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Care, Oppression, and Marriage

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Mara Marin
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Abstract

This article draws attention to a form of injustice in intimate relationships of care that is largely ignored in discussions about the legal rights and obligations of intimate partners. This form of injustice is connected to a feature of caregiving I call “flexibility,” in virtue of which caregiving requires “skills of flexibility.” I argue that the demands placed by these skills on caregivers create constraints that amount to “vulnerability to oppression.” To lift these constraints, caregivers are entitled to open‐ended responses to their work, responses that would enable them to pursue their own projects while providing care. Instead of protecting individual choice of intimate relationships, marriage law should protect these entitlements.

Type
Open Issue Content
Information
Hypatia , Volume 29 , Issue 2 , Spring 2014 , pp. 337 - 354
Copyright
Copyright © 2014 by Hypatia, Inc.

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Footnotes

I accumulated many debts of gratitude while writing this article. I would like to thank Anita Chari, Julie Cooper, Andrew Dilts, Dorit Geva, Bob Gooding‐Williams, Leigh Claire LaBerge, Jacob Levy, Patchen Markell, John McCormick, Claire McKinney, Jennifer Pitts, Shalini Satkunanandan, Molly Shanley, Anna Marie Smith, Elizabeth Wingrove, Linda Zerilli, Rebecca Zorach, and two anonymous reviewers for this journal. The Society of Fellows at the University of Chicago, as well as the Justitia Amplificata Center and the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at Frankfurt University generously supported my work while writing this article.

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