Thinking the aid and care relationship from the standpoint of disability

Abstract

Thinking the aid and care relationship from the standpoint of disability: Stakes and ambiguities Penser la relation d'aide et de soin à partir du handicap : enjeux et ambivalences For approximately thirty years in Anglo-Saxon countries (Gilligan, 1982;Tronto, 1993) and more recently in France (Garrau & Le Goff, 2012;Molinier, 2013;Paperman, 2013; Paperman & Laugier, 2006) a school of the social sciences, called the ethics of care, has criticized the idea-carried by progressive thought since the Enlightenment-of a rational, autonomous, individual subject (the modern, Cartesian, Western subject).Indeed, for these authors, vulnerability and dependency are constitutive aspects of everyone, no matter who, and bring about a need for care.More specifically, these dependency relationships, viewed positively, have been analyzed as being at the source of a unique moral experience (Gilligan, 1982) -care, defined as attention to others, concern for their well-being and concrete activities targeting this well-being.The use of the word ethics references this moral potential in dependency relationships: preserving these constitutive relationships for human beings, through care, is a moral stake on equal footing with the quest for justice.Hence the goal of this school of thought-to rehabilitate the practices and values linked to care, which are often hidden, implicit, or even denigrated.First focused on women and the "mother-child" relationship, the ethics of care was then careful to differentiate itself from a type of essentialism that others had ascribed to it and that claimed that women were "naturally" inclined to provide care to "naturally" weak beings (children, the ill, the elderly or disabled, etc.).Several authors called attention to this assigning of care work to certain social groups based on one's belonging to a gender, class and race (Glenn, 2009;Tronto, 1993).These authors showed that while care relationships are first interpersonal, they are also caught in a historical process and a broader social context.They analyzed how care dovetails and is defined across different levels: direct care relationships (micro level) and the social or institutional coverage of care needs (macro level), and by so doing invited questions about the borders between the private and the public spheres.Thus, the ethics of care, from the "standpoint of dependency" (Kittay, 1999), promotes a new figure-the person and citizen, fundamentally relational, that is elaborated and evolves by and in care relationships; it also emphasizes imbalance and the emotional dimension of this care relationship.This school of thought encountered research on disability, but ran into-sometimes radical-criticism, notably from another school of thought that had grown out of the mobilization of disabled people: disability studies (Albrecht,

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