Contribution to the Journal Femina Politica – Zeitschrift für feministische Politikwissenschaft

In this article, I address the precarious relationship between democracy and care and develop a radical democratic understanding of care – Radical Democratic Care. I proceed in four steps: First, I introduce the concept of practices of contradiction. I plausibilize their radical democratic potential and at the same time explain why not every form of contradiction qualifies as democratic. In doing so, I show that radical democratic theory promotes an activist ideal that encompasses care in the idea of “care for the agon” (Honig 2019). However, the question of the enabling conditions of this political care for the agon remains unanswered. I problematize this gap and argue that it is due to a theoretical repression of care work. In the second step, I clarify the relevance of care work for democratic theory and shed light on the power relations in which care work is embedded, as well as the associated mechanisms of exclusion. In particular, embodied effects of care work such as exhaustion and feelings of powerlessness play a role with regard to the inability/possibility of being able to withstand and achieve contradiction. In the third step, I therefore refer to the concept of mis/fit by Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (2011). Because mis/fitting in the context of Critical Disability Studies allows (human) bodies to be theorized as both materially and politically produced, I can make analytically tangible the paradoxical role that the prevailing organization of care work plays in either enabling different social groups to contradict or structurally hindering them in doing so. In conclusion, I argue that the redistribution of care as reproductive labor and its link to care as a collective political logic – care – is a prerequisite for practices of contradiction to actually unfold their radical democratic potential.

You can find a reading sample in german here.

Zieringer, Carolin. 2024. Radical Democratic Care. Eine sorgetheoretische Perspektive auf Praxen des Widersprechens. In Femina Politica, 02/2024, 76-84.