Feminist Reflections on Vulnerability

Disrespect, Obligation, Action

Dados Bibliográficos

ID4877046
AutoresEwa Plonowska Ziarek (University at Buffalo, State University of New York, autor correspondente)
Ano2013
Volume42
Fascículo3
Páginas67-84
Data de publicação2013-01-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessNão
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoSubStance (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0049-2426 • E-ISSN: 1527-2095
EditoraProject MUSE (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1353/sub.2013.0036
OpenAlexW1967775275
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas13
Referências citadas8

Feminist Reflections on Vulnerability:Disrespect, Obligation, Action Ewa Plonowska Ziarek (bio) Political and Ethical Vulnerability: What’s the Difference? At least since the 1970s, vulnerability has emerged as a significant area of research in international social sciences. Combining sociology, studies of climate change, politics, and cultural geography, these interdisciplinary studies of vulnerability are concerned with the exposure of populations to natural, economic, and political disasters.1 In the area of national defense, vulnerability means a failure of security, the exposure to or the risk of an attack by hostile forces or, recently, terrorism.2 From natural disasters to political catastrophes, from economic/political disempowerment to the weakness of military defense, the patterns and the causes of vulnerability have to be measured, prevented, or at least managed in order to protect populations. Indeed, this is the goal of global vulnerability studies, whether located in academia or in political, national, or international organizations.3 Since such studies aim to control and protect populations and natural environment across the globe, vulnerability thus conceived represents the expansion of biopolitics on the global scale. The protection of vulnerable people (the emblem of which are often racialized women and children) and nature always occurs in the name of security, which, according to Hardt and Negri, represents a constructive aspect of biopower and the new means of its legitimation (18-31). Since the mobilization of the military or police power in the name of security requires a constant threat, the vulnerability of populations to internal or external dangers, from terrorism and the influx of illegal immigrants to drug wars, provides the means of such legitimation. At the other end of the spectrum and no doubt connected to the security of populations as its “dialectical other,” vulnerability occupies the self-help terrain. From books to talk shows, vulnerability signifies a risk that has to be managed by individuals themselves or is reclaimed as a new virtue to be cultivated.4 As a moral virtue, vulnerability loses its negative connotations and becomes associated instead with empathy and the ability to connect with others—that is, with the capacities traditionally associated with middle-class white femininity. Thus the security [End Page 67] of populations has its counterpart in individual morality, understood as either self-management or the cultivation of new virtues. The central question I want to explore here is whether there can be a different discourse of vulnerability outside the hold of biopolitics, security, and self-management. Can vulnerability signify a different intersection between politics and ethics apart from risk management on a global or individual scale? Can it be mobilized by feminist politics and ethics? On the level of politics, vulnerability, I would like to propose, has two contradictory meanings, which are nonetheless connected. In feminist and anti-racist struggles, vulnerability is intertwined first of all with subjection to racist and sexist violence, with bodily injury and extreme destitution. In other words, it signifies the damaging and indeed disastrous effects of domination and power. Yet vulnerability also has a positive meaning: it can be reclaimed as a condition of intersubjective freedom, action, and political engagement. Consequently, what is opposed to violence and disaster is not personal or national security or risk management. On the contrary, the commitment to security perpetuates biopower, and thus compromises the conditions on which the practice of freedom itself depends. Thus, what I propose as an alternative to risk management is the struggle for more expansive notions of freedom and justice. The main claim in this essay is that these two political meanings of vulnerability—the subjection to violation and the struggle for freedom—are interconnected with the third, ethical signification of vulnerability. By ethics, I do not mean privatized morality of “virtue,” but, rather, I mean a specific understanding of ethics proposed by Emmanuel Levinas. According to Levinas’s influential theory of responsibility, ethics shifts the concern from the subject’s vulnerability to the plight of the other person. Such an ethics calls for responsibility for the other’s exposure to violence and calls for vigilance against aggression that the other’s fragility might provoke. Not opposed to political struggles for freedom, responsibility foregrounds what I will call an ethical vector of freedom

Biopower · Computer security · Criminology · Development economics · Environmental ethics · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Security studies · Sociology · Vulnerability (computing) · Foucault, Power, and Ethics · Hannah Arendt's Political Philosophy · Law · Political Theology and Sovereignty