Virtues of Vulnerability

Within the liberal tradition, the physical body has been treated as a focus of rights discussion and a source of economic and democratic value; it needs protection but it is also one's dominion, tool, and property, and thus something over which we should be able to exercise free will. However, the day-to-day reality of how we live in our bodies and how we make choices about them is not something over which we can exercise full control. In this way, embodiment mirrorslife in a pluralist body politic: we are interdependent and vulnerable, exposed with and to others while desiring agency. As disability, feminist, and critical race scholars have all suggested, barriers to bodily control are often a problem of public and political will and social and economicstructures that render relationality and caring responsibilities private, invisible, and low value. These scholarly traditions firmly maintain the importance of bodily integrity and self-determination, but make clear that autonomy is not a matter of mere non-interference but rather requires extensive material and social support. Autonomy is thus totally intertwined with, not opposed to, vulnerability. Put another way, the pursuit of autonomy requires practices of humility. Given this, what dowe learn about agency and self-determination, as well as trust, self-knowledge, dependence, and resistance under such conditions of acute vulnerability?The Virtues of Vulnerability looks at the question of how we navigate "choice" and control over our bodies when it comes to conditions like birth, illness, and death, particularly as they are experienced within mainstream medical institutions operating under the pressures of neoliberal capitalism. There is often a deep disconnect between what people say they want in navigating birth, illness, and death, and what they actually experience through all of these life events. Practices suchas informed consent, the birth plan, advanced directives, and the patient satisfaction survey typically offer a thin and unreliable version of self-determination. In reality, "choice" in these instances is encumbered and often determined by our vulnerability at the most critical moments. This book looks atthe ways in which we navigate birth, illness, and death in order to think about how vulnerability and humility can inform political will. Overall, the book asks under what conditions vulnerability and interdependence enhance or diminish our sense of ourselves as agents. In exploring this question it aims to produce a new vocabulary for democratic politics, highlighting traits that have profound political implications in terms of how citizens aspire, struggle, relate to, and persevere with eachother.

The book brims with ideas, insights, citations, distinctions, takes, analogies, and asides. The scholarship is impressive, and the writing is welcoming., Sara Rushing has written a breathtaking book that places fleshy bodies at the center of citizenship. Examining medical encounters across the lifespan, from birth to illness to death, Rushing provocatively argues that bodily fragility can create conditions for autonomy, not just dependence. Vulnerability decimates fantasies of sovereignty and exposes us to felt experiences of humility, which can, surprisingly, bolster our agency and teach us how to be better citizens of our damaged democracy. The Virtues of Vulnerability is a gorgeously written work of political theory and feminist studies that could not be more timely., Where Foucault focused on the birth of the clinic, Sara Rushing's splendid new book offers a political theory of the clinic. In the sites where we birth, die, or heal, Rushing finds not just an alienating health matrix that reconstitutes autonomously choosing subjects of self-mastery, but people practicing the virtues of vulnerability and humility. Detailed, thoughtful, intense, and witty,The Virtues of Vulnerability is a pleasure to read from start to finish., Sara Rushing's notion that humility needs autonomy — not the masterful sovereign autonomy of traditional social contract theory but the autonomy of an individual in relationship with herself and others — is a major theoretical innovation. Her related idea that autonomy needs humility insofar as it is an ongoing process (and thus never settled or done) is similarly critical. If only the people who set up the kinds of clinics and spaces (for birth, for life, for death) that Rushing describes here read her book! Better yet, if the 'patients' who populate these spaces could read The Virtues of Vulnerability there would be a revolution in terms of care, agency, and the power of the citizen-subjects that she describes.

Sara Rushing is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Montana State University, Bozeman, and Co-President of the Association for Political Theory from 2020-2022.