Gender Politics: Toward a Feminist Rethinking of Disaster Response

Philosophical approaches to disaster response have tended to foreground classical Western moral theory and social contract frameworks, which have in turn shaped emergency management principles in practice. These frameworks have tended toward an agent-centered view of moral obligations in disasters which map disasters against the mythology of the state of nature and its associated justifications for the exercise of state power. In their focus on individual desert and the restoration of rights and property, established moral frameworks have failed to attend to the inequitable impacts of disaster, particularly in the disparate and disproportionate ways that they impact women and communities of color. In this chapter, we draw on feminist philosophy and Black feminist organizing praxis in order to offer alternate frameworks for theorizing disasters and the duties of response. We develop an account of disaster rooted in the ethics of care, highlighting the ways that disasters are primarily crises of care. These crises of care are organized through privatized local and global care chains which distribute care toward the privileged, producing care drains that exacerbate the inequitable impact of disaster in ways that are rarely captured in established ethical frameworks for disaster. In search of alternate ethical frameworks, we explore resources within Black feminist organizing in order to develop an account of resistant care ethics, capable of reshaping priorities in disaster management and response.