oa ‘As long as care is attached to gender, there is no justice’

Care has long been a key field of struggle and discourse for feminist interventions and movements. The significance of gendered assumptions, attitudes, and practices about caring tasks and those who care has led critics to specifically focus on this crucial task of human reproduction that has previously largely been considered a private matter. Starting in the late 1980s, the tensions and conflicts between dominant moral theories and questions of care has been a crucial concern for theorists. Joan C. Tronto, Professor of Political Science at the University of Minnesota, US, has been one of the key thinkers who have developed the ethics of care approach that puts care at the centre of the construction of a new morality. In this interview, Tronto recalls some of the main steps in the development of her own thinking and the formulation of different aspects of a theory of justice that starts with human relationships rather than abstract, completely independent individuals. The interview links Tronto’s personal intellectual journey with the development of a theoretical and ethical perspective that has had strong influences on feminist discourses for several decades. Important contemporary questions such as the relationship between the concept of care and the discursive reproduction of gender are explored and put into a broader context of a feminist theory of justice. Tronto also speaks of her latest attempts to link processes of care and relating with questions of global democratic challenges.