基本説明
Offers a sophisticated, original, unromantic, and challenging account of feminist reproductive politics in the USA in the 1970s and 1980s.
Full Description
In Seizing the Means of Reproduction, Michelle 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. She argues 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.
Contents
Acknowledgements 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
