DeFalco, A orcid.org/0000-0003-2021-5714 (2020) Towards a Theory of Posthuman Care: Real Humans and Caring Robots. Body & Society, 26 (3). pp. 31-60. ISSN 1357-034X
Abstract
This essay interrogates the common assumption that good care is necessarily human care. It looks to disruptive fictional representations of robot care to assist its development of a theory of posthuman care that jettisons the implied anthropocentrism of ethics of care philosophy but retains care’s foregrounding of entanglement, embodiment and obligation. The essay reads speculative representations of robot care, particularly the Swedish television programme Äkta människor (Real Humans), alongside ethics of care philosophy and critical posthumanism to highlight their synergetic critiques of neoliberal affective economies and humanist hierarchies that treat some bodies and affects as more real than others. These texts and discourses assist me in proposing a theory of care that regards vulnerability as the normative effect of posthuman vital embodiment, as opposed to an anomalous state that can be overcome or corrected via neoliberal practice.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © The Author(s) 2020. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage). |
Keywords: | Care, representation, robots, posthumanism |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Cultures (Leeds) > School of English (Leeds) |
Funding Information: | Funder Grant number Wellcome Trust 205336/Z/16/Z |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 05 Feb 2020 16:31 |
Last Modified: | 21 Jul 2022 10:24 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | SAGE Publications |
Identification Number: | 10.1177/1357034X20917450 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:156494 |