Disavowal DA: The perm replicates the 1AC’s disavowal of vulnerability, which embeds carelessness in the body and the soul.

The first theoretical contribution of the proposed re-theorization of scholarship on care ethics in organizations is to provide a framework for understanding why disavowing embodied vulnerability underpins care’s systematic and persistent undermining. Feminist psychoanalytic perspectives focus on embodied vulnerability and the existential threat to survival it poses by evoking dependency and neediness for political ends. They explain how neoliberalism embeds this disavowal by promoting the illusory idea of invulnerability. The framing that I propose highlights why affect is indispensable to discourses on the supremacy of the market logic in all walks of life and how individuals and societies embody neoliberal politics of care. The dominant neoliberal dogma, I argue, is predicated on the fantasy that endless consumption and success in the competition for ‘scarce resources’ can assuage our existential vulnerability and even our fear of death (Fotaki, 2006). As a result, capitalist culture affects how we deal with distress and suffering; it shapes how we relate to others; it determines how the unconscious functions (Vanheule, 2016). While market societies promote greed, indifference to the poor (Polanyi, 1944), and other undesirable characteristics (Hirschman, 1977), individuals appropriate dominant discourses that encourage ambivalence about care by linking it to weakness, neediness and potentially diminished survival.

These have significant implications for understanding the relative unimportance of care in organizations and society. Specifically, psychoanalytic insights into the disavowal of vulnerability provide an alternative understanding of how power relations contribute to the undervaluation of care and the reproduction of neoliberal ideology. Yet to date, there are no explanations linking the evasion of this reality with the actual politics of undermining care. This is despite the engagement with Judith Butler’s ideas on recognition in contemporary workplace dynamics and the relationship between vulnerability and resistance (M. Tyler, 2019), ethics (Varman et al., 2021), or precarity (Hultin et al., 2021). Organizational scholars have not taken up these ideas to theorize care, and the work of psychoanalytic feminists on the unconscious, affect and body, as discussed above, has not been applied to theorizing care in organizations and organizing. The article addresses these lacunae in the theorization of care in a specific way through psychoanalytical framing. The implication for the organizational scholarship is that feminist ethics of care cannot play a vital role in rethinking our business models and work organizations (Lawrence & Maitlis, 2012; Liedtka, 1996) without acknowledging conflicting feelings arising from our state of dependency surrounding care. This requires delving into the relationship between the business models neoliberalism propagates, how these are affectively appropriated and how they impact different bodies. Therefore, we cannot advocate changing relationships between various actors in organizations and beyond (e.g. stakeholders; see Burton & Dunn, 1996) by merely evoking collaboration and the need for care. To achieve this, it is crucial to explain the causes of the absence of caring in organizations. Theorizing care through a psychoanalytic lens can also explain how carelessness becomes normalized and embedded in subjects’ souls and inscribed on their bodies. Psychoanalytic feminist insights show the affective appropriation of dominant discourses and ideologies at the psychic level and their enactment through the body that can lead to evading vulnerability and repudiating care. At the same time, the proposed framework stresses the connection between people through intercorporeality, offering new vistas for enacting care. It originates in the embodied and affective experience with others, preceding and exceeding the rational schemes that seek to regulate it – similar to Pullen and Rhodes’ (2014, 2022) idea of intercorporeal generosity, inspired by Diprose (1998).