Reimagining citizenship: Exploring the intersection of ecofeminism and republicanism through political care and compulsory care service

As the world was hit by COVID-19, care workers were once again recognized as key workers in society, whose primary responsibility is to ensure the survival and well-being of people. Care work is defined as a set of “economic activities in the home, market, community, and state that fit loosely under the rubric of human services” (Folbre, 2006, pp. 11–12). Although care work is frequently performed within households as an unpaid form of labor and is not monetized, the pandemic has revealed a shortage of care supplies and an increasing demand for care. Despite its importance, care work remains one of the lowest-paying occupations in the global capitalist economy. Furthermore, recent studies have indicated that women, both in and outside the formal workforce, continue to bear a disproportionate burden of unpaid care work (Chopra & Zambelli, 2017; Güney-Frahm, 2020; Power, 2020).

Given these complexities and contradictions, this article aims to contribute to the adequate recognition of such an essential and ineliminable form of work. Feminist scholars and care theorists have attempted to reframe care as an explicitly political idea (Held, 2018; Kittay, 1999; Noddings, 1984; Robinson, 2010; Ruddick, 1980; Sevenhuijsen, 1998; Tronto, 1993). Previous research about care work has commonly been raised from an enduring critique that the notions of public sphere and citizenship have been plagued by a misogynized democracy deficit.

The first section characterizes care work as an essential maintenance activity that stems from human vulnerability. Then the second section shows how both vulnerability and care work are “feminized” and therefore “interiorised” by “imagined invulnerability,” a dominant patriarchal mentality, logic, norm, and discipline of liberal capitalism. The third section, however, argues that care should be a collective concern of all citizens, moving it out of the private sphere and into the realm of politics, by interpreting the Arendtian understanding of “the political” and “public life.” Not only is care already a political issue, but it should also be developed as a sense of citizenship, which this article shall call political care. This is achieved by combining ecofeminist philosophy with the republican understanding of politics and power, so that care work is no longer gendered but seen as a universal interest for all citizens in society. To this end, the article proposes an institution of compulsory care service, given its emphasis on both degendering care work and fostering active citizenship.

First and foremost, as humans, we are inherently vulnerable beings. Vulnerability is a defining aspect of our existence and is an inseparable part of what it means to be human. It stems from our corporeality and mortality and encompasses our universal susceptibility to hunger, thirst, diseases, disabilities, ill health, and death (Mackenzie et al., 2014, p. 7). Our bodily limitations make us prone to various dangers, harms, and hazards, making “precarity,” in Butler's terms, an unavoidable part of the human experience (2004). Vulnerability also marks our bodily existence with dependency, as we all require care and assistance from others at some point in our lives to mitigate risks and live a good life. We can both depend on others when we are in need and provide aid to other vulnerable beings.

The definition of care suggests that giving and receiving care is a collective and public experience, not a one-way or temporary situation. Care is multidimensional and accompanies different temporal and spatial scales throughout our lives. In this way, both vulnerability and care are essential and ineliminable. The connection between vulnerability and care work highlights that vulnerability often motivates us to develop moral obligations, such as the ethics of care, to ensure the well-being and autonomy of those whose lives are interdependent and influenced by the social and ecological environment we all live in. By placing vulnerability at the center of our moral duties and social learning, we can create more politically feasible and justified conditions to achieve social justice, democratic equality, virtuous citizenship, state responsibility and ecological sustainability, which all remind us of “what we owe to one another as citizens” (Mackenzie, 2014, p. 36).

Another key aspect is that this life-sustaining and repairing activity acknowledges our constitutive dependency on one another and aims to improve the autonomy and well-being of other people. It is a long-standing ecofeminist view that we are dependent not only on other human beings but also on nonhuman beings and the natural world, comprising the web of life. As relational and vulnerable beings, we live in our community by organizing social norms and ethico-political obligations. If we were absolutely independent, there would be no need to fulfill the moral obligation to care for someone in need or reciprocally, to be in need of care and attention from others. Ecofeminist ethics affirm that the ways in which humans relate to the natural world should be “open-minded and attentive,” thereby fostering “an attitude of care and compassion” (Matthews, 1994, p. 159). That is, vulnerability motivates us to take ethical actions based on “care and compassion for human and non-human others” (Barry, 2012, p. 75).

To take a further step, ecofeminists employ the notion of “kinship,” arguing that the range of family can be extended to our human and nonhuman “relatives” (Mathews, 1994, p. 162). Thus, within the planetary community where human and nonhuman relatives are complicatedly networked with one another, each individual can be kind, caring, and loving without the need for their motivations to be justified by the Kantian notion of rationality, believed to enable moral agency (Donovan, 1990, p. 355). Yet, as I will argue in the next section, care and compassion should not be taken for granted or assumed to be inherently positive experiences but should be adequately revalued first, considering the exploitative conditions that often characterize both unpaid and paid care work in the liberal-capitalist world.

Vulnerability is not necessarily negative nor always positive, but is rather “ambivalent” and open-ended, “[taking] diverse forms in different social situations” (Gilson, 2011, p. 310). The recognition that vulnerability is marked by ambivalence is in parallel with ecofeminist endeavor to deconstruct the human/nature dualism, encompassing other subsequent dualisms dividing reason and emotion, men and women, and so forth (Haraway, 2003; Merchant, 1990; Plumwood, 1993; Strathern, 1980). Within this binary framework, dependency, arising from vulnerability, is typically perceived as a negative and feminized (also, in turn, negatively relegated) trait, with human rationality often more closely associated with independence, masculinity, and thus superior. However, ambivalence is a more accurate reflection of the complexities of the real world—more nuanced and varied than the binary classification misunderstands.

For example, MacIntyre (1999) argues that human rationality would not have developed if dependency was not a constitutive part of the human condition. All rational claims, whether spoken or written, are made to be recognized and responded to by others in the end, meaning that having an audience is integral in the process of making rational claims. The process of making rational claims begins to exist in the real world through reactions from others however they are positive or negative, and with the potential to harm or benefit us. The audience, once distinct from the speaker, now becomes part of the discourse as soon as they engage in the conversation. Language connects the speaker to the outside world, bridging the divide between speaker and audience. Note that there is nothing inherently superior about language; it is merely one form, just one way of communication. Furthermore, the rational claim made by the speaker is never entirely “original” or “independent,” as the speaker's knowledge that shapes the claim must have been influenced by their previous learning experience. The process of learning, which precedes speaking, requires acquiring a language to convey knowledge and involves the participation of other beings. Hence, it can be said that we are, to a great extent, entirely dependent on others for learning new knowledge. The speaker is dependent on the audience, as speech alone cannot advance the discourse. The audience also takes on an active role, reacting to the claim and providing feedback when necessary, thereby becoming critics now. Here, we can see that “listening” is also associated with “activity” and occurs concurrently with “speaking,” challenging the dualism of speech (language)/listening and activity/passivity. Dependency now turns into relationality and sociality, by the time the speaker interacts and communicates with the audience. Therefore, rational claims or such speech acts are not entirely separable from dependency and attentiveness; hence the binary between them is now unclear and meaningless. To summarize, dependency enables relationality, sociality, and communication.

Put differently, vulnerability leads us to be open and exposed to change, affections (both affected and affecting), encompassing both passivity and activity. That is, as Gilson (2011) suggests, vulnerability is “a condition of potential that makes possible other conditions” (p. 310). But vulnerability is neither avoidable nor eliminable; it is simply part of what and who we are. While the inherent vulnerability is a fundamental, constitutive part of the human condition, our reactions to changes and instabilities can differ, and we have the potential to respond to these changes and uncertainties “possibly in a generative and not destructive way” (Rushing, 2021, p. 132).

However, not everyone is equally vulnerable to social, political, economic, and ecological changes. Thus, we have additional conceptions of vulnerability, such as situational and pathogenic vulnerability. Situational vulnerability refers to a person's temporary or enduring vulnerability that is “caused or exacerbated by social, political, economic or environmental factors” (Mackenzie, 2014, p. 39). Often, situational vulnerability is related to pathogenic vulnerability, where existing unjust social norms, policies, and economic systems may even worsen a person's vulnerability and undermine their well-being.

For example, natural disasters may bring a multitude of difficulties, from housing shortages to loss of life. Those affected by natural disasters are situationally vulnerable, and this vulnerability can become even more pronounced if the disaster leads to illness or death. That is, situational vulnerability could upheave our inherent vulnerability. As the Hurricane Katrina disaster in the United States shows, ecological disasters often disproportionately affect individuals based on preexisting socioeconomic inequalities (Zoraster, 2010, p. 75). Low income, financial insecurity, insufficient evacuation means, and fragile housing are all “risk factors” that stem from structural injustice and contribute to what is known as pathogenic vulnerability. Furthermore, failed social policies that unintentionally exacerbate existing structural injustices also contribute to pathogenic vulnerability by “[causing or compounding] major capability failure, thereby entrenching social inequality and injustice” (Mackenzie, 2014, p. 54). In this sense, Mackenzie argues that inherent vulnerability and situational vulnerability are not exactly “categorical” but rather have intersecting characteristics that can give rise to new forms of vulnerabilities (2014, p. 39).

However, vulnerability is reduced to or exaggerated as an inextricably feminine trait that is seen as a “problem” to be “solved,” “eliminated,” or “ignored.” On the other hand, invulnerability, an invented ideology, is perpetuated by the powerful who seek to maintain the status quo through hypermasculinity. Hypermasculinity is an important element of invulnerability, because hypermasculine norms and values function as a false guideline showing how to be an ideal or “real” man. The hypermasculine ideal can be summarized with three characteristics: (1) sexual aggression as an admirable personality trait; (2) risk-taking as a desirable challenge or an exciting entertainment, such as high-risk investments in the stock market and casual sex with strangers, and, in short, openness to risk-taking as a bold, capable “manly” attitude; and (3) violence as an approvable problem-solving behavior (Mosher & Tomkins, 1988, p. 61). These ideals are as old as the “warrior” role model for men in the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, in which hypermasculine invulnerability was invented as a “virtue of being a male” (Mosher & Tomkins, 1988, p. 64).

Most modern societies criminalize some of these hypermasculine behaviors like violent outbursts, and it is far from true that aggressive and uncivil people are in an advantageous position of success in social situations such as the workplace. Yet, patriarchal culture keeps educating boys to behave like a “real man,” that is, invulnerable man. On young boys’ socialization, ecofeminist thinker Plumwood (1986) suggests that such characteristics “must kill what is tender, emotional and dependent, and has a need for mastery and control, to be active and transforming with respect to nature” (p. 129). Quintessential examples include from a common struggle in parenting when the boy is “too soft and emotional” to the grown-up man now choosing his career path in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) or entrepreneurship, although there is little evidence explaining masculinity's substantial role in technology-oriented career fields (Gupta et al., 2009, p. 398; Simon et al., 2017).

The normativity of hypermasculine invulnerability connects vulnerability to weakness, disadvantages, victimhood, immatureness, premodern (closer to nature), and, because these are all gendered, femininity. For example, when a man becomes disabled due to injury or aging, he immediately loses his “masculinity” that was previously assigned to him by society based on his dominant gender status (Vaittinen, 2015, p. 103). When he loses his “independent” body, he requires assistance with daily activities, from eating and bathing to running errands. This neediness causes able-bodied individuals to view him as too weak and not masculine enough to exercise his own autonomous will, making him not a “full” or “complete” citizen of the modern polity. There are numerous examples of the relegation of disabled bodies, for example, the ways in which Korean War veterans were treated so poorly in post-war Korea (Kim, 2012, p. 325). Not only were rehabilitation programs for the veterans absent, but there were also no effective systems for reemployment and education. The disabled veterans were called national heroes, but their bodies had to be hidden from the public sight in the face of reestablishing the ruined state and erasing the nightmare of the war. Likewise, disabled people are historically excluded from the public sphere, which is a political arena for and by “active” participants with “autonomous” bodies. Following gender dichotomies that categorize politics, publicity, and citizenship as maleness, disabled bodies are associated with weakness, passivity, private (hidden from sight), prepolitical, and interchangeably, femininity, and femaleness.

However, there are no significant differences in the intrinsic human conditions embodied by able and disabled bodies, except for the different degrees of care each requires. To put this in Butler's terms, precarity is universal, but it could be “allocated differentially” (2004, p. 31). As Vaittinen (2015) summarizes, having to urinate and defecate has nothing to do with determining one's moral disposition, sexuality, socioeconomic status, and so forth. Nevertheless, disabled people who require care assistance are downgraded to the status of inert and passive beings. Hence, we can identify that vulnerability itself is not only denied but also gendered, while the idea of invulnerability, on the other hand, is proliferated as something desirable and necessary to achieve.

The bifurcation of vulnerability and invulnerability is a social construction created by patriarchal liberal capitalism. It is a modern creation shaped by Enlightenment thought, which originated from Francis Bacon and Immanuel Kant, and perceives humans as independent, rational, self-centered, and invulnerable individuals (Merchant, 1990). Invulnerability encompasses modern liberal ideals such as self-mastery and rational thinking, which have further evolved into competitive self-interest in the era of neoliberalism. According to this classical and neoliberal logic, homo economicus is believed to be free as long as their economic and other activities are not intervened by external power such as the government. For the government, it is considered virtuous at best not to interfere with the market so that the economy can be “free.”

However, these moral principles are “imagined” and false because they overlook our inherent vulnerability and dependency, which I shall call “imagined invulnerability” in this article. One key aspect is that the control and mastery (i.e., domination) that is imagined through invulnerability is structural and hegemonic, meaning that it is a cultural hegemony where “consent and force nearly always coexist.” This means that domination is not always explicitly oppressive, but it is often accepted as a social norm by the majority of the people (Jackson Lears, 1985, p. 568). Although they may seem acceptable in society, the biases produced by imagined invulnerability have detrimental effects, particularly for marginalized groups of human and nonhuman beings, compared to white, wealthy, heterosexual cisgender men.

Imagined invulnerability has its roots in the Promethean faith of the Enlightenment era, which celebrates human progress through science, technology, and domination of the natural world (Dryzek, 2005, pp. 52–53). This classical liberal belief claims that nature itself has only “use values” and is “only serviceable to us” in order to “[increase] the abundance of production” and make “men richer” (Ricardo, 2001, p. 208). It also believes that any form of natural or social disaster and difficulty can be resolved through modern technology, material prosperity, and economic growth. The invulnerable Promethean belief is now particularly associated with the exacerbating climate crisis, where advanced technologies such as geoengineering are expected to be the solution.

Moreover, the imagined invulnerability of the human condition creates a hierarchical ordering between rationality and emotion, the public and private, competition (economic) and altruism (charitable), able-bodied and disabled, and so on (Matthews, 2017, p. 58). As explained in the previous section, this modern dualism is also a gendered device, meaning that invulnerable characteristics are supriorized and attributed to men, while subjects and values associated with vulnerability are inferiorized and considered feminine, as seen in the example of the disabled body (see Table 1). The ecofeminist notion of intersectionality also explains that this gendered division is consolidated in other sites of struggle where power dynamics are oppressive and unjust to marginalized subjects, such as non-Western countries and the people, nonhuman beings, and nature, in comparison to the West, humans, and culture (Davion, 2001; Griffin, 1999; Perkins et al., 2005; Tickner, 1993).

To summarize, the false belief in human invulnerability and the resulting hierarchical ordering between invulnerability and vulnerability are at the heart of “masculine” domination over women and nature. This reason/emotion dualism is then extended to the culture/nature (as well as civilization/barbarity, often found in the justification of colonialism) dualism, which embodies a fundamental mentality of human and nonhuman dichotomy. Dichotomies are not harmful in and of themselves, but they become toxic as soon as they develop hierarchical orderings that potentially create tyrannical power relations. Consequently, reason, culture, individual autonomy, masculinity, and growth-oriented economy are seen as vastly superior to emotion, nature, the common good, femininity, and coordinating communitarian economies in liberal conscience.

Within this dualistic liberal worldview, care work is wrongly seen as inherently feminine work. Moreover, the public value of care work has also been denied or misconstrued and considered private rather than public action. The division of the public and private spheres is structurally more beneficial to some groups, namely, privileged and able-bodied citizens who are exempt from “privatized” care work. These privileged groups and individuals are exempt from care work due to their socioeconomic status based on gender, racial and ethnic identity, or class (Ahn, 2012; Song, 2013). It represents a form of “privileged irresponsibility,” which operates to seek their own needs and achieve their personal autonomy, independence, and imagined invulnerability. This is further normalized by the neoliberal market mechanism in which care services, such as childcare, health care, education, and eldercare, are financialized and commercialized and can only be purchased by those who can afford them, making care a commodity (Ungerson, 1997).

For those who cannot afford this neoliberal procurement of care services, care work is reduced to be delivered within the family, with women more likely to bear the burden of this unpaid work. Migrant women, who may work in care as a profession, may not even have formal eligibility, such as the right to vote, and thus cannot take part in decision-making in the society they live in. This highlights the absurdity that our care responsibilities are outsourced even to noncitizens. Furthermore, paid care labor is mostly carried out by low-paid women, in many cases from financially deprived and/or non-Western/white backgrounds. This racialized “global care chain” has created another form of domination over these women hired by upper-middle-class parents and couples who are often located in the Global North (Oksala, 2018, p. 226).

Oksala pinpoints ethical problems in outsourcing care responsibility to a third party, suggesting that the social benefits of rearing and caring for children would be disproportionately distributed only to particular people. Paid workers provide skilled labor and taxes to their employers and pensioners, respectively. However, the employers and pensioners are the people who had little to do with care work when the workers were children. By contrast, unpaid and paid care workers, who consequently contribute the most economic value that the workers create, are not even appreciated adequately by market capitalism (Dengler & Strunk, 2018, p. 167).

In this sense, White points out that “care has evolved as a set of professional rather than political practices” (2010, p. 4). Care is doubly “privatized,” first confined to households and then incorporated into the formal, private economy, and also transformed into a “commodity” to be bought and sold. Care has also become negotiable not through democratic deliberation in politics but through monetary relations and negotiations in the market. The commercialization of care labor also brings more complexities. On the one hand, it is difficult to assign a financial value to the quality of care, and care is often mistakenly viewed as an altruistic and feminine expression of love and sacrifice. On the other hand, care is crucial for human survival and general well-being. These complexities and the downplaying of care work result in poor pay for care workers in the commercialized realm (Folbre, 2001). This segregation not only divides people based on gendered divisions of labor but also according to their financial capabilities, creating a divide between relatively financially disadvantaged care providers and upper-middle-class consumers, as well as perpetuating racial injustice.

Feminist scholars have critiqued this sharp split, as well as the public experiences within agonistic politics, for its underlying presumption of white, bourgeois, able-bodied male experiences (Benhabib, 1993, p. 103). According to Benhabib, agonistic public deliberation is exclusive as it is “based on competition” where one's “preeminence” and “heroism” are emphasized over collaboration, coordination, or concert (1993, p. 102). Able-bodied (because they are not too old or injured yet) people are expected to exhibit the norm of invulnerability and take the role of “merciful” or “beneficial” helpers, producers/workers, and decision-makers (MacIntyre, 1999, p. 2). They are expected to be “active,” “healthy,” and “autonomous,” thereby justifying their existence as “normal” and entitled to participate in agonistic competition in politics. In short, the agonistic public sphere is optimized for the political participation of homo economicus (see Engster, 2022).

In this regard, agonal politics marginalizes those with greater care burden, predominantly women, as they have limited temporal and spatial accessibility to the public sphere. Care receivers, such as disabled men, are also removed from public sight, limiting politics to a space for invulnerable and masculine citizens. This means that care issues are less likely to be prioritized on the public agenda and effectively depoliticized (Armstrong & Armstrong, 2005, p. 169). However, not only has care as a public spirit been underrepresented in Western political thoughts, but care work has also been excluded from the political agenda-setting process due to its symbolic association with private interests and family affairs (which are also privatized), despite its clear primacy, publicity, and collectiveness that, again, affects all of us.

The crucial point is that women and other “vulnerable” individuals, who are seen as “feminine” or “emotional” and therefore not capable of fitting the model of a rational and unemotional public citizen, often thriving in the market too, are excluded from the notion of citizenship. They are disconnected from the “invulnerable” understanding of citizenship because of their vulnerability, whereas invulnerable, able-bodied, masculine public citizens are seen as the embodiment of citizenship.

One may critique Arendt on the ground that her notion of politics as performance contributes to privileging publicity over the “private” sphere, and thus, in this understanding of “politics,” care work remains undervalued, as it is not within the sphere of “politics” (Benhabib, 1993, p. 105). However, it is questionable if such criticisms also derive from this misunderstanding based on the public/private and paid/unpaid labor dichotomy. Sandilands also suggests that the polis is an ambivalent, unpredictable place that “[lacks] … a firm foundation” (1999, pp. 160–161). Reinterpreting Arendt, we can see the political discussion has no “inevitable barring of the private” nor “priori definition” of its content (Sandilands, 1999, p. 161). In other words, the political is not confined to a set boundary with a fixed content, but rather it is an enduring, fluid, and never-ending process that is conversation-dependent at all levels. Its uncertainty and unpredictability are inherent to the nature of politics in public life, as it is an artifact of vulnerable human beings who are susceptible to both corruption and the thriving of social and ecological communities.

The concepts of uncertainty and unpredictability bring a deeper consideration of republicanism into the discussion. Republicans view politics as being subject to change and stability, which is critical to the success of a republic (Cannavò, 2010, p. 369). Public spiritedness is a driving force behind both transforming a corrupt republic into a flourishing one and maintaining a just republic to prevent corruption. Here, change and stability are not dichotomously separated. It is important to note that the prosperity of a strong republic does not override timelessness, meaning that its prosperity does not guarantee its permanence. Engagement from citizens who prioritize the common good is essential for the flourishing of both social and political communities. This is because participation as a process of democratic politics shapes the dynamics of change and stability. On the other hand, when a republic loses its dynamism, it becomes more vulnerable to corruption. Thus, “preventing the unsustainability of the republic is central to republicanism” (Barry, 2012, p. 227, original emphasis).

On this grounded republican notion of public spiritedness, green republicanism—a particular strand of republicanism—emphasizes the importance of “willingness to sacrifice” in changing or stabilizing politics aimed at human flourishing (Cannavò, 2010, p. 369). As referring to communitarian or participatory politics, sacrifice as a civic virtue is better understood as a reciprocal and co-beneficial caring relationship. This new social norm of mutual caring would create a continuous, timeless, and patterned virtuous cycle, fostering “the virtues of trust and solidarity” (Tronto, 2017, p. 32). In other words, public spiritedness should be based on care that aims to enhance others’ autonomy. Thus, care not only refers to bodily care work but also encompasses the concept of political care, which places a focus on our inherent vulnerability, dependency, and sociability. In sum, republican thought highlights that public space is a key arena for citizen engagement and that the political is a fluid and contingent content. Thus, “private” issues should be allowed and indeed encouraged to enter the realm of politics.

The more power and responsibility someone has, the more unnecessary vulnerability of others they can create by neglecting their own civic duties. The implications of this cannot be understood solely within the confines of the ontology of inherent vulnerability, as some people hold more power and authority than others in the real world, making them less vulnerable and dependent.

It is nearly impossible to eliminate one's dependency on others, some of which occasionally turn out to be relatively more powerful due to social, political, economic, and cultural factors. Regarding this, Skinner's account for freedom as an absence of dependence needs to be revised to recognize the inherent and situational condition of dependency, while relatively minimizing the pathogenic vulnerability of the powerless. To this end, delinking power and irresponsibility must be preconditioned. Power is often associated with privilege to abdicate one's responsibility (and thus “privileged irresponsibility”), whereas more responsibility should follow after power by principle. In short, capable power should be caring too.

Brazil serves as a partial example of capable caring power. In the 1990s, following the dispossession of land by agribusiness elites, rural communities in Brazil organized the Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST). When the MST called for a political agenda to sustain workers and their natural environment, including more cooperative and democratic forms of decision-making, the left-wing governments of Presidents Lula da Silva and Rousseff responded with support and co-optation (Langthaler & Schüßler, 2019, p. 218). However, their governments were incapable of competing with parliamentary power and were eventually ousted by a judicial coup. Thus, this real-world example only partially represents “capable” caring power by a care-minded state. Nevertheless, we can learn that caring power can consolidate to enhance the well-being of vulnerable people, which is the purpose of having a state (Urban & Ward, 2020, pp. 12–13). As the Brazilian example implies, the primary presumption is that such an ideal model of the caring state can be justified when the state cares for all its human and nonhuman actors.

This is a significant point from an ecofeminist perspective because those with power—white people, Europeans, capitalists, men—can often evade their responsibility to care for both human and nonhuman others within the liberal–capitalist world within which they are dominant. That is, they are, and see themselves to be, powerful enough to exempt themselves from responsibility and blame (Ferrarese, 2016, p. 237). By contrast, having power should mean having more responsibility to care. Care, in this context, not only refers to care work/labor (i.e., reproduction) in narrower terms. It also encompasses any collective corporeal, social, political, and economic activities that are aimed at fulfilling other's needs, reducing or preventing harm, and thereby increasing their autonomy. Power and domination should be recognized differently in a caring democracy, where power should be exercised to enhance the well-being of others, rather than for private interests.

The ideal of contemporary republicanism aims to minimize the pathogenic vulnerability of the powerless by placing limits on the abuse of power (i.e., nondomination) through constitutional and legal constraints and democratic control, as well as by addressing the disconnect between power and irresponsibility. Therefore, caring power would “[combat] privilege by placing the more powerful party in a relationship in which the less powerful is still able to contest” (Tronto, 2020, p. 193). This is also applicable to the democratic deficit in the realm of care, as care responsibilities are not equally distributed to all citizens but are disproportionately assigned to women.

Drawing from the public value of care, we can identify that care refers to more than just care work in the narrow sense. In line with vulnerability, care is not just about bodily caregiving, but its fundamental purpose is to meet the needs of others and enhance their autonomy and well-being. Therefore, care work should be understood in political terms as political care, with a focus on our inherent vulnerability, dependency, and sociability.

In this sense, political care and privileged irresponsibility are not just compared limitedly within the practice of care work, but they have broader implications for the ways in which human communities organize politics. Privileged irresponsibility is shaped by a misrecognition of the human condition based on individualism, liberal capitalism, and therefore imagined invulnerability. On the other hand, political care is a political ideal that puts human dependency and relationality at the center of problem-solving mechanisms in politics. Political care, as a form of ecofeminist–republican citizenship, views collective flourishing as a goal that can be achieved only through minimizing the situational and pathogenic vulnerabilities of other people. This is because the web of life, including our relations to the more-than-human world, is structured on our mutual dependency. Collective flourishing requires continuous and tireless political care for all interests, not only for oneself and one's loved ones but also for others whose relationships to us are interconnected. In other words, enhancing one's own autonomy, resilience, and well-being is possible through meeting the needs of others (Sevenhuijsen, 2003, p. 182).

Political care also differs from solidarity based on self-interest. Democratic but careless contestation and negotiation can risk promoting solidarity only within a homogeneous group. Because the concept of solidarity is socially constructed and often politically motivated, the “us versus them” division effectively binds wage-earners who share similar backgrounds and interests, for example (Morgan & Pulignano, 2020, pp. 21–22). Citing the OECD, Morgan and Pulignano point out that the biased and exclusionary solidarity, shared among full-time male workers in the manufacturing industry, for example, has partly contributed to a “persistent gender pay gap” in Germany, leaving female part-time workers excluded from the benefits of bargaining and negotiations (2020, p. 23). By contrast, political care prioritizes the uncompromizable value of “the provision of what is necessary for the health, welfare, maintenance and protection of humans and the more-than-human world” (Harcourt & Bauhardt, 2019, p. 3). A politically caring citizen would advocate for human and nonhuman peoples in urgent need, even though the recipients are strangers and even not members of the same species as the caring citizen. For this reason, solidarity cannot be said to be a synonym of political care because, as stated above, it is not necessarily about moral rationality (i.e., doing the right thing), but often can be motivated by selfish interests.

It is important to note that each individual is also unique in the way they have plural and particular individualities (Arendt, 2018). Ecofeminists, too, argue that caring between members of the Earth community should be better understood and delivered on an individual basis, avoiding a holistic and monolithic view of nonhuman beings and the natural world (Matthews, 1994, p. 162). Therefore, care can take diverse forms depending on specific circumstances, open to various interpretations. Take an example of care work in the privatized and feminized domain in comparison with running a political rally in public. They seem to be separable, however, both actions have a common aim of improving the autonomy of vulnerable, dependent beings, and both have a collective aspect that is common to all of us. Furthermore, they both entail the value of equality and the principle of common responsibility to care for other people.

The care-centered public life should address the current irresponsibility of those who do not participate in privatized and feminized care work thanks to their biologically assigned and socially privileged gender status. Men's social and cultural power has been used to justify avoiding their moral duties to perform reproductive work, while solidifying the idea of masculine, technocratic politics that effectively excludes care work. Adjusting unequal gender power relations requires removing “privileged responsibility” and normalizing men's accountability for care work. The gendered politics of invulnerability features both a “care deficit” of democracy and a “democracy deficit” of care (Tronto, 2013, p. 17). Degendering feminized care work could be the starting point for blurring the line between reproductive/female/apolitical and productive/male/political that is drawn by imagined invulnerability. Equitable distribution of responsibility for care work could promote democratic care as a condition for gender justice and as a form of citizenship. Framing care production as a civic virtue, on par with voting in democracy, is essential for cultivating both democratic care (i.e., nongendered care work) and caring democracy (i.e., political care). Publicizing the concept of care through equalizing care work would establish a new normal that shifts away from invulnerable, hierarchical dualisms. With a care-oriented public mindset at the center of politics, from familial to national levels, we can discover more effective tactics for reducing social, economic, and ecological unsustainability.

Taking an ecofeminist–republican approach, one could suggest an institutionalization of “compulsory care service” that is, by character, in parallel with the green republican suggestion for “compulsory civic sustainability service” (Barry, 2008, p. 7; Kim, 2020, p. 86). Compulsory care service would make all capable adults choose to serve their duties in childcare, public healthcare, eldercare, nature stewardship, or even military and policing services for a certain period of time. If the military and police are conceived as masculine institutions where “publicity” is extremely heightened, contemporary caring realms (both paid and unpaid) could be said to be located at the other extremely “privatized” and “feminized” matrix. The binary contrast between bodily care as “women's work” and national security as “men's work” needs to be dismantled not only to achieve gender equality but also to reduce military expenditure in the long term, as being both geopolitically dangerous and ecologically unsustainable. Although this article has too limited space to discuss reconceptualizing national security with a political care approach, broadening the range of care work to include military and police service is suggestive to deconstruct the “invulnerable,” “careless” view of the soldier as the archetypal modern male citizen.

With a presumption of maintaining the state recruitment of paid care workers as well as unpaid care work in family, compulsory care service could provide citizens with a formal opportunity to remind them of the ideal of political care by encountering human vulnerability and corporeal limitedness, as well as responding to the needs of care recipients (Kim, 2020, p. 86). In short, compulsory care service could degender care by giving people, regardless of their genders, a choice to serve in a range of care work including for the more-than-human world, while also suggesting other alternatives to military service as a caring activity, with both caring and military service now viewed as “socially necessary.” Though it is potentially applicable to any society, this model could be particularly more relevant to and feasible in countries where military duty remains to be required of cisgender men.

Moreover, compulsory care service could effectively serve distributive justice ends by fairly allocating both the responsibilities (burdens) and benefits (entitlement) of care. Public care procured by compulsory care service should be provided as a form of universal basic services (UBS). UBS refers to the provision of “free public services that enable every citizen to live a larger life by ensuring access to certain levels of security, opportunity and participation” (Gough, 2019, p. 534). The main idea of UBS is to expand the social safety net in order to meet essential goods and services—such as housing, foods, education, transportation, legal services, and, in this article, care services—that all humans need for survival and to lead a good life, which polities have devised and partially institutionalized for many decades. This idea derives from a notion of universal human rights, which is in parallel with the notion of human vulnerability that no one can exist independently from others. Gough (2019) referred to this essential expenditure as social or collective consumption. When human basic needs are met by actual goods and services, not by cash, the provisioning system is less likely to be dominated by the market logic because the resources cannot be exchanged by means of the logic of market exchange and capital accumulation, that is, economic growth. Thus, essential services and goods such as care should be decommodified, which effectively eases the economic burdens of people.

As opposed to the claim that it is inherently oppressive for the state to force citizens to do something, compulsory care service can foster participatory politics and a sense of active citizenship in the stage of policy-making and in the praxis of care work, which is a central focus of republicanism (Barry, 2012, p. 259; Coote et al., 2019). As Nedelsky (2018) points out, very few high-profile lawmakers and bureaucrats involved in developing and administering care policy, paradoxically, have little direct experience of care themselves. Through the experience of all members of society providing and using universal care services together, it is crucial to revalue and practice care-oriented ideas such as mutual trust, compassion, responsiveness, responsibility, and solidarity. Having a sense of collective experience is important in democracy because it creates valuable social capital, such as citizens’ active political participation that enables deliberating for more sustainable welfare service. While a compulsory care scheme could be legalized and constituted at the national level, the actual practice could be administered locally to meet local needs effectively.

The article has argued that vulnerability should be recognized as a fundamental human condition that serves as the foundation for developing a care-oriented conception of citizenship. Imagined invulnerability views gendered vulnerability as a weak, undesirable femininity, but this article has shown that caring, which stems from our universal vulnerability, is a desirable moral quality in a democratic state. While there are some tensions between the principles of universality and particularity, the article has demonstrated that they do not have to be viewed as mutually exclusive. Our inherent and inescapable vulnerability can be exposed to situational or pathogenic vulnerability, whose dynamics are often shaped by power inequalities.

The article also highlighted the need to recognize the particularity of vulnerability. The concepts of power and responsibility were used to demonstrate the lack of care in the current political arena. The absence of care is not only a moral failing of a few individuals but rather a deep-seated structural problem that the dominant political culture within liberal democracy has not yet recognized as being politically relevant. In other words, care must be considered a public and common interest that should be addressed in the political domain.

Therefore, degendering care work and politicizing the concept of vulnerability-oriented care should be the starting point for transforming the masculine view of public life into a more caring one. In specific terms, degendering and democratizing care would be one way to separate privilege from the irresponsibility of men. From a broader perspective, the cultivation of the virtue of care could provide a fair justification for regulating and sanctioning power, both legitimate and unjust, to address social, economic, and ecological issues.

However, individual citizens cannot be expected to practice political care on their own if they are not supported by appropriate systemic arrangements. With this in mind, this article has proposed a potential institution of compulsory care service, so that individual citizens can effectively practice political care. Here, care work is not only essential labor for human survival but also an actual practice of virtuous citizenship. Compulsory care service is symbolically a feminist institution and is also supported by republicanism, given its emphasis on active citizenship and regulatory characteristics of the state.