Why care studies? The discourses associated with this universal human practice have rarely been critically examined. Searches in the MLA Bibliography yield a smattering of “hits.” The first and only critical anthology on the subject came out last year: Discourses of Care: Media Practices and Cultures (Bloomsbury 2020). By contrast, the subject has been of interest for some time in feminist thought in disciplines such as philosophy, ethics, education, nursing, and social policy.
Our panel is timely in seeking to redress this marginalization of the topic in literary and cultural studies. (Care associated with the medical profession lies outside the panel’s purview.) Because relationships of care are often narratively configured, the “Discourses of Care” of the title declares our intention to interrogate how caregiving practices are modeled in narrative modes. The “Ethics of Care” of our title announces that we are guided in part by philosopher Eva Feder Kittay, who, in Learning From My Daughter: The Value and Care of Disabled Minds (Oxford UP, 2019), wrestles with the thorny issues caregiving summons.
Our panel’s four presenters will adhere to a fifteen-minute limit. The presider, Chris Gabbard, will make no comments beyond introducing the participants, strictly enforcing the time limit, and supervising fifteen minutes of Q&A. In the first presentation, “Handle with Care: Blackness and Embodied Neurodivergence in Toni Morrison’s Beloved,” Diana R. Paulin explores how the characters Sethe and Denver both produce and enact an ethics of care as they navigate the legacies of racialized violence, enslavement, the Middle Passage, white supremacy, and subjection that have shaped their lives and community. By continually recalibrating their shifting roles as deliverers and recipients of care, they demonstrate how the meanings and functions of caregiving are not universal; more often than not, “care” is contingent on the particular material conditions and context in which it is administered and received. Morrison represents care and caregiving as vital to the process of healing, resilience, and survival in the wake of trauma born out of the intergenerational experiences of slavery.
Kate Washington grapples with care in “The Yoke of Duty: Ethics of Caregiving in Middlemarch.” George Eliot’s 1872 novel considers the ethical questions inherent to unpaid caregiving for the ill, which in the era was the province of women and done largely at home. The angel-in-the-house qualities of an ideal Victorian woman map neatly onto those expected of a good caregiver. This paper reads the female characters’ choices against the feminist-ethical philosophical framework recently pioneered by Kate Manne, which offers a fresh perspective on the cultural assumptions underlying care obligations.
The third presenter, Amanda Apgar, returns us to the present day in “Constructing the Non-autonomous Subject in ‘Special Needs’ Parental Memoirs.” Apgar examines “special needs” parental memoirs (SNPMs) as narratives of care. SNPMs are a subgenre of disability life writing written by parents of children with disabilities. Caring for a child with a disability is narrated as sometimes tragic and sometimes extraordinary. Parental memoirs are unpopular among disabled self-advocates, and she argues that this hostility names a critique of the so-called autonomous subject constructed in SNPMs. The problem with parental memoirs, she shows, is the non-autonomy attributed to children, disabled or not, and the ways in which this attribution reifies the distinction between abled and disabled in the U.S. cultural imagination via discourses of dependency and care.
Talia Schaffer will close by bringing the subject of care to the academy. In “Communities of Care and the Composite Writing Model,” she asks whether we can use an ethics of care to rethink the model of professional success in academia and authorship. Ethics of care has always advocated for radical interrelationality, and Schaffer advocates for regarding writing as a scene of care, then asks whether such interrelationality can transform how we regard authorship. Academics have understood a research career as a diachronic narrative of landmark achievements, but a synchronic mode stressing networks prioritizes interactivity, rewarding references as traces of help received. Reorienting us towards a collectivist care model of writerliness, Schaffer’s interrelational idea aims to alter how we read, what we read for, and how we evaluate what we write.