Jigsaw #4:Reproductive

Politics

this week:Bentley, “Feeding Baby Teaching Mother: Gerber and the Evolution of Infant Food and Feeding Practices in the U.S.”

Mamo and Fishman, “Potency in All the Right Places: Viagra as a Technological Gendered Body” + Angier, “The Search for the Female Equivalent of Viagra”

Squier, “Negotiating Boundaries: From Assisted Reproduction to Assisted Replication”

Wilding, “Vulvas with a Difference”

Shiebinger, “Feminist History of Colonial Science”

Reflection #9:How do some social critics connect these images….

…and how does Petchesky both contest as well as embrace such reasoning?

Rosalind Pollack Petchesky: “Fetal Images: The Power of Visual

Culture in the Politics of Reproduction”

Pro-life: set the terms of debate via powerful imagery (264):“a picture of a dead fetus

is worth a thousand words” (263)

Visual Reductionis

m

Ultrasounds & Privileging Vision“panoptics of the womb” (277)

Impulse to “see inside” has come to dominate ways of knowing about pregnancy and fetuses (275)

Fetishization: severing function; detaches fetus from mother (277)Vision: connects us to “truth” but distances us from the corporeal

technoscientific management of pregnancy:

Do technologies likeAmniocentesisIn vitro fertilizationElectronic fetal monitoringCesarean sectionsUltrasounds

carve away women’s management of their pregnancies? (271)

put women in adversarial positions to their own fetuses? (271)

propel OBGYNs into profit and relevance? (272)

Reductionism, revisited:Certain feminist critiques of so-called “war against the womb” are themselves reductionist (278)

Every woman’s experience of visualization technologies conflated as victimization

Women’s experience will be contextual

Feminist reductionism ignores:Some women’s enjoyment

feeling may be no more natural than seeing

Women’s resistance to medical control; women’s agency

Women’s complicity in visualization technologies

Some women’s willing participation in “the war against the womb”

Those women who desire reproductive technology to assist in fertility

Due to socio-economic marginalization, some women are never given the opportunity to utilize these technologies in the first place

If we’re thinking like feminist scientists…

Objectivity must be reevaluated for feminists as well: “objectification identified as masculinist will take different forms: some detach viewer from viewed; some make possible that attachment” (283).

“A true biological perspective does not lead us to determinism but rather to infinite variation, which is to say that it is historical” (284)

“Feminists have no common standpoint about how women ought to use this power” (286).