Gilded scars: constructing the proudly vulnerable political subject

Recent feminist scholarship has redefined vulnerability as the shared ontological characteristic of all (human) beings. While this move has enabled reconceptualizing vulnerability as the shared commonality of humanity, it has also brought forward a question on whether and how this resignified concept might be employable as a source of political agency. In this article, we offer a typology of three distinct ways in which political agency based on vulnerability is assembled. Based on extant literature, we distinguish between political mobilizations of embodied injurability and political mobilizing based on shared precarity. Alongside these, we identify a third modality based on our empirical work where activists publicly display their many vulnerabilities with an aim to make them acceptable and valued. We call this transvaluing vulnerability. Through the creation of a ‘proudly vulnerable political subject’, the activists prefigure a different kind of society based on collective care. This political project, we argue, is enabled by the ambivalence of vulnerability as both openness to injury and to care. It does not start from vulnerability as a problem to be tackled, nor a condition to be overcome, but as a capacity to be accepted and collectively cared for.