I feel most safe when I feel cared for. This feeling requires knowing certain things to be true — from knowing that my basic physical needs are met, to knowing that someone will care whether my physical needs are met. Sometimes, when I find myself suddenly dizzy from hunger, or shivering with cold, the physical effects are diminished as soon as someone sets off to find me a banana or a blanket. What I am trying to express is an idea that would probably seem too obvious to be spelled out if it weren’t for the conditions we live under: that safety and care are entwined, and that they exist in physical forms such as shelter, food, and medicine; in social forms such as community, solidarity, and collective experience; and in emotional forms — joy, love, perseverance, grief. In talking about one we are necessarily talking about the other. There are, however, a number of complications involved in setting out the relationship between safety and care. First, the punitive, patriarchal logic which has subordinated ideas of what safety means. Second, the conditions of life which have made both safety and care finite — and scarce — resources. The meaning of security I differentiate between safety — which is entwined with care and community — and security — which is the form of safety offered by the state. Security is institutional and state-centric: security ties our fate as people to the security of the state itself. Security is paranoid in its Hobbesian conceptualisation of human nature as violent, selfish, and aggressive. This logic of security responds to threats — usually defined through racist and colonial frameworks of foreign policy, and racist and classist frameworks of domestic policy — through violent arms: the police and the military on one hand, economic deprivation on the other. Security is always out of reach, conditional on our acceptance of ever more violent intrusions of the state into our lives. The concept of safety, when it comes to the lives of women, is dominated by
a patriarchal logic of control and protection. Iris Marion Young sums up this dynamic in her essay The Logic of Masculinist Protection1: An exposition of the gendered logic of the masculine role of protector in relation to women and children illuminates the meaning and effective appeal of a security state that wages war abroad and expects obedience and loyalty at home. In this patriarchal logic, the role of the masculine protector puts those protected, paradigmatically women and children, in a subordinate position of dependence and obedience. By this logic, women are safe in the home, threats come in the form of dangerous, unknown men, and the duty of protection is performed by the father, brother, or husband. Of course, this logic does not extend protection to all women, in all situations: the woman deserving of protection is predominantly white, heterosexual, bourgeois, and — above all — pure. Her purity, in fact, is the object of protection, not her life. Her grateful obedience is the price of protection. Young draws a parallel between security at home and security in the homeland. The security state is authoritarian and paternalistic, expecting loyalty and obedience from its citizens in exchange for security. The state reserves the right to define security threats, and to exclude from its protection those deemed threatening to the structures of power upon which the state is built. This is done most obviously through racist policing targeting marginalised communities. The greatest con of the security state is to convince swathes of the population that its true aim is protection, when in reality it leaves in its wake such immense destruction.
1 Iris Marion Young, The Logic of Masculinist Protection: Reflections on the Current Security State. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Vol. 29, No. 1, 2003, 1-25.