2 - The Ethical-Political Perspective

Summary

The aim of this chapter is to promote a view of designers making ethical-political choices. It introduces key concepts that feminist scholars contributed to our understanding of ethics and politics concerning the relationships between equality, difference, and social justice. The feminist ethics of care and responsibility builds on the centrality of relationships for women’s thinking. Joan Tronto emphasized the interrelatedness of an ethics of care with social justice arguing that the ways care is performed and institutionalized are deeply entangled with issues of power and inequality. There is also a connection between caretaking and the many forms of invisible work that socialist feminists claimed women do to maintain the paid labour force and their domestic labours that ensure social reproduction. The chapter concludes with observations about feminist politics drawing a line from ‘the personal is political’ to the ‘matrix of domination’, concepts that help us understand how power as a source of inequalities is organized on different levels and what to do to enable marginalized groups to ‘jump into the public sphere’, become visible, and have a voice.