Body Politics: What's the State Got to Do with It?
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Body politics: What's the state got to do with it? Persistent link: http://hdl.handle.net/2345/bc-ir:107357 This work is posted on eScholarship@BC, Boston College University Libraries. Chestnut Hill, Mass.: Boston College, 2017 The work is licensed under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by- nc/4.0/). BODY POLITICS: WHAT’S THE STATE GOT TO DO WITH IT? Edited by Jordan A. Pino & Konstantinos Karamanakis BODY POLITICS “Whether meant to or not, law, in addition to all the other things it does, tells stories about the culture that helped to shape it and which it in turn helps to shape: stories about who we are, where we came from, and where we are going.” Mary Ann Glendon, Former Ambassador to the Holly See Body Politics: WHAT’S THE STATE GOT TO DO WITH IT? Jordan A. Pino Konstantinos Karamanakis Editors Eagle Print Collegiate Press Chestnut Hill This book was prepared by students in the Political Science Honors Seminar, Body Politics (Fall, 2016) at Boston College, Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts. Copyright in each chapter of the collective work is retained by the individual author. The work is licensed under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ This book is dedicated to our mentors in the Boston College Department of Political Science. Contents Chapter 1: Editors’ Preface 1 Konstantinos Karamanakis Jordan A. Pino Part I: Vulnerable Communities Chapter 2: Transgender Rights in Juridical Perspective 9 Jordan A. Pino Chapter 3: The Development and Success of Disability Rights in Germany 21 Connor Tobin Chapter 4: The Criminalization of Marital Rape: A Story of Progress and Pushback 31 Lauren Lin Chapter 5: Restriction through Rights: Abortion in the Soviet Union 41 Sylvia Waghorne Part II: Displaced Persons Chapter 6: The EU Identity Crisis 53 Kevin Sheridan Chapter 7: Improving the Long-Term Circumstances of Internally Displaced Persons: State Strength as the Determinant Factor 65 Cesar Garcia Chapter 8: Political Power and Barriers for Internally Displaced Women in Colombia 77 Colleen Ward Part III: Corporeal Governance Chapter 9: Agency, Distance, and Distrust: Compulsory Vaccination in the United States 89 Konstantinos Karamanakis Chapter 10: Discrimination and Experimentation: A Study of How Different Racial Groups Are Adversely Affected by Government Research 99 Ashley Puk Chapter 11: Racial Politics of Coerced Sterilization in the Twentieth-Century United States 109 Miriam George Chapter 12: The Coerced Sterilization of HIV-Positive Women in South Africa 119 Madison Armstrong Part IV: Ideologies in Movement Chapter 13: Rights in Conflict: The Abuelas’ Search for Truth in Post-Dictatorship Argentina 131 Katie Daniels Chapter 14: Reagan and AIDS: A Complicated Legacy 141 Jack Massih Chapter 15: Homophobia in Poland and Hungary: Assessing its Political Motives and Influences 151 Thomas Hanley Chapter 16: The Impact of “States of Emergency” and the State’s Appropriation of the “Terrorist” Body 163 Emily Murphy Contributors 183 Editors’ Preface Growing up, our families screened movies and baked cookies from scratch on Saturday evenings when no one had plans to go out. We cherish our memories of those rare occasions when each of our families could be alone and at ease – just us, our parents, our siblings … and the state. States regulate the intimate affairs of their citizens in order to create societies wherein the predominant behaviors and relationships are compatible with the mission of the reigning regime. In the Soviet Union, for example, the Kremlin outlawed abortion in 1936 in order to grow the Soviet labor force and hasten industrialization; in Argentina, the Alfonsín Administration legalized divorce in 1987 so as to weaken the influence of the Catholic Church during the country’s transition from dictatorship to democracy; and in the United States, Washington continues to reserve its most generous legal benefits for families to promote marriage and child-rearing. Because of legal restrictions and civic incentives, almost every decision one makes as a private citizen is influenced in some way by the state: indeed, even an activity as innocuous as baking with one’s family at home is subject to a myriad of government-sponsored regulations designed to cultivate a productive and orderly society based on its conception of those terms. Consider this example to its fullest, logical extent. Before a family can bake cookies, their ingredients must have passed inspection by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Their kitchen must have been constructed by a state-licensed contractor, and in accordance with local construction ordinances. Their home must have been sold to them by a state- licensed realtor, and the deed to that home transferred to them under the auspices of a notary public. Their source of income used to buy these necessities must have been reported to the state, and whatever portion of it the state may have chosen to seize for its own purposes must have been promptly surrendered. The parents in this family must have secured a marriage license – an impossible feat for same-sex and interracial couples in the United States not one generation ago – or have been otherwise awarded guardianship over their children. The children must have been assigned a sex by the state at birth, and may only self-identify with the five recognized racial categories on legal forms. If, at some point, the parents decide to seek a divorce or to terminate a pregnancy, it is the state’s prerogative to honor such requests. And, if the children wish to join another family or set off on their own as emancipated minors, the state must also approve such arrangements. The list goes on and on. It is easy to sympathize with Michel Foucault’s assertion that the citizen is merely an element to be managed in relation to strategies of the economic and social administration of populations. “Editors’ Preface” | KARAMANAKIS & PINO The impact of state regulations can vary. Nevertheless, whenever a government enacts a law, it signals to its constituents its preference for particular associations, lifestyles, and traits. Let us consider the issue of marital status: on the one hand, incentivizing marriage and child-bearing can help serve the interests of society by ensuring stable population growth and two-parent households, whose children are believed to “do better in life” as adults (Barone 2013). On the other hand, restricting marital and parental incentives to only this specific type of couple demeans all other types of couples. In the United States and the United Kingdom, for example, same-sex couples were once denied the right to marry because (among other reasons) these states did not have vested interests in such unions. Same-sex marriages neither furthered the objective of child-bearing – and thus threatened the state’s primary justification for matrimony – nor affirmed the popular moral standards of these societies at the time. Despite the willingness of the United States and the United Kingdom to grant the same legal benefits to same-sex couples granted to heterosexual couples in the form of civil unions, proponents of marriage equality recognized that any differentiation between union and matrimony would afford the commitment of same-sex couples less social worth than that afforded to traditional marriages. Indeed, to regulate in promotion of certain characteristics necessarily deems populations without those characteristics as undeserving of the social privileges and public value otherwise granted. These populations become “others” – enemies of the sovereign whose bodies and relationships must be physically micromanaged, or even eradicated, in order to neutralize the perceived threat their differences pose to the objectives of the regime. Populations may become others when (1) their private choices interfere with a practical goal of a regime, as is the case in the above examples. Populations also become others when (2) their domination is deemed necessary for affirming the superiority of the enfranchised majority, or when (3) their eradication is considered necessary for the legitimacy and survival of the state. Perhaps these latter ‘otherizations’ are best exemplified by the human rights violations committed by the military dictatorships of Chile (1973- 1990) and Argentina (1983-1989), and by the United States during its War on Terror. In all three instances, national leaders identified a population not compatible with the mission of the state: for the United States, these were Iraqis and Afghans suspected of terrorism, or sympathetic to terrorism or terrorists; for Chile and Argentina, these were leftists, and anyone sympathetic to socialism or socialists. Jihad and Marxism being antithetical to the mission of these regimes, the U.S., Chile, and Argentina exercised their powers to murder, torture, and disappear those who ascribed to such concepts. The second scenario usually underscores the first and the third. Underlying a state’s perception of certain groups as threats to society is, oftentimes, a deep aversion for the characteristics projected onto these ‘otherized’ groups. Martha Nussbaum explains in her From Disgust to Humanity that those minorities whose inherent human characteristics are different from the inherent characteristics of a majority are often made to be objects of disgust – because a majority can easily distance itself from a minority, deny that minority full personhood, and thus project its fears and anxieties onto them. It is easy to see how disgust has fostered the categorization of others, and has encouraged the infliction of pain on the bodies of others. Gay men, and the anti-sodomy laws that accompanied their exclusion from the marriage contract, are one example. The experiences of the detainees of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo provide another. Khalid Sheik Mohammad, the principal architect of the 9/11 attacks, for example, was water-boarded 183 times while detained at 2 BODY POLITICS Guantanamo Prison.