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

Murphy, Michelle

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822353369 ISBN 13: 9780822353362

Publisher: Duke University Press, 2012

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

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.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

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 techniques and practices as a means of also designating "women's health" "bodies," and "sex" as politically charged sites, feminist self help, I argue, was a kind of protocol feminism—a form of feminism concerned with the recrafting and distribution of technosocial practices by which the care and study of sexed living-being could be conducted. In other words, the politicization of life in the formulation of "women's health" was simultaneously bound to the politicization of the details of the techniques by which it was known and materially altered. While feminisms are often categorized by historians into the slots of liberal, postcolonial, or Marxist (for example), such templates fail to capture the range of feminist counter-conduct—such as feminist biomedical and policy projects—that have multiplied in the last forty years, as well as the myriad feminist formations—such as entrepreneurial feminisms or imperial feminisms—that shore up and lend ethical legitimacy to dominant formations. A daring form of counter-conduct in the 1970s, protocol feminism has since become a common mode of feminism that can today be found in NGO-ized projects and bureaucracies concerning health, international development, and domestic violence, as well as international policy.

Protocol is a term used widely in biomedical practice to name the formal guidelines, instructions, or standards for composing a task—all the steps in drawing blood, for example, from assigning staff, to standardized orders, to attaining consent, to syringe angle, to labeling, to disposal, as well as all the choreographed arrangement of subject positions and institutional players it draws in—doctors, nurses, hospital management, lab technicians, insurance agents, medical device companies, and of course patients. Feminist self help, as a protocol feminism, likewise assembled together bodies, feelings, tools, modes of politicization, social interactions, relations of exchange, and emerging biomedical logics converging on questions of reproductive health in the 1970s. Unlike medical protocols, offered as rational and apolitical technical achievements, feminists saturated protocols with politics.

Feminist self help did not emphasize the term protocol, but instead talked of process, structure, procedures, and practice. Turning to the term protocol here helps to highlight the standardizable and transmissible components of feminist practices. Moreover, the question of protocol draws attention to the scripting of relations between component entities—the instruments, labor, gestures, identities, emotions, and so on—assembled to compose feminist practices. Here, I am building on the insights of theorists Gilles Delueze and Felix Guattari, who describe an assemblage as composed, not by the list of tools and components, but by the interminglings that make the tools possible. In other words, it is not the historical availability of a set of components which assembled feminist self help; it is the arrangement, composition, or protocols which actualized the elements in some ways, not others, evoking historically specific generative capacities to act, to matter, to care, to count or be counted, to attach, to emote, to narrate, to ignore, to work, to value, to politicize, and so on. Protocol is a word that describes the specific choreography of such evocative relations.

At the same time, feminist protocols were always a reassemblage, not simply historically new but crafted by appropriating and altering elements already available in the 1970s. As a reassemblage, feminist self help was entangled with, and did not wholly repudiate, the historical conditions of its emergence. This state of reassemblage is more than just a historiographical observation of this book; it was also an explicit tactic embraced within feminist self help. On a concrete level, feminist self help's two iconic artifacts—the plastic speculum (featured in the vaginal self-exam, detailed in chapter 2) and the menstrual extraction kit (of chapter 4)—were examples of reassemblage, one reconstituted from a device used in conventional medicine, the other made by rejigging an instrument from an illegal abortion clinic with a mason jar and aquarium tubing. Feminist self help was thus shaped by an announced ethic of reassemblage in the sense that its practitioners were often tactically attempting to appropriate and reshape existing practices or technologies.

Even further, feminist self help emphasized its own internal ethic of flexible and experimental reassembly, aspiring to craft protocols that could foster change, move between sites, and be tailored to particular needs as decided by individuals or small groups. Feminist self help focused on practices that could be done by lay people routinely, suitable for a living room, and constructed out of common items. Since feminist self help practices were rooted in a reflexive and collective project of investigating one's own body, its protocols ideally were always under revision to suit local politics and the particularities of individual embodiments. Through this explicitly experimental ethos, the protocols of feminist self help were multiply revised as they moved across time and place. And then later in the century, this quality helped to facilitate the reappropriation of feminist protocols within conventional biomedical, family-planning, and development practices. Thus, feminist protocols served as more than instructions for assembly; they actively encouraged revisable and mobile appropriations and rearrangements.

Though marginal in the 1970s, today protocol feminism has become a common element within contemporary biomedical and developmental modes for governing sexed life, in which feminist and other politicized projects—typically within NGOS but also within states—aspire to intervene in and ethicize the standards, terms, policies, and guidelines through which women's lives are governed. Examples range from feminist NGOS that write manuals of best practices for family planning, to concerns over the "process" of meetings, to feminist efforts in the early 1990s to change the language of un population policy to that of "reproductive health." Moreover, the project of feminist technoscience studies (of which this book is a part) is in kinship with protocol feminism as expressed through its promise of doing science another, better way.

In attending to the importance of protocol within Californian feminist self help of the 1970s, I want to insist on two claims from which to historicize the traffic between feminisms and technoscience. First, I want to argue the broad claim of this book that the histories of feminism and technoscience are conjoined, and that this relationship is not merely a story of feminism's critique and correction of science. Instead, practices such as feminist self help were examples of technoscience in the twentieth century, even as they were in agonistic relationships with other forms of technoscience. The proliferation of diverse forms of participatory science and politicized health and environmental projects in the late twentieth century is as important a feature of technoscience as were particle accelerators, industrial labs, and the rise of biotechnology. Feminist self help was a politicization of technoscience as much as of reproduction.

Second, I argue that this study of feminist self help requires the historicization of feminisms through the same methods one would use to treat any other instances of technoscience. Rather than an account of successive, ever improving, waves of feminism, or of separate roads to feminism plotted by different racialized communities of women, or a story of the errors of feminism and its failures to accurately prophesize neoliberal futures, this chapter seeks to chart the assembly of feminist self help in Los Angeles in the early 1970s as a protocol feminism made possible by discrepant histories of politicizing life and health.

Feminist self help as a protocol feminism drew together and reacted to already extant practices, infrastructures, commodities, epistemologies, and subject positions available in the landscape of its emergence. I will leave detailed questions of the epistemological content of feminist self help to the next chapters, and the social history of the women's health movement to other scholars. Here, I am interested in tracing some of the entanglements—the acts of reassemblage, appropriation, and disavowal—that variously agitated and animated Los Angeles feminist self help as a protocol feminism within larger historical conditions of possibility. By following a nonexhaustive and select set of genealogical entanglements as they relate to the politics of protocol, this chapter treats protocol feminism as complexly conditioned by discrepant relations outside itself and at the same time as a reassembly of those conditions

In other words, feminist self help was both a symptom and diagnosis of its moment. Feminist self help critically diagnosed and redirected the exercise of power as it moved through technical practices that invested reproductive health with new political dispositions. At the same time, it was a symptom animated by and entangled within both existent and often contradictory conventions of stratifying and politicizing living-being (such as through nationalism, race, citizenship, labor, and so on) as well as emerging milieus of technoscientific practice affiliated with the Cold War, new racial logics, and capitalism.

In striving for this double vision of feminist self help—as both made out of and making a larger biopolitical topology—I do not want to lose track of why I first became interested in the history of feminist self help in the first place: it was a practical and influential instance of an attempt to fashion a feminist technoscience that has materially shaped my life and those of many others around me. It was formative to the epistemological and political investments of my own scholarly field of feminist technoscience studies, itself crafted in the 1980s. Feminist technoscience studies, in turn, has been a critical aspect of the field of science and technology studies more generally, as well as more recently of the field of women and gender studies. Thus, I want to invite interested readers to consider how science and technology studies or women's studies, which emerged simultaneously to feminist self help, are likewise imbricated in this historical formation.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Seizing the Means of Reproductionby MICHELLE MURPHY Copyright © 2012 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Publication date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0822353369
• ISBN 13: 9780822353362
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 268