Vulnerabilities: Weak Resistances and Precarity (S01E02)

How does vulnerability become a source of strength in resistance?

Is vulnerability really a weakness—or is it our most vital foundation for collective resistance?

In this episode of Dialogues for Resistance, we unpack the politics of vulnerability amidst escalating “anti-gender” mobilisations across Europe. Moving past the illusion of the self-sufficient individual, in this episode we talk about intersectional precarity & burnout and why risk and exhaustion are structured unequally across gender, race, disability, and borders—and why care must redistribute labour. Then we take up Ewa Majewska’s concept of ‘weak resistance to discuss how everyday, non-heroic practices of maintenance and care sustain political movements. We also talk about weaponised grievance and how reactionary politics co-opts the language of protection and victimhood to justify exclusion and harassment.

So join us and discover how reclaiming vulnerability as shared interdependence, rather than individual failure, provides the blueprint for durable coalitions and sustainable queer-feminist world-making.

Keyword: protest, social justice, everyday resistance, activism, fragility, humanity

Episode Citation: Kulpa, R., & Zabrzewska, A. (2026). Vulnerabilities: Weak Resistances and Precarity (S01E02). Podcasting Social Justice: Dialogues for Resistances (Podcast Series). https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22048291

CITING THE PODCAST SERIES:

Kulpa, R., & Zabrzewska, A. (2026). Podcasting Social Justice: Dialogues for Resistances (Podcast Series). https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21676257

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Welcome! You are listening to Podcasting Social Justice Dialogues for Resistance, a podcast series about anti-gender politics and queer feminist resistances. I'm Roberto Kulpa.

SPEAKER_01 0:14

And I'm Ada Sabschewska. In this podcast, we examine everyday life consequences of anti-gender in parliaments, in the press, across civil society, and the institutions that shape people's lives.

SPEAKER_00 0:27

In this season one, we stay close to lived experience. We ask how anti-gender politics reshapes ordinary life, what it does to safety, belonging, and access to care.

SPEAKER_01 0:40

We trace how the same politics travels across borders, through migration regimes and the everyday violences that gather at Europe's edges, alongside the solidarities people build to survive and to resist.

SPEAKER_00 0:54

Today we're shifting to a word we hear everywhere: vulnerability. It shows up in activism, in policy, in mental health talk, and it often comes with a familiar assumption. Vulnerability means weakness.

SPEAKER_01 1:09

Yes, but feminist thinkers have pushed back hard against that. They argue vulnerability is a basic condition of being alive, of having a body, of being dependent on other people.

SPEAKER_00 1:21

In other words, vulnerability is not just something that happens when you fail to be strong. It's built into the fact that we are born from other bodies and that we survive through care. Both the care that we receive and the care we give.

SPEAKER_01 1:37

Which already tells us something political, Rob, because the dominant story of the ideal person in patriarchal neoliberal cultures is the autonomous, self-sufficient individual, rational, resilient, self-reliant, someone who needs nothing and no one. And feminist philosophy says that figure is a fantasy.

SPEAKER_00 1:57

And a useful one to that, because it hides how much life depends on relationships, infrastructures, and unequal labor, including gendered labor, care work, and the invisible work of keeping communities alive. But we need to be careful here. If vulnerability is part of the human condition, does that mean everyone is vulnerable in the same way? The answer is clearly no, and this is one of the crucial tensions.

SPEAKER_01 2:27

Yes. Feminist theory insists vulnerability is unevenly distributed. Some people are made more exposed to harm, more disposable, more surveilled. That is what we mean by precarity.

SPEAKER_00 2:39

So what you're saying is that vulnerability is structured by power, and that power has many coordinates: gender, race, disability, citizenship, class, migration status. To name just a few.

SPEAKER_01 2:52

Yes, exactly. Vulnerability is never only personal. It is produced and intensified by institutions and policies, by policing and borders, or by austerity and welfare cuts.

SPEAKER_00 3:05

Not to mention hostile media, workplace discrimination, and everyday forms of violence.

SPEAKER_01 3:11

So when we speak about vulnerability, we have to ask whose vulnerability, under what conditions, and who is expected to carry it quietly. And this is where the idea of intersectional care becomes essential.

SPEAKER_00 3:27

Care cannot only mean being kind, or checking in, or posting the right words. If care is going to sustain resistance rather than romanticize it, it has to redistribute labor. It has to ask who always organizes, who absorbs conflict.

SPEAKER_01 3:51

So intersectional care also means building movements where people can step back without being punished where rest is not treated as betrayal, and where disability, migration status, child care responsibilities, and trauma histories are treated as part of political reality.

SPEAKER_00 4:10

Let's ground it in lived experiences of the Resist project participants. Do you remember the Greek case? The activists working across feminist, anti-racist, environmental, and migrant justice movements described something they called intersectional burnout. What is it, Rob? It's not just burnout as too much work, but burnout as the cumulative strain produced when multiple struggles are addressed in isolation. When movements become siloed, when solidarities don't hold, and when people are forced to constantly translate between spaces that refuse to see the overlaps.

SPEAKER_01 4:47

I have an example for you here. One activist talked about working endless hours, sleeping in an organization's office, and feeling as if they were digging a hole in the water. And if this is what exhaustion looks like for activists without the most extreme structural constraints, then the stakes intensify for people who also face asylum regimes, disability exclusions, or racialized violence.

SPEAKER_00 5:12

I'm thinking what this tells us is that intersectional care should be an ethical commitment to shared responsibility and long-term resilience. It is what makes solidarity practical.

SPEAKER_01 5:25

Couldn't agree more. It is what stops vulnerability being turned into a private shame, and instead turns it into a collective question. What do we owe each other when we know we are not equally protected and when we know the struggle is long?

SPEAKER_00 5:41

So, Ada, a question to you. Since you are the feminist philosopher here, why has vulnerability captured feminist philosophers' attention so strongly?

SPEAKER_01 5:51

Well, partly because it names something that is easy to deny when you are privileged and protected, but impossible to deny when your life is exposed. Bodies are finite. Bodies can be injured. Bodies need housing, healthcare, recognition, and other people. And bodies are not just private objects, they are regulated, policed, and valued differently.

SPEAKER_00 6:14

Which means vulnerability is always already political.

SPEAKER_01 6:18

Yes. And vulnerability also disrupts that familiar figure of the self-made, self-reliant subject.

SPEAKER_00 6:25

So what you're telling is that feminist thinkers remind us that we are born from other bodies and sustained through care.

SPEAKER_01 6:32

Yes. But the question shifts from why someone is not coping to who is being asked to cope alone, and whose labor is keeping the world running quietly in the background.

SPEAKER_00 6:43

Okay, so vulnerability becomes a way of seeing interdependence, and of naming the unequal distribution of risk and support across gender, race, disability, class, and citizenship.

SPEAKER_01 6:55

It does not go unnoticed that nationalist and heteronormative ideologies often come with a gendered demand for heroism. Men defending the nation, women sacrificing for motherhood. The story of virtue becomes a story of endurance through self-denial, or strength through domination.

SPEAKER_00 7:14

If we treat vulnerability as a practice of being in the world rather than a state of the body, we can resist those demands that you've mentioned.

SPEAKER_01 7:23

And if we make space for politics rooted in care, solidarity, and persistence, rather than politics that only recognizes the heroic, we can hope for a better world.

SPEAKER_00 7:34

As we close, I keep coming back to one shift we have tried to make throughout this episode. Vulnerability is not a synonym for weakness, it is a way of naming interdependence, embodiment, and the fact that life is sustained through care.

SPEAKER_01 7:50

But the moment we say that, we also have to say something else. Vulnerability is structured and politically ambivalent. It can open space for alliance, because when people admit exposure and dependence, they can recognize each other, build coalitions, and demand conditions that make life livable.

SPEAKER_00 8:07

So what you're saying is that vulnerability can also be weaponized? In right-wing and anti-gender politics, we see a recurring move where dominant groups cast themselves as under threat.

SPEAKER_01 8:19

Yes, sadly. They speak the language of protection, especially the protection of children, women, the nation, while directing fear and punishment at queer and trans people, migrants, racialized communities, and feminists.

SPEAKER_00 8:32

And the Manosphere in particular gives this a very specific emotional style. It turns grievance into identity.

SPEAKER_01 8:41

It frames men as victims of feminism, of diversity policies, of so-called political correctness. It tells them that their lost entitlement is actually harm, and that restoring hierarchy is a form of self-defense.

SPEAKER_00 8:56

And this shows us precisely that vulnerability can be also performed as resentment and then converted into permission to harass, to restrict rights, to demand obedience, to treat equality as attack.

SPEAKER_01 9:11

That is why the task is not simply to celebrate vulnerability. It is to practice it carefully, intersectionally, and with attention to who is being asked to carry the costs.

SPEAKER_00 9:21

That is where queer feminist world-making stays possible, and that is where resistance becomes something people can actually endure. Thanks for listening. Thank you. You've listened to Dialogues for Resistance, a podcast series about how anti-gender politics travels and how queer feminist resistances answer back.

SPEAKER_01 9:46

In this season one, we follow those dynamics across Europe, and you have just listened to an episode on vulnerability and queer feminist resistance.