On Refusing to Care as a Feminist Ethic: A Response to ‘Reactionary Feminists’ Louise Perry and Mary Harrington

It is long established that care is a feminist issue, even as feminists of different philosophical and political stripes disagree regarding the value of care as a guiding ethic. Into the debate on care comes ‘reactionary feminism’, a recent UK-based movement which argues that the technological advances of the sexual revolution have prioritized liberal freedom and alienated women from caring roles with deleterious effects. The most prominent ‘reactionary feminists’ are Louise Perry, author of The Case against the Sexual Revolution (2022), and Mary Harrington, author of Feminism against Progress (2023). This article reads Perry and Harrington with and against feminist writing that offers radical ways of thinking about care and freedom beyond domesticity and heteronormativity. These include the Laboria Cuboniks Collective's manifesto, Xenofeminism (2018), and my own concept of ethical ‘self-fulness’, propounded in my 2019 book, Selfish Women. Together, these constitute, respectively, collectivist and individualist ripostes to the reactionary feminists.