Description
Ideas of protection sit at the center of health care practice. Surprisingly, literatures on the health-security nexus evade thorough conceptualization of protection albeit implicitly discussing notions of protection through conceptions of security and safety. The health-security nexus, thus, not only constitute one key example of the absence of an in-depth engagement with protection in IR, but also constitute a critical site to intervene into this void.
We argue that a feminist ethics of care can help us to conceptually trace and problematize how ideas of protection manifest and enables us to explore whose protection is taken seriously and how different needs for protection are (not) addressed.
The article proceeds in three steps. Firstly, we outline the particular role of protection in health crises where bodies can be in need of protection and at the same time might be the cause for this very need and suggest protective clothing as an actual research material to address this complexity. Secondly, we introduce a feminist ethics of care perspective as a useful theoretical lens to critically approach and grasp the discursive and material negotiations of protection and, thirdly, exemplarily apply this lens to different manifestations of the protection suit across health crises.
