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Jigsaw #4: Reproductive Politics

Jigsaw #4: Reproductive Politics. t his week:. Bentley, “Feeding Baby Teaching Mother: Gerber and the Evolution of Infant Food and Feeding Practices in the U.S .”

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Jigsaw #4: Reproductive Politics

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  1. Jigsaw #4:Reproductive Politics

  2. 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”

  3. Reflection #9: • How do some social critics connect these images…. • …and how does Petchesky both contest as well as embrace such reasoning?

  4. Rosalind Pollack Petchesky: “Fetal Images: The Power of Visual Culture in the Politics of Reproduction”

  5. Pro-life: set the terms of debate via powerful imagery (264):“a picture of a dead fetus is worth a thousand words” (263)

  6. Visual Reductionism

  7. 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

  8. technoscientific management of pregnancy: • Do technologies like • Amniocentesis • In vitro fertilization • Electronic fetal monitoring • Cesarean sections • Ultrasounds • 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)

  9. 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

  10. 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).

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