Philosophy
The shame attached to dependency does not stop at the bedside. It hardens into forms, offices, pensions, and policies that force people to prove their need before they can be seen.
The State and the Burden
The violence of the dependency-as-shame conflation does not stay inside the home. It moves outward, takes institutional form, and becomes policy.
In India, disability benefits are structured around proof of deficit. You must demonstrate, repeatedly, that you cannot do the things a normal person can do, that your dependency is real and not manufactured, that you are not playing the system. The person whose disability is visible, documented, and categorised within the existing taxonomy receives recognition. The person whose condition is episodic, or invisible, or falls between official categories, or who cannot navigate the bureaucratic process because the bureaucracy itself is inaccessible, receives nothing, or fights for years, or quietly stops asking. The asking itself becomes exhausting. And the exhaustion is read by the system as evidence that the need was not so urgent after all.
The elderly encounter a parallel structure. Old age is not a disability in legal terms, but the dependencies of old age on pension systems, on healthcare that is affordable and accessible, on a built environment of ramps and rails and legible signage are routinely treated as secondary, as costly, as a burden on the productive economy. Geriatric care in India remains catastrophically underfunded. The assumption, rarely stated and rarely questioned, is that the family will absorb the cost. And the family, again, means women, daughters, daughters-in-law, female relatives who restructure their working lives around the needs of the ageing person, and who receive neither wages nor recognition for doing so.
Kittay calls this person the ‘dependency worker,’ and insists that the undervaluation of care work is not incidental to liberal political theory but structural to it. Valuable work, in the liberal story, produces goods, profit, measurable outcomes, and the forward motion of progress. Care work is responsive rather than productive. It attends to what is, rather than reaching toward what could be. It is slow, repetitive and undramatic. And its invisibility is not an oversight. It is required. The fiction of the self-sufficient individual can only be maintained if someone else is quietly doing the work of sustaining life. The refugee carries this logic to its geopolitical extreme. A person whose dependency on a host state is treated, in almost all political rhetoric, as a problem. The language burden, crisis, flow, surge, is the language of dependency (read as threat). The refugee has needs: shelter, safety, documentation, the ability to work, to study, to live. These needs are real. And yet the political response is structured around the question of how much dependency the receiving state is obligated to tolerate before it may say: enough. This is the ledger, operating at the scale of nations.
Butler, in her work on precarity and grievability, asks whose lives count as lives, whose deaths are mourned? Whose suffering registers as suffering in the political imagination? The question of dependency is parallel: whose needs count as needs? The answer, in most political orders, tracks closely with whose bodies are considered normal, whose dependencies are considered legitimate, and whose claims on the collective are considered appropriate.
Tibet, Gaza, Sudan, Iran?. The villages in Manipur that did not make the international news cycle. The disabled child whose school has no ramp. The elderly woman cannot access her pension because the office is three bus rides away, and the buses are not accessible. The woman who returned to work too soon after surgery because the system did not provide for her not to. The dependency in all these cases is real. The non-recognition of it is a political choice, dressed in the language of scarcity and the regrettable limits of what is possible.