Linking care with troublemaking, part 1.5

Note: As I was reviewing part 1 of this series on linking care with troublemaking, I was struck by Tronto’s definition of care. Instead of adding in my reflections about the definition to part 1 (which is already too long), I thought I would post a part 1.5.

In Moral Boundaries (and earlier with B Fisher in “Toward a Feminist Theory of Caring” from Circle of Care), Tronto offers the following definition of care:

On the most general level, we suggest that caring be viewed as a species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, our selves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web (103).

Maintain. Continue. Repair. Those ideas don’t seem to resonate at all with making and staying in trouble. Or, do they? Is it possible to imagine making trouble–disrupting the status quo, challenging ideas that are assumed to be givens and emphasizing the brokenness of ideas/images/visions–as actually contributing to the sustaining and repairing of the world? What does it mean, from a feminist (ethics) perspective, to repair things or people? What are the differences or similarities between repairing and creating, fixing old ideas and constructing new ones? Perhaps I should check out (literally and figuratively) Elizabeth Spelman’s Repair at Wilson Library?