, AND CARE………………………………………………..128 Care and Subjectivity………………………………………………………..131 Carework as Bodywork…………………………………………………..….135 Serializing Caregivers: Bodywork and Inequality………………………......155 iv V. EMBODIED CARE RECONSIDERED: (RE)CREATING CARING SUBJECTS………………………………………………………..166 Prospects for a Politics of Care: A Brief Overview…………………………171 Engendering Critical Practices of Embodied Care…………………………..183 The Moral Vocabulary of Care………………………………………….......223 VI. DEMOCRATIC CARE IN A POSTMODERN AGE……………………...225 The Wave of the Future? Care-o-Bots in the 21st Century………………….225 Care and Democratic Citizenship…………………………………………...229 REFERENCES………………………………………………………………………....241 v CHAPTER ONE CARING AND THE WORK OF POLITICS I. CONNECTING CARE TO POLITICS The United States now confronts what Ruth Rosen in a 2007 article in “The Nation” called the care crisis, characterized primarily by a societal failure to adequately restructure the workplace and family life following women‟s mass entrance into the paid workforce so that the caring needs of individuals and families continue to be met.1 The current congressional stalemate over how to address major failures in the health care system is only one manifestation of a much larger failure to make care a political priority. Today, most families are dual-earner households, wherein both adults work, usually full- time, outside of the home, which means that there is no longer a full-time, unpaid caregiver in the home.2 With rising costs in childcare and elder care, families often struggle to find adequate and affordable care for children and, increasingly, for aging parents. Often, the work of finding, managing, and performing care continues to fall to women, even though they, too, have full time jobs.3 And when arrangements can be made 1 Ruth Rosen, "The Care Crisis," The Nation, March 12, 2007 2007, 135. 2 Janet C. Gornick and Marcia Meyers, Families That Work: Policies for Reconciling Parenthood and Employment (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2003), Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work, 2nd Owl Books ed. (New York: H. Holt, 2001). 3 Sharon Hays, Flat Broke with Children: Women in the Age of Welfare Reform (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), Arlie Russell Hochschild and Anne Machung, The Second for the care of dependents during work hours, families must still figure out how to meet the often overwhelming caregiving needs for family members during those times when one or both earners are not at work. Although men have increased their participation in housework and caregiving responsibilities over the past decade, it is still the case that women, on average, manage and perform the bulk of this work in the home.4 This means that the “burden” of care is not equally distributed across both genders in heterosexual dual-income households; even when care is outsourced so that both adults can work, men are much more likely to be “off the hook” for caregiving activity in the home, while women only during work hours and sometimes not even then. Single mothers are, not surprisingly, most vulnerable to the consequences of the care crises, since they very often have no extra help and are in low- paying jobs that make meeting the costs of childcare extremely difficult, if not impossible. Middle- and working-class families, as well as single-parents, most often end up having to patch together a combination of caregiving arrangements, which include paid childcare or eldercare and assistance from friends and families, while the working poor can sometimes gain access to federal or state programs, though many of these support services are certainly at risk of being diminished or disappearing altogether in the Shift (New York: Penguin Books, 2003). For a good overview of the rising costs of child care in the United States, see Stephanie Armour, "High Costs of Child Care Can Lead to Lifestyle Changes, Adjustments," April 18, 2006. 4 Suzanne M. Bianchi, John P. Robinson, and Melissa A. Milkie, Changing Rhythms of American Family Life (New York: Russell Sage Foundation 2007), Ellen Galinsky, Kerstin Aumann, and James T. Bond, "Times Are Changing: Gender and Generation at Work and at Home," (Families and Work Institute, 2008). 2 recent economic downturn.5 Rosen writes that, “women who work in the low-wage service sector, without adequate sick leave, generally lose their jobs when children or parents require urgent attention. As of 2005, 21 million women lived below the poverty line—many of them mothers working in these vulnerable situations.”6 Further, it is far from clear that President Obama‟s recent proposal for middle-class tax benefits, which would increase public support for child care, elder care, and retirement (thinking about elder care in advance), will either come to fruition or, if they do, provide much relief to the working poor and those most afflicted by the absence of public care or even the publicly shared value of care in this country. One common assumption, which Rosen seems to share, is that the upper-class and very wealthy do not suffer the consequences of the care crisis and that this perhaps contributes to a lack of political will to address the problems that result from it.7 These families are not as vulnerable to the “burden of family care,” to use Nancy Folbre‟s phrase in a recent NY Times article on the need for a Dependent Price Index to measure the costs of caring for dependents, because they are typically able to absorb the costs and employ full-time nannies or at-home caregivers, very often from developing countries, to meet their caregiving needs.8 Yet, at the same time, job loss and the need to be more flexible and mobile for work opportunities has meant that more workers in all socio- 5 Jason DeParle, "For Victims of Recession, Patchwork State Aid," New York Times, May 9, 2009, Paula Span, "Adult Day-Care Centers Worry About Funding," The Washington Post, December 1, 2009. 6 Rosen, "The Care Crisis." 7 Ibid. 8 Nancy Folbre, "How Much Do We Spend Caring for Family?," New York Times, February 1, 2010. 3 economic brackets are taking jobs that may not be nearby, which often leads to new care- related challenges in the home. Although women are less likely to experience job loss in the current economy, it is not clear that the exit of men from the labor market across all classes is resulting in a decrease of time spent on housework and care for women. In any case, it is certainly true that the wealthy are able to secure care more easily than the middle-class and the poor, and so, in one way, are less likely to feel the worst of the strain put on work/family arrangements as a result of the collective failure to make care a political priority. However, I want to suggest that even the wealthy are victims of the care crisis in this country, but not because they lack the financial means to pay for costly care services.

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