1 The French word care, borrowed from the English, remains an “untranslatable” word, something Barbara Cassin describes as: “not that which we don’t translate, but that which we never stop (not) translating.” [1] Out of this incessantly re-examined “untranslatable knot,” there has emerged a vast network of terminology in French, covering the notions of caregiving, responsibility, attention, concern for others, solicitude, upkeep, support, presence... The various ramifications of this lexical network demonstrate the semantic richness of the word-notion; and studying it permits us to explore connections between language, categories of thought, and perceptions of social realities. Because no French word perfectly renders the nuances, polysemy, and implications of the English term “care”, [2] and because of the definite article “le” that nominalizes the noun care in French, whilst the English word “care” functions also as a verb, there is an unfortunate tendency in French to assimilate “care” to a concept or a specific object: to say “le” care is always straining language, an impoverishment, since it has to designate both an analytical perspective and the social realities, apparently dispersed in everyday indeterminacy, to which this perspective lends meaning.

2 In academic-speak in France, the term le care signals first and foremost an ethical reflexion that bestows a discursive form both on absent moral voices and on obscured or delegitimized questions in the humanities and social sciences. The ethics of care are opposed to the dominant liberal ethics centred around a normative model of justice whose universal values are applied to a subject at once abstract and arbitrarily considered autonomous, that is to say without social context. The ethics of le care are contextualist, signifying that they highlight moral problems about the materiality of specific, complex situations. What’s more, they don’t erase but, quite the contrary, give value to the links of interdependence between people perceived as ontologically vulnerable. And while the ethics of care don’t reject the pertinence of justice to morality, they consider that morality goes beyond justice. [3] In addition to the ethical perspectives, the term le care embraces an ensemble of scholarship anchored in different disciplines and concerned with the various social formations and systems that have devalued the act of caring for others. Thus, if history seems central to care/le “care studies”, it is because studying care calls for understanding the historical conditions of the social and moral division of labour that have led to the marginalization of caregivers. To say that “care” is untranslatable does not signify that, once we have named it, we are not able to see that it has been at the centre of our preoccupations and reflections all along. It is precisely in this deferral that history can grasp the forms and structures, continuities and ruptures, the connections that go to make up care.

3 Our present examination of the state of research on care focuses on French academic research. Initially inspired by English-language research, as will be summarized below, the study of le care in France has blossomed in the last decade, opening up dialogues that go beyond the American influence. [4] The question remains: how to speak about a transdisciplinary research field that is barely institutionalized, and for which the stakes and perspectives are often misunderstood, even ridiculed? [5] That said, the published research in this field, despite its diversity, is anchored in a shared community of thought and, far from being isolated, partakes in the manifestation of a broader epistemological turn. This research shares a critical perspective which, by challenging certain models, renders others intelligible. These convergences should not, however, mask the fact that research on le care signifies, and has always signified in France, an open and dissonant field of research, where attachments to disciplinary boundaries have not entirely disappeared and in which the premises, methods and results have produced controversy. In conclusion to this preliminary presentation, I will sketch out some research domains that attest to the originality and the vigour of French studies of le care.

Epistemological perspectives

4 While the history of care studies in France has yet to be written, it began with the introduction of English-language research on the topic. In 2005, an early work by the philosopher Sandra Laugier, psychologist Pascale Molinier and sociologist Patricia Paperman presented the late-twentieth-century American debate in which the “ethics of care” came to critique and confront the foundation of liberal ethics; their work helped the debate to resonate in the French context. [6] For the next decade or more, in a series of collective publications, seminars and international conferences, [7] each of these three authors developed a paradigm of le care rooted in an ethnographic discussion of everyday morality. [8] Coincidentally, in January 2006, Fabienne Brugère published an article in the journal Esprit in which she evoked the same American research. In a book published shortly thereafter, Brugère coined the term the “ethics of solicitude,” to describe a different conception of moral action founded on women’s experiences. [9] Fabienne Brugère also contributed to academic recognition of le care, most significantly by publishing a volume about this type of ethics in the “Que sais-je?” series, [10] and co-editing with Claude Gautier two important collections of articles on the subject. [11] While introducing le care into French academic and political debate, [12] Fabienne Brugère, Sandra Laugier, Pascale Molinier and Patricia Paperman were all also encouraging, through the supervision of significant doctoral theses, [13] collective research projects, [14] conferences, [15] special issues of academic journals and seminar cycles, [16] research that distanced itself from institutionally dominant forms of moral philosophy and political sociology. It was therefore thanks to the pioneering work and commitment of these scholars that care studies gradually became a particularly vibrant field of research in France.

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6 While originally working within separate disciplines, researchers on le care commonly referred to the same texts, specifically two works by the American scholars Carol Gilligan and Joan Tronto, that were (re)translated into French in 2008 and 2009. At the end of the 1970s, in the course of her research on moral psychology, Carol Gilligan elaborated an ethic critical of the dominant ethical approaches, which she named “the ethics of care.” [17] In her book In a Different Voice, she then contested the theory of Lawrence Kohlberg, a celebrated psychology professor at Harvard University, who had established a scale of moral development based on the mastery of rational principles capable of articulating a universal ethic. However, when tested on adolescents provided with theoretical dilemmas, the experiment empirically favoured the boys who, in their results, appeared morally superior to the girls. Being skeptical of these findings, Carol Gilligan sought to deconstruct the epistemological biases of the experimental protocol which, according to her, did not account for the possibility of an alternative moral voice, principally expressed by the young women in the experiment. She thus established that their social roles and the gendering of virtues prompt women to prioritize their responsibilities to their loved ones, to protect them from suffering and to take care of their needs, all acts which seem to them more urgent and relevant than the application of abstract moral codes. First translated into French in 1986 under the title Une si grande différence [Such a Big Difference], Gilligan’s text, whose influence had been considerable in the United States, gained only minimal traction in France. Reissued in 2008 under a title closer to the original, Une Voix différente [A Different Voice], [18] in a reworked translation by Vanessa Nurock and preceded by an introduction by Sandra Laugier and Patricia Paperman, the work is today a foundational reference in care studies in France.

7 In this same category of influence is the work by Joan Tronto, Moral Boundaries: a political argument for an ethic of care (1993), translated into French in 2009 under the title Un Monde vulnérable. Pour une politique du care [A Vulnerable World. Towards a politics of care], a book which marked an epistemological shift in care studies. Joan Tronto articulates the ethical perspective of care in relation to a Marxist-inspired critique of inequality and structures of power, in order to construct a global analytical model. According to Tronto, if social subjects depend on one another for their basic needs, knowing who takes care of these needs and how they do so becomes a central ethical and political question. On the ethical side, the responsibility certainly falls on the man or woman who perceives the need of the other and has to respond. However, in contemporary neo-liberal societies, this capacity to perceive is delegated to a group of devalued people, such that moral action and political subordination are intricately entangled. Observing the vicious circle of the devaluation of the activities that define care and caregivers, Joan Tronto proposes a “holistic” framework that seeks to consider a fair distribution of the “burden” of caregiving, which she describes as “a species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue and repair our ‘world,’ so that we can live in it as well as possible”. [19]

8 In 2010, Sandra Laugier, Pascale Molinier and Patricia Paperman brought together Carol Gilligan and Joan Tronto in a unifying conference named after a citation from A Vulnerable World: “Against the indifference of the privileged”. [20] There isn’t a seminar, conference, journal issue, encyclopaedia article, book collection, or journalistic article about le care in France that doesn’t refer to the work of these two theorists. Their importance to the French historiography of le care is confirmed by the research dedicated to their work, [21] even if this acknowledged double heritage does not constitute exclusive Anglophone influence on French research on care: in the forefront of the constellation of other authors concerned are philosophers Martha Nussbaum and Eva Kittay, and sociologists Arlie Hochschild and Evelyn Nakano-Glenn.

9 The explicit reference to the American field is not the only point of convergence in French care studies, a field where there is also agreement about certain key hypotheses. To begin with, French care studies define the social subject as ontologically vulnerable. Echoing Martha Nussbaum’s argument [22] that vulnerability is a relationship to the world we live in, Patricia Paperman recalls that “there is nothing exceptional about vulnerable people” and that this primordial vulnerability connects the subject to a network of interdependence that is brought to light by care studies. [23] The moral subject is equally a social subject, that is to say a relational subject; research on care therefore rejects what Martha Fineman [24] calls the “myth of individual autonomy” promoted by liberal ethics. Moreover, this research tackles ethics through the study of practices, evoking the hypothesis of Joan Tronto for whom a universal principle such as “We should take care of those who are around us and those who form our society,” has no moral value if not translated into appropriate behaviours. Finally, feminism constitutes a transversal theoretical and political connection, because the perspective of care aims to give a voice to those whose voices are socially stifled, most notably the voices of women. The field of care studies is thus a fightback by the experience of women, who have been unjustly enclosed within the private sphere and associated with values considered insignificant. Or, as Fabienne Brugère puts it, care permits the “rearming” of feminism. [25]

A concept born of the crisis of liberalism

10 Because paradigms gain intelligibility when contextualized, we will take a moment to situate the development of care studies in both its French and American contexts. The emergence of the concept of care in the United States in the 1980s is often correlated to two phenomena: the erasure of the US version of the welfare state (already weak) resulting from Ronald Reagan’s neoliberal reforms, otherwise known as “deregulation”; and women’s increasing participation in the workplace. Once devoid of a political profile, as they had been partly financed by social programs and otherwise voluntarily taken charge of in the private sphere by women, caregiving activities progressively became a crucial problem, particularly where the most vulnerable populations were concerned. The stakes became even more significant as the number of vulnerable or dependent people increased, paradoxically in connection with medical progress. However, the crisis in care that reinforced the need to re-evaluate the respective roles of public action and individual responsibility regarding care was ultimately resolved by the informal exploitation of workers, especially female workers, who were often immigrants excluded from citizenship status. Certain women social scientists therefore began to study the mutation of the social and normative contexts that organize caring for others. [26] What are the physical and emotional needs legitimately taken care of, and in what manner does this occur? Who takes them on and who benefits from these services? In the decade separating the work of Carol Gilligan and that of Joan Tronto, these questions became central: and the langage of care has allowed these questions to be formulated as problems that are inextricably social and moral, calling for collective action and responsibility. Furthermore, at the turn of the millennium, inaugurated symbolically by the events of 11 September 2001, the perception of a vulnerable social subject became more widely circulated in a world in which not only was life already rendered perilous by the laws of a market economy, but which was now burdened by the double menace of terrorism and environmental disasters. [27]

11 The emergence of an “ethics of care” must also be understood in the context of growing tensions within the American feminist movement, specifically, a series of claims united under the generic term “black feminism.” In the 1980s, African-American feminists, Chicanas and those born in the “third world,” whose (different) voices began to make themselves heard, reproached the dominant feminist majority for having focused exclusively on the grievances of white middle-class women, and for having universalized their own situation while marginalizing the diverse experiences of other women, notably women of colour. [28] Black feminism ruptured the fictional representation of a unified collective of women, and made it necessary to rethink gender domination as a phenomenon impossible to isolate from other power relations, especially those of social class and race. [29] Care studies (with the intention of promoting a diversity of moral voices) was working towards a deconstruction of how white middle-class women had managed to obtain partial privileges, notably by benefitting from the invisible work of poorly-paid women – and men – who were themselves socially underprivileged and often people of colour. Joan Tronto thus argues that those members of a society who are the most privileged, in the hope of separating themselves from all visible dependence that might be judged demeaning or degrading, are contributing to the marginalization of care, as well as to the anthropological, moral and political devaluation of the people (men and women) responsible for caregiving activities. [30]

12 In the context of American scholarship, care studies also benefitted from the epistemological renewal of “situated knowledge,” a term translated into French as “epistemology of viewpoints” or more literally as “connaissance des savoirs situés”. [31] These epistemologies coming out of feminist critiques of academic knowledge upended the norm of axiological neutrality. [32] They revealed the biases by which apparently neutral research in reality translates the point of view and the interest of the most powerful social groups. [33] In solidarity with this movement, the ethics of care affirms itself as contextualist and singularist: as opposed to liberal ethics that value a supposed impartiality, the ethics of care evaluates contexts, the materiality of a situation, and the subjective accounts that all allow for the emergence of moral questions. As such, the solutions inspired by care studies give prominence to what Donna Harraway calls “partial perspectives”: by refusing either to renounce tragedy, or to presume that all moral dilemmas can be addressed by perfect solutions, care studies incorporate the option of “the lesser evil” solution. Joan Tronto [34] affirms that liberal ethics ultimately reinforces the moral legitimacy of the privileged to remain privileged, whereas it marginalizes those most vulnerable, while pretending to uphold a community of equals. Because its “impartiality” is itself deduced from an affirmation of equal rights, it leads it to rationalize away de facto inequalities, and to justify them by the supposed moral or cognitive deficiencies of the underprivileged. As such, according to Joan Tronto, the capacity to articulate a universally valid moral judgement actually contributes to the masking of inequalities.

13 In France, the study of le care emerged in a slightly different academic and political context. Thanks to studies that took the experiences and accounts of subaltern subjects seriously, [35] early research in le care became one of the vectors of “situated knowledge,” though this emerged as a distinctly minority approach, because of the radical nature of its departure from the dominant French tradition of foundational positivism and its structuralist developments. For Patricia Paperman:

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[…] abandoning a mono-logical posture is a condition of inquiry in the perspective of le care […] Knowledge cannot be produced by a subject occupying a position of observer assumed to give him access to the “truth” […] The challenge that le care addresses to the social sciences is first and foremost epistemological. [36]

15 Pascale Molinier says much the same thing when she affirms that “listening to the voice of women care workers, means taking the risk that one might lose one’s privileges, including one’s epistemological privileges”. [37] Less centred on the critique of neoliberalism, whose forms are more insidious than in the United States and emerged later in France, [38] French research emerged just as employment, notably that of women, was becoming more precarious. [39] At the same time, due to the interplay of various public structures, the “caregiving” sector offered employment, albeit demeaning employment, which only reinforced the logic of discrimination and social exclusion. [40] Articulated within a feminist sociology of labour, the ethics of le care inspired empirical research into the increasing precariousness of women’s work, [41] and correlated it with a critique of the international division of labour and the violence inherent in the social processes of gendering and racialization. [42] As with the American case, but via an academic rather than a political intervention, care studies in France took on the tools of intersectional feminism, one of the foundational texts of which [43] was translated into French a few months before the publication of the aforementioned pioneering work of Patricia Paperman and Sandra Laugier. [44]

16 The French cartography of care studies remains profoundly influenced by the respective production of the social scientists who first introduced it. As such, Sandra Laugier has contributed beyond just the emergence of the field in France. Her early works on American pragmatism have led her to work on other authors who have critiqued liberal ethics, such as Cora Diamond, Iris Young or Annette Baier, whose research she has translated and disseminated through various publications. Connecting care to other alternative moral theories and critiques, Laugier’s perspective has initiated important research by a new generation of philosophers. [45] Fabienne Brugère’s research on care comes out of a broader questioning of the neoliberal-neoconservative shift that brought about an “extinction” of democracy: [46] she invites us to reflect on what she calls “sympathetic democracy”. [47] Patricia Paperman, prior to her work on care, while still collaborating with the Moral and Political Sociology Research Group [48] and focusing on Arlie Hochschild’s notion of emotional labor, [49] had contributed to a re-evaluation of affect in the social world, connecting a pragmatic sociology of emotions to a critique of domination. [50] Her research posits that, in contrast to the sole application of reason and calculation, emotions and imagination are central to the performance of moral connection to the world. [51] Paperman’s research emerged in tandem with the “affective turn” which has influenced critical theory since the beginning of the twenty-first century, [52] and helped launch a new dialogue between sociology and philosophy. Ten years before the publication of Le Souci des autres, Pascale Molinier was already engaged in participatory research concerning the psychological suffering of subaltern staff in the healthcare industry. [53] All of these initiatives helped expand a transdisciplinary space conducive to the development of critical thought.

Critical potential

17 At the epicentre of research on care is an ethical reflection committed to the redefinition of the moral subject, understood as both affective and relational, in order to formulate a critique of social organization and domination. The care studies perspective is potentially subversive, because it performs inversions and de-centerings of the social order and re-evaluates the importance of individual people, values, and emotions.

18 The research of Carol Gilligan, like that of Joan Tronto, offered a feminist critique of John Rawls’s Theory of Justice, a work that, by taking up the liberal tradition of the social contract, proposed a neo-Kantian alternative to utilitarian doctrines. [54] According to Rawls, a just society is a society founded on the liberty of individuals having equal rights, a liberty which can only be limited by a shared respect for universalizable principles. However, the ethics of care challenges the premise of Rawlsian justice, that is to say, the conceptualization of a moral subject as solitary and detached from all specific social constraints. With In a Different Voice, Carol Gilligan chose to illustrate the innovative distinction between an ethic of care and an ethic of justice with an experiment. A question was posed to Jake and Amy, two 11-year-old children, one of each gender, having equivalent intelligence levels: they were asked to resolve a classic problem from moral psychology. Heinz's wife is very sick and at risk of dying if not given medication that Heinz is too poor to buy. Should Heinz steal the medication from the druggist to save his wife’s life? Jake affirms that Heinz should steal the medicine, suggesting that, if he were put on trial, the jury would understand his action and acquit him. With more hesitation, Amy considers it more important that Heinz stay out of jail, because if he were to be arrested, he would no longer be able to take care of his wife. She suggests that the best moral solution is for Heinz to attempt to convince the druggist to offer him the medicine. Jake analyses the dilemma as a conflict of hierarchy between subjective rights: justice is served when the right to life is considered more significant than property rights. Amy refuses to resolve the problem in a purely logical fashion and translates the dilemma in terms of the specific situation. According to her, all the actors in the drama must together resolve the dilemma in a satisfactory manner, via dialogue. Her moral reasoning is anchored in a vision of the world that is “comprised of relationships rather than of people standing alone, a world that coheres through human connection rather than through systems of rules”. [55] Gilligan shifts the centre of gravity of the moral question, by underscoring the primordial significance of the preservation and maintenance of relationships for human life, and for society as a whole. Thus, “care is a revolution,” [56] because it requires that the definition of morality should have at its centre the experiences of everyday life, and integrate the voices of those who have been dominated in society, particularly women.

19 Joan Tronto suggests that the ethics of care “displaces moral boundaries”: the first boundary is the one separating morality and politics, which excludes the possibility of true equality in the sphere of justice; the second boundary is the one separating public and private life, because care is traditionally associated with the values and experiences of women working in the devalued private sphere; the third boundary is one that maintains a moral hierarchy between the powerful and the subaltern, allowing the former to impose norms upon the latter in order to defend their own interests and satisfy their own needs. [57] While her point of view requires recognizing that care is critical to the common good, she notes that the processes defining care are distributed across a variety of practices and actors, suppliers and beneficiaries, a situation that contributes to the attenuation of care’s importance and masks care’s political effects. In order to make them more visible, Joan Tronto proposes a re-articulation of four analytically distinct but in practice entangled “phases” of care: “caring about,” or attending to the other; “taking care of,” or taking responsibility for; “caregiving” that is the actions that mobilize ethical and practical skills to maintain and sustain others; and “care receiving”, or the inclusion of the perspective of the recipient of the action. In Tronto’s view, the first two phases do not disturb the interests of the privileged, whereas the second two imply accounting for socially marginalized people. Increased social justice requires a recalibration of the attention paid to the needs and values of all people, irrespective of their social position.

20 French research has notably explored two critical motivations of le care: updating our understanding of care as a global social process; and accounting for socio-political forms of subordination where domestic work is concerned. Considering the process of care aims to “connect the dismantled fragments of care into an intelligible unity,” [58] and to unveil the power relations that fragment care and render it invisible. Coming from different disciplinary backgrounds, Claude Martin and Florence Weber have reconstituted the circuits of care with respect to persons who, in their everyday life, require care for survival. Their research traces the complex modalities of how responsibility for financial, material, affective and mental health needs are distributed between various actors: families, non-profit associations, domestic workers, the state. The results of their research concur in indicating the importance of informal networks of proximity and the weight of women’s work in these configurations. Comparing the responsibility taken for the physical and emotional wellbeing of dependent persons in different European states, Claude Martin has proposed a critique of the various forms of welfare state whose actions undergird a male-centred model, one that delegates the principal burden of care to women in situations of political and economic vulnerability. [59] Thus for example, Italy, confronted with an aging population, has encouraged the development of clandestine labour and the exploitation of badanti, poor women, frequently immigrants without papers, who live in the homes of the people for whom they provide care. [60] In contrast, France claims to promote people working in the domain of care by providing them with an occupational status, while holding pay levels very low. This is the point explored by Florence Weber: how can one explain the trifling salaries of domestic workers in the context of increasing social demand for their work, which requires real know-how and skills? [61] Her ethnographic approach, examining different levels of the domestic economy, state policies and their local implementation by private and public actors, underscores the tensions between political principles, administrative criteria and professional norms. It must be understood that these normative conflicts are never resolved in favour of the women workers. Referring to Joan Tronto’s model, we can say that this research analyses the advantages accorded to the needs for care provision of the middle classes, which take precedence over the recognition of subaltern workers.

21 An ensemble of transnational research has also reinvigorated reflection about domestic service, examining models of intersectional subordination and their ethical stakes in relation to the distribution of care work in a global postcolonial economy. The socio-historical research of Evelyn Nakano-Glenn has initiated this analysis of the political structures of domestic service. Working with the biographies of three generations of Japanese-American women working as domestic servants in San Francisco between 1900 and 1970, she scrutinizes the connections between gender, economic transformations and the racial segmentation of the labour market. [62] Today, in first world countries and in a political context nevertheless increasingly unfavourable to international migration, women of colour still find themselves massively responsible for housework and taking care of vulnerable persons. This phenomenon illustrates the routine nature of the vicious circle of devaluing the work of care, whereby vulnerable people are taking care of other vulnerable people. Empirical research on French society echoes the work of Saskia Sassen, Arlie Hochschild and Rachel Parrenas. [63] Saskia Sassen underlines the discontinuity in migration patterns according to gender and linked to a globalization that has generated a new “disadvantaged class,” made up of women deprived of political rights, isolated, and unlikely to benefit from collective strategies and actions. [64] In order to describe and analyse the informal transnational networks by which women delegate to other women the care of vulnerable persons, the American sociologist Arlie Hochschild has proposed the notion of “global care chains”. [65] These chains begin in poor countries, end in the first world and make it possible to regroup within a single political process, situations that initially seem unrelated and dispersed. [66] According to Rose-Myrlie Joseph, who works on female migration between Haiti and France related to care:

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[Haitian] women from the countryside become domestic workers in Port-au-Prince, and this allows their female employers to invest their own time in non-domestic labour and thus afford international migration. Once in France, these same women themselves become domestic servants for French women who in turn are able to invest their time in non-domestic labour. [67]

23 In France, this concept of “global care chains” has inspired both a systematic analysis of care migrations [68] and particular ethnographic studies that underline the capacity for agency and the forms of resistance open to the different women involved in these migration chains. [69]

24 Finally, it is possible to see an entire political sociology of postcolonial domestic service emerging from these studies of relationships shot through with unequal distributions of power, acts of resistance to oppression, and emotions; relationships between women care workers and their employers, but also between the workers and their transnational families. [70] These French studies are based on past historical research that had scarcely been examined before by scholars of political sociology. But with the development of care as a field of research and its deconstruction of the boundaries between private and public space, between productive and reproductive activity, between the formal labour market and unrecognized labour, between affect and rationality, there has been an impetus to reinvestigate these issues in light of politics. [71] The intersection of migration, colonialism, and domestic service is today inspiring some ambitious historical projects. [72] Among them, a recent collective volume attempts to sketch out a global history of domestic labour (by both sexes) and care between the seventeenth and twenty-first centuries, bringing together contributions connecting the study of types of cultural and economic circulation with local contexts of domestic service. [73] The informal nature of the labour and the arrangements made between employers and domestics, the practices of resistance performed in the sphere of intimacy, are examined in their continuities and discontinuities. If one were to single out a contribution from this collection, it would be the article by Shireen Ally: working from three portraits of domestic servants and three types of subordination (slavery, servility, and service) she reconstructs three centuries of evolving relationships between masters/mistresses and their women servants in South Africa.

Debates and controversies

25 The still emergent history of care studies in France and elsewhere reveals the importance for their development of the constructive criticism addressed to the field and the controversies that have generated counter-arguments. One of these recurring critiques concerns the fluid nature of the boundaries of care: it has been said alternatively that the field is either too vast or too circumscribed. This lack of clarity is frequently correlated to the impossibility of substantiating a precise definition of care, which would render invalid the heuristic properties of the research. [74] For example, Clémence Ledoux suggests that care remains an “ambiguous” concept, because the “perimeter defining its beneficiaries and its activities” is constantly changing: if everything can be defined as care, “from maintaining roads to the preparation of meals”, if care is everywhere, it fails to mean anything. [75] To refute this critique, it is important to note that care – much as with the concept of gender – is an analytical perspective that, by definition, has neither a set of predefined objects nor a “perimeter”. [76] Such a perspective makes it possible to speak to a variety of effects across space and time, and encourages comparative as well as historical approaches. Care studies have been deployed not within an incremental logic, where it suffices to add on new objects of care, but according to an extendable logic that aims to increase comprehension of the relations involved when people take care of one another. This is how Carol Gilligan initially thought of care, as an ethics of everyday life, aimed at preserving the ways of living that were important to people. By exposing the political biases and the failures of liberal ethics, Joan Tronto extended this ethics to include an analysis of social relations, highlighting how interdependence is also inscribed within power structures. In a third moment of its development, the perspective of care has begun to include analyses of relationships between humans and animals, as well as between humans and the environment. [77] Today, in cutting edge work, the ethics of care is evoked in order to rethink questions of international relations and global justice. In this vein, the Japanese philosopher Yayo Okano, in her research on the “comfort women” of the Second World War, argues that sexism and colonialism rooted in international law have obstructed the recognition of a massive system of sexual slavery for which the Japanese state still refuses to take either legal or political responsibility. [78] According to Okano, much more than legal ethics, the ethics of care allows us to understand why it has taken the survivors of these crimes over forty years to have their voices heard, in an international community that has mainly sought to smother those voices. Care seems also to be the sole ethical perspective likely to think about reparation to the victims, not through symbolic acts, but through a genuine concern that takes responsibility for their suffering.

26 The critique of an overly polysemic or imprecise definition of care makes it possible to distinguish two separate scientific uses of the concept in studies of le care in France. The early works of transdisciplinary research, which we have privileged in the discussion here, systematically associated care with a critical ethical reflection. However, other studies commonly use the term le care to refer to a group of caregiving activities and, rather than applying a critical perspective, offer a basic sociology of the object. Dissociated from the ethical question, le care might thus “remain the object of a neoliberal usage in which caregiving simply participates in the broader framework of a globalized market rationality” [79] to the point of qualifying as “the moral face of capitalism.” [80] That said, the distinction between these two ways of using the term le care is not always so clear, because much research implicitly associates the critical approach and the substantive approach, regrouping under the rubric of le care, “an ensemble of affective and sexual services provided within a relation of interdependence.” [81] Equally sceptical about this object-based sociology, Christelle Avril offers a slightly different critique. Based on her own empirical research on domestic workers, she is critical of “the idea of care work” [le travail du care] for highlighting “love in labour” and thus giving a “positive connotation” to what is actually arduous work performed by women from “lower-class backgrounds”. [82] This observation deserves to be nuanced. First of all, the ethics of care is less concerned with love than with the affect and sense of responsibility felt towards another person: we can be touched by a person, or feel responsible for someone, without loving them; this is precisely why care is, above and beyond the sentiments attested to, an ethics and not a simple reaction. In addition, when sociologists of care refer to the love that care workers (sometimes) speak of feeling for those they care for, the researcher’s intent is to analyse those emotions as part of a contextualized social relationship. The language of love can for example be used to express the meaning and the value women assign to their work, where the expression of affect allows them to emphasize their subjective resistance to drudgery, oppression, and dehumanization. [83] It can even be an instrument of struggle and empowerment where racial and class domination is concerned: Anne McClintock thus describes as the “colonial secret” the fact that women from subaltern groups were able to exercise, through ties of affection, a certain power over the children of the dominant social group. [84] The idiom of love is thus not necessarily a case of false consciousness casting magic dust on menial work: it can be the translation of a certain capacity for autonomy, resistance and action.

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28 At the other end of the spectrum from critiques suggesting that the concept of le care is too loosely defined, scholars working in line with liberal ethics have claimed that it can be shrunk down to a narrow type of morality based on proximity. And indeed, in her early writings, Joan Tronto pointed out the possibility of such a shrinkage, because people tend to be concerned first and foremost with those who are culturally, emotionally and physically close to them. [85] Therefore, in her later work, she sought to analyse how a particularist ethic could provide a sufficiently robust morality to allow for questioning justice on a global scale, and notably with respect to environmental justice. [86] According to Tronto, relations of care can be extended to entities larger than one’s immediate community, because our responsibility towards others applies not only to humans beyond one’s national borders who are under threat, but also to non-humans and inanimate objects. Thus it is not our common humanity that is the basis of our particular responsibility and moral obligations, but a commitment to a specific relationship rooted in our attachment to history and to nature. Tronto goes further to state that care can even be more constraining than universalist ethics when it comes to thinking about our global responsibilities, because a relational conception of responsibility would enable individuals to better understand their obligations to those who are far away but real, whereas a universalist ethics allows them to remain abstract. [87] As such, the limits of responsibility towards others are not constrained, they reach beyond one’s proximity, into a space of solidarities that are at once rooted and deterritorialized. [88]

29 Born out of the confrontation that placed the ethics of care in opposition to liberal ethics, care studies have continually been structured around major controversies. The first of these arose in the English-language context: a divergence in the interpretation of Carol Gilligan’s work, in which disagreements arose concerning the difference between a feminine ethic and feminist ethic. [89] By connecting the ethical disposition inherent to the concept of care with virtues considered naturally feminine, the work of Nel Noddings (1984) outlined an ethic of care in which the concern and self-abnegation involved in caregiving was modelled upon a mother-child dyad. [90] These ideas were extended by the work of Sarah Ruddick who, while considering mothering as a social role, also defended a normative conceptualization of social organization based on the complementarity of gender roles, without questioning the nature of their construction. [91] In these cases, the ethics of care essentialized a moral distinction between masculine and feminine, recognizing as female moral attitudes both natural and specific that reinforced social stereotypes associating women with emotions rather than reason, and with private rather than public values. [92] More than ten years after the publication of In A Different Voice, Carol Gilligan definitively dispelled any ambiguity by confirming that “her” ethic of care was a feminist and not a feminine ethic. [93] She pointed out that she had never written that care was naturally feminine but had observed empirically the correlation between the moral reasoning of adolescent girls and an alternative ethic that she called the “ethics of care”. Joan Tronto, [94] without contesting these empirical findings, interpreted them differently, proposing to erase the focus on a person's sex, and to deal instead with the concepts of gender and class, correlating differences in morality to an individual’s social position. The data collected by Carol Gilligan thus could serve to question the social mechanisms by which norms of the assignment of such tasks as solicitude and caretaking are transmitted. Understanding the undervaluing of care working requires a deconstruction of both masculine and feminine social identities, and engaging with the notion of gender as a relationship of domination. [95] With this in mind, the historical research of Susan Reverby on the gendering of virtues in contemporary American society seems particularly useful for understanding the cultural construction of care provided by women with no personal relationship to the recipients as proof of family love. [96]

30 In the French context, which is characterized by a strict polarization between materialist and differentialist feminisms, the ethics of care has sometimes been qualified as “ambiguous”. For Sandra Laugier, by contrast, care denotes a “radicalization of feminism”. [97] In the first place, the feminism of the ethics of care lies in its criticism of theories of justice, since the latter have promoted values privileging patriarchy. But, even more subversively, according to Laugier, the idea of a feminine morality is itself feminist:

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[…] it is about defending a different form of morality, a different voice that is present in each of us but which is precisely neglected because it is first and foremost, empirically, the voice of women, and it is concerned with activities considered feminine because they are enacted principally by women. [98]

32 A particularly stimulating controversy emerged around the tensions concerning three central notions of care, namely vulnerability, dependence, and interdependence. [99] From the point of view of the logic of care, these three notions seem connected: our ontological vulnerability renders us dependent and forms the basis of our moral obligation to take care of others. This notion of mutual vulnerability has made it possible to point out the imposture of a normative subject who is self-sufficient, and has underscored how even the most powerful people are part of a network of dependency. Marc Bessin suggests, in this way, that we consider our “journey through life” as a process of circulation within care. [100] Vulnerability is inherent to the subject’s inseparably moral and social experience of life, characterizing not only the subject but also his or her intersubjective relationships and the relationships linking humans, animals and nature more generally. All of these connections are always precarious and their possible destruction reinforces people’s vulnerability in such a way as to make it necessary for them – that is to say the various forms of life – to be protected. [101] That said, the recognition of vulnerability, of dependence and interdependence as anthropological givens poses ethical as well as epistemological dilemmas. This is because certain forms of vulnerability appear more radical, and certain forms of dependency more tragic, than others. Estelle Ferrarese underlines in this way how, for Carol Gilligan and Joan Tronto, vulnerability is defined less as an exposure to injury (in the etymological sense) than as the risk of being abandoned: the vulnerable subject is he or she who depends on the actions of another for the satisfaction of his or her basic needs. [102] On the other hand, for Martha Nussbaum, anthropological vulnerability is something “in between autonomy and dependency”, because humans are simultaneously capable and vulnerable. [103] It thus becomes imperative to distinguish between the vulnerability and exposure to suffering that is simply constitutive of the human condition, and the kind of vulnerability that is caused by specific contingent forms of social organization which do not apply equally to all humans.

33 Analysing the situation of extremely dependent persons has made it possible to articulate the tensions at work between dependency and interdependency. For Eva Kittay, the radical dependency of people in situations of handicap is different from the common interdependency of everyone, because it forces us to think about our responsibility towards others without reciprocity, in a unilateral sense radically excluded by liberal ethics, but also attenuated if care studies are focussed on interdependency. [104] In their ethnographical study of people who care for extremely dependent family members, Aurélie Damamme and Patricia Paperman were able to re-examine the question of justice with regards to the burden of care. [105] They demonstrate how, in the deep nature of social relations, caregiving is imbued with power: the abuse of power is certainly always a possibility when the beneficiary of care cannot express his or her own needs; however, those performing the role of caregiver can also feel abandoned and exploited, even in cases where the work is limited to taking care of a family member. The results of their research confirm the hypotheses of Eva Kittay who has stressed the complexity of caregiving in situations of extreme dependency that are a real challenge for democracy: on the one hand, institutional assistance is a matter of justice; and on the other hand, caregivers shouldn’t be abandoned, as they themselves require material and emotional assistance in order best to make use of their skills. [106] If they receive no support, they can feel rejected from their rights as full citizens and excluded from the fundamental values of democracy. It is thus a dependency upon care itself that appears to be the common destiny.

Results of fieldwork: care case by case

34 In parallel with these ethical and epistemological reflections, and by inverting perspectives and paying attention to minority voices, research on care in France has uncovered previously masked connections, thus problematizing practices and a knowledge base that had upheld certain stereotypes. I previously cited the renewal in studies of domestic service, gender and migration and caregiving involving extremely dependent individuals. I will now present three areas of study that have been (re)invested thanks to the perspective of care: non-medical labor within medical institutions; the relationship between humans, animals and the environment; and art as a means to care for others and maintain a shared world.