Fragments of Grief, part 5

Here is the fifth and final fragment that I place beside the others in my experimental essay of living and grieving beside Judith. In the manuscript, I titled this final fragment: There is no conclusion, only another fragment to place beside the others.

There is a more general conception of the human at work here, one in which we are, from the start, given over to the other, one in which we are, from the start, even prior to individuation itself, and by virtue of our embodiment, given over to an other: this makes us vulnerable to violence, but also to another range of touch, a range that includes the eradication of our being at the one end, and the physical support for our lives, at the other (Butler, Undoing Gender 23).

Butler devotes her attention in Precarious Life, Undoing Gender and Frames of War to how the recognition of our vulnerability in the midst of others often results in very violent, yet always failed attempts to deny or conceal it. But, albeit briefly, she offers the possibility of another way of thinking about and responding to our vulnerability as caring for and being in loving proximity to one another.

The night before her big surgery, the one that would determine whether she lived (for how long?) or died (on the operating table?), my mom was scared. She really hated doctors and hospitals. And she didn’t want to die. My oldest sister asked her if she would like to cuddle with her three daughters on the bed. She agreed, and together we–the three daughters and Rosie J, still in my womb—laid beside Mom. We held her as we waited, not knowing what would happen next.

My living and grieving beside my mom Judith and my daughter Rosemary Judith has enabled me, through joy and sadness and life and loss, to bear witness to the potential of this second non-violent meaning of vulnerability and to imagine the ethical potential of grief to be found not so much in what we have lost—a loved one–but in what we have gained—the recognition that we have the potential to love and be loved, to care and be cared for.

My thoughts: Originally I had planned to end this essay with a (somewhat dry and straightforward) conclusion about what I had done in the essay and how I had used Butler. Somehow that just didn’t seem to fit with the rest of the essay. It was too abstract and removed and I didn’t think I had the energy for or the interest in making sense (abstractly or meta-theoretically) of the fragments and their expressions of my living and grieving. I thought of the Butler passage (the one that I use above) and suddenly the story about the bed came to me. The idea of touch and physically being connected seems central to thinking about care (care-giving, care-receiving, caring about, keeping vigil) in relation to living and grieving beside those who are dying (and those who are living in the midst of death and dying). I know I have much more to write about these connections and what they mean for me, both in my struggles to make sense of how I cared/failed to care for my mom and/or my daughter and in my critical efforts to reflect on what care is and could/should be. For now, I will take a break from this project. I will place it beside me as I work through (and on) other ideas about troublemaking, care, blogging, curiosity and feminist virtue ethics.

To be continued…

Linking care with troublemaking, part 2: What does it mean to care?

This entry is part of my series on care and its connections with troublemaking. As I mentioned previously (here and here), I am interested in thinking through what care is and how it does/doesn’t connect with troublemaking. So, what does it mean to care? Having just written a brain-melting chewy bagel about Foucault, Butler and virtue ethics, I want to keep this entry a little lighter–maybe light like a double-glazed donut…umm, double-glazed.

Anyway, this morning my son FWA, who is 2 weeks away from turning 7, read his weekly “watch me read” book to me (thanks, FWA for waiting until this morning to remind me about this assignment–just 30 minutes before you had to leave for school!). This week’s book, which is part of Houghton Mifflin’s Invitations to Literacy Series, was “We Care.” As you might imagine–that is, if you are a regular reader here–the title made me curious. What do they mean by care? And, who is the we that cares?

So, the story is about a little girl who passes by a local homeless shelter called Main Street on the way to school everyday. One day she decides to ask her teacher about the shelter and whether or not the people who go there have beds and enough food. In other words, she is curious and cares about these people and their needs. The teacher doesn’t know but decides that being curious about Main Street might be a good project for the whole class so she encourages them to  curious about the residents of Main Street. But, the teacher doesn’t just want her students to be curious, she wants them to do something with that curiosity. She organizes the students and their parents into a plan of action: they will give care to the residents of Main Street by bringing food and other things the residents might need and by performing a play. A big chunk of the story (which is 16 pages total) is devoted to describing how the students, their parents, and the teacher all get involved in preparing the gift boxes and the play. Towards the end of the story, the class goes to the shelter and delivers their boxes to the head of Main Street and performs the play for the residents. The experience gives the students such a “warm feeling” that they decide they want to do more. The teacher suggests that they tell other classes about the shelter project so that those classes can care about and care for too. Here is how the story ends:

Now our school often brings food and other things to Main Street House. We don’t put on a show every time we go, though. But that’s all right. Our class trips show we care (16).

So, “we care” means:

  • to be curious about others
  • to care about those others and their needs
  • to do something for those one cares about by giving care to them
  • to spread the word to others
  • to engage collectively in caring about and caring for

There are many things that I like about this story. I like that kids are being encouraged to care. I like that caring about isn’t enough and that action, in the form of giving care, is also required. I like that that care is imagined as collective and involving more than an individual; it includes the class, the entire school, and even the larger community (including parents). I like that continued and repeated caring is necessary–students shouldn’t just care once, they need to care again and again by visiting Main Street House repeatedly.

But (you knew it was coming, right?), I was also troubled by this story because it left out some crucial steps and some very important actors in the process. First, the students are never encouraged to collectively develop or critically reflect on how or why they should care about these residents. The process of figuring out what form of care might be most effective for the residents is never discussed. Moreover, the reasons why the residents are homeless are never addressed (or even asked). The student, Jynelle, doesn’t ask why some people are living at Main Street instead of in their own homes; she merely asks if they have enough beds there. I don’t know how much time you have spent around little kids, but the first question that they are often compelled (and it does almost seem like a compulsion) to ask is: Why? Athough maybe by the time students are in 3rd grade, they have already been conditioned out of asking why–scary thought. In the context of this story, not asking why is significant. Asking why indicates that the way something appears to be should not just be assumed to be the way it should be or the way that it always has been (In another entry, I discuss the importance of why for critical thinking and troublemaking). When the student doesn’t ask why, it is implied that why doesn’t matter because homeless shelters are just the way the world works: some people are homeless, some aren’t. It’s a fact of life. Don’t try to change it, because you can’t. For me, the failure to ask why is a major problem. Asking why isn’t just about trying to make trouble by creating extra work for the teacher or by distracting us from the real work of developing solutions or plans of action for caring about those people. To ask why is to claim that the situation of being homeless is not to be assumed and that it is something that could and should be different. It is the first step in challenging and resisting injustice. And it is the first step in transforming yourself into a person-who-doesn’t-merely-accept. Uh-oh, didn’t I just talk about this in my last entry? This entry is in danger of becoming another chewy bagel. Let’s just say, asking why is important.

A second problem: Something big is missing in this story: the actual people who are receiving the care, the residents of Main Street Shelter. We never get to read about the actual stories of these people. And they aren’t visually represented in the text. When the story describes the students’ play at Main Street, the illustrations are of the children performing. We also never get to read about their reactions to the care that they are given. When the story describes the effects of the Main Street project, there is no discussion of how it benefits the residents or how the care makes a difference in their lives. Instead, the story focuses on how giving care to the residents gave the students warm feelings.  This is a problem because giving effective care necessarily requires that we ask about how we should give care. We shouldn’t assume (or presume) to know what needs should be addressed. We need to ask those to whom we are giving care,  How can we help you? Or, even better, how can we make it possible for you to help yourselves? This is also a problem because, by leaving the actual voices and experiences of those who need care out of the story, those who receive care are reduced to objects (as opposed to subjects) of care.

Since this entry is getting too long (I didn’t realize that I would have so much to write about this book), I need to stop. But, before I do, I want to offer some practical ways to tell this story differently–practical ways that might be even approved for use in an elementary school…well, as long as it isn’t in Texas. So, here are my suggestions for some small (but potentially transformative) ways to make this a story that offers a more expansive and effective vision of what it means to care:

  • Have the teacher contact the shelter and actually ask: what can we do to help? What care can we give to your residents? You could have her ask the director or, even better, have her talk with actual residents.
  • What about including a brief mention (even a sentence would help) of how a resident or the director visited the class and told them about the shelter and what the residents needed.
  • Let Jynelle ask why. You don’t even have to answer it (although that would be awesome), just let her ask it.
  • Include some faces, names, voices of the residents. At least include them in some of the pictures.

Okay, here is one suggestion that might be too ambitious for a third-grade level book:

  • Instead of talking so much about how students get a warm feeling because they feel good about caring for others, focus just a little more attention on why they are sad (at least you mention it on page 13) or even why they are mad that others don’t have a home.

Okay, my brain (and the rest of me too) is done. Now I want to find some kids’ books that talk about social justice and encourage kids to question and challenge. Any suggestions?

Linking care with troublemaking, part 1.5

Note: As I was reviewing part 1 of this series on linking care with troublemaking, I was struck by Tronto’s definition of care. Instead of adding in my reflections about the definition to part 1 (which is already too long), I thought I would post a part 1.5.

In Moral Boundaries (and earlier with B Fisher in “Toward a Feminist Theory of Caring” from Circle of Care), Tronto offers the following definition of care:

On the most general level, we suggest that caring be viewed 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. That world includes our bodies, our selves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web (103).

Maintain. Continue. Repair. Those ideas don’t seem to resonate at all with making and staying in trouble. Or, do they? Is it possible to imagine making trouble–disrupting the status quo, challenging ideas that are assumed to be givens and emphasizing the brokenness of ideas/images/visions–as actually contributing to the sustaining and repairing of the world? What does it mean, from a feminist (ethics) perspective, to repair things or people? What are the differences or similarities between repairing and creating, fixing old ideas and constructing new ones? Perhaps I should check out (literally and figuratively) Elizabeth Spelman’s Repair at Wilson Library?

Linking care with troublemaking, part 1: Defining Care

It is spring break and I am taking a few days to think through some ideas that keep coming up in my reading, researching and teaching. One idea that I have been experimenting with for some time now is that of troublemaking as a form of care. I can’t quite remember where or when I first started to think that care and troublemaking could (or should) be connected, but this idea seems to be bothering/inspiring/haunting/provoking me lately.

I think one reason that I like connecting care and troublemaking is because much attention (some positive, a lot negative) has been given to the concept of care within feminist ethics. In the context of feminism and feminist ethics, care is popularly understood as being closely tied to nurturing and the re-valuing of women’s work/women’s roles/women’s ways of knowing/women’s practices as mothers and care-givers. This focus produces a narrow framing of the issue: Care = Nurturing = Comfort = Maternal = Women. While this framing does not accurately represent how many feminist ethicists reflect on and use care in their own projects, it can be hard to think of care as a feminist practices outside of the frame of the nurturing mother. I think that linking troublemaking with care could enable us to rethink how we understand care and feminist ethics and how we frame their relationship. At the very least, just thinking about troublemaking (which emphasizes discomfort and uncertainty) as a form of care makes some serious trouble for care and feminist ethics!

Note: Why, you may ask, am I using the language of frames/framing here? Last week in my grad class on troublemaking, we read the introduction to J Butler’s latest book (May 2009), Frames of War. So the idea of framing is fresh in my mind. I really like Butler’s use of framing as a way to focus (to frame?)  her own discussion of grief, war and the livable life. She not only uses the concept of framing as a way to think about how we represent/structure/understand an idea, issue or norm (the frame), but she also argues that we need to spend some time troubling that framing instead of quickly moving to create new frames. At one point in the essay (pages 8-12, to be exact), she traces the meaning of “to be framed” and encourages us to engage in a troubling/calling into question of our frames in order to expose how they always produce an excess/outside that doesn’t fit (drawing upon Trinh T. Minh-ha, she calls this a “framing the frame”). She understands this excess/outside in two different ways: a. (negatively) as a necessary part of the process of framing that functions at the limits and helps to define what one is (A), by what one isn’t (not A) and b. (positively) as the uncontrollable part of the process of framing that always exceeds (breaks with) that framing and enables it to take on new meanings/new contexts. Hmm…does this fit with my discussion of the framing of feminist ethics and care. Yes! But, how? Well, I can’t quite articulate that right now. I will leave it to fester–in my brain and on this blog–for a while…

This discussion and reflection on care, troublemaking and feminist ethics is a big project (a book, perhaps?). Right now I want to focus in on some definitions of care offered by those engaged in feminist ethics. Bypassing the definitions offered by Nell Noddings or Carol Gilligan, I want to begin with Joan Tronto’s four part definition of care as it is articulated in chapter 4 of Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care (but also coming out of her work with Berenice Fisher who wrote a fabulous book, No Angel in the Classroom, that I use whenever I teach Feminist Pedagogies).

Tronto begins her essay by revisiting the definition of care that she created with Berenice Fisher:

On the most general level, we suggest that caring be viewed 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. That world includes our bodies, our selves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web (103).

In offering this definition, Tronto wants to highlight several features. Caring:

  • implies a reaching out beyond the self (relational)
  • requires action
  • is not limited to human interaction
  • is not exclusively dyadic (relationship between 2 people)–not just about mother/child relationship
  • is largely defined culturally
  • is an ongoing process, not a single act or type of activity
  • is a practice and a disposition
  • are those practices that have maintaining, continuing, repairing the world as their end

Tronto offers four phases of care that are analytically separate but interconnected in the ongoing process of care:

Phase One: Caring About
Phase one involves the recognition that caring is necessary. It is about paying attention to issues/individuals/communities/nations/regions and identifying their needs.

I am particularly interested in the phase of caring because it resonates with my own linking of care with curiosity and paying attention. I think of caring-as-curiosity as more than just paying attention and recognizing that there are needs to be met through practicing care. Is this phase always (and only) phase one in a larger process of practices? Why is it important to distinguish it analytically from other forms of care? What are the limits or dangers of doing so?

Phase Two: Taking Care of
Phase two involves assuming responsibility for those needs and developing ways to respond to them. This second phase goes beyond identifying a need to the recognition that action is needed and can be taken.

When I think of taking care of something, I often think of solving (or getting rid of) a problem. Tronto doesn’t address the (sometimes) negative tone of this phrase or the potential conflicts between solving a problem (taking care of it) and the need for ongoing care. She does, however, discuss how it is often connected with men and the power/privilege they have in being able to address and solve problems (121).

Phase Three: Care-giving
Phase three involves the actual physical labor that is necessary for taking responsibility and meeting the needs of others. Tronto offers the following as examples: nurse administering medication, repair person fixing a given thing, mother (or father?) talking with her child about the day’s events, a neighbor helping a friend to set her hair (107).

I am struck by her examples here. These activities seem to be overwhelmingly feminine–can a father engage in these caring activities? Or, when a father cares is he engaged in mothering? Tronto does suggest that these are the examples that most quickly spring to our minds–is this true? Is this how we envision care?

Phase Four: Care-receiving
Phase four involves the responses of the person/community/object who receives care.  Tronto believes this phase is necessary because focusing on how the object of care responds to that care enables the care giver to assess whether their actions were effective and productive.

Is this another form of paying attention? So, it is not just that we pay attention to the need for care but that we pay attention to our practices of care and the limits and possibilities of that care. Hmm…so maybe paying attention (and caring about how we care) is important for multiple phases of giving care.

After providing her definition and phases of care, Tronto devotes the rest of the essay to exploring how care (as a practice and disposition) is marginalized; is gendered, raced, and classed; and contained as work and as weakness. In terms of containment (and the connections between race/class/gender and containing care), Tronto writes:

…caring about, and taking care of, are duties of the powerful. Care-giving and care-receiving are left to the less powerful (114).

Tronto also discusses the importance of thinking about care as a disposition and a practice. She suggests that envisioning care only as a disposition reduces care/caring work to emotions and the private individual’s emotional investments and intentions. This suggestions troubles me a little as I think about my own interest in promoting troublemaking as a virtue/attitude/approach. It also troubles me as I think about the role of emotions in terms of Sara Ahmed and her discussion of collective feelings. Ahmed is not interested in drawing such a strict division between emotions/feelings and actions. In “Collective Feelings: Or, the Impressions Left by Others,” she argues that “emotions do things” and that “rather than seeing emotions as psychological dispositions, we need to consider how they work, in concrete and particular ways, to mediate the relationships between the psychic and the social, between the individual and the collective” (27). Hmm….

It is helpful for me to work through Tronto’s definition here. In part 2 of this linking care with troublemaking, I want to read chapter 5 of Moral Boundaries–“An Ethic of Care” and think about what this might mean for my exploration of care and for Michel Foucault’s use of care in “The Masked Philosopher” (which I discuss here) and in The Care of the Self: The History of Sexuality, Volume 3.

Here’s a story of a troublemaker…

Okay, I have been watching way too much Brady Bunch this summer. I still have the theme song going through my head. Here’s a story…of a troublemaker…who was writing ’bout her troublemaking past… Anyway, a few days ago I wrote an entry about kids-as-disciplinary-problems, Judith Butler, and troublemaking. It got me thinking about my own narrative of growing up as a troublemaker.

As a child, I was a troublemaker. But, what does that mean? Well, I had a lot of teachers who really didn’t like me (from elementary school through high school). Not because I acted out in class. I didn’t. Not because I made faces in assemblies. I didn’t. And not because I “did really bad things.” Because, I really didn’t. No, they disliked me because they could sense—somehow—that I saw through their bullshit (for more on being a bullshit detector, see here) and that I wasn’t going to simply believe that what they said was the “Truth.” I guess I was a threat to their already tenuous hold on the classroom.

I asked a lot of questions (and not hostile ones. Just lots and lots of “why” questions). I always wanted to know why things worked the way that they did. I liked exploring ideas without immediately placing judgment on them. And even though I looked the part of the good little white student, I refused to fully buy into the rules and norms that undergird the white suburban school and its goal of molding the minds of children into good little consumer citizens.

So, when I think of my own troublemaking “roots” it is not through the tradition of disrupting class or being disrespectful to teachers. For me, troublemaking was never about breaking the rules (even though I can see why many rules need to be broken) or rebelling against authority/authority figures. No, the tradition of troublemaking that I draw upon in my own understanding and practice of being in/making/staying in trouble is the tradition of posing questions…and lots of them. The question that I used to pose a lot as a kid, and the question that Butler suggests is the first act of disobedience, is “why.” As in, why is something this way and not that? For Butler, to ask “why” is to introduce the possibility that something could be otherwise, that the way things are is not they only way that should or could be. It is to open up the possibility of making ourselves into subjects-who-disobey instead of subjects-who-merely-obey. [Of course, “why” is not the only question many of us do—or should—ask. With my training in feminist/queer/critical theory, the question that I pose a lot now is “at whose expense”? This question seems to infuse the somewhat innocent “why” with an awareness of oppression and a desire for justice.]

Here are some key passages from my earlier entry on Butler and asking lots of questions:

Butler argues that asking why things are the way that they are is a form of disobedience (or is way of not being obedient if obedience requires unquestioned acceptance). The emphasis here is not on disobedience as a refusal to follow the rules or a rejection of rules altogether–some rules are necessary and important and helpful.  No, Butler wants to emphasize disobedience as the refusal to be/become subjects who accept and willingly/unthinkingly obey the dictates that we are given without question. Again, in this sense, the disobedience is not to Rules or Law or the State (although that is important as well), but to the formation of us as subjects-who-merely-obey. So, Butler is particularly interested in how our obedience or disobedience functions on the level of self-(re)making (or what Butler would call subject formation).

Now, this idea of disobedience is not just about how and who we are as political subjects who engage in those practices that are traditionally considered to be political (like voting or protesting or being a part of activist communities or even participating in civic organizations). This idea of disobedience is about how and who we are as selves as we engage in our everyday activities and as we work (intentionally and not so intentionally) on our moral/ethical/intellectual development. And it happens when we ask “why”–not once or twice but everyday and all the time.

In this earlier entry, I link Butler’s promotion of asking questions with the “childish” behavior of asking “why”:

Kids are really good (sometimes too good) at asking “why”–from the mundane (why isn’t yellow your favorite color?) to the scientific (why can’t it snow in the summer?) to the existential (why can’t Nana live forever?) to the defiant (why do I have to eat my vegetables?) to the disturbing (why can’t I eat my own poop?) to the repetitive (Why? Why? Why?). The asking of these questions can be tedious for parents, but they are (most often) not done by children in order to be destructive or disrespectful. At their best, these “why” questions demonstrate curiosity and an interest in (caring about) the world and how it works. And, they are an assertion of a self-in-process who is claiming their independence from the forces that shape them.

Posing “why” and later, “at whose expense” questions (to myself and to others) got me in a lot of trouble. A lot of that trouble was bad (such as teachers hating me, being dismissed and discounted as a problem—not so much a disciplinary problem but just a problem), but a lot more of it was good (as in helpful/productive/motivating for me). The refusal to merely accept and the desire to remain open to other ways of being (instead of just fixing in on the way I am supposed to see and/or act in the world) shaped who I am and have, I think, made me a better (happier, more responsible, aware and just) person.

I am drawn to Judith Butler’s work because one primary aspect of her philosophy/ethos/system of thought is the value of asking (and never stopping your asking) of questions. When I look to Butler it is this important strain in her work that resonates with me. Not the acting out (and acting up) that is reflected in the narrative about her as a “disciplinary problem.” This single-minded reduction of troublemaking to bad behavior and the revaluing of “being bad” as good doesn’t work for me. It certainly doesn’t speak to my experiences. And, it is not, in my opinion, a helpful resource for a feminist or queer ethics.

Butler’s emphasis on always asking questions helped me to understand what I had been doing for so long when I was younger. When I was a kid I felt the pressure of opposing forces: 1. a family of intellectuals who encouraged me to think and question and challenge and care (about justice, from my dad the ethicist, and about the world and imagining it otherwise, from my mother, the artist/dreamer/social historian) and 2. the (almost completely) white suburban, conformity-imposing, competition-driven public schools that I attended from fifth through twelfth grade. From my family (and my position as white and middle/intellectual-class), I inherited a strong sense of entitlement–of course, I should ask questions and think, I could do anything and be anything! But from the schools I attended in suburban D.C. (in Northern Virginia) and suburban Des Moines (the insurance capital of the Midwest!), I was reminded everyday that I could ask some questions but only if they were framed in the right way and only if they furthered the goals of success in the forms of being better than everyone else and of acquiring the most stuff (status, possessions, awards, knowledge-as-commodity).

It has always been a struggle to navigate these forces. Why did I have to make everything so difficult? I would sometimes ask myself. Why can’t I just participate in the system like a “good girl”? [Of course, as a white, middle-class, heterosexual, I was a “good” and proper girl and my choice to not fit in was always just that…a choice. I always had the privilege to pass and fit in as normal, even if I often felt like I couldn’t force myself to do it.] How can I reconcile the desire to care about others/the world/justice that my parents instilled in me with the implicit (and sometimes explicit) command by many teachers/adults/”society” to care only about myself and how I could fit in and be very successful? Of course, this was definitely not how I phrased it as a child. But the language of feminist and queer theories and of Butler’s (albeit underdeveloped) notion of  troublemaking have given me a way in which to understand and articulate what was (at least partially) going on with my struggles to care but fit in, to question but not to outrage or alienate, and to stay open to new possibilities of thinking, being and doing.

So, there you have it. The opening chapter (or maybe the preface) to my troublemaking narrative. There is much more to say about my own experiences of making/staying in trouble. Indeed, I feel like I have barely scratched the surface.