Primum Mobile: Women and Auto/mobility in the Era of the Great War

Abstract: This article explores the construction of Andrea Dworkin as a public persona, or a ‘feminist icon’, revered by some and demonized by others. It argues that in both her fiction and non-fiction, Dworkin engaged in a process of writing herself as an exceptional woman, a ‘feminist militant’ as she describes herself in the subheading of her 2002 memoir, Heartbreak. The article illustrates Dworkin's autobiographical logic of exceptionalism by comparing the story told in Heartbreak to the story of Dworkin's major novel, Mercy, which features a heroine, Andrea, who shares Dworkin's name and significant biographical details. While Dworkin has insisted that Mercy is not an autobiographical novel, the author undertakes a reading here of Mercy as the story of Dworkin if she had not become the feminist icon of her own and others' construction. In Mercy, Andrea unsuccessfully attempts to escape the silent, victimized status that Dworkin has insistently argued is imposed upon women. In her repeated victimization, Andrea functions for Dworkin as an ‘everywoman’ who both embodies Dworkin's world-view and highlights how Dworkin's own biography exists in tension with some of her central assumptions about women, gender and contemporary society.     

The Virtual Speculum in the New World Order

Beginning by reading a 1992 feminist appropriation of Michelangelo's Creation of Adam - in a cartoon in which the finger of a nude Adamic woman touches a computer keyboard, while the god-like VDT screen shows a disembodied fetus - ‘Virtual Speculum’ argues for a broader conception of ‘new reproductive technologies’ in order to foreground justice and freedom projects for differently situated women in the New World Order. Broadly conceptualized reproductive practices must be central to social theory in general, and to technoscience studies in particular. Tying together the politics of self help and women's health movements in the United States in the 1970s with positions on reproductive freedom articulated within the Legal Defense and Educational Fund of the NAACP in the 1990s, the paper examines recent work in feminist science studies in several disciplinary and activist locations. Statistical analysis and ethnography emerge as critical feminist technologies for producing convincing representations of the reproduction of inequality. Untangling the semiotic and political-economic dialectics of invisibility and hypervisibility, ‘Virtual Speculum’ concludes by linking the well-surveyed amniotic fluid of on-screen fetuses and the off-frame diarrhea of uncounted and underfed infants in regimes of flexible accumulation and structural adjustment.     

re-negotiating reproductive technologies: the ‘public foetus’ revisited

In debates over abortion, the foetus and the woman have been continually positioned as antagonists. Given the stakes involved in such debates about personal integrity, individual responsibility, life and death, it is no wonder that many radical feminist authors have concentrated on refocusing the attention on women and away from the disembodied foetus. Such writers have worked hard to decode and deconstruct the public foetus in our midst and have mobilized interpretative tools such as cultural criticism to contextualize the production and consumption of foetal images. Barbara Duden's book, The Public Foetus, is an important and interesting contribution to this effort, which is still taken up by authors writing in this field. Duden's strategy is to seek to remind us (and in particular those who are involved in reproductive medicine) that pregnancy is concentrated in the embedded pregnant woman rather than the disembodied ‘public foetus’ and she attempts to retrieve the embodied woman as the site of pregnancy through what Michaels has termed a ‘fetal disappearing act’. While this may create as many problems for women as it resolves, I would argue that, while the ‘public foetus’ continues to loom large in the politics of abortion and women's positions in relation to the new reproductive technologies remain contested, Duden's work remains important in the continuing debate about how women's reproductive freedom can be continually re-negotiated and re-established.     

forbidden tastes: queering the palate in anglophone Indian fiction

We examine pregnant women’s experiences with routinised obstetric ultrasound as entailed in their antenatal care during planned pregnancies. This paper highlights the ambiguity of ultrasound technology in the constitution of maternal–foetal connections. Our analysis focusses on Australian women’s experiences of the ontological, aesthetic and epistemological ambiguities afforded by ultrasound. We argue that these ambiguities offer possibilities for connecting to the foetus in ways that maintain a kind of unknowability; they afford an openness and ethical responsiveness irrespective of the future of the foetus. This suggests that elucidating women’s experience has implications for theorising ethics across maternal–foetal relations and, more specifically, for the ‘moral pioneering’ (Rapp, 2000) that reproductive technologies can demand of women. Moral pioneering cannot be reduced to moments or processes of decision-making; it must allow for greater recognition of the affective commitments entailed in and incited by ultrasound. Furthermore, focussing on experiences of the ambiguity of ultrasound allows for understanding the ways in which affectivity circulates across domains commonly understood as medical or social, public or private. In doing so, it contributes to undermining a series of tensions that currently shape feminist analysis of obstetric ultrasound, often at the expense of the experience of women.     

The Warnock report: The politics of reproductive technology

The Warnock Report (the report of the Committee of Inquiry into Human Fertilisation and Embryology, requested by the government of Great Britain) is a crucial text in the discourse on reproductive technologies. This paper is an investigation of the Report to find out exactly what is being said about women's bodies. I explore the relationship between the state and science, between ideology and technology, and the attempt of the Warnock Inquiry to construct a meaning of technology practice.After a brief introduction, the scope of the report is considred in part I. Part II discusses the Inquiry's treatment of infertility and the family. It includes sections on artificial insemination, invitro fertilisation, egg donation and surrogacy. The analysis reveals the Inquiry's preoccupation with the meaning of motherhood and social control of breeding. Women as women are not a presence in the discourse. Part III covers the Report's consideration of scientific research. I show that genetics is an inextricable part of research associated with artificial reproduction and that there exists an undercurrent eugenic meaning of genetics in the discourse on reproductive technology. An epilogue ties together the main points of my analysis.In short, what the text of the Report revealed was that the state and science require that women's bodies be available to serve the patriarchal nuclear family and the needs of scientists. The state empowers science because politicized technologies can be utilized by the state to intervene in population control. This is the logic behind eugenics and the policing of women's sexuality via reproductive technologies.     

‘Why do we need all this?’ A call against genetic engineering and reproductive technology

The central argument of this article is that the discussion on the new reproduction technology should not start with these technologies as such and their possible benefits and abuses but with the basic question whether we need this technology at all, whether the fundamental problems of women in capitalist-patriarchal societies can be solved by technology. According to the author, genetic engineering and reproductive technology are not only not capable of solving any of these questions, they are destructive to a human relation to our bodies, nature, other peoples. Exploitative and oppressive relations cannot be overcome by more sophisticated technology-even if it were in the hands of women—but only by a revolutionizing of these relations.     

Testing the reproductive hypothesis: or what made working-class women sick in early Victorian London

Using patient case records from University College Hospital in London in the 1830s and 1840s, this article re-evaluates the reproductive model of Victorian women's health. The women who were admitted to UCH were working-class women, and the evidence from the patient records suggests that their understandings of their bodies both conflicted with and supported the Victorian medical model of women as biologically fragile and delicate as a result of their reproductive functions. The female patients represented their bodies as essentially strong, but also recognized that this strength was very tenuous. Rather than concentrating solely on internally induced causes of ill health, the patients stressed socio-economic reasons for becoming sick.     

Maternal Responsibility and Traceable Loss: medicine and miscarriage in twentieth-century Australia

This article historicises the meaning of miscarriage in twentieth century Australia. It identifies a number of crucial turning points in scientific interpretations of the causes and treatments of miscarriage that produced shifts in the communication of responsibility to women for their own pregnancy losses. It also describes the changes that a number of medical technologies, including pregnancy detection, foetal visualisation and assisted conception, have brought to bear on the pregnant and pre-pregnant body. These technologies proliferated a variety of forms of reproductive loss during a period in which women experienced enhanced prospects of conception, as well as foetal, infant and maternal survival.     

That’s One Heck of an “Unruly Horse” Riding Roughshod overr Autonomy in Wrongful Conception

The case of Rees v. Darlington Memorial Hospital N.H.S. Trustarises from a lower court backlash against the a prior decision of the British House of Lords in McFarlane v. Tayside Health Board. McFarlane holding that healthy children brought about by negligence in family planning procedures are blessings, and parents should therefore be denied the costs of child maintenance. But, would the House agree with the Court of Appeal in Reesthat the factual variation in that case of a disabled parent with a healthy child should form an exception? In tracing the appeal of Reesto the House of Lords, this note explores their Lordships’ refusal in principle to depart from McFarlane, as well as the invocation of an autonomy-based approach to address the harm of unsolicited parenthood. In reflecting on the extent to which the wrongful conception action can be said to reinforce the value of reproductive autonomy, this note argues, nevertheless, that Reesillustrates in another way a significant departure from McFarlane, but that this is still a turn in the wrong direction. Far from resonating with women’s diverse experiences of reproduction, the law of negligence continues to illustrate little respect for reproductive choice. Therefore, this note calls for a deeper understanding of autonomy, one that recognises and embraces the diversity of individuals’ reproductive lives.     

A child at any price?: An overview of issues in the use of the new reproductive technologies,and the threat to women

Since the advent of modern contraceptive techniques, sexuality and reproduction have been divided more than at any other time in human history. At first, this was seen as a liberating process for women, particularly for heterosexual women. Now, new reproductive technology has separated sexuality and the procreative process even further: a child can now be created without recourse to sexual intercourse. This too has been presented as a liberation for women. However, within this process men are gaining control of an experience uniquely female. The result of allowing this technological process to go unchecked could be the elimination of women and the development of artificial wombs.     

Gutter politics: women newsies and the suffrage press

The article examines the role of the suffrage news-seller in light of the important role official organs came to play for organisations within the movement and the competing claims the act of selling placed on women unaccustomed to venturing into the streets and facing public hostility. The argument draws on evidence from a variety of newspapers, with a particular emphasis on Votes for Women, to demonstrate the extent to which organisations tried to encourage and reward volunteers to sell papers. These positive appeals and testimonials found in the periodicals are read against the more ambivalent and negative accounts of the experiences of paper-sellers found in suffrage fiction and autobiographies which deal more directly with the personal costs of these attempts to raise the profile of the movement. The conclusion stresses how the contradictions between such sources can offer insights into the dilemmas faced by women activists in these years.     

Sex research and the construction of sexuality: A tool of male supremacy?

The social construction of sexual knowledge is analyzed by examining the model of sexuality which underpins ‘scientific’ sex research. It is an essentialist model, in which ‘sex’ is equated with heterosexuality, and coitus is assumed to be a biological imperative; male violence against women is legitimated; and sexual practices based on dominance and submission are ‘normalized’ on the basis of biological determinism. Male-defined sex research can thus be seen as constructing and promoting, by means of spurious scientific legitimation, a model of sexualiy which both reflects and reproduces the interests of male supremacy. The particular form of male sexuality that exists under male supremacy has been ‘naturalized’ and ‘universalized’, and presented as the scientifically objective model, not merely of male sexuality, but of sexuality in general. Conceptions of female sexuality based on the same model must be rejected, if feminist sexual practices are to be developed.     

To Buy or Not to Buy? Vulnerability and the Criminalisation of Commercial BDSM

This paper examines the interaction of law and policy-making on prostitution, with that of BDSM (bondage and discipline, sadism and masochism). Recent policy and legal shifts in the UK mark out prostitutes as vulnerable and in need of ??rescue??. BDSM that amounts to actual bodily harm is unlawful in the UK, and calls to decriminalise it are often met with fears that participants will be left vulnerable to abuse. Where women sell BDSM sex, even more complex questions of choice, exploitation, vulnerability, power and agency might be thought to arise. Does the combination of activities take two singular behaviours into the realm of compound harm? Are those who sell BDSM doubly vulnerable in a way that would justify criminal intervention? This paper argues that in imposing categories of vulnerability, the state engages in the heteronormative construction of risky sexual subjects who must be rehabilitated, responsiblised or punished. Through an examination of existing empirical studies on BDSM, the paper offers a feminist critique of the potential criminalisation of commercial BDSM and calls for more research on the lived experiences of those who buy and sell BDSM.     

the gift of gametes – unconscious motivation,commodification and problematics of genealogy

Three-way baby making is not new: genetic surrogacy existed in Biblical times and donor insemination was recorded in Britain over 200 years ago. However, the gift of gametes between women breaks all social conventions. This paper examines the phenomenon of gamete-donation questioning whether a ‘gift’ of such magnitude can ever be ‘free’ (as the Human Fertilisation & Embryology Authority advocates), or a ‘true’ gift (in Derridian terms). Exploration of this unprecedented ‘gift’ from a psychoanalytic approach is supplemented by an interdisciplinary one, drawing on the gift literature in philosophy, anthropology, ethnography and socioeconomics, as well as neonatal research and reproductive medicine. Critics note the dearth of analyses that take seriously the psychological ramifications of contemporary treatments, protocols and expectations in reproductive medicine. Based on psychoanalytic therapy within a clinical practice devoted to reproductive issues, the author argues that institutionalised asexual reproduction alters unconscious conceptualisations of the act of procreation – converting the passionate intimacy of primal scene into a clinical coupling of gametes in a mechanised arena. The author argues that, too charged to contemplate, the gamete's transcendent quality and blurring of elementary personae/res distinctions leads protagonists, including professionals, to defensive commodification. Multiple emotional meanings are ascribed to gifted gametes by each in the triangle of donor, recipient and offspring, illustrated here with verbatim material. This article addresses some of the far-reaching socio-political consequences for class, race, age, gender and sexuality of asexual reproduction, related to selection procedures and uneven global and local distribution of fertility treatment and its cost in financial, physical, practical and emotional terms. Similarly, feminist unease over (patriarchal) reproductive control and gatekeeping policies are considered, as well as ethical concerns over genetic manipulation, pre-implantation screening, sex selection, selective foetocide and potential exploitation of transnational donors and surrogates.     

Foetal politics and the birth of an industry

In early Western society, women were considered to have a minor role in the reproductive process. Their social status was, correspondingly, secondary. Since the eighteenth century, women's contribution to procreation has been widely accepted, yet their social status remains. Women's importance in the reproduction of the species has not guaranteed them social prestige and the argument of this paper is that women's social standing is being further assaulted by the legal and economic consequences of innovations in birth technology. Two well-publicized innovations, Artificial Insemination by Donor, and In-Vitro Fertilization (or ‘test-tube babies’) have provoked legal, political and economic considerations which focus upon the possibilities of extensive bioengineering. The significance of this for women is that birth technology is not being fashioned after the interests of its clients but, instead, is becoming a new mercantile frontier in which women's needs may well be eclipsed by commercial and political ambitions.     

immigrating into the occupation: Russian-speaking women in Palestinian societies

This article explores sex selective abortion (SSA) as a form of structural violence within the broader notion of women’s ‘protection’ in contemporary India. While SSA tends to be framed more generally within ethical and choice-based frameworks around abortion access and reproductive ‘rights’, and specifically in India around preference for sons as a discriminatory, cultural, technological misogyny, this article argues that sex selective abortion in India needs to be understood as an outcome of broader systemic economic, political and social processes. The deepening of neoliberal values through state policies has impacted significantly on social relations, shaping SSA as a manifestation of structural violence. State-driven policies in India reflect a neoliberal governmentality through state patriarchy that is implicit within the neoliberal developmental, governmental and capitalist paradigm of contemporary India. This article argues that SSA is structurally produced and therefore cannot be remedied through awareness-raising strategies such as beti bachao or financial inclusion as a means to ‘protect’ or ‘save the girl child’. Indeed, it is neoliberal economic forces that actively, though seemingly inadvertently, promote anti-women, sex selective abortion as a reproductive strategy, which is then disciplined through neoliberal governmentality. This highlights SSA as a form of gendered and structural, rather than discriminatory, violence.     

The image of women in Hinduism

Lively discussions on the nature of women went on for a very long time in ancient India. Women were so virtuous that they outnumbered men in heaven. God therefore spread vices among women to make heaven secure for men alone. Mythically conceived, as it is, the concept of dependence of women on men and their faithfulness and servility to husbands was deeply implanted in society. Legendary characters like Sita, Savitri and Parvati, all noted for their devotion to and dependence on husbands were eulogised and kept alive not only by the media but also by the national leaders. Although there were reputable women philosophers, teachers, poets and thinkers, none of them is a model for Hindu women. From the time a male heir became essential for the inheritance and concentration of personal property, and also for the continuance of the lineage, women served only as a means through which these were to be achieved: it is ideal wifehood and not ideal womanhood that Hindus upheld through the ages. In spite of recent legislation in India recognising women's independent entity, the over-all economic conditions of the country makes the dependent image of women still relevant today.     

a migrant ethic of care? negotiating care and caring among migrant workers in London's low-pay economy

A care deficit is clearly evident in global cities such as London and is attributable to an ageing population, the increased employment of native-born women, prevalent gender ideologies that continue to exempt men from much reproductive work, as well as the failure of the state to provide viable alternatives. However, while it is now acknowledged that migrant women, and to a lesser extent, migrant men, step in to provide care in cities such as London, there is less research on how this shapes the nature, politics and ethics of care. Drawing upon empirical research with low-paid migrant workers employed as domiciliary care providers in London, this paper explores the emergence of a distinct migrant ethic of care that is critically shaped by the caring work that migrant women and men perform.     

Remotely sensed: a topography of the global sex trade

Voluntarily or not, women are moved in great numbers from Manila to Nigeria, from Burma to Thailand, and from post-socialist countries to Western Europe: female geobodies in the flow of global capitalism. The recently released 53-minute video essay Remote Sensing by the Swiss artist and video director Ursula Biemann traces the routes and reasons of women who migrate into the global sex industry. Taking a geographical approach to trafficking, the video develops a particular visual language generated by new media and satellite technologies, which traces the migration of women in the age of digital images.All stills are taken from the video that was shot in the Philippines, Thailand, California, and the German–Czech border.