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NEWS & LETTERS, JUNE 2003
Woman as Reason
Race, class and the politics of choice
by Maya Jhansi POLICING THE NATIONAL BODY: RACE, GENDER AND CRIMINALIZATION. Edited by Jael Silliman and Annanya Bhattacharjee. South End, 2002. What is choice? How do class and race complicate the politics of choice? These are the kinds of questions addressed in a new book, POLICING THE NATIONAL BODY: RACE, GENDER AND CRIMINALIZATION, edited by Jael Silliman and Annanya Bhattacharjee. In this anthology, activists and writers associated with the Committee on Women, Population and the Environment (CWPE), a multiracial feminist organization, expose the realities of criminalization, violence and poverty faced by women of color, and raise a number of provocative questions about the future of the women’s movement. In the 1990s, the CWPE focused on exposing the misogynist assumptions of environmental activists and population control advocates. In this anthology, the writers continue this CWPE tradition of challenging false assumptions, not only of mainstream society, but of activist and feminist communities. Several writers bring out the ways that poor women and girls come under the control of abusive state and global policies, often in the guise of feminist-friendly rhetoric. JUST CHOICES Several essays--“Private Fists and Public Force: Race,
Gender, and Surveillance” by Anannya Bhattacharjee, “Better Dead than
Pregnant: The Colonization of Native Women’s Reproductive Rights” by Andrea
Smith, and “Killing the Black Community: A Commentary on the United States War
on Drugs”-- take up the ways that the criminalization of poor women of color
results in a brutal, violent attack on reproductive choice. The racist crackdown
on “crime” has been accompanied by an ideological assault on Black, Latina,
Native American and poor women. This has led to a direct policing of women’s
bodies by the State, either through appeals for the “welfare of the fetus”
or through endangerment or neglect of the health of poor women. In addition to addressing the specific realities of women of color, the authors in this anthology are engaged in a dialogue about the women’s movement in general. Several argue that the movement has been depoliticized by the current focus on public policy rather than grassroots organizing. For example, the Black Women’s Health Project, which had 120 local chapters and thousands of members in the 1980s, dwindled down to less than 10 chapters in the 1990s, after it opened a public policy office in D.C. and closed its community organizing office in Atlanta (p. 150). Instead of mobilizing a critical mass, many feminist organizations are engaged in placing a few women in power through electoral politics. As the authors of “Just Choices: Women of Color, Reproductive Health and Women’s Rights” point out, more than a decade has passed since the last national conference on reproductive health. What this means is that we are represented “by a few women speaking on behalf of the many rather than the many speaking for themselves” (p. 150). In addition to this critique of activism, there is an important but largely underdeveloped theoretical critique in many of the essays. For example, several authors critique the “market model” of choice offered by the liberal feminist movement, i.e. the assumption that choice is simply the ability to choose (buy) contraception from a range of options. This leads some pro-choice advocates into supporting the use of untested and dangerous forms of birth control and chemical sterilization, such as depo-provera, quinicrine and norplant, simply because they are cheap and easily available--of course, for use on poor women’s bodies. COMPROMISING FEMINISM Betsy Hartmann’s essay “The Many Faces of Population
Control” is one of the most thought-provoking. She sharply criticizes the The
UN Cairo+5 population conference in 1999, which was much touted by feminists for
replacing population control strategies with a focus on women’s empowerment
and family planning. However, Hartmann writes, the Cairo conference was at best
a double-edged sword. It allowed women to challenge their governments on a range
of reproductive issues, but at the expense of compromising with their
neo-liberalist agendas. Because mainstream groups saw the Vatican and
fundamentalism as the main problem, economic issues about development were seen
as less important. Fear of fundamentalism led many women’s groups into
alliances with government delegations committed to neoliberal market policies,
because they supported “choice.” The result of this “strategizing,” Hartmann argues,
is that “the Cairo consensus reinforces the belief that economic and
environmental ‘scarcities’ are caused by population growth, not by a highly
unequal, unstable and unjust global capitalism” (p. 274). This supports the
assumptions of racist population control advocates. Though the rhetoric may have
changed from “population control” to “women’s empowerment,” the
“fertility of poor women” is still seen as the cause of “the ecological
destruction of the whole planet” (p. 259). Hartmann roundly criticizes the global women’s
movement, as well as the U.S. movement for allowing the onslaught of
fundamentalism and the Right to restrict their critiques of the government. For
example, feminists remained largely uncritical of Clinton because he supported
international women’s rights, though at home, he yielded to the Right’s
demonization of women of color by abolishing welfare. All in all, this anthology suggests the need for a deeper, more uncompromising and inclusive women’s movement. There is, however, no serious discussion of the threat of fundamentalism, which does indeed police the bodies of women of color in many parts of the world. In the interview at the end with Angela Davis on post-September 11 realities, fundamentalism is not even mentioned. Nevertheless, the anthology is an important book to discuss for people who are interested, not only in the ability of a few to choose, but in the emancipation of all women from violence, poverty, brutality and patriarchal control. |
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