Decolonizing bodies and the ethics of care: On the significance of embodied vulnerability as the future of cultural studies

Abstract

In the contemporary moment, systemic failures – from climate change to pandemics to political repression – have created embodied vulnerabilities worldwide. I argue here that the increasing precaritization of individual bodies is an index of the political formations that create and condition vulnerabilities among certain populations. Recognizing this, analyses of the conditions of embodied vulnerability are crucial to cultural studies in that they contribute to understanding and challenging neocolonial and patriarchal power and injustice. Feminist materialism and theories of post- and neo-colonialism reveal the processes of embodiment as complex modes of epistemic violence. To reorient cultural studies theoretically and methodologically, I propose the feminist ethics of care as a working framework for mapping, challenging, and changing the processes of materialization at work in unjust and asymmetric embodied vulnerabilities.