Vulnerable Bodies: Critical Notes on Vulnerability, Interdependence, and Political Mediations

Abstract

This article deploys a critique of the expansion of the concept of “vulnerability” as an ethical-political foundation in contemporary feminist literature. It distinguishes between a sociological-descriptive usage—differential exposure to material conditions of existence—and an ontological-universalist one—a shared human condition—showing that the ontologization of the category dehistoricizes it and moralizes conflict, transforming negativity into the immanent management of harm. The text examines the biopolitical institutionalization of vulnerability, through which subjects deemed “vulnerable” become objects of tutelage, screening, and administration, as well as its political indeterminacy, since the notion can be appropriated both by progressive projects and by reactionary victimisms. Against those readings that naturalize interdependence, the text seeks to re-inscribe the body within the field of social reproduction through the historical-material mediations that constitute it, thus avoiding a moral fetishization and the reduction of politics to a demand for recognition and protection. The article concludes by advancing a politics of mediation and composition: departing not from a pre-political universal—“we are all vulnerable”—, but a unity constructed from situated experiences of exploitation, dispossession, and oppression, reclaiming negativity as the driving force of social emancipation.