Tenderness is Political: Vulnerability, Care and My Ceramic Practice

“Vulnerability is a feature of our embodied social condition.” - Judith Butler

We are, from the beginning, socially formed bodies and dependent on networks of care. And yet, the dominant political and economic imaginaries of our time are built on the denial of that condition. Neoliberal ideology glorifies autonomy, productivity and resilience, the figure of the self-sufficient individual who needs no one and owes nothing. Patriarchal structures, in turn, often equate strength and authority with emotional distance, and rationality with the suppression of vulnerability. In both cases, dependency is framed as failure.

This denial is not neutral. It produces forms of violence : the normalization of cruelty in public discourse, the delegitimization of grief, the shaming of need, and the expectation that bodies must endure without complaint. When vulnerability is disavowed, those who embody it most visibly are rendered disposable.

To speak of tenderness in this context is not to retreat into sentimentality. It is to insist that the recognition of shared vulnerability has ethical and political consequences. Butler’s work on nonviolence suggests that if we understand ourselves as fundamentally interconnected, then harming another is never fully external to us; it reverberates within the relational field that constitutes us. Nonviolence, then, is not passive. It is an active commitment to preserving the livability of a world we co-create.

Tenderness operates within this horizon. It is a refusal of cruelty as a norm. It is the decision to respond to fragility (one’s own and others’) with care rather than domination. It disrupts the fantasy that we are isolated units competing for survival and instead foregrounds the reality that we are sustained by what is often invisible: attention, touch, care, time.

As an artist, I cannot separate my practice from this framework. I am interested in creating handmade ceramic objects that carry a sense of warmth and presence, pieces that feel alive and are chosen intentionally rather than consumed quickly. The ceramics I make are not only functional objects; their shapes, colors and illustrated surfaces are ways of expressing the values that guide my work.

Working with clay is a slow process that demands attention, patience and care. Choosing to work this way is not only an aesthetic decision, but also a way of insisting that sensitivity and vulnerability still have a place in how we create and inhabit the world.

If we accept that we are constituted through our relations, then the objects that accompany our daily lives are not entirely neutral. The presence of handmade things, shaped slowly and carrying traces of the hand that made it, can gently remind us of another tempo: one where attention matters, where care circulates, and where tenderness is not something abstract, but something we practice in the ordinary gestures of everyday life.