Traditionally, women have taken on the caregiver role and still do, but they are increasingly working outside the home, leaving this demanding and often undercompensated labor to immigrants and people of color, who themselves not infrequently must leave behind dependents in their own homes or in their home countries. Because caregiving thus serves as a nexus of matters having to do with power, privilege, gender, race, ethnicity, class, and disability, it raises complex political and ethical questions. The subject has not been adequately examined in literary scholarship. The panel is an attempt to address this need.
The panel will interrogate depictions of care/dependency with an eye toward care’s ethical dimensions and representational challenges. Narratives organize and give meaning to the world and, as such, can either reinforce stereotypes or transform the ways we imagine caregiving, care receiving, and interdependency.
In our first paper, “Outside the Frame: Photographing Illness, Family, and Care in the Era of AIDS,” Rachel Adams reminds us that LGBTQ people often find the most valued care relations within chosen, rather than legal or biological families. She then traces how the AIDS epidemic brought chosen and biological families into crisis around caring for unprecedented numbers of disabled and debilitated gay men, whose situation was compounded by the prejudices of medical professionals and other institutions devoted to care. Estranged biological families often regrouped to provide care for dying men, sometimes collaborating with and sometimes excluding chosen partners and family networks. Adams informs us that the most iconic image of the early AIDS epidemic is Theresa Frare’s photograph of a young man on his deathbed surrounded by his grieving family. Adams argues that the fame of this photo had the ironic effect of obscuring equally powerful photographs shot by Frare, which told more nuanced stories about care and family. Expanding that frame, Adams explores the alternative narratives about family, care, and illness in the time of AIDS told by the broader corpus of Frare’s work.
In our second presentation, “The Yoke of Duty: Ethics of Care in Middlemarch,” Kate Washington considers how George Eliot’s sprawling Middlemarch (1872) grapples deeply with questions of medical ethics, duty, and love. Washington argues that this novel demands attention for its consideration of ethical tensions inherent to caregiving for the ill, which in the Victorian era was the province of women and done almost exclusively at home, by family members. The angel-in-the-house qualities of an ideal Victorian woman—quiet, selfless, dutiful, tender—map neatly onto those expected of a good caregiver, whose supposed sole imperative was then (and sometimes now) to cater to her charge. Washington parses two moments in Middlemarch involving Mary Garth and Dorothea Brooke Casaubon. In both cases, the narrative makes plain that caregivers need not and indeed must not sacrifice their whole selves: ethical caregiving, in Middlemarch as in reality, must balance the needs of both parties.
In the third paper, “An ‘Ethics of Betrayal’: Carework in Angie Cruz’s Soledad and Naima Coster’s Halsey Street,” Belkis González discusses how caring for oneself while caring for loved ones is commonly referred to as a matter of finding “balance”; finding a point of equivalence between one’s responsibility to oneself and one’s responsibility toward others. González examines how two recent works of Latinx literature trouble this conceptualization of care, representing the work of care as the conduit to political and cultural agency. In Angie Cruz’s Soledad and in Naima Coster’s Halsey Street, the protagonists have worked to distance themselves from the racial/ethnic and working class locations of their families. González explains how both protagonists, impelled by complex motives, return to their families when a parent falls ill. González explores an “ethics of betrayal” in the texts by Cruz and Coster and the “possibilities for being” that these texts reveal.
In our final presentation, “Representations of Disablement and Care in Sara Suleri’s Meatless Days: a Perspective from the Global South,” Sushil Oswal positions Sara Suleri’s Meatless Days as a study of care from the perspective of disability studies. Oswal lays the groundwork through exposition: the somewhat hypochondriac father and his aged mother present exemplary notions of dependence, independence, and interdependence in a Punjabi extended household that lives in several in between spaces—the grandmother’s pre-independence India, her newspaper editor son’s nationalist Pakistan, Suleri’s Welsh mother in her Anglo-Welsh academic environment of the Punjab University in Lahore, and her husband’s highly traditional but politicized Moslem Indo-Pakistani family structure. Oswal explores the contradictions between the concepts mutual well being acquired in an Indian household and an individualistic British education.
“Representations of Care, Ethics of Care” investigates portrayals of care as well the ethical intricacies of the practice. Testifying to the interest in this subject are the twenty-two excellent proposals I received in response to my CFP. This panel raises important questions regarding what it means to be human vis-à-vis the interaction of caregiving and receiving, and for this reason its fits well with the convention’s Presidential theme.