Seizing the Means of Reproduction: Entanglements of Feminism, Health
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Seizing the Means of Reproduction ExpErimEntal FuturEs Technological Lives, Scientific Arts, Anthropological Voices A series edited by Michael M. J. Fischer and Joseph Dumit Seizing the Means of Reproduction Entanglements of Feminism, Health, and Technoscience michEllE murphy Duke University Press Durham and London 2012 © 2012 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper ♾ Typeset in Chaparral Pro by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book. contEnts Acknowledgments vii Introduction. Feminism in/as Biopolitics 1 1 Assembling Protocol Feminism 25 2 Immodest Witnessing, Affective Economies, and Objectivity 68 3 Pap Smears, Cervical Cancer, and Scales 102 4 Traveling Technology and a Device for Not Performing Abortions 150 Conclusion. Living the Contradiction 177 Notes 183 Bibliography 219 Index 247 acknowlEdgmEnts When I started this project ten years ago I imagined I would be writing a history of the United States women’s health movement. Yet once I started following feminist techniques, letting their travels lead my research in and out of feminisms, I began posing new questions about the histories of ap- propriation and transformation through time, place, and politics. In this task, I have many people to thank. I am deeply grateful to the participants in the feminist self help movement who generously shared time and information with me: Carol Downer, Suzanne Gage, Eileen Schnitger, Shawn Heckert, Monika Franz- nick, Nancy Boothe, Paula Hammock, Peggy Antrobus, and Andaiye. In addition, I would like to acknowledge the enthusiastic assistance of Lorraine Rothman and Dido Hasper, two important figures of the Califor- nia feminist health movement who both died during the writing of this book. I am also thankful to the Boston Women’s Health Collective Library and the Schlesinger Library for their assistance in collecting materials. This project was generously supported by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Support for the project also came from the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, the Peter Wall Institute at the University of British Columbia, the Clayman Center for Gender Research at Stanford, and the Jackman Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto. I wish to thank Courtney Berger at Duke Uni- versity Press for guiding the improvement of the manuscript. Over the many years of working on this book, I incurred debts to many colleagues and friends for their generous intellectual support. At the mpiwg, my sincere thanks to Lorraine Daston, Abigail Lustig, Sabine Höhler, Chris Kelty, Maureen McNeill, Hannah Landecker, and the Berlin Feminist Science Studies Workgroup. The arguments in this book are part of larger intellectual debates in the field of science and technology studies, and hence I am indebted to many colleagues in this field for their criti- cal intellectual engagement: Gregg Mitman, Joe Dumit, Warwick Ander- son, Lochlann Jain, Cori Hayden, Jackie Orr, Joe Masco, Steven Epstein, Evelynn Hammonds, Samer Alatout, Vincanne Adams, and the members of the Oxidate workgroup. I would especially like to acknowledge Kavita Philip’s influence: her incisive feedback and inspiring exchanges have had a deep influence. Since I was a graduate student, Adele Clarke has acted as a crucial mentor, despite the fact that I never quite managed to become located in the San Francisco Bay area for any length of time. Her imprint on this book is large. The University of Toronto has provided me with a wonderful envi- ronment in which to stretch my thinking about transnational feminist analytics. In particular, I would like to acknowledge the roles that Alissa Trotz, Linzi Manicom, Shahrzad Mojab, Ashwini Tambe, Elspeth Brown, Mariana Valverde, and Ritu Birla have had on my politics and thinking. I have had the privilege of working with wonderful graduate students at the University of Toronto who have helped me to refine my approach to the history of feminism and its entanglements with race and science, with Carla Hustak, Rachel Berger, Michael Pettit, and Brian Beaton playing par- ticularly important roles in shaping this book. My collaborators in the Toronto-based Technoscience Salon have been crucial interlocutors. I am particularly grateful to Natasha Myers for her support, both intellectual and social, in our mutual efforts to form a charged technoscience studies community accountable to contemporary politics and thought. I would also like to thank Andrea Adams, Jason Brown, Kathryn Scharf, and Sean Fitzpatrick for their encouragement and friendship Finally, my greatest debt goes to my lovely family. Claudette and Ted Mur- phy and Ellen and Richard Price have helped this project through their generosity through thick and thin. On the day I sent my final revisions to the press, my grandmother Loretta Yuill died, and so I honor her here. I have been buoyed by Mika and Maceo Mercey, who remind me what life is all about. I am immeasurably grateful to Matthew Price, who has read every word of this book many times over. His judicious editing and keen eye for writing have improved this work tremendously. He has propped me up in incalculable ways during the years it has taken me to complete this work and continues to amaze me with his generosity. Thank you. viii Acknowledgments introduction Feminism in/as Biopolitics Sex changed in the second half of the twentieth century. With the aid of synthetic hormones, immortal tissue cultures, and delicate pipettes the very biological processes of human fertility, and even the sexual form of the body as male and female, became profoundly manipulable. Labs and clinics were vital spaces to this transformation of sex, but so too were state departments of finance and aid agencies, as well as supranational organizations such as the World Bank. Large- scale national and trans- national schemes encouraged the technological limiting of births, dis- tributing birth control pills, iuds, and surgical sterilization to millions, helping to alter the fertility of entire populations for the sake of a greater economic good. The alterability of reproduction in its aggregate form—as “population”—became a shifting planetary problem amenable to techni- cal, state, and market solutions. Sex’s changeability expanded further, be- yond humans, to intensify in the animal and plant kingdoms as agribusi- ness mutated seeds into patentable commodities, and livestock was bred with artificial insemination and embryo transfer. This rapidly emerging technical ability to alter human and nonhuman reproduction, stretching from molecular to transnational economic scales, was accompanied by new problems and promises for the politicization of life—not just should, but how could reproduction be transformed? Feminists in California during the 1970s answered this promise by po- liticizing the details of biomedical practice. They appropriated, revised, and invented reproductive health care techniques: making photographic diaries of cervical variation, crafting politicized health manuals, examin- sioning biopolitics as topological is useful to thinking historically about the confluence of multiple biopolitical modes at work in any given place within the twentieth century. Beyond just change over time, a topological sense of biopolitics emphasizes: (1) multiplicity, (2) uneven spatiality, and (3) entanglements. In other words, rethinking biopolitics as topological highlights the layered and overlapping configurations that have materi- alized life in multiple and inconsistent ways over time and across space.24 Spatializing this multiplicity, then, requires considering how the exten- sion and distribution of biopolitical practices and their effects were pro- foundly uneven—shaped by race, social movements, nation- states, global capital, segregation, dispossession, urban centers, transnational technical projects, and so on. It is through this topological approach—emphasizing uneven distributions, scales, and multiple layers—that I hope to map the often provincial projects of Californian feminists within larger historical tendencies. Beyond attending to specificities of scale and time, investigating bio- politics as topological encourages attention to the connections between divergently produced instances of biopolitics. In other words, thinking topologically draws attention to the history of attachments, proximities, relationships, fissures, and separations between different instantiations of biopolitics. Therefore, methodologically the book strives to go beyond multiplying kinds of biopolitics by focusing on the relationships of appro- priation and connection between feminist biopolitics and more dominant forms of biopolitics. It tracks the productive and uneven relationships— antagonistic and supportive, material and discursive—that mutually ani- mated both feminism and other technoscientific practices, particularly in medical and family- planning forms. Hence, the book argues for the importance of attending to entanglements, defined as attachments of ma- terial, technical, and social relations across divergent and even antago- nistic terrains of politics. While genealogy as a method invokes modes of descent, here I attempt to also capture recursive loops, sideway move- ments, circuits of appropriation, and other vectors of connection within the past.25 Such sideways connections can be explicit acts of appropriation be- tween feminism and more dominant