Author Flyer - Intellectual Disability and Being Human: a care ethics model

Revista Estudos Feministas, 2021

We met with Eva Feder Kittay in an afternoon of December at a café in New York City where she generously spoke for almost two hours about her work on the Ethics of Care and Disability, and her experience as Sesha's mother. A recently retired Professor of Philosophy from Stony Brook University, in New York, Kittay is a leading figure in feminist philosophy and philosophy of disability and has also made a substantial contribution to the fields of social and political theory and ethics. Along with other feminist theorists such as Joan Tronto and Virginia Held, Kittay was one of the pioneers in proposing an alternative ethical theory centered not on normative, general, universal principles of justice, but on interpersonal relationships, responsiveness to specific needs, and relationships of dependence and interdependence. An Ethics of Care. Her work as a philosopher is intertwined with her trajectory as Sesha's mother and she has built her career in a way that is not common within the discipline of philosophy: writing from one's own personal life. She was also a pioneer in bringing matters of care and disability-with special attention to cognitive disability-into philosophy. In 1999 she published the groundbreaking book Love's Labor: Essays on Women, Equality and Dependency (Eva KITTAY, 1999). In this collection of essays, she presented a feminist critique of John Rawls' theory of justice and formulated an alternative conception of equality that takes into account relationships of care, dependency, and the dependency workers. With that, she argued for the recognition of Care as a primary good. Moreover, she placed dependency, interdependency, and care in the center of the discussions on social justice. She also argues for a better distribution of dependency work, one that is not by gender, race or class, but through skills or inclination which requires the valorization of such labor. Since then, she has published over eighty papers, books and book chapters on issues of dependency, the relational self, the relationship of care and justice, asymmetry of relationships, social justice, politics of care, and disability. Kittay is also a prominent figure on Disability Studies. With a work grounded in an Ethics of Care, she has argued against philosophers and scholars who reduce the moral status of people with cognitive disability. With that, she addresses matters of the dignity of people with cognitive disability, personhood, justice, the role of care and of relationality, and also the guarantee of rights and access to health care for people with disabilities. She co-edited the book Cognitive Disability and its Challenge to Moral

Disability & Society

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Sexualities, 2016

Ethics and Social Welfare, 2018

In this paper, we seek to develop an understanding of the human driven by a commitment to the politics of disability, especially those of people with intellectual disabilities. Our position as family members and allies to people associated with this phenomenon of intellectual disability influences our philosophical conceptions and political responses. This has led us recently to develop a theory of dis/human studies which, we contend, simultaneously acknowledges the possibilities offered by disability to trouble, reshape and re-fashion the human (crip ambitions) while at the same time asserting disabled people’s humanity (normative desires). We sketch out four dis/human considerations: (1) dis/autonomy, voice and evacuating the human individual; (2) dis/independence, assemblage and collective humanness; (3) dis/ability politics, self-advocacy and repositioning the human; and (4) dis/family: desiring the normal, embracing the non-normative. We argue that this feeds into the wider project of dis/ability studies, and we conclude that we desire a time when we view life through the prism of the dishuman (note, without the slash).

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2022

Those giving care to people with intellectual disabilities in the United Kingdom are obliged to drive bad forms of intimacy, such as abuse, out of the caring relationship. They must also enable these individuals to find positive forms of intimacy through reciprocal relationships such as friendships. These two aims are normally separated, but in an organization called L'Arche UK, they are combined in the same relationship when caregivers pursue reciprocal friendships with those they support. What happens to this ethical project when those with intellectual disabilities are violent to their caregivers? Trying to pursue intimate engagement in this context has the unexpected result of creating distrustful and tense relationships, which raises questions not only about why this ethical project goes so wrong, but also about what it would mean for it to go right: that is, what a richer and fully positive reciprocity between limited and complex human beings would actually look like in practice.

For this paper, emotional and socio-political questions lie at the heart of relationships in understanding intellectual disability and what it is to be a human. While the sexual and intimate is more often than not based on a private and personal relationship with the self and (an)other, the sexual and intimate life of intellectually disabled people is more often a 'public' affair governed by parents and/or carers, destabilizing what we might consider ethical and caring practices. In the socio-political sphere, as an all-encompassing 'care space', social intolerance and aversion to difficult differences are played out, impacting upon the intimate lives of intellectually disabled people. As co-researchers (one intellectually disabled and one 'non-disabled') we discuss narratives from a small scale research project and our personal reflections. In sociological research and more specifically within disability research it is clear we need to keep sex and intimacy on the agenda, yet also find ways of doing research in a meaningful, caring and co-constructed way.

Disability & Society, 2015

2012

Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, 17(3), 143-71., 2002