Abstract
This article finds disciplinary and social barriers around the concept of care and asks about the reluctance it raises in France. That form of collective distance from the concept of care has to do with what Joan Tronto theorized as "the indifference of the privileged", but also with the reluctance still raised by feminism as well as the rejection of an ethics that would criticize the universalist stance on justice. The authors also ask, more broadly, about the difficulties of a feminist perspective in social sciences - once it is admitted that care work is indicative of social inequalities, relations of exploitation and domination - to integrate the ethical dimension inherent in work and the political concept of care. The authors show that the difficulty is real: the analyses take place on different scales - from interpersonal relationships to transnational relations - and they unfold from heterogeneous and multidisciplinary methods and questions. The articulation of analyses of care at different scales cannot do without the idea of responsibility either, which should be extended beyond interpersonal relationships. That non-substantial view of responsibility is discussed after Iris Young and Joan Tronto, to whom relationships that link distant people/peoples must be taken seriously.
Keywords:
care; responsibility; the indifference of the privileged; scale