Editors Rachel Brown and Deva Woodly bring together Mara Marin, Shatema Threadcraft, Christopher Paul Harris, Jasmine Syedullah, and Miriam Ticktin to examine the question: what would be required for care to be an ethic and political practice that orients people to a new way of living, relating, and governing? The answer they propose is that a 21st-century approach to the politics of care must aim at unmaking racial capitalism, cisheteropatriarchy, the carceral state, and the colonial present. The (...) politics of care is an approach to political thought and action that moves beyond the liberal approach which situates care as a finite resource to be distributed among autonomous individuals, or as a necessarily feminine virtue. Instead, those elucidating the politics of care for the contemporary era draw on rich interdisciplinary traditions and social movements to theorize and practice care as an inherently interdependent survival strategy, a foundation for political organizing, and a prefigurative politics for building a world in which all people can live and thrive. (shrink)

This book considers whether there is a legitimate or even necessary place for the perspective of 'care' when addressing questions of universal justice. To this end, it examines two major frameworks of contemporary moral philosophy_Jürgen Habermas's model of discourse ethics and Jacques Derrida's deconstructive ethics of radical singularity_in which the contrasting standpoints of communicative reciprocation and care for the absolute otherness of the other are respectively prioritized.

Responding to Ike Kamphof’s “Webcams to save nature: Online space as affective and ethical space,” this essay considers the further contextualization of Kamphof’s analysis using the idea of agencement and the provocation to consider further the politics of affect.

Against a background of neoliberal precarity, the yoga industry promotes a practice experienced by, and inscribed on, the body that is meant to transcend physiological boundaries and expand individual and collective awareness. In this context, research on contemporary yoga has shed light on how women, and specific notions of womanhood, are key to a promise of wellness, healing, and self-realisation that is materialised by White, monied, slender female practitioners as embodiments of the proper way of undertaking self-care. The yoga (...) industry, thus, participates in a politics of the body, embedded in the intricate structures of the current neoliberal politico-economic regime. Based on these observations, this article sets out to interrogate how the yoga industry’s mandate of tending to the body enters the way female teachers and practitioners navigate, experience, and express their journey into yoga. By analysing selected interviews conducted with women yoga instructors and practitioners in the city of Genoa, the article examines how they frame yoga as a way of caring for the self while navigating personal issues and bodily ailments. As a path of self-scrutiny and self-realisation, yoga is talked about as providing some relief from life’s predicaments and embodied vulnerabilities while also accommodating gender normativity. The article develops a critique of the problematic appropriation of self-care by the yoga industry’s mainstream cultural repertoires as a sociologically neutral individual response to living with neoliberal precarity. The article contends that feminist politics of care provide a framework to re-inscribe yogic self-care within a broader process of collectively subverting neoliberal injunctions about tending to the body. (shrink)

The body of research on the social and political implications of Donald Winnicott’s psychoanalytic theory has been growing steadily in recent years. This has long been overdue, considering the preo...

Feminist literature on care has extensively addressed inequalities that cut across the social categories of gender, class and ethnicity in relation to care work. One category that has received less attention in theories of caregiving so far is age. Built on the feminist literature of care and taking young (female) carers as its subject matter, this article tackles age as a third social category of intersectional inequalities along with class and gender. Firstly, through dealing with Nancy Fraser’s (...) justice framework of participatory parity, it is argued that addressing the intersectional inequalities that young (female) carers face necessitates a justice framework that contemplates both the distributional and recognitional aspects of care. In this respect a dual conceptualisation of care is presented – both as a social good and a social process. Secondly, a critical analysis will be presented of the elements of the justice framework of Fraser, where the notion of subordinated status will be related to the identities of young carers. Lastly, the normative framework participatory parity will be discussed in relation to the politics of need, as care practices define the needs of young carers that are contextualised in the care processes, but also in a childhood space. (shrink)

À partir d’une critique des éthiques libérales et des modes de légitimation des inégalités sociales, les recherches sur le care ont constitué depuis une dizaine d’années en France un champ de recherches dialoguant avec les travaux de féministes étatsuniennes et notamment ceux de Carol Gilligan et Joan Tronto. Centrée sur la conception d’un sujet ontologiquement vulnérable et relationnel, cette perspective du care a affirmé l’importance morale et politique du souci d’autrui dans la préservation d’un monde commun. Des travaux (...) transdisciplinaires se sont ainsi saisis de voix étouffées ou minorées par le genre, la classe ou la race ; voix des domestiques, des aides-soignantes, des « femmes de réconfort » ou des personnes en situation de handicap. Ces travaux ont exploré des questions dévalorisées par les sciences sociales, comme le soin non médical, la dépendance ou les multiples attachements des humains aux non-humains. (shrink)

In the struggle for breathable air amid pollution and climate change, both resistance and inspiration can be found in ‘atmospheric care practices’ (Vine 2019). In this article, I embed these practices in a more than human political approach (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017). More than human atmospheric care practices work to undo toxic harm both on a material and social level while intimately involving human beings with more than human worlds. In so doing, they are demonstrative of different (...) kinds of agency and political activity that open up alternative ways of relating and responding to climate change. (shrink)

Caring for the stranger -- Why compassion in politics? -- Historical perspectives on social welfare and global development -- Historical perspectives on human rights -- Compassion in religious and secular thought -- Justice and moral responsibility -- Altruism, empathy, and the making of "Us" and "Them" -- The moral politics of Liberals and Conservatives -- Politics against compassion in the United States -- Compassion in public policy and law -- Creating a more compassionate and just society.

There is a growing demand to incorporate social, economic and ethical considerations into biotechnology governance. However, there is currently little guidance available for understanding what this means or how it should be done. A framework of care-based ethics and politics can capture many of the concerns maintaining a persistent socio-political conflict over biotechnologies and provide a novel way to incorporate such considerations into regulatory assessments. A care-based approach to ethics and politics has six key defining features. (...) These include: 1) a relational worldview, 2) an emphasis on the importance of context, 3) a recognition of the significance of dependence, 4) an analysis of power, including a particular concern for those most vulnerable, 5) a granting of weight to the significance of affect, and 6) an acknowledgment of an important role for narrative. This policy brief provides an overview of these defining features, illustrates how they can appear in a real world example and provides a list of guiding questions for assessing these features and advancing a politics of care in the governance of biotechnology. (shrink)

This article examines the Israeli women’s movement, Checkpoint Watch, as a case from which to argue that the strategic use of the politics of care can challenge existing social and political orders. The conscious decision of activists to direct the practice of care toward the ‘wrong’ subject – toward Palestinians rather than Israeli soldiers – challenges the dehumanisation of Palestinians in Israeli society. While the politics of care may call the political order into question, the (...) service of a behaviour that is considered essentialist may paradoxically reinforce the existing social order. I argue that the politics of care has the potential to challenge both the political and the social order, though not simultaneously. (shrink)

Virginia Held assesses the ethics of care as a promising alternative to the familiar moral theories that serve so inadequately to guide our lives. The ethics of care is only a few decades old, yet it is by now a distinct moral theory or normative approach to the problems we face. It is relevant to global and political matters as well as to the personal relations that can most clearly exemplify care. This book clarifies just what the (...) ethics of care is: what its characteristics are, what it holds, and what it enables us to do. It discusses the feminist roots of this moral approach and why the ethics of care can be a morality with universal appeal. Held examines what we mean by "care," and what a caring person is like. Where other moral theories demand impartiality above all, the ethics of care understands the moral import of our ties to our families and groups. It evaluates such ties, focusing on caring relations rather than simply on the virtues of individuals. The book proposes how such values as justice, equality, and individual rights can "fit together" with such values as care, trust, mutual consideration, and solidarity. In the second part of the book, Held examines the potential of the ethics of care for dealing with social issues. She shows how the ethics of care is more promising than Kantian moral theory and utilitarianism for advice on how expansive, or not, markets should be, and on when other values than market ones should prevail. She connects the ethics of care with the rising interest in civil society, and considers the limits appropriate for the language of rights. Finally, she shows the promise of the ethics of care for dealing with global problems and seeing anew the outlines of international civility. (shrink)

In this interview, Estelle Ferrarese elaborates on her account of vulnerability and care to highlight its political and social, as opposed to its ethical, dimensions. Drawing on, amongst others, Adorno, Tronto, Castell, and Laugier, she argues that vulnerability and care should not be understood ontologically, as an antropological exposure of the body, but rather socially, as the normative expectations and material conditions under which care work takes place. Situating her approach in anglophone and francophone discussions on vulnerability (...) and precarity, she discusses her approach to normative expectations and how it informs her account of vulnerability of living at the mercy of someone else's agency, as well as the politicization of vulnerability. She also discusses the political implications of her account of vulnerability and care with regard to a range of contemporary issues, such as the Men's Right Movement, the posthuman turn and the Antropocene, and mutual aid and the neoliberalization of the welfare state. (shrink)

Virginia Held assesses the ethics of care as a promising alternative to the familiar moral theories that serve so inadequately to guide our lives. The ethics of care is only a few decades old, yet it is by now a distinct moral theory or normative approach to the problems we face. It is relevant to global and political matters as well as to the personal relations that can most clearly exemplify care. This book clarifies just what the (...) ethics of care is: what its characteristics are, what it holds, and what it enables us to do. It discusses the feminist roots of this moral approach and why the ethics of care can be a morality with universal appeal. Held examines what we mean by "care," and what a caring person is like. Where other moral theories demand impartiality above all, the ethics of care understands the moral import of our ties to our families and groups. It evaluates such ties, focusing on caring relations rather than simply on the virtues of individuals. The book proposes how such values as justice, equality, and individual rights can "fit together" with such values as care, trust, mutual consideration, and solidarity. In the second part of the book, Held examines the potential of the ethics of care for dealing with social issues. She shows how the ethics of care is more promising than Kantian moral theory and utilitarianism for advice on how expansive, or not, markets should be, and on when other values than market ones should prevail. She connects the ethics of care with the rising interest in civil society, and considers the limits appropriate for the language of rights. Finally, she shows the promise of the ethics of care for dealing with global problems and seeing anew the outlines of international civility. (shrink)

Scientific progress in the areas of health and biological science is phenomenal. Still, current health policies limit optimal benefit for our peoples. Our present system costs too much, delivers too little, is not comprehensive, coherent, or cost-effective, does not allow choice, is not equitable, and is not universal. We must overcome many crises if we are to create a healthy people fro the twenty-first century in the US. We will need to use multiple strategies to achieve the nation's goals of (...) Healthy People 2010, which are to: 1) increase the quality and years of healthy live; 2) eliminate health disparities; 3) provide access to primary preventive care for all citizens. We are the richest country in the world and the only industrialized country that does not provide health care for its entire people. Health care costs are escalating and insurance is out of reach for many. Public policy changes are necessary to provide universal access to basic health care. We have advances in sciences; now we need the science delivered to our people in an equitable way. Politicians will respond proportionately to the insistence of the people. Healthcare professionals and scientists should lead the way. (shrink)

This article engages with Adriana Cavarero's framing of sexual difference, specifically in terms of how this displaces “bodies that queer”. For Cavarero, the narratable self is inescapably relational and characterized by vulnerability, which is how ethics arises in the form of a decision between caring and wounding. At the same time, Cavarero's deconstructive method of appropriating stereotypes restricts the scope of sexual difference to dimorphism. In examining the implications of this, I build on the work of Michel Foucault and Judith (...) Butler by looking to the intersexed life of Adélaïde Herculine Barbin, whose suicide in 1868 at the age of twenty‐nine was precipitated not through malice or cruelty, but through concerted care. This mode of care is anchored in the apparent self‐evidence of how we see and how we think with and through narratives that sediment in orders of power/knowledge. While agreeing with Cavarero's critique of the autonomous “I,” the article nevertheless argues for authorial audacity—the courage to name oneself—as a way of subverting asymmetrical power relations, including those that make it possible to inadvertently generate suffering through care. (shrink)

Departing from the thought-provoking conversation between David Theo Goldberg and Achille Mbembe on the driving themes in Mbembe’s Critique of Black Reason, this commentary elaborates upon three topics that emerge in this conversation: the role of desire and how it is articulated in black abjection, the politics of care, and contemporary practices of repairing the injustices perpetrated in the context of European modernity. It is emphasized that black reason as a practice of repairing and transformation is especially enacted (...) within contemporary movements like the refugee movements organized around the Black Mediterranean and in the lived freedom archives and abolitionist imaginaries of movements where gender and race cross-cut. Characterized by their transnational dimension and a radical openness towards new beginnings, these expressions of black reason imagine and reinvent justice and democracy anew. (shrink)

국가의 구성원들이 더 훌륭해지도록 돌보는 플라톤적 보살핌의 통치가 국가 구성원들이 모두 저마다 다른 방식으로 능동적으로 산출하는 공공적 유용성을 포괄할 수 있는 앎의 관점을 획득함으로써 그들에게 동의를 얻을 수 있는 것이어야 한다는 함축을 살펴본다. 플라톤의 정치철학을 그의 여러 대화편에 편재하는 다양한 문제의식의 직조물에서 찾는다면, 보살핌으로서의 통치에서 동의는 교육과 상호작용하는 중대한 주제로 보인다. 『고르기아스』의 칼리클레스와 『카르미데스』의 크리티아스가 각각 대표하는 왜곡된 정치적 삶의 유형이 공통적으로 대중의 동의를 배제하는 양상에 대한 플라톤의 비판적 고찰을 살펴보고, 이를 토대로 『정치가』가 제기하는 보살핌으로서의 통치에서 동의가 필요한 이유를 짚어본다. (...) 보살핌으로서의 통치에 대한 플라톤의 탐색은 앎으로서의 덕성을 돌보는 소크라테스적 윤리에, 인간의 정치적 삶의 구체적 조건을 이루는 상호의존성, ‘기하학적’ 동등성, 다양한 능동성에 대한 특유의 고찰을 더해 정치적 앎과 동의를 결합시키는 독특하게 플라톤적인 ‘정치적인 것’을 제시한다. (shrink)

This paper examines Hannah Arendt’s contribution to a conception of political life that remains vigilant of the foreignness that confronts us in our efforts to inhabit a shared world. To this end, I interpret Arendt’s less appreciated discourse on caritas, or love of the neighbor in Love and Saint Augustine, as a critical appropriation of Heidegger’s notion of care. In turning to caritas, I maintain that Arendt captures, perhaps more fully than Heidegger, the foreignness that care is destined (...) to confront in its native desire to belong to something outside of itself. This, I argue, leads Arendt to insist that the responsibility to care is not foremost a matter of individual existence, but rather of politics, grasped precisely as an openness to the foreign in communal life. (shrink)

The construction of foreign domestics as ‘Others’ has been a critical process to the globalization of domestic service. While the globalization of domestic service has been associated with a transnational female labour force, the transnational labour system has always been reconstituted as a new labour regime consistent with local particularity. In this article, I examine how Taiwanese employers discursively construct the otherness of their Filipino domestics. I argue that Taiwanese employers construct and naturalize the otherness of foreign domestics utilizing national (...) identities, racial characteristics, and nationally based class difference. These differences, integral to the racialization of foreign domestics, are central not only to the persistence of their servitude at home but also to their social and political marginalization in the host society as a whole. The localization of a transnational labour force necessitates the examination of the contextual politics of difference. Rather than speaking of the universalized experience of foreign domestics, the contextual politics of difference provides a comparative framework for understanding not only the relational but also the contextual nature of identity construction. It demonstrates how difference is localized in the transnational system of care and how the localization of difference serves to reproduce social and global inequality. (shrink)

Homelessness is an obvious moral challenge, given the fact that it is a problem that millions of people in the developed world have to deal with on a daily basis. In the relatively scarce literature on this subject, there appear to be—roughly—three main approaches, namely, what I will refer to as the “difference approach,” the “liberal approach” and the “care approach.” In the paper I will critically review these three moral perspectives on the issue of homelessness. I will argue (...) that the difference approach and the liberal approach in the end are unconvincing. Homelessness can hardly be interpreted in terms of an internally valued group identity nor in terms of autonomy and its preconditions. I will defend a version of the care approach instead, an approach that focuses on the concrete and particular needs of the homeless. (shrink)

The U.S.Supreme Court's 6-decision in Gonzales v. Oregon is the latest defeat for the Bush administration in its sustained attack on Oregon's physician-assisted suicide law. Both the majority opinion and the major dissent in Oregon provide an opportunity to assess the dangers inherent in allowing a political agenda that emphasizes the sanctity of life and minimizes professional ethical obligations to overshadow quality patient care at the end of life.

In this paper the authors argue that the exploration of the nature of needs and rights should begin with the actually existing organization of care and of justice in society. The authors raise two key concerns with this organization: 1) the invisibility of care to some, and 2) the inaccessibility of rights to others. Recent work by care scholars has called attention to the ways the current organization of care work perpetuates the myth of self-sufficiency for (...) some, while reducing others to mere dependents. Law and Society scholars have demonstrated the problems of uneven access to legal remedies within the current organization of the legal system. Addressing these concerns simultaneously reveals both the problems of the current organization of needs and rights as well as illuminating alternative possibilities. The authors argue, first, that a justice perspective, based on rights is inadequate because its presumed universality is belied by the reality of the inaccessibility of rights to many. Second, the authors argue that a care perspective, currently formulated upon the assumption that only some people have needs, is also flawed because its presumed particularity distorts the human experience and subsequent policies. Instead, the authors need to conceive of care in a public way that permits both rights and needs to be understood as applicable to all. The authors propose some initial thoughts about how to create such a public concept of care. (shrink)

The 2006 term of the United States Supreme Court is now well underway, and the results of the congressional mid-term elections are in. No doubt, decisions will be handed down and national legislation proposed – perhaps even enacted – that will directly or indirectly affect the physician-patient relationship as well as the profession of medicine itself. Of major concern to physicians, patients, and the lay public is the ongoing, rather contentious debate surrounding both patient access to adequate pain control and (...) what constitutes proper physician conduct in treating patients who are experiencing either chronic or end stage disease pain. Those knowledgeable in palliative medicine maintain that an “epidemic of undertreated pain” now exists, and probably has existed for more than a decade. A significant number of patients experience unnecessary pain and suffering, and this disturbing phenomenon is both an individual patient care problem and a public health concern. (shrink)

The impacts of the activities of technological societies extends further into the future than their capacity to predict and control these impacts. Some have argued that the repercussions of this deficiency of knowledge cause fatal difficulties for both consequentialist and deontological accounts of future oriented obligations. Increasingly, international politics encompasses issues where this problem looms large: the connection between energy production and consumption and climate change provides an excellent example. As the reach of technologically-mediated social action increases, it is (...) necessary to ask whether a political imaginary that extends itself to match this reach requires new concepts, and how far they should displace traditional political concepts of obligation, based on reciprocity and harm avoidance. This paper draws on recent scholarship on the role of concepts of care in political philosophy, bringing together phenomenological and feminist concepts of care in contributing to a positive concept of non-reciprocal intergenerational obligation that defends a constitutive connection between care and justice. (shrink)

This article seeks to explore institutional psychotherapy’s politically informed practice by highlighting two key concepts: crisis and resistance. It first briefly sketches a conceptual overview of the two concepts, paying particular attention to the complicated interactions between their political and therapeutic meanings. Following each conceptual elaboration there is a discussion exploring the ways in which the concept has been used by two key members of the institutional psychotherapy movement, Frantz Fanon and Félix Guattari.

This paper explores the potential for an international political theory of care as an alternative to liberalism in the context of contemporary global politics. It argues that relationality and interdependence, and the responsibilities for and practices of care that arise therewith, are fundamental aspects of moral life and sites of political contestation that have been systematically denied and obfuscated under liberalism. A political theory of care brings into view the responsibilities and practices of care that (...) sustain not just ‘bare life’ but all social life, from nuclear and extended families to local, national and transnational communities. It disrupts and challenges the individualism of liberalism, and the associated valorization of ‘freedom’, ‘autonomy’, and ‘toleration’. Instead, it emphasizes an ontology of relationality and interdependence that accepts the existence of vulnerability without reifying particular individuals, groups or states as ‘victims’ or ‘guardians’. Furthermore, by demonstrating the gendered and raced nature of caring in the contemporary world—from the household to the transnational level—an international political theory of care challenges our received assumptions about ‘dependence’ in world politics, and opens up space to interrogate politically not only gender but race and other aspects of inequality in the global political economy. (shrink)

In the operating theater, the micro-politics of practice, such as interpersonal communications, are central to patient safety and are intimately tied with values as well as knowledge and skills. Team communication is a shared and distributed work activity. In an era of "professionalism," that must now encompass "interprofessionalism," a virtue ethics framework is often invoked to inform practice choices, with reference to phronesis or practical wisdom. However, such a framework is typically cast in individualistic terms as a character trait, (...) rather than in terms of a distributed quality that may be constituted through intentionally collaborative practice, or is an emerging property of a complex, adaptive system. A virtue ethics approach is a necessary but not sufficient condition for a collaborative bioethics within the operating theater. There is also an ecological imperative - the patient's entry into the household (oikos) of the operating theater invokes the need for "hospitality" as a form of ethical practice. (shrink)

The subtle thought of care -- Knowledge politics -- Assembling neglected "things" -- Thinking with care -- Touching visions -- Speculative ethics in antiecological times -- Alterbiopolitics -- Soil times: the pace of ecological care.

The United States has a population of three hundred million, according to latest Census Bureau estimates. Forty-seven million, including many non-citizens, are uninsured. That is, 16% of the total United States population has no health insurance. Millions more have inadequate coverage and are in danger of losing that. Private, corporatized medical coverage, structured by the insurance industry, is the basis for the current system. This article is an attempt to lay out the principal health care issues, to look at (...) the alternatives and the cost of those alternatives, and to try to determine whether there is a particular regime that, despite its imperfections, is the best available to us now. (shrink)

Introduction -- The ethics of care and global politics -- Rethinking human security -- 'Women's work' : the global care and sex economies -- Humanitarian intervention and global security governance -- Peacebuilding and paternalism : reading care through postcolonialism -- Health and human security : gender, care and HIV/AIDS -- Gender, care, and the ethics of environmental security -- Conclusion. Security through care.

With this nuanced and interdisciplinary work, political theorist Mihaela Mihai tackles several interrelated questions: How do societies remember histories of systemic violence? Who is excluded from such histories' cast of characters? And what are the political costs of selective remembering in the present? Building on insights from political theory, social epistemology, and feminist and critical race theory, Mihai argues that a double erasure often structures hegemonic narratives of complex violence: of widespread, heterogeneous complicity and of "impure" resistances, not easily subsumed (...) to exceptionalist heroic models. In dialogue with care ethicists and philosophers of art, she then suggests that such narrative reductionism can be disrupted aesthetically through practices of "mnemonic care," that is, through the hermeneutical labor that critical artists deliver—thematically and formally—within communities' space of meaning. Empirically, the book examines both consecrated and marginalized artists who tackled the memory of Vichy France, communist Romania, and apartheid South Africa. Despite their specificities, these contexts present us with an opportunity to analyze similar mnemonic dynamics and to recognize the political impact of dissenting artistic production. Crossing disciplinary boundaries, the book intervenes in debates over collective responsibility, historical injustice, and the aesthetics of violence within political theory, memory studies, social epistemology, and transitional justice. (shrink)

This article aims to initiate a discussion on the demarcation of the ethics of care. This discussion is necessary because the ethics of care evolves by making use of insights from varying disciplines. As this involves the risk of contamination of the care ethical discipline, the challenge for care ethical scholars is to ensure to retain a distinct care ethical perspective. This may be supported by an open and critical debate on the criteria and boundaries (...) of the ethics of care. As a contribution, this article proposes a tentative outline of the care ethical discipline. What is characteristic of this outline is the emphasis on relational programming, situation-specific and context-bound judgments, a political–ethical perspective, and empirical groundedness. It is argued that the ethics of care is best developed further by means of an intradisciplinary approach. Two intradisciplinary examples show how within the frame of one discipline, other disciplines are absorbed, both with their body of knowledge and their research methodology. (shrink)

In “Conceptions of Care,” Tove Pettersen discusses and articulates select ways in which care can be comprehended. Several difficulties related to an altruistic understanding of care are examined before the author presents the case for a more favorable concept: mature care. Mature care is intended to take into account the interests of both parties to the caring relationship. This understanding of care facilitates the expression of the relational and reciprocal aspects of caring while emphasizing (...) the equal worth of all involved. Also attended to is the embeddedness of care in wider cultural and political contexts. (shrink)

Agonizing care: care ethics, agonistic feminism and a political theory of care ‘Care’ is central to nursing theory and practice, and has been described in a variety of ways. Intense conversations about care have been developing in other fields of study as well, from the social sciences to the humanities. Care ethics has grown out of intellectual exchange between feminist thought, moral theory and the critique of traditional western political philosophy. However, care ethics (...) is not without its critics, as these accounts of care have also sparked vigorous challenges. This paper traces the construct of care through nursing theory, care ethics, feminist critiques of moral and political theory and agonistic feminism to outline a set of problematics that a political theory of care should engage. It discusses how care is conventionally posited in more or less essentialist, universalizing and naturalizing terms. It introduces the ideas of feminist theorists who resist dichotomizing care and the political, and situate care in the context of power and politics. The tensions between care feminism and agonistic feminism are highlighted in order to explore the potential of theorizing both care and nursing in political terms. (shrink)