Seizing the Means of Reproduction: Entanglements of Feminism, Health, and Technoscience (Experimental Futures) - Softcover

Murphy, Michelle

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822353369 ISBN 13: 9780822353362

Verlag: Duke University Press, 2012

Inhaltsangabe

In Seizing the Means of Reproduction, M. Murphy's initial focus on the alternative health practices developed by radical feminists in the United States during the 1970s and 1980s opens into a sophisticated analysis of the transnational entanglements of American empire, population control, neoliberalism, and late-twentieth-century feminisms. Murphy concentrates on the technoscientific means-the technologies, practices, protocols, and processes-developed by feminist health activists. They argue that by politicizing the technical details of reproductive health, alternative feminist practices aimed at empowering women were also integral to late-twentieth-century biopolitics. Murphy traces the transnational circulation of cheap, do-it-yourself health interventions, highlighting the uneasy links between economic logics, new forms of racialized governance, U.S. imperialism, family planning, and the rise of NGOs. In the twenty-first century, feminist health projects have followed complex and discomforting itineraries. The practices and ideologies of alternative health projects have found their way into World Bank guidelines, state policies, and commodified research. While the particular moment of U.S. feminism in the shadow of Cold War and postcolonialism has passed, its dynamics continue to inform the ways that health is governed and politicized today.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

M. Murphy is Associate Professor of Women and Gender Studies and of History at the University of Toronto. They are the author of the Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty, also published by Duke University Press.

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Seizing the Means of Reproduction

Entanglements of Feminism, Health, and TechnoscienceBy MICHELLE MURPHY

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2012 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5336-2

Contents

Acknowledgments......................................................................viiIntroduction. Feminism in/as Biopolitics.............................................11 Assembling Protocol Feminism.......................................................252 Immodest Witnessing, Affective Economies, and Objectivity..........................683 Pap Smears, Cervical Cancer, and Scales............................................1024 Traveling Technology and a Device for Not Performing Abortions.....................150Conclusion. Living the Contradiction.................................................177Notes................................................................................183Bibliography.........................................................................219Index................................................................................247

Chapter One

Assembling Protocol Feminism

A feminist self help clinic in 1970s California might be found at a local Women's Center with participants perched on shabby sofas below a poster of a raised fist clenching a speculum. Or it might be held in a home with children and spouse tucked away, or even in a church basement. Self help clinics could form in any nonmedicalized setting, with women examining themselves and each other on couches, chairs, or pillow-topped tables, as much as at a formal feminist health center. No sterile blue paper gowns or obstructing medical drapes were required. Instead, participants wore street clothes, taking off skirts, pants, and underwear, but casually leaving on socks and knee-highs (see figure 1.1). While a self help kit's iconic tool was the cheap plastic vaginal speculum, it might also have included information on local abortion laws, a mimeographed list of local abortion clinics, the twenty-five-cent Birth Control Handbook from Montreal, or instructions for starting your own advanced research project.

"A Self Help Clinic is not a place," so feminist self help founders asserted. "It is any group of women getting together to share experiences and learn about their own bodies through direct observations." In other words, a self help clinic was not locatable within the physical walls of a medical facility. Instead, it was a mobile set of practices, a mode for arranging knowledge production and health care, in other words, a protocol—a procedural script that strategically assembles technologies, exchange, epistemologies, subjects, and so on. Put simply, a protocol establishes "how to" do something, how to compose the technologies, subjects, exchanges, affects, processes, and so on that make up a moment of health care practice. A feminist self help clinic provided choreography for "how to" assemble sexed living-being, technoscience, and politics.

Self help clinic was the official term used for events—not places—organized by Los Angeles area Feminist Women's Health Centers in which women, mostly but not exclusively white, and often strangers to each other, met for a set number of weeks to learn self-examination techniques associated with gynecology and to "demystify" their own bodies as facilitated by a lay health worker. Visual examination of genitals and cervixes was joined by tactile techniques of palpating uterine size and position. Protocols of examination, moreover, were performed along with social protocols of "consciousness raising"—women sitting in a circle on the floor comparing experiences and observations, "as we did then." Conventional medical methods were designed for anonymous encounters between doctors and strangers, while feminist self help was to be practiced by "a cluster of women" who had earned an intimate and affective knowledge of each other's bodies. It was crucial to feminist self help that it not be a solitary practice—it required a group to instantiate acts of "care of the self" into politicized and experimental modes of nonprofit exchange ("sharing") and knowledge production ("consciousness raising").

These protocols of self help traveled broadly across the United States and Canada through a flurry of mimeographed, and later photocopied, how-to flyers and pamphlets that described, in text and pictures, instructions for forming a "self help group" (see figure 1.2). Sometimes, after an organized clinic ended, women would continue meeting in their own "advanced groups," moving from basic examination to the articulation of more avowedly experimental projects, such as investigations of sexuality and female ejaculation, lesbian health, or the practice of "menstrual extraction."

Donning white lab coats to surreptitiously purchase urine pregnancy test kits (then medical supplies administered by doctors, not over-the-counter commodities) the inaugural self help clinic began by teaching women how to conduct urine pregnancy tests on themselves at the local Women's Center in a house on Crenshaw Boulevard in Los Angeles. Even later, within the formal women's health centers that provided abortion and reproductive health services—which rapidly emerged after 1973 in Los Angeles, Orange County, Santa Ana, Santa Cruz, San Diego, Oakland, Chico, and elsewhere—the minutiae of practice was profoundly politicized. How health histories were taken (as "herstories"), insistence on group alternatives to individual doctor–patient encounters ("participatory clinics"), the requirement of narrating abortions as they were performed, and even the exact instruments chosen were all open to politicization and revision. At its peak from the early 1970s to the early 1980s, between the apex of radical feminism and the rise of militant Reaganera antiabortionism, these scattered projects formed a reticulate, experimental, and influential hands-on strand of a nationally interconnected women's health movement.

Feminist protocols were typically designed to spread and be mobile. They were often transmitted by live demonstrations first initiated by a handful of Californian women who undertook "road trips," traveling by station wagon or bus and sleeping on couches to arrive at college towns, big cities, and church basements, where they gave slide show presentations culminating in a live performance of vaginal self-examination. This labor was privately referred to as "pr" work, accomplished not only by travel and text, but also supported by the assiduous documentation of practices through home movies, photos, and slides that increasingly portrayed a multiracial constituency of participants. Thus, the expression and spread of feminist self help protocols was dependent on cheaply available technologies of popular photography and photocopy reproduction, as well as on infrastructures of highways and bus systems. Such infrastructural possibilities were additional ingredients in the feminist reassembly of the terms of health care. Sketches, photos, and instructions from paper flyers made in one town were cut, pasted, and recopied in another to create local versions of feminist self help. By the mid-1970s, feminist self help had been demonstrated at the un Conference on Women in Mexico City, while projects linked by their citations to each other were established in Germany, France, Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Barbados, India and Brazil, to name just a few sites in a transnational itinerary.

In foregrounding the politicization of...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2012
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822353369
• ISBN 13: 9780822353362
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 268
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland