Care ethis week 6

Banerjee main idea

Banerjee argues that solidarity should not be based on the assumption that people within a group are the same or experience the same oppression.

Problem of liberal feminism

Basic idea was that women experience the same oppression because they are women, which ignores intersectionality.

Decolonizing solidarity

For Banerjee, decolonizing solidarity means not imposing one supposedly universal experience onto everyone else.

Reciprocity and Banerjee's problem with it: assymetry and incommensurability

Based on people being equal and symmetrical. Doesn't accomodate asymmetry: people have different amounts of power/resources or incommensurability: some experiences cannot be completely translated into each other's terms

Solution Banerjee on problem of solidarity

If we're different, how can we come together to fight oppression? --> concept of ambiguity

Ambiguity

We are simultaneously: Transcendent → capable of acting, choosing and moving beyond our current situation AND Immanent → situated in a body, society and material circumstances that constrain us. We are free, but also vulnerable and constrained.

Example of ambiguity:

someone might have the ability to make choices, but their social and material circumstances determine which choices are actually available to them.

Agency and vulnerability

Relational term. My ability to pursue my goals depends partly on other people responding to me. A person can experience vulnerability and oppression and still be excercising agency and resisting it.

New understanding of reprocity

reciprocity means recognizing that we affect one another's possibilities for agency, even when we are very different. You can relate to someone reciprocally without being equal in every respect.

Two dangers of reciprocity

Assimilation: you're like me --> difference disappears

Radical othering --> you are so different that we cannot relate to each other. Banerjee says we are connected, but not the same. This is the ambiguity at the heart of reciprocity

Ethics of humility

We can never understand another person's experience fully, so we need humility.

Crenshaw intersectionality

the idea that different forms of social inequality — such as gender, race, and class — do not always operate separately, but can intersect and reinforce one another. Intersectionality is concerned with power and social structures.

Crenshaw single axis thinking

looking at problems through only one category.

Davis main idea:

How can struggles against racism, colonialism, gender violence, and state violence connect across national borders?

Transnational solidarity

solidarity across countries and communities. Different struggles should not be treated as isolated problems

Intersectionality of struggles

The question shifts from how identities overlap in a person to how different social justice movements connect to one another, including across national borders.

Intersectionality of identities

It means recognizing that race, class, gender, sexuality, nationality, ability and so on can't be analyzed in isolation, because they overlap in a person's life.