ENGL 579 A1: The Feminist Ethics of Care: Theories, Ecologies, Poetics

M. Carrière

Care is ubiquitous in our lives and indeed to all forms of life. The term alone is semantically plural; it can denote concern, anxiety, attention, solicitude, charge, protection, or grief, or it can give rise to a myriad of adjectives (careful, careless, caring), compound nouns (care package, care provider, home care) as well as various idioms (to take care, to not care less, who cares!). Care is an ontological necessity and essential to any form of survival. And so why is care relegated to the lower spheres of societal importance? What if, with philosopher Joan Tronto, we took care seriously? What if, with Carol Gilligan before her, care were understood in feminist, rather than feminine, terms? And what if, with Stó:lo writer Lee Maracle, we acknowledged care as a politics that could restore women's power within Indigenous governing systems? It is beyond a moral disposition or abstract, disembodied ideal that we will consider the feminist ethics of care, and particularly their renewal in the current millennium which both succeeds and surpasses second-wave feminism. In the first instance, our study will be transnational, as it looks to care's correlations with intersectionality, material and posthuman theory, Indigenous philosophies, and ecofeminism. The reactivation and transformation of the feminist ethics of care in twenty-first-century thought will then find literary models in the fiction and poetry of English-Canadian, Indigenous, and Québécois writers. A side-by-side reading of these authors' works will consider the complexities, breakdown, and generative aspects and time of care, in the face of normative, neoliberal, sexist, racist, and unsustainable bio-capital power structures. Format and activities will include rotating seminar facilitation and team presentations (40%); short assignments in writing for the profession (mock abstract, call for papers, peer review) (20%); research paper (40%). Throughout, we will be thinking about our own positionalities, privileges, stakes, and accountability in relation to our university work.

 Tentative Readings/Excerpts 

• Bellacasa, María de la Puig. Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds. U of Minnesota P, 2017.
• Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Polity, 2016.
• Gilligan, Carol. In a Different Voice. Harvard UP, 2003.
• Lindberg, Tracey. Birdie. HarperCollins, 2015.
• Maracle, Lee. Memory Serves: Oratories. Edited by Smaro Kamboureli. NeWest, 2015.
• Thúy, Kim. Ru. Vintage, 2015.
• Toews, Miriam. All My Puny Sorrows. Knopf Canada, 2014.
• Tronto, Joan. Caring Democracy: Markets, Equality, Justice. New York UP, 2013.
• Vermette, Katherena. river woman. Anansi, 2018.
• Wong, Rita. undercurrent. Nightwood, 2015.