Eva Feder Kittay

Eva Feder Kittay is a feminist philosopher whose work centres care, dependency, disability, equality, and moral personhood. She is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Stony Brook University/SUNY and a senior fellow at the Stony Brook Center for Medical Humanities, Compassionate Care and Bioethics. Her work is especially important for disability justice because she challenges political theories that treat independence as the norm and dependency as an exception.

A key work to reference is Love’s labor: Essays on women, equality and dependency. In that book, Kittay argues that dependency is not marginal to human life; it is central to it. She shows how social institutions often fail to account for the dependency of childhood, illness, disability, and old age, and how that failure devalues the labour of those who provide care.

For this site, Kittay is useful because her work helps name the unpaid dependency labour that families, especially mothers, are forced to absorb when schools fail disabled children. Her framework shifts the question from “why is this child so costly?” to “why has the system refused to organise itself around the real conditions of human dependency, care, and interdependence?”