Do cities enable caring-with men? An ordinary politics of urban care

Introduction

This piece presents a critical commentary on the promise of care-full and just cities (Williams, 2016), specifically, how men are understood as subjects of urban care (Power and Williams, 2020). While recognising that some groups are more vulnerable than others, cities embodying the vision of care-full justice enact caring practices for everyone regardless of one’s gender, social class, race etc. However, I argue that men as subjects of urban care often occupy an ambivalent and contested terrain of discussion in existing literature on critical masculinities studies (Gorman-Murray and Hopkins, 2016; Messerschmidt, 2019) as well as Southern/situated urban geography that challenged cis-heteronormative norms and social practices associated with hegemonic masculinity (Arun-Pina, 2021; Truelove, 2019). Furthermore, this line of inquiry is informed by previous work on cultural constructions of masculinities, spaces and care giving/-receiving which consider that (1) some men provide and/or receive care more easily compared with other men based on context dependent performances of masculinity, sexuality or social class (Canoy, 2015; Canoy and Ofreneo, 2017; Ofreneo and Canoy, 2017), and that (2) understandings of care giving practices by and of men need to take into account a more nuanced and situated knowledge of economic conditions, social meanings, and cultural norms which structure spaces and subjectivities of care (Gorman-Murray, 2017; Joshi, 2021). In this context, I suggest the need to articulate more explicitly some ways in which these bodies of work can be interwoven expand the possibilities of care-full cities (Williams, 2020).

Building upon previous literatures on care-full cities and critical masculinities, I aim to forward a culturally embedded and distributive practice of caring-with men as ordinary politics enacted and acted upon by common and uneven urban care structures and relations. Whereas Power and Williams (2020) have already emphasised that practices of care are ‘present in all urban spaces and places’, beyond care experienced in interpersonal spaces (e.g. home) and care enacted in welfare state policies, I posit a complementary rethinking of care, politics, and masculinities in complex geographies of the city, which remain scant in existing literature in urban studies. Specifically, this piece contributes to the cultural (re)production of urban political ecologies (Gandy, 2022) by examining situated meanings of urban care as well as enriching intersectional and embodied approaches to urban masculinities (Canoy, 2021).

Overall, my discussion offers a generative space to inspire future studies in examining the material infrastructures and cultural spaces of care in Southern cities or ordinary urban spaces (Legg and McFarlane, 2008) as a way to make visible the complex cultural spaces and politics of vulnerability amongst men. Some scholars have already emphasised the valuing of care as ‘a distinct and vital ethic, contributing to an understanding of the possibility of the urban’ (Williams, 2017: 826). Conversely, I animate an ordinary politics of the urban that seeks to reimagine the (im)possibilities of caring-with men in culturally diverse cities. As an expanded space of critical reflection, this piece invokes an ‘ongoing process of inspiring, instigating and critically evaluating collective efforts to make more just cities’ (Iveson, 2010: 440), by reconfiguring the city as a ‘cultural and ecological refugia’ (Gandy, 2022) in the context of politicising men as subjects of urban care in relation to interrogating everyday places and spaces of embodying masculinities (Chowdhury, 2021; Malmström, 2022; McDowell and Harris, 2019). While real cultural and structural obstacles do exist which hinder some groups from receiving decent care compared to others, an ordinary politics of urban care motivates the need ‘to expose the common roots of the deprivation and discontent, and to show the common nature of the demands and the aspirations of the majority of the people’ (Marcuse, 2009: 109; emphasis added). As such, understanding the material-cultural intersections of everyday care labour, spaces and masculinities is crucial in unpacking the relational dynamics of care-full cities beyond the North -South comparative binary axis.

Care-full cities and caring-with men as subjects of urban care

As a starting point, I would like to offer a brief review of the rich theorising of care by feminist scholars who viewed care as a vital political relation between the self and others in belonging to a human and non-human world. Drawing from earlier work by Fisher and Tronto (1990: 40), care is defined 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, ourselves and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web.

The assumption of universality in defining care as a human need to connect with others in their work slightly differs from other scholars, such as Gilligan (1982) or Noddings (1984), who conceptualised care in gendered terms. For example, Gilligan’s seminal work entitled In a Different Voice critiqued how care in psychological theory reinforces a hierarchical and moral ascription of viewing behaviour based on a masculine ideal of justice. While there is a theoretical and political difference between the views on care used by feminist scholars, like Tronto and Gilligan, recent scholarship on feminist and urban geography has further developed these lines of argumentation to care/caring in order to forward a vision of cities as both care-full and just (Bond and Barth, 2020; Power, 2019; Williams, 2016).

However, care ethics as a guiding principle of co-living and co-participating with others in the city is not entirely new to geography. Amin’s (2006: 1021) image of the good city similarly echoes an ethics of care ‘incorporating the principles of social justice, equality and mutuality. In his view, cities imbibe a ‘public culture of –conviviality’ which fosters hybrid connections between people, state and infrastructures in ordinary urban spaces (Legg and McFarlane, 2008). By contrast to the Marxist image of an (economically) unjust city, the critical potential of feminist care ethics has likewise been taken up by some scholars to advance an alternative vision of the city underpinned by concepts of care and justice as relational, prosaic, and mediated. (Williams, 2017). Feminist scholars like Power and Williams, through their individual (Power, 2019; Williams, 2016, 2017, 2020) and collaborative work (Power and Williams, 2020), outlined the possibilities of care research ‘in maintaining, continuing, repairing and transforming our urban worlds’ (Williams, 2020: 102591). Based on this recent body of work, caring-with others is integral to diverse people and collectives inhabiting spaces/places and sustaining common life in the city.

Power and Williams (2020) identified subjects of urban care as a key domain in understanding care-full and just cities. Although viewed as a universal human need, provisions of care in some cities are prioritised to cater to the most vulnerable (e.g. children, women, disabled, ageing populations etc.), who may (still) experience enduring forms of marginalisation and discrimination. These provisions reflect a commitment to address injustices accrued over time which construes care as a temporal process and situated practice of caring-with echoing ‘sensitivity to the deep histories of care’ (Power, 2019: 6) and non-care (Bond and Barth, 2020). In relation, I argue that men as subjects of urban care often occupy an ambivalent and contested terrain of discussion in existing literatures on critical masculinities studies as well as Southern/situated urban geographies that challenge cis-heteronormative norms and social practices associated with hegemonic masculinity. For example, recent debates surrounding the concepts of caring masculinities, fatherhood, and domestic care spaces in most Euro-American countries show tensions between existing policies on paternal care labour, cultural politics of masculinity (i.e. ideal/normative masculinity vis-à-vis other forms of masculinity) and everyday enactments of child care and parenting (Beglaubter, 2021; Elliott, 2016; Joshi, 2021; Takács, 2020). Specific to the urban scale, approaches to embodied urban political ecologies have long been critical of everyday experiences of gender-based inequalities faced by women in light of the intersecting contexts of male-dominated, classed, and cis-heteronormative structures of governing and transforming urban spaces (Adams et al., 2018; Arun-Pina, 2021; Datta, 2016; Truelove, 2019). Working through and distilling insights from these varying yet related literatures can offer an expanded space of mobilising care-full justice in cities (Williams, 2017) marked with deep histories and everyday practices of non-care.

However, I recognise that focusing on men as subjects of (urban) care may also risk reinstituting the gender binary it wishes to deconstruct (Jordan, 2020). As such, it is imperative to assert masculinities (in the plural form) as relationally reconstructed in culturally mundane spaces and places inflected by other social categories such as sexuality or social class (Canoy, 2015; Canoy and Ofreneo, 2017). Examples include how some men are more reluctant to seek psychological help because of internalised stigma (e.g. it’s not ‘manly’ to seek for help) based on gender role expectations related to masculinity (Seidler et al., 2018), fear of negative judgement due to unemployment (Affleck et al., 2018) or feelings of social non-acceptance in particular places over time among gay men (Lewis, 2014). Furthermore, we also need to take into account how geographical regions, national histories and infrastructural resources, to name a few, permeate and restructure spaces and subjectivities of care giving/-receiving amongst men (Gorman-Murray, 2017; Joshi, 2021). For instance, some gay and non-gay identified Filipino men who have sex with men find it difficult to (re)inhabit their home and work spaces and to receive care from others (Ofreneo and Canoy, 2017; Robles and Canoy, 2019). Therefore, situating masculinities in intersectional politics and everyday encounters may resist a binary coding of gendered relations which require embracing a hybrid politics of the urban beyond the discourse of identity difference or social and economic determination anchored on existing structural conditions.

Caring-with as ordinary politics in the city

In this section, I animate an ordinary politics of the urban that contributes to reimagining the (im)possibility of caring-with men in culturally diverse cities. While previous scholars have already emphasised the valuing of care as ‘a distinct and vital ethic, contributing to an understanding of the possibility of the urban’ (Williams, 2017: 830), I situate care ethics, and by implication the politics of men as subjects of urban care, within the purview of a common life– a shared and differentiated life space that is ‘governed by relations that cannot be made even perceptible or visible through the orthodox concepts of ethics (justice, impartiality, catalogue of duties, rational choice, etc.)’ (Laugier, 2016: 222). In using this frame, caring-with men as ordinary politics is understood as an everyday and intersectional practice whereby men are positioned as particular and ‘knowable’ other/subjects (Ramdas, 2016). This implies that while provisions of urban care are ideally distributed to everyone regardless of gender, experiences and practices of care giving/-receiving are simultaneously felt as deeply personal and loving as well as alienating and hurtful encounters for some men. For example, HIV positive Filipino heterosexual and gay men receiving care from their families experienced emotional support in complex ways contingent on intersecting cultural meanings of being a (married) man or a bakla (Filipino term referring to effeminate men) in the family, the stigma of one’s illness, as well as feelings of shame in losing work (Ofreneo and Canoy, 2017). In this context, caring-with men is linked to practices of caring for the family as a cultural expectation of pursuing a familial life with social acceptance and earned respect.

The view of caring-with men as ordinary politics affirms the notion of urban spaces as relational sites of political encounters, interruptions, and experimentations which may fall within the ambit of state regulation or ‘outside’ its boundaries of governance (Dikeç and Swyngedoux, 2016). This assertion has deep resonances with transversal logics, contested relationalities, and infrastructural space-making that underpin the theorising of political power and legacies of social resistance in the scholarship involving Southern urbanisms (Caldeira, 2017; Canoy et al., 2022; Meriläinen et al., 2020; Recio and Dovey, 2021; Saguin and Alvarez, 2022). We can view this body of work as embodying collective urban experimentations which enable a sustained (re)distributive politics in order to counter the evolving and slippery politics of neoliberal urbanism (Peck et al., 2013). In this context, we can further distil two salient insights from these in order to enrich a situated ethics of caring-with men. I posit (1) that caring-with enacts convivial relations, networks or coalitions that work through ‘local legacies of negotiating difference’ (Amin, 2010), and (2) that such relations allow us to rethink masculinities as embodying relations of vulnerability that constitute an intersectional amalgam of caring and non-caring constituencies (Bartos, 2019).

Perhaps, it is worthwhile to mention that distributive politics through ‘experimental’ or transversal connectivities or relations do not weaken the critique of structural constraints to care/caring. Some scholars have already critiqued a distributive or ‘flattening’ logic of geographic concepts such as assemblages as being ‘too descriptive’, and thus reinforcing existing hegemonies while failing to transform deep inequalities in the city (Kinkaid, 2020a, 2020b; Rankin, 2011). Such critique is fair, but also partial. In fact, studies that aim to ‘radicalise’ the urban convey a strong commitment to interrogate and transform enduring unequal power relations embodied in the material-discursive flows, and fragmented socio-infrastructural processes rooted in real-world problems such as social housing (Harris et al., 2020), gentrification (Yetiskul and Demirel, 2018), food sustainability (Moragues-Faus and Sonnino, 2019) or (im)mobility issues during the pandemic (Canoy et al., 2022). Whether these studies actually transform the city in real and concrete ways is a different story. Conversely, similar reasoning and critique can be applied to other perspectives, approaches or models of changing and sustaining life in the city (i.e. not using ‘care-based’ ethics). Each perspective holds a promise of working through problems endemic to city life oriented towards establishing alternative urban imaginary futures. These complex debates, which I defer for another time, need more productive spaces for collegial discussion across communities of scholars studying the possibilities and limits of radical perspectives in explaining issues related to urban spaces, relations, bodies, and power.

Moreover, I want to also emphasise that situated practices of caring-with adhere to a heterogenous politics of ‘togetherness’, rather than being propelled by unitary partisan politics of a ‘located’ urban collective. Echoing Laugier’s (2016) understanding of care ethics situated in a common life, Dikeç and Swyngedoux (2016) recognised these reconstituted intensities as a political process of ‘being-in-common’ with others in the city. In this sense, urban care is not a fixed relational process bounded to particular places or restricted to particular political collectives. Rather, caring-with men as intersectional politics resonates with Nancy’s (2003: 23) notion of ‘community without an origin’, which enables social relations that transgress normative boundaries of a particular place. As such, the (im)possibility of care in cities hinges upon and supports the relational and unbounded view of the urban as simultaneously global (Parnell and Robinson, 2017), which encompasses everyday urban (im)mobilities (Middleton, 2011), contested practices of infrastructural space making (Saguin and Alvarez, 2022), and the (re)production of urban cultures (Kuppinger, 2014). In relation to cultures of masculinities in the city, Chowdhury (2021) found that everyday mobilities in Kolkata, India, are (re)structured by both enduring transportation infrastructures and tacit cultural norms and expressions associated with being a respectable man. Insights from studies like Chowdhury can enrich our critical appreciation of the cultural and material intersections of urban space-making vis-à-vis how care/caring as a value and practice may take shape, be reinforced or even neglected among certain groups of men in particular cities.

The promise of care-full justice in cities, ordinary politics and everyday masculinities

In summary, this critical commentary builds upon the discussion of care-full and just cities, specifically in further deconstructing men as subjects of urban care. I achieved this by making visible the complex cultural spaces and politics of vulnerability amongst men. In linking caring practices with diverse cultural constructions and material infrastructures shaping everyday masculinities, I was able to problematise caring relations and spaces in cities through an intersectional and situated politics of caring-with. Specifically, I posited caring-with as ordinary politics which aim to reimagine the (im)possibilities of care in culturally diverse cities. As an expanded space of critical reflection, this piece seeks to reconfigure the city as a cultural and ecological refugia in the context of politicising men as subjects of urban care as well as contextualising spaces and places of embodying everyday masculinities.

This last section briefly outlines the promise of care-full and just cities as a possible urban imaginary for every man. I use the word promise following Kemmer and Simone’s (2021) notion of ‘cities as promising machines’ which generate different futural trajectories situated in everyday enactments of anticipating or declaring a city yet to come. Similar to Williams’ (2017: 826) vision of care-full justice as a ‘utopian dreaming and ideal for the possibility of the urban as just and caring place’, my intellectual engagement of rethinking the possibilities of caring-with as ordinary politics extend the renewed encounters, creative resistances, and hybrid praxis of space making in a city for all men – a kind of dream within a dream. In this view, performing everyday masculinities is an ethico-political strategy aimed at challenging the cultural hegemonic inscriptions of being a man as well as questioning and questioning and holding accountable the social institutions and material infrastructures that reproduce non-care and injustices that affect everyone, albeit, in varying degrees and in tacit forms. Therefore, mobilising everyday masculinities as a distinct mode of cultural critique contributes to incremental urban world building, and a politically affirmative reimagination of urban care futures.

An ordinary politics enables fuller insights by locating or situating one’s theorising involving care, justice and men/masculinities, rather than a simple elucidation of the theory itself (see also Lawhon et al. (2016) entitled `Unlearning (un)located ideas in the provincialization of urban theory’). This critical commentary, like any piece of writing, can only make sense within a politics of co-location shaping my understanding of masculinities, and the struggle, even the refusal to give and receive care from others as a man. As a gay man who lived in a who lived in a predominantly Catholic country like the Philippines for more than 30 years, I observed that the performance of everyday masculinities in cities of Metro Manila was always different or in-excess of what is deemed conventional or traditional forms of masculinity (but of course there are enduring practices too!), this was also true elsewhere, beyond the borders of the metropolis (i.e. hybrid, classed, non-identifying/trans/non-binary, cosmopolitan etc.). Asserting these relational and intersecting masculine formations, however, neither denies nor downplays the real oppressive relations enabled by ideologies supporting heteronormative, patriarchal and misogynistic impositions of certain men over others nor absolves these men from blatant impunity, sexism, discrimination and historically accrued violence.

Rethinking men as subjects of urban care in ordinary cities also contributes to a comparative and situated knowledge production beyond geographic binaries of North–South relations (Lawhon and Truelove, 2020; Parnell and Robinson, 2017; Robinson and Roy, 2016; Roy and Ong, 2011). In this light, the point of extending the notion of care-full and just cities is not to say that it is inapplicable to Southern cities or that its vision is readily discernible in cities in the North. Instead, this paper amplifies the need to theorise the complex relationship between care ethics, masculinities, and the urban in ways that challenge how these concepts (dis)appear in theory and in everyday encounters. As such, one fruitful direction is to systematically unpack and reflect upon how Euro-American concepts of ‘caring masculinities’ (Elliott, 2016) or ‘caring democracies’ (Tronto, 2013) appear and are dealt with in Southern cities. Again, the point is not to reinstitute existing geographic binaries, but rather, critical to such as task is the careful articulation of key implications of theories/concepts ‘travelling’ across geographic boundaries. For the purpose of our discussion, this means inquiring how theoretical, policy, and everyday issues of care giving/-receiving amongst men are framed and responded to vis-à-vis how Southern cities are (re)built, represented, lived and transformed in indeterminate ways.

To conclude, performing everyday masculinities grounded in the promise of care-full and just cities enables ‘caring-with to become [an] embodied and embedded justice work’ (Bond and Barth, 2020: 10). Thinking with vibrant communities of feminist scholars and urban geographers in mind, I encourage others to also engage in thinking-writing-caring about the more-than-urban worlds they deeply care for and inhabit. More empirical studies that tackle men as subjects of urban care are needed to fully realise the situated possibilities of care-full and just cities. In relation, situated understandings of caregiving/-receiving with men in the city hopefully will inspire more crosscurrents and interdisciplinary synthesis across bodies of work in urban studies, feminist care geographies and gender/sexuality studies. Caring-with men as ordinary politics is a step towards encouraging situated and comparative inquiries through consolidating a hybrid praxis of global urban masculinities.