Paper: Performing
Care or Gender? A Feminist Critique of Motherhood
Abstract
Within
the discipline of care ethics, care is perceived as a virtue, expressed in acts
of compassion towards the needy. Theorists Carol Gilligan and Nel Noddings,
known for their contribution to care ethics, further suggested that compassion
is a feminine virtue, thereby branding caring/care-giving as a feminine task. Theorist
Joan Toronto has criticised Gilligan and Noddings for essentializing women.
This paper aims to extend Toronto’s notion of care ethics to review women’s
position as caregivers in the society, arguing that motherhood or women’s task
of caring for a child is an act of "gender
performativity" that reinstates women’s position as docile, domesticated
being. The paper uses the theory of “gender performativity” to examine how laws
designed to empower women function as perpetrators of gender stereotypes instead. The Paper further argues
that the 2013 Company’s Act which provides reservation for women in companies
is necessitated by the fact that women are still viewed as caregivers and not
capable managers, and is a by-product of the essentialist
association between women and care-giving. In this inter-disciplinary study, case
studies and mass media reports are used to support the claim that laws based on
care ethics perpetuate gender stereotypes, by essentializing women as
mothers/caregivers.
Ruchira Datta is an adjunct faculty at Christ University, Bangalore. Her areas of interest include food and feminism, postcolonial literature and posthumanism and presented "Forging Identities Using the Third Space Theory: An Analysis of Jhumpa Lahiri’s Hema and Kaushik Stories at Christ University National Seminar, 2015. She has published “A Feminist Reading of Food as 'Private Language' in Like Water for Chocolate” in the TETSO Interdisciplinary Journal, 2016.
