Rebecca Jordan-Young,
"Introduction"
(page 2 of 6)
Producing Justice
What exactly gets reproduced by reproductive technologies? All too
often, as many pieces in this issue detail, reproductive technologies
are modes for reproducing hierarchies based on race, sex/gender,
sexuality, class, physical ability, and position in the global economy.
As Sarah Franklin reminds us in this issue, though, there is a long
feminist tradition of imagining that new technologies—in the right
hands, in a feminist mode—may produce fantastic new ways of being,
perhaps even disrupt the sex distinction itself. Reproduction, as Rose
prompts, is never a simple matter of projecting identical entities (be
they people, traits, or DNA sequences) relentlessly into the
future.[2]
Instead, every reproduction opens the possibility for change,
"mutations" that are sometimes subtle and sometimes dramatic. This is
true on an organic level, and also the social one. Viewed this way,
technologies of social reproduction also hold the possibility of
producing something that does not yet properly exist—namely social
justice. Multiple versions of this particular feminist vision have been
articulated and enacted by artists, activists, scholars, and ordinary
people trying simply to rework the meaning and modes of
"family-building" to align with a politically-grounded determination to
act as if all reproductive futures mattered.
Reproductive justice offers a way to rethink the fundamental
conditions of reproduction, potentially giving structure to longstanding
but ad hoc feminist moves towards transformation in this realm. Women
of African Descent for Reproductive Justice, a group of health
activists, coined the term to signal "reproductive health integrated
into social justice" at a meeting in 1994.[3]
More than simply a term or
a concept, reproductive justice describes a movement, led by women of
color and allied with other movements against oppression based on race,
gender, sexuality, class, migrant or immigrant status, and nation.
While the movement is new, the reproductive justice concept is rooted in
longstanding insights of women of color activists and scholars, such as
Puerto Rican activist and physician Helen Rodriguez Trias, whose
eloquent critique of sterilization abuse in Puerto Rico can be heard in
the documentary La Operación,[4]
and Angela Davis, whose 1981
classic Women, Race, and Class included a chapter devoted to the
history and politics of reproductive rights.[5]
There, Davis called out
the racism and class-bias of the white foremothers of the movement for
birth control and abortion rights, as well as the generation of abortion
activists who followed uncritically in their footsteps:
The abortion rights activists of the early 1970s should
have examined the history of their movement. Had they done so, they
might have understood why so many of their Black sisters adopted a
posture of suspicion toward their cause. They might have understood how
important it was to undo the racist deeds of their predecessors, who had
advocated birth control as well as compulsory sterilization as a means
of eliminating the 'unfit' sectors of the population.
As the rich historical accounts by Dorothy Roberts, Jennifer Nelson,
and Silliman, Gerber Fried, Ross, and Gutierrez show, Black, Latina,
Asian, and Native American women have been an energetic force behind the
demand for reproductive freedom for decades, pushing against the narrow
notion that reproductive freedom means only freedom from
(unwanted) reproduction.[6]
Ensuring that birth control went hand in
hand with provision of health care, nutrition programs, and broad
anti-poverty work that would allow women to raise the children they bear
with dignity, feminists of color and their white allies have been
pursuing a reproductive justice agenda for a far longer period than the
lifetime of the term.
Though she's rarely if ever claimed as a foremother of the
reproductive justice movement, we find other roots of contemporary
reproductive justice demands in the words of Audre Lorde. Delivering
the speech I Am Your Sister at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn
in 1984, Lorde pulled sexuality-based oppression onto the stage.
Identifying some of the same broad issues that other feminists of color
were connecting to reproductive rights, Lorde noted that homophobia and
heterosexism blocked recognition that she and other lesbians were active
members of Black women's struggle for justice:
When I picketed for Welfare Mothers' Rights, and against
the enforced sterilization of young Black girls, when I fought
institutionalized racism in the New York City schools, I was a Black
Lesbian.[7]
Lorde went further, pointing out that homophobia and heterosexism
were strategically used not just to demonize lesbians, but to obscure
the reality of Black people's lived experiences of "family":
I have heard it said that Black Lesbians are a threat to
the Black family. But when 50% of children born to Black women are born
out of wedlock, and 30% of all Black families are headed by women
without husbands, we need to broaden and redefine what we mean by
family. I have heard it said that Black Lesbians will mean the death of
the race. Yet Black Lesbians bear children in exactly the same way other
women bear children, and a Lesbian household is simply another kind of
family. Ask my son and daughter.[8]
In the past few years, foes of abortion and reproductive
health services have adopted the language of racial and sexual justice,
pointing selectively to the history of racism in the reproductive rights
movement, and arguing that the disproportionate number of abortions
obtained by women of color amounts to "genocide." As we go to press,
conservative Governor Jan Brewer of Arizona has just signed a law
banning abortions that are performed because of the race or sex of the
fetus; this is the first law banning "race selection" abortions, but
three other states (Illinois, Oklahoma, and Pennsylvania) have already
banned abortions performed because of fetal sex. While the surface
language of the Arizona law is one of equal human dignity, the content
of the debate shows how concepts like justice and "multiculturalism" can
be mobilized to serve the anti-immigrant sentiments that dominate
Arizona politics. As one Arizona Republican who supported the bill
explained, "We are a multicultural society now and cultures are bringing
their traditions to America that really defy the values of America,
including cultures that value males over females."
Page:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6
Next page
|