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Gender and Reproduction - Coggle Diagram

- - - - Reproduction is often mobilised as a way of exploring what the significance of sex is and what the significance of gender is
    - - Debates surrounding 'breast' vs 'chest/body feeding'
  - - - 1960s feminist theorists, using Marxist theory, argued reproduction has been employed to establish hierarchies and patriarchal oppression
        
        Shulamith Firestone
        
        Identifies cis-gender women's reproductive capacities as absolutely foundational to gender inequality/hierarchy
        
        A biological reality, rather than something socially contingent/manufactured
        
        Women are made inferior by their ability to experience pregnancy
        
        Considers childbirth 'barbaric'
        
        Argues that care responsibilities and dependency on men naturally follow this biology
        
        She says, however, that despite this being biological, does not mean we have to accept this as having to be determined
        
        In order to achieve women's liberation, we must work on reproductive technologies
        
        Ectogenesis
        
        Contraceptive
    - - 'Mother' as a socially contingent position within a patriarchal gender order, rather than as a biological consequence (Rich, 1976)
        
        Norms of motherhood are historically and culturally determined
        
        The 'naturalised' and 'idealised' figure of the full-time, stay-at-home mum which emerged during industrialisation
        
        Separation between the workplace and the domestic private home
        
        Demands that mothers suppress their own self-hood
        
        A child does not actually need a mother character to fulfil the demands of love and care
      - Black feminist critique
        
        Gender injustice is not necessarily the most harmful force
        
        Motherhood can be a site of superior self-expression
      - Mother's experience 'powerless responsibility' (Rich, 1976), insofar they are often unable to share the conditions within which they are responsible
      - HOWEVER
        
        Mothering can be a state of resistance and pleasure
        
        But we need to delink 'motherhood' form the possibilities and potentialities of 'mothering' (Rich, 1976)
    - - The idea that reproduction is a biological imperative that everyone (particularly women) should experience tat desire to do
        
        Thus, those not wanting to reproduce are ostracised and portrayed as miserable
        
        E.g. miserable childless cat lady
      - Heavily implicated in heteronormativity and the pathologisation of queerness (Edelman, 2004)
      - Reproduction is highly politicised at the population level
        
        Takes 9 people to support 1 person's pension
        
        UK population size will reduce unless women have 2.08 children each
        
        The actual fertility rate is below
    - - 'Eugenics'
        
        We should engage in socially engineering to prevent the reproduction of those believed 'inferior'
        
        E.g. minority ethnic groups and disabled people
        
        Pursued through positive and negative means
        
        Positive
        
        Financial incentives
        
        Negative
        
        Forced sterilisation
        
        Segregation
      - Argument that eugenics has been translated into economisation and disposability
        
        We decide that there are some people who will contribute to the gross domestic product and other who will not, and this will be inherited by their offspring
        
        The right to have a child becomes commodified
        
        Facilitates a realignment of geopolitical hierarchies by enabling extractive and exploitative treatment of the internal 'other' (Tidier 2022; Bhambra and Holmwood 2018)
      - These biopolitical and necropolitical rationales and practices view the womb as a site of danger, national pride, investments speculation, etc
    - - Implemented in 2017, limiting the number of children for whom a low income family can claim a means tested benefit
      - Policy doc claims the limit was not designed to shape fertility rates, though framed the 'collateral damage' of reduced fertility as a good thing
      - Misogynistic and classist narratives around those on benefits
        
        Women having children purely to claim benefits
      - Disproportionately impacts multiply marginalised women
        
        E.g. poor, minority ethnic, and from particular religious communities
        
        The UK has a large Desi population which this affects
      - Impoverished millions of women and children
        
        Shaping the conditions of parenting/social reproduction
  - - - Abortion was criminalised in 1961 under the Offences Against the Person Act
      - Abortion Act 1967
        
        While abortion is still a crime, this act acts as a defence for women/doctors committing an abortion
        
        Under certain conditions:
        
        The pregnancy is within 24 weeks
        
        The pregnancy causes risk to the woman
        
        Risk of abnormalities for the child
    - - Pregnant capable people cannot hope to achieve equality if they are not permitted to control their reproductive rights
      - Pregnant people must be permitted to chose
      - Laws which subjugated pregnant capable people's physical and mental wellbeing to the perceived needs of a foetus are incommensurate with a liberal order
        
        A woman should not be legally held to risk her own life for a foetus/ another
    - - While many feminists would say abortion is a precondition to achieving reproductive justice, it hides many of the social conditions within women exist
        
        Ignores other inventions into the reproductive lives of marginalised women
        
        E.g. forced sterilisation
        
        Universalises white middle class women's experiences of reproductive oppression
        
        Fails to recognise this group of people who would like to have children, bit would rather have an abortion as they do not have the resources to parent
  - - - Social movement and political philosophy which looks as reproductive as a political issue which needs to be addressed on multiple fronts
      - We cannot think of abortion alone
        
        We must consider it alongside other reproductive social justice and intersectional issues
      - Centres black and minority women's experiences of reproduction
        
        Questioning the centrality of abortion
      - Embraces polyvocality and plurality
    - - the right to have a child
      - the right not to have a child
      - the right to parent the child you have in safe and healthy environments
- - - - Marxist Theory of the Waged Worker
        
        A primary feminist analysis of Marx is how capital rules and develops through the wage
        
        The wage being the dividing line between productive and non-productive work and between potential power and powerlessness
        
        Modern industry provides the conditions for workers to associate, unionise and revolt
        
        The family is a bourgeoise institution
        
        Founded on private gain
        
        According to the left, as housewives, women are not suffering from capital but from the absence of it
        
        Dividing line between the productive industry work and the non-productive work of being in the household
        
        The strategy for revolution for Marxists is to enter the bedrooms and kitchens
        
        Why don't we consider the housewife as a revolutionist?
        
        Capitalism is happening in the home
      - Recognising Housework as Work
        
        Nobody wants to invest in the housewife as a revolutionary subject
        
        But housework is the subtlest violence of capitalism
        
        The waged worker is exploited but can also bargain and revolt
        
        Wage means you are part of a social contract
        
        Housework has not only been imposed on women but transformed into a natural attribute
        
        Capital had to convince us that it is natural and even fulfilling
        
        When housework is not considered as work, we are prevented from struggling against it
        
        Complaints are no longer revolt, but nagging (Federici, 12)
        
        Labour and work translated into 'love'
      - Demand for Wages
        
        Wages against housework as a political perspective, not a literal thing
        
        By denying housework a wage and transforming it into an act of love, capital has in essence got a lot of work for free
        
        Women seeking housework as the best thing in life
        
        Disciplining the male worker with his own servant
        
        Naturalising housework as a feminine attribute
    - - Sexuality and Capitalism: Heterosexuality
        
        Subordination of sexuality to the reproduction of labour power means that heterosexuality has been imposed on us as the only acceptable sexual behaviour
        
        Sexual contact with women is forbidden because in bourgeoise morality, anything that is unproductive is obscene, unnatural, and peverted
      - Queer Social Reproduction
        
        Reproduction is not something that is contained in the household, but extends to all sites of society
        
        Wages Due Lesbians, 1980s
        
        Lesbians who began to articulate their demands as political
        
        Published a form listing the types of emotional labour expected from them under Thatcher's neoliberalism
        
        Outlined that being a lesbian meant challenging racism, ableism, classism, etc in a variety of contexts
        
        Provided queer women the economic power to afford sexual choice
      - Trans Social Reproduction
        
        Analysing the many forms of work that reproduce queer and trans social life and survival
        
        Transition as work (Giles 2019)
        
        Inaccessibility of heteronormative household for many queer people (Cohen and Monk 2016)
        
        Meaning you don't have anyone to sustain you even while you work
        
        Thus queerness is precarity
        
        Reproductive labour is on the street, outside the household, in community
        
        Labour is both the work of resistance and of unpaid labour that is necessary
    - - Tithi Bhattacharya
        
        If human labour is central to our understanding of capitalism, and not commodities, how can we specify human labour?
        
        Marx often thought that the reproduction which happened within the household, also exists within commodities
        
        Feminists, in response, required us to specify the category of labour
        
        Who works?
        
        How?
        
        Under what conditions?
        
        Intersectional questions
      - Capitalism is not just an economic system
        
        Rather it is a wider social reproductive system sustains accumulation
      - Production of goods and services and production of life are part of in integrated system
  - - - People who protest capitalism are not always the workers
      - Questions about access to the commons
    - - At a global scale, the backend work of the work is sent to global majority worlds
      - People who live in countries that have been continually extracted now work in Export Processing Zones, or factories, or in call centres to do the kind of invisible maintenance work necessary for the world's economy to survive (Ong, Freeman, Salzinger)
      - Racialised, sexualised, and gendered work has always been naturalised on to certain bodies
    - - Reproductive Labour shaped by:
        
        Destroying subsistence economies
        
        Financialization of economies
        
        Shrinking commons
        
        Neoliberal austerity
        
        Childcare
        
        Bursaries
        
        Care work
    - - Three-tier transfer of reproductive labour among women in sending and receiving countries of migration
      - Migrant women (as well as class-privileged women) purchase lower-wage household services of poorer women
      - Race and/or class privilege is used to transfer their reproductive labour with responsibilities to less privileged women
    - - Third world women take on the burden of first world women's liberation from domesticity
        
        This causes a 'care drain' and a 'global heart transplant'
        
        The global domestic labour market siphons off affective energies away from the poor countries of the world as third world women fracture households and leave families motherless and wifeless