Imagining care ethics: disability, violence, and caring spaces – Trudy’s mothering story

Who is Trudy? What is Mother? Lalvani (2019: 2) describes, ‘Mother is often understood in dominant discourse as a person without further identity, or as existing without context; however, motherhood is a relational identity’ [emphasis in original]. In 2016, England, UK, I met Trudy, a 63-year-old mother, when she responded to my call for research participants about disability and criminal justice. We met again in 2017 for a follow-up, and then remotely via telephone and email in 2020, 2023 and 2024. She had a lot to say, as her autistic son Mathais had been so violent towards her, she was hospitalised on more than one occasion. The final time she was attacked, Mathais was arrested, charged, and incarcerated. I discovered on listening to her story she will always be Mother and will always be caring. Via Trudy’s story, we find care-full-ness, resolve and survival are obvious. Indeed, caring and care-full-ness ought to be privileged and positioned as not simply about the practical day-to-day aspects of caring (although these are important) but about how practical caring and emotional caring co-exist within the socio-political sphere and through our sociological imagination and care full storytelling. It is hard to hear how someone experiencing physical and emotional pain can continue to care for and about, and so deeply. Yet beyond Trudy’s personal troubles, this story tells us about the bigger picture. A dominant story of care is one that we want to hear, one that we are comfortable with, however, it often works to exclude. As Plummer (2019) suggests about narrative exclusion; symbolic violence is committed as we displace, stigmatise and scapegoat certain groups. Human beings, in this case, Trudy and Mathais, are only autonomous and interdependent, if they are safe and in beneficial relations of care. Fundamentally, as Noddings said thirty years ago, ‘[i]f caring is to be maintained, clearly, the one - caring must be maintained’ (Noddings, 1995: 26). This is certainly the case for Trudy, as ethical caring is nuanced, and care full practices ought to involve everyone via relational and interdependent responsibility.