Reading Need help on my assignment

This assignment can be completed at any point in the quarter. The write-up should be saved as a pdf and uploaded to Canvas no later than Nov 29 by 11:59pm.

Attend a campus event focused on feminist or social justice issues and write a 650-750-word report(2.5-3 pages double-spaced) on the event and its connections to themes we are exploring in this course. Write as if you were explaining the event to friends who did not attend the event and are not in Femst 20: make sure you describe key aspects of the event and clearly define the course concepts and themes that you are discussing.

In your report, identify:

the main theme(s) of the event
who was in attendance and how they participated / how they responded
your experience of the event and how you responded personally and/or politically
connections to at least 2 ideas presented in our course readings, referring to specific page numbers and properly citing the relevant sources.

This assignment should properly cite all materials referenced and follow either MLA or APA style guide (ask your TA if they have a preference).

A provisional list of events will be posted and periodically updated on the course Canvas page. If you would like to attend an event that is not included on this list, please consult with your TA and/or the instructor to see if it is a good fit for this assignment.

Why is this a useful Femst 20 assignment?

This assignment is meant to help you recognize how ideas and concepts discussed in the course apply to issues and struggles happening outside of the classroom. It is also meant to help you develop your ability to choose among different forms and styles of writing.

Carrie Rentschler / 56. #safetytipsforladies 581

in Social Movements and the Transformation of American Health Care, edited by Jane Banaszak-Holl, Sandra Levitsky, and Mayer N. Zald. New York: Oxford University Press.

Taylor, verta, and Nancy Whittier. 1992. “Collective Identity in Social Movement Communities: Lesbian Feminist Mobili- zation.” Pp. 104–129 in Frontiers in Social Movement The- ory, edited by Aldon D. Morris and Carole McClurg Mueller. New Haven: Yale University Press.

valenti, Jessica. 2007. Full Frontal Feminism. Berkeley, CA: Seal Press.

van Dyke, Nella, Sarah Soule, and verta Taylor. 2004. “The Tar- gets of Social Movements: Beyond a Focus on the State.” Pp. 27–51 in Authority in Contention, Vol. 25, edited by Daniel J. Myers and Daniel M. Cress. Oxford: JAI Press.

van Laer, Jeroen. 2010. “Activists ‘Online’ and ‘Offline’: The Internet as an Information Channel for Protest Demonstra- tions.” Mobilization 15(3): 405–417.

Wall, Melissa A. 2007. “Social Movements and Email: Expres- sions of Online Identity in the Globalization Protests.” New Media and Society 9(2): 258–277.

Warner, Russ. 2013. Who Wastes More Time at Work: Mil- lennials, Gen X’ers or Boomers? New York: AOL. Retrieved July 3, 2014 (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/russ-warner/ who-wastes-more-time- at-w_b_2618279.html).

Williams, Ray B. 2013. Do Facebook and Other Social Media Encourage Narcissism? New York: Sussex Publishers. Retrieved July 3, 2014 (http://www.psychologytoday.com/ blog/wired-success/ 201306/do-facebook-and-other-social- media-encourage-narcissism).

White, Robert W. 1989. “From Peaceful Protest to Gue- rilla War: Micromobilization of the Provisional Irish Republican Army.” American Journal of Sociology 94(6): 1277–1302.

Whittier, Nancy. 1995. Feminist Generations: The Persistence of the Radical Women’s Movement. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.

Yaeger, Taryn. 2012. Who Narrates the World? The OpEd Project 2012 Byline Report. New York: The OpEd Project. Retrieved August 2, 2013 (www.theopedproject.org/index.php?option= com_ content&view=article&id=817&Itemid=149).

READING 56

#safetytipsforladies: Feminist Twitter Takedowns of Victim Blaming

Carrie Rentschler

#safetytipsforladies: A hashtag about how tired women are of being told to do stupid, ineffective, unrealis- tic things to avoid being raped. (Hilary Bowman-Smart 2013a)

HILARY BOWMAN-SMART started #safteytips- forladies on March 21, 2013 out of exaspera- tion with dominant victim blaming anti-rape

advice-giving after reading yet another article advising women how to take a risk management approach to their own safety. As she explained on her blog,

I am absolutely sick to death of being told what to wear and what to do and how to be, as though any of that will somehow save me from being raped. It’s not a woman’s responsibility to prevent sexual assault. How about we teach men not to rape instead? ( Hilary Bowman-Smart 2013b, emphasis in original)

Before March 2013, Twitter hashtags like #SafteyTips- ForWomen shared traditional self-defense tips that

focused on potential victims’ (usually women’s) bodies and behaviors. While women can develop resistance strategies and knowledge of how to fight back against violence, most rape prevention work still places pri- mary responsibility for stopping rape on those who are targeted for this violence (see Rachel Hall 2004; Car- ine Mardorossian 2002; Martha McCaughey 1998; Carrie A. Rentschler 1999). Tweets using #safetytips- forladies called out the victim-blaming focus of most rape prevention, shifting attention from the issue of women staying safe, according to a source at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), to how to stop rape (“Stop Rape” 2013).

After Bowman-Smart’s tweet, others followed suit, humorously tweeting with the hashtag to mock the advice-giving tropes of traditional rape prevention

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582 Part IV: Social Change

a “symbolic rerouting” of anti-rape discourse, an “event marked by … a change of direction” in how we talk about and politicize sexual violence and its prevention (2013, 156). Today, #safetytipsforladies and other feminist hashtag generation around victim blaming responses to sexual violence, like #YesAll- Women (Samantha C. Thrift 2014), provide particu- larly visible examples of how social media can be used to redirect attention in feminist responses to sexual violence from campaigns rooted in the behavior of the survivor to those that target the actions of those who might rape.

Read as a collectivizing feminist response to rape culture, #safetytipsforladies reveals the femi- nist delight in exposing misogynist, victim-blaming ideas through humor, in ways that resonated around the Internet. Feminist blogs and the online press registered the impact and virality of the feminist hashtag through their “best of” and “favorites” lists. For Madeline Davies (2013) of Jezebel, “the women of Twitter took over something dumb and made it into something awesome.” In this way, the humor of #safteytipsforladies explains both its spread and the memetic remaking of feminist jokes that respond to victim blaming attitudes and slut-shaming rhet- oric (see Limor Shifman 2014, 94–96). In the pro- cess, #safetytipsforladies helped change the terms of feminist debate about sexual violence, drawing broader media attention to feminist rape prevention discourse through the derisive laughter that ener- gizes current feminisms (Susan Douglas 2010, 22). The hashtag activism of #safetytipsforladies illus- trates how humor nurtures a politics of joy and resil- ience in the face of rape culture and its apologists. Alongside the feminist feeling structures of rage and exasperation in the fight against the pernicious vic- tim blaming of so much rape prevention, feminist hashtag humor asserts the value of hijacking spaces of discussion and commentary online, articulating feminist critique in ways that also, importantly, make us laugh.

R E F E R E N C E S

Bing, Janet. 2007. “Liberated Jokes: Sexual Humor in All-Fe- male Groups.” Humor 20 (4): 337–366.

Bowman-Smart, Hilary. 2013a. “Chronicling the Unex- ceptional.” Tumblr, March 20. Accessed July 11, 2014. h t tp : / / pa s y l r ee . tumb l r. com/pos t /45816844116 / safetytipsforladies-a-hashtag-about-how-tired.

discourse. Tweets by Kayla @fangirl124 and FemArm- ChairRegime @femarmchairregime joked that women should don chain mail or three sweat suits, a ski mask, and sleeping bag to avoid rape, using hyperbolic exaggeration to reveal the irrational vic- tim-blaming logic behind the idea that what women wear makes them more susceptible to sexual assault. Bonnie Dean @BonDean deployed a humorous visual meme to suggest that women should leave their vagi- nas at home before they go out, referencing comic Wanda Sykes’ stand-up routine where she jokingly advised the same, while Lesley @jarvgirl suggested that women should have a 404 Error code tattooed around their bikini line. Mikki Kendall (@Karnythia), creator of the hashtag #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen (2013), called out victim-blaming rape prevention by stating that most advice tells women to “stop being a woman in public. #safetytipsforladies” (March 25, 2013).

That women turned to Twitter to express their exasperation with rape prevention advice is quite revealing, for they simultaneously hijacked typical prevention discourse and repopulated Twitter chan- nels with a different kind of peer-to-peer advice giv- ing. Tweets using the hashtag were quickly generated and recirculated, demonstrating how humor fuels the dissemination of feminist ideas via social media (see Bing 2007). Noting the speed with which the hashtag caught on, feminist bloggers commented on the absurdity of most anti-rape advice directed at women, emphasizing the need to “shift the focus to the ones doing the raping instead” (HarlotOverdrive 2013). While tweets collectivized expressions of fem- inist “fed-upness” (Carrie A. Rentschler 2014), #safe- tytipsforladies also indexed suggestions for solving the problem of rape in ways others found useful (e.g., Kristina Chew 2013). Tweets such as Kate Wood’s @ gimmepanda combined satirical jabs at the individu- alizing, paranoia-producing “tips” format of anti-rape risk management advice while also criticizing the stranger danger paradigm of rape prevention. Rape Crisis Scotland’s humorous 2012 campaign “Top Ten Tips to End Rape,” re-tweeted with #safetytips- forladies, tells men how not to rape by, among other things, advising men to carry whistles to warn poten- tial victims. While presented jokingly, the campaign nonetheless models how to make potential rapists responsible for their behavior.

As film scholar Yuriko Furuhata argues, media hijacks like those we see in feminist hashtags represent

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Alicia Garza / 57. A Herstory of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement 583

Kendall, Mikki. 2013. “#SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen: Women of Color’s Issue with Digital Feminism.” The Guardian, August 14. Accessed August 11, 2014. http:// www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/14/ solidarityisforwhitewomen-hashtag-feminism.

Mardorossian, Carine. 2002. “Toward a New Feminist Theory of Rape.” Signs 27 (3): 743–775.

McCaughey, Martha. 1998. Real Knockouts: The Physical Fem- inism of Women’s Self-Defense. New York: New York Univer- sity Press.

Rentschler, Carrie A. 1999. “Women’s Self-Defense: Physical Education for Everyday Life.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 26 (1): 152–161.

Rentschler, Carrie A. 2014. “Rape Culture and the Feminist Politics of Social Media.” Girlhood Studies 7 (1): 65–82.

Shifman, Limor. 2014. Memes in Digital Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

“‘stop rape’ dislodging ‘stay safe’ advice on social media.” 2013. CBC.ca Storify. Accessed October 16, 2014. https://storify.com/cbccommunity/both-sexes-boost- stop-rape-answer-to-stay-safe-adv.

Thrift, Samantha C. 2014. “#YesAllWomen as Feminist Meme Event.” Feminist Media Studies 14 (6): 1090–1092.

“TOP TEN TIPS TO END RAPE.” 2012. Glasgow: Rape Crisis Scotland.

Bowman-Smart, Hilary. 2013b. “#safteytipsforladies, or Why vic- tim-Blaming is Moronic.” Hilaroar (blog), March 21. Accessed July 11, 2014. http://hilaroar.tumblr.com/post/45957899437/ safetytipsforladies-or-why-victim-blaming-is.

Chew, Kristina. 2013. “Let’s be Honest: These are the 15 Best Safety Tips for Women.” The Care2 (blog), March 26. Accessed July 11, 2014. http://www.care2.com/causes/ best-15-safetytipsforladies-from-ladies-who-.

Davies, Madeline. 2013. “Women Take Over #safteytipsforladies and Make it 100 Times Better.” Jezebel (blog), March 25. Accessed July 11, 2014. http://jezebel.com/5992329/women- take-over-safetytipsforladies-and-make-it-100-times-better.

Douglas, Susan. 2010. Enlightened Sexism: The Seductive Message that Feminism’s Work is Done. New York: Times Books.

Furuhata, Yuriko. 2013. Cinema of Actuality: Japanese Avant- Garde Filmmaking in the Season of Image Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Hall, Rachel. 2004. “‘It Can Happen to You’: Rape Prevention in the Age of Risk Management.” Hypatia 19 (3): 1–19.

HarlotOverdrive. 2013. “#safteytipsforladies (or why I want you to stop telling me how I can prevent being sexually assaulted).” Harlot Overdrive: Sex, Culture, Nonsense (blog), March 20. Accessed July 11, 2014. http://harlotoverdrive. wordpress.com/2013/03/20/safetytipsforladies/.

READING 57

A Herstory of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement

Alicia Garza

I CREATED #BLACKLIvESMATTER with Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi, two of my sisters, as a call to action for Black people after seventeen-year-old

Trayvon Martin was posthumously placed on trial for his own murder and the killer, George Zimmerman, was not held accountable for the crime he commit- ted. It was a response to the anti-Black racism that permeates our society and also, unfortunately, our movements.

Black Lives Matter is an ideological and political intervention in a world where Black lives are system- atically and intentionally targeted for demise. It is an affirmation of Black folks’ contributions to this soci- ety, our humanity, and our resilience in the face of deadly oppression.

We were humbled when cultural workers, artists, designers, and techies offered their labor and love to expand #BlackLivesMatter beyond a social media hashtag. Opal, Patrisse, and I created the infrastruc- ture for this movement project—moving the hashtag from social media to the streets. Our team grew through a very successful Black Lives Matter ride, led and designed by Patrisse Cullors and Darnell L. Moore, organized to support the movement that is growing in St. Louis, MO, after eighteen-year old Mike Brown was killed at the hands of Ferguson Police Offi- cer Darren Wilson. We’ve hosted national conference calls focused on issues of critical importance to Black people working hard for the liberation of our people. We’ve connected people across the country working

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truth-telling and intellectual activism

by patricia hill collins

Speak the truth to the people

Talk sense to the people

Free them with reason

Free them with honesty

Free the people with Love and Courage

and Care for their-Being Mari Evans, from I Am a Black Woman (1970)

Mari Evans’ poem invokes the social and political upheaval of the

Civil Rights and Black Power movements in this country. Like others

of her generation, Evans rejected the separation between scholar-

ship and activism, school and society, thinking and doing. She wrote

poems, plays, children’s books, and a musical adaptation of Zora Neale

Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. Along with other artists,

intellectuals, and activists at the time, she engaged in multiple forms

of intellectual activism.

http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1177%2F1536504213476244&domain=pdf&date_stamp=2013-02-12

37WINTER 2013 contexts

I wonder how effec-

tively today’s scholars

and public intellectuals

speak the truth about

contemporary social

issues. New technolo-

gies have opened up

formerly unimaginable

ways for us to talk to

one another. We are swimming in information, but how much

of that information moves us closer to the truths that will sustain

us? Individuals can now see themselves on YouTube and post

their ideas on blogs with blinding speed. Yet for all this talk

and noise, what are we saying that is of value? Where are the

conversations that will spur contemporary intellectual activism?

Breathing life into ideas requires working across differences and

building communities in which dialogue is possible.

Today, in our increasingly corporate colleges and universities

and monopolistic mainstream media, we confront a contradic-

tory politics of inclusion and exclusion. Some of those from

formerly excluded groups now occupy positions of power and

authority inside the social institutions that once excluded them.

Many of these insiders engage in intellectual work. At the same

time, as the lyrics of global hip-hop remind us, far too many

people remain excluded.

As an American citizen, an African American woman from

a working-class background, and an academic who has expe-

rienced considerable upward social mobility, I am both an

insider and an outsider. Throughout my professional career, I

have struggled to gain clarity about how ever-shifting patterns

of belonging and exclusion have shaped the

contours of my intellectual activism.

Negotiating the contemporary politics of

knowledge production as an “outsider within”

raises some fundamental dilemmas. In a mis-

guided effort to protect standards, many of my

academic colleagues at different colleges and

universities derogate any work that is “popu-

lar” as less rigorous or scholarly. They see such

“political” work as nonacademic. Such norms

suppress the kind of engaged scholarship

that interests me and that is fundamental for

intellectual activism. But because ideas and politics are every-

where, the potential for intellectual activism is also everywhere.

speaking truth to power There are two primary strategies of intellectual activism.

One tries to speak the truth to power. This form of truth telling

uses the power of ideas to confront existing power relations.

On a metaphorical level, speaking the truth to power invokes

images of changing the very foundations of social hierarchy

where the less powerful take on the ideas and practices of the

powerful, often armed solely with their ideas. One can imagine

this process through the David and Goliath story of the weak

standing up to the strong, armed only with a slingshot (as relying

solely on the power of one’s ideas seems to be). A Google search

of the phrase “speak the truth to power” uncovers numerous

hits seemingly focused on confronting those who wield power

within existing social institutions.

My lengthy educational training was designed to equip

me to wield the language of power to serve the interests of

the gatekeepers who granted me legitimacy. My teachers did

not consider that I might choose to use those same weapons

to challenge much of what I learned, at least not as deeply as

I have actually done. While we may think of our educations

as our individual intellectual property, we quickly fi nd out that

powerful groups expect us to place our fancy degrees in service

to conservative political agendas. Power routinely claims that it

has a monopoly on the truth. Yet my education revealed multiple

truths, most of which were co-opted and repackaged to suit the

vested interests of the more powerful. The richness of alternative

points of view remained ignored, neglected, ridiculed, and/or

persecuted out of existence.

Much of my academic writing strives to

speak the truth to power, namely, to develop

alternative analyses of social injustices that

scholarly audiences will fi nd credible. Much

of my career as a sociologist has been spent

speaking the truth to power about race, class,

gender, and sexuality, yet race has been central.

I have focused on anti-racist discourse and prac-

tice that might catalyze people to think about

their worlds differently and, as a result, act

differently within them. My work constitutes

theoretical interventions in what counts as truth

about race and racism.

Contexts, Vol. 12, No. 1, pp. 36-39, 41. ISSN 1536-5042, electronic ISSN 1537-6052. © 2013 Temple University Press. Used by permission of Temple University Press. http://contexts.sagepub.com. DOI 10.1177/1536504213476244

Illustrations by Corey Fields

38 contexts.org

This is a difficult time to talk overtly about race; many

American citizens believe that we are living in a post-racial world.

The election of Barack Obama has simultaneously highlighted

the visibility of race and the difficulties of talking about it. In this

context, terms like “family,” “community,” “post-racial society,”

and “color blindness” are invoked by thinkers on both the left

and the right sides of the political spectrum, with racial subtexts

carried within what appears to be a newfound unity across the

historically divisive categories of race and gender. I think that if

we can change our thinking about race, we can do so about

gender, class, sexuality, religion, and citizenship too.

Speaking the truth to power in ways that undermine and

challenge that power is often best done as an insider. Some

changes are best initiated from within the belly of the beast.

Standing outside, throwing stones at the beast, and calling it

names won’t change much, except perhaps, to make the beast

more dangerous because now it no longer believes that its

underlings love it. Challenging power structures from the inside,

and working cracks in the system, requires learning to speak

multiple languages of power convincingly.

speaking truth to the people A second strategy of intellectual activism aims to speak the

truth directly to the people. In contrast to directing energy to

those in power, a focus that inadvertently bolsters the belief that

elites are the only social actors who count,

those who speak the truth to the people

talk directly to the masses. The distinction

here is critical. It’s the difference between

producing a memo that documents the

many cases of a boss’s bad behavior and

beseeches him or her to change his or her

ways and having a meeting with the staff to strategize ways

that they, individually and collectively, might deal with the boss

and the lines of authority that put them in the situation to begin

with. The former strategy speaks the truth to power—the latter

strategy speaks the truth to the people.

Mari Evans’ poem exemplifies this second form of truth tell-

ing. Evans demands much from intellectual activists by arguing

that ordinary, everyday people need truthful ideas that will assist

them in their everyday lives. Such truth-telling requires talking,

reason, honesty, love, courage, and care. For academics whose

horizons have been narrowed to preparing for the next reap-

pointment, promotion, and tenure committee meeting, or their

lecture for the huge introductory sociology class that meets at

9:00 a.m. three days a week like clockwork, this conception of

truth-telling constitutes a luxury that may be reserved for only

the most privileged faculty members. Who has time to talk with

every student, reason with the students, give them an honest

assessment of the required textbook, love them in ways that

empower and not demean, show the courage to try something

radically different, and express a level of basic care?

Intellectual activists who devote their attention to the public

can pay a high price. In the United States, scholars and activists

who place their education in service to their local publics are

routinely passed over for cushy jobs, fat salaries, and the chance

to appear on National Public Radio. In some areas of the globe,

speaking the truth to the people lands you not on cable television

but under house arrest, in jail, or killed. Contemporary American

intellectuals must remember that, when it comes to our ability

to claim the power of ideas, we are the fortunate ones. For

our parents, friends, relatives, and neighbors who lack literacy,

work long hours, and/or consume seemingly endless doses of

so-called reality television, the excitement of hearing new ideas

Because ideas and politics are everywhere, the potential for intellectual activism is also everywhere.

39WINTER 2013 contexts

that challenge social inequalities can be a rarity.

I am an intellectual whose scholarly work aspires to speak

the truth to power. Yet a sizable portion of my intellectual work

has also aimed to speak the truth to the people. Both forms of

truth telling are intertwined throughout my intellectual career,

with my books, journal articles, and essays arrayed along a

continuum with speaking the truth to power and speaking the

truth to the people on either end. Engaging these two forms of

truth telling within a singular work is challenging.

speaking in multiple registers My book, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Conscious-

ness and the Politics of Empowerment is written in multiple

registers, for scholarly audiences as well as non-academic Afri-

can American women. I faced a difficult challenge in crafting

this book. How could I write a book about African American

women’s intellectual production that would be accepted by

scholarly audiences that had long excluded and derogated this

group? How might I write a book that spoke directly to African

American women that they would find truthful, yet avoid the

risk of being dismissed by scholarly audiences (who controlled

publishing resources)? I had to find ways to examine the everyday

creativity and resistance of African American women within the

constraints of an academic discourse that

would not be seen by scholars as being too

popular or political. I also had to consider

how my arguments would be recogniz-

able to and useful for African American

women. And I had to sharpen my skills of

translation.

Because the material at that time was so new and I was

an unknown scholar, I knew that my publisher would recruit

scholarly reviewers to give my manuscript a thorough assess-

ment. Yet to shield my book from the power relations that

made African American women objects of scholarly knowledge,

I also developed ways of including African American women as

reviewers of my material.

I invited a few Afri-

can American women

undergraduates from

my University of Cin-

cinnati Africana Studies

courses to serve as

readers for chapters of

my manuscript. They

were bright, energetic,

primari ly working-

class students whose

childhoods in the Cincinnati metropolitan area had provided

them broad, heterogeneous networks of African American

friends, neighbors, and relatives. I was not interested in my stu-

dents’ ability to correct my English or inform me of how my book

might benefit from additional citations from the top scholarly

journals. Instead, I asked them to tell me what thoughts and

emotions the ideas in my book raised for them. Did the ideas

in Black Feminist Thought ring true for them? Could they think

of examples from their own experiences that illustrated and/or

contradicted the book’s main ideas? As I wrote and revised my

manuscript, I tried to incorporate both forms of truth-telling into

this one volume.

Black Feminist

Thought became

an award-winning

book. A fundamen-

tal reason for its

success has been its

ability to engage in

dual forms of truth

telling. The format

of the book enables

In heterogeneous democratic societies, finding ways to share important ideas with diverse groups of people is important.

40 contexts.org

the maquiladora syndrome by gloria gonzález-lópez

“So are you like all the

other researchers who

have been here, people

we have helped, who

collected their data and

then left, disappeared,

and never came back?

Are you like that?” The

director of a community-

based agency in Mexico

City confronted me with

this question when I

approached her about my recent research project.

“No, no!” I wanted to shout in response. “I am not that

kind of researcher, I am a feminist sociologist, an intellectual

activist!” But even as I heard myself refuting her accusations, I

knew that I would have to work hard to convince her that I was

not just another knowledge invader who was visiting Mexico

to interview people, extract their histories and collect a wealth

of rich data, all for her own professional benefit, and that of a

small intellectual elite.

This conversation haunted me as I traveled and lived in

four large Mexican urban centers (Ciudad Juárez, Guadalajara,

Mexico City, and Monterrey). Well endowed with prestigious

research grants, I was conducting ethnographic research on

incestuous relationships in Mexican families. In recent volunteer

work, I had learned from activists and mental-health profession-

als in Ciudad Juárez that research on sexual violence within the

family was completely invisible. This also validated my preliminary

research on this theme, led by my original interest in studying

this topic with immigrants.

With that research, I hoped to make good on my commit-

ments as a feminist and intellectual activist; I wanted to conduct

research that was urgently needed and useful. But I had heard

many complaints from local community workers about research-

ers from the north (as well as some Mexican institutions) who

make careers out of research on local communities in the global

south without giving anything back. The situation sounded

like the academic equivalent of the renowned maquiladoras,

or Mexican assembly plants that exploit cheap local labor to

produce goods for northern markets.

This “maquiladora syndrome,” as I came to think of it,

troubled me deeply and motivated me to explore ways to engage

in some form of professional reciprocity. I asked the director

how I could return the generous support her agency had given

me in identifying potential informants for my project. I was

startled when she responded, “Teach me what you know.” “But

what do I have to offer you?” I wondered. I thought about all

the knowledge I have accu-

mulated through years of

studying, teaching, and

writing in top-ranked U.S.

universities. Though I am

a tenured professor with a

hefty record of accomplish-

ment, when confronted

with the question of how to

genuinely give back to the

communities from which

I was “extracting” data, I

found myself speechless.

This humbling experience compelled me to rethink what

I know, and what I teach, and how knowledge circulating in

our intellectual communities might be of use to those situated

outside of them. I thought about all the work I have done on

Mexican immigrants and their sex lives, men and masculinity,

sexuality and violence, and feminist research methods. I shared

this list with the agency director, and together we designed

seminars and workshops for the professionals, activists, and

other women and men who were working in the trenches of

Mexico City.

In preparing for and participating in these seminars, I felt

deeply vulnerable. Rather than simply impose “northern know-

ing,” I struggled to figure out how to share ideas in ways that

would resonate with the complex social realities of these profes-

sional activists. I realized that if I really wanted to be a feminist

intellectual activist, I had to allow myself be transformed by the

ways of knowing that emerged from my conversations with

these people. As a Mexican immigrant myself, I have frequently

felt marginalized in intellectual circles located on the north side

of the border; now I was in a situation of privilege vis-à-vis these

community workers in the global south. For many of them, I

was “la doctora de Texas,” the Mexican who had made it in

the United States. I was the borderless immigrant, una feminista

without fronteras going back and forth both intellectually, and

in my own heart.

In refusing to participate in the intellectual maquiladora

syndrome, I learned that creativity and collaborative knowledge

production is rooted in vulnerability and openness. The con-

frontational woman who later became a supportive and loving

friend, the woman who moved me deeply when she said, “teach

me what you know” taught me many valuable lessons about

the politics of intellectual reciprocity and engaged research.

Gloria González-López is in the sociology department at the University of Texas at

Austin. She is the author of Erotic Journeys: Mexican Immigrants and Their Sex Lives.

41WINTER 2013 contexts

undergraduate and entering graduate students to access the

challenging concepts that they need to speak the truth to

power in the academy. To assist them in translating social theory,

I chose to use theoretical language in volume, and included a

glossary of terms that would encourage my readers to tackle

difficult ideas. Graduate students and scholars can access more

theoretical arguments about how oppressed groups can produce

oppositional knowledge that assists in their survival. The book

also serves as a point of entry for readers who are interested in

intersectional scholarship on race, class, gender, and sexuality.

Over the years, I have come to appreciate how people

apply the general arguments raised by the experiences of Afri-

can American women to their own situations. Black Feminist

Thought provides its readers with a shared space that validates

what each one brings to the table, yet enables them to gain

access to the knowledge of the other. It shows that, via pro-

cesses of translation, it is possible to bring these two seemingly

antithetical traditions of truth-telling closer together.

The recent rediscovery of public sociology in the United

States has provided institutional support, or at least a vocabulary,

for talking about issues of intellectual activism. In the current

climate of academic sociology, this idea of public sociology has

been elevated to a level of increased visibility that has given it

some legitimacy. Public sociology speaks to the desire that many

sociologists have to talk with and educate the public.

In heterogeneous democratic societies, finding ways to

share important ideas with diverse groups of people is impor-

tant. I have tried to make the main ideas of my intellectual

work accessible to broad, nontechnical audiences both inside

and outside of academia, combining academic rigor with acces-

sibility. I believe that our analyses of important social issues are

strengthened when we engage in dialogues, and speak with

people and not at them.

Those of us who participate in intellectual activism must

do a better job of engaging the public. How different our ideas

about families, schooling, immigration, and government would

be if we presented them not simply at academic conferences

but also at neighborhood public libraries, to groups of college

students, returning students, at parent education classes—and

even to our own families.

Patricia Hill Collins is Distinguished University Professor of Sociology at the Uni-

versity of Maryland. The preceding is adapted from her book, On Intellectual Activism

(Temple University Press, 2012).

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Printed from Oxford Research Encyclopedias, Communication. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a single article for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: University of California, Santa Barbara; date: 13 November 2023

Queer(ing) Reproductive Justice Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz, Department of Communication Studies, University of Iowa and Shui-yin Sharon Yam, Gender and Women Studies, University of Kentucky

https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.013.1195

Published online: 29 November 2021

Summary The history, principles, and contributions of the reproductive justice (RJ) framework to queer family formation is the nexus that connects the coalitional potential between RJ and queer justice. How the three pillars of RJ intersect with the systemic marginalization of LGBTQ people—especially poor queer people of color—helps clarify how the RJ framework can elaborate the intersectional understandings of queer reproductive politics and kin.

Keywords: reproductive justice, family, queer studies, reproduction, intersectionality, LGBTQ, queer studies and

communication

Subjects: Gender (Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Studies), Health and Risk Communication

Introduction

In June 2019, the National LGBTQ+ Taskforce published a tool kit entitled “Queering Reproductive Justice.” In it, the Taskforce outlined the ways in which reproductive justice (RJ) connected intimately with LGBTQ+ liberation movements as the RJ framework acknowledged how queer people were “impacted by intersecting forms of oppression” in their daily lives (National LGBTQ Taskforce, 2019, p. 6). In addition to outlining the barriers queer people faced in accessing healthcare, the report also outlined the shared legal histories and oppressions between the reproductive rights and justice movements and LGBTQ+ rights.

The Taskforce is not alone nor is it the first in identifying the intersections and coalition potential between RJ and LGBTQ+ advocacy. Long-standing alliances between reproductive politics and LGBTQ+ struggles exist—these include, for example, shared resistance to state interference in sexual expression, reproduction, and family formation, and affirmations of kin outside of White middle-class heteronuclearity (Enke, 2007; Samek, 2016; Thomsen & Morrison, 2020). Explicit assertions of this alliance are increasingly commonplace. In 2007, Miriam Zoila Pérez, a queer Latinx reproductive justice activist and author of the groundbreaking Radical Doula Guide, penned an op-ed, also entitled “Queering Reproductive Justice,” in which she criticized a gay male leader in LGBTQ+ rights after he argued that it would be counterproductive for gay rights activists to take a stance on the federal abortion ban (Pérez, 2007). Pérez argued against divisive, single- issue advocacy that frames movements against one another, advocating instead for queer alliances with RJ through “shared principles based in the human rights to health and a desire for real social change” (Pérez, 2007, para. 6).

Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz, Department of Communication Studies, University of Iowa and Shui-yin Sharon Yam, Gender and Women Studies, University of Kentucky

https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.013.1195

https://oxfordre.com/communication/search?btog=chap&f_0=keyword&q_0=reproductive justice

https://oxfordre.com/communication/search?btog=chap&f_0=keyword&q_0=family

https://oxfordre.com/communication/search?btog=chap&f_0=keyword&q_0=queer studies

https://oxfordre.com/communication/search?btog=chap&f_0=keyword&q_0=reproduction

https://oxfordre.com/communication/search?btog=chap&f_0=keyword&q_0=intersectionality

https://oxfordre.com/communication/search?btog=chap&f_0=keyword&q_0=LGBTQ

https://oxfordre.com/communication/search?btog=chap&f_0=keyword&q_0=queer studies and communication

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Scholars across disciplines have taken up this call to cultivate coalitions across social movements by queering reproductive justice (Nixon, 2013; Price, 2017, 2018; Radi, 2020; Russell, 2018; Smietana et al., 2018; Stacey, 2018). This body of scholarship explores the following: how LGBTQ+ rights activists build political coalitions with other social movements and advocacy groups through the intersectional framework of RJ; how and whether activists can analyze and dismantle the legal, material, and sociocultural barriers queer people face in reproduction and family formation through RJ; and how researchers and activists can productively draw on the confluences of “stratified reproduction,” “reproductive justice,” and “queer reproductions” as three key theoretical frameworks with distinctive lineages. Scholars hold different perspectives on the queering of RJ: While some scholars advocate for applying “political intersectionality” to cultivate coalitions between RJ and the LGBTQ+ movements (Price, 2018, p. 596), others argue that not all queer reproduction and family-making fit within the RJ framework (Russell, 2018; Smietana, 2018) and critique the homonormative impulse entailed therein (Butler, 2002; Stacey, 2018). The conversation is broadly interdisciplinary, spanning fields such as anthropology, sociology, and increasingly communication studies in which scholars draw on critical frameworks that understand human communication as constitutive and world-making in the queering of RJ.

This article first provides a brief background and history of RJ before exploring existing tensions on queer(ing) RJ. Then the article traces two central tenets in queer(ing) RJ: first, how the RJ framework applies to the reproductive health and social lives of queer people in areas such as access to assisted reproductive technologies (ART), adoption, and gender-affirming healthcare; and second, how queer RJ opens up possibilities for coalitions among different forms of “disruptive families” that challenge the heteronuclear familial model (Smietana et al., 2018, p. 121).

The Reproductive Justice Framework

A term coined in 1994 by 12 U.S. Black feminists at a conference in Chicago, reproductive justice includes three pillars: “The right not to have a child; the right to have a child; and the right to parent children in safe and healthy environments” (Ross & Solinger, 2017, p. 9). Reproductive justice expands the scope and stakeholders of the dominant pro-choice movement, led primarily by White women, by addressing the multiple systems of oppression experienced by Black, Indigenous, and other women of color in their reproductive lives (Price, 2010). The reproductive justice framework, in other words, contextualizes reproductive politics and oppression in relation to other social justice issues such as racism and poverty. This alliance of Black women drew on the “epistemic privilege of the oppressed,” while also integrating the shared experiences among women of color organizers who were convening at international human rights gatherings, such as the International Conference of Population and Development in Cairo (Narayan, 1988, p. 34; Price, 2010). This collaboration marked the beginning of a broad and intersectional movement that would slowly transform reproductive rights politics in the United States and, increasingly, in

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global contexts as well. In recent years, scholars in feminist studies have examined and called for a transnational turn in reproductive justice (Bailey, 2011; Fixmer-Oraiz, 2013; Garita, 2015; Hernández & Upton, 2018; Jolly, 2016; Radi, 2020).

Working alongside other women of color in the United States through the SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Health Collective, the first SisterSong national conference in 2003 featured reproductive justice prominently in its programming (Ross & Solinger, 2017, p. 66). The reproductive justice framework proved pivotal in assembling a broad-based coalition that drew over 1.15 million people to the 2004 March for Women’s Lives and other grass-roots initiatives organized by women of color-led advocacy groups (Hayden, 2009; Silliman et al., 2016). Shortly thereafter in 2005, Asian Communities for Reproductive Justice (ACRJ) published a formative report that distinguished the reproductive justice (RJ) framework from those of reproductive health and reproductive rights. ACRJ clarified that while the reproductive health framework focused on enhancing access to reproductive healthcare, the reproductive rights framework “is a legal and advocacy model that serves to protect an individual woman’s legal right to reproductive health care services,” often with an emphasis on the individual’s right to privacy and to choice (Asian Communities for Reproductive Justice, 2005, p. 2).

Distinct but connected to these two frameworks, RJ is based on an intersectional approach to social injustices and oppression. While reproductive health and rights, respectively, emphasize the access to healthcare and legal infrastructure, RJ focuses on grass-roots organizing and coalition-building across advocacy organizations because reproductive oppression is the outcome of interlocking systems of power (Asian Communities for Reproductive Justice, 2005). As one of the cofounders, Loretta Ross, put it: “Reproductive Justice posits that the ability of any woman to determine her own reproductive destiny is directly linked to the conditions in her community and these conditions are not just a matter of individual choice and access” (Ross, 2006, p. 2). Rather than focusing on singular reproductive issues, such as abortion rights that preoccupied many White feminist activists, RJ focuses on “reproductive oppression” writ large, which Ross defined as “the control and exploitation of women, girls, and individuals through our bodies, sexuality, labor, and reproduction” (Price, 2010; Ross, 2006, p. 2). Given the multi-issue coalitional approach of RJ, scholars and advocates from across disciplines have used the framework to explore issues such as environmental justice, disability justice, immigration, transphobia, and prison reform (de Onís, 2012, 2015; Gaard, 2010; If/When/How, 2017; Olivera, 2018; Piepmeier, 2013; Radi, 2020; Smith, 2019).

RJ’s principles, approaches, and vision—including its focus on movement building across social causes—are shaped by intersectionality. A term coined by legal feminist scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989), but with a rich lineage traceable throughout the history of U.S. Black feminist activism and thought (Collins, 2008; Nash, 2019), the theory of intersectionality clarifies how marginalized people are often oppressed by multiple interlocking systems of power. In the context of reproductive politics, the mainstream pro-choice narrative grounded in “privacy” and “choice” fails to address the complexities of reproductive oppression for women marginalized by class, race, nation, and immigration—women for whom the right to have a child (or to parent children) has been violently curtailed through various mechanisms (e.g., eugenic state policies that rendered poor women and women of color particularly vulnerable to forced sterilization

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throughout most of the 20th century). Thus, an intersectional account of oppression in the context of reproductive politics significantly broadens the scope and potential impact of the movement.

As RJ scholar Kimala Price pointed out, intersectionality highlights “structural and institutional aspects of oppression” and sees “oppressions as overlapping and co-constituting” (Price, 2018, p. 594). Acknowledging structural intersectionality provides fertile ground for the RJ movement to bring together different marginalized communities—including Black women, Indigenous women, and queer and trans people—to organize in solidarity with one another (Price, 2010). As a multi-issue advocacy and movement-building network, for example, SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Collective encompasses organizations and groups that share common goals, albeit having their unique political concerns and emphasis; the organization also collaborates with other social justice and reproductive rights grass-roots advocacy groups, including Black Lives Matter, to address reproductive oppression at the nexus of gender, race, and class (Rankin, 2016).

While RJ is founded by Black women in the United States, the framework has transnational significance and relevance. In addition to RJ activists’ involvement in the 1994 U.N. International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo and the founding of a U.S. Women of Color Coalition for Reproductive Rights at the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing (Carrión), SisterSong co-authored a shadow report in 2014 for the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination with the Center for Reproductive Rights and the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health. Scholars have drawn on RJ frameworks to consider transnational women’s rights organizing (Carrión; Garita, 2015) to interrogate requisite sterilization for legal gender recognition by numerous states (Radi, 2020) and to think through the ethical terrain of transnational gestational surrogacy (Bailey, 2011; Fixmer-Oraiz, 2013). However, despite RJ’s transnational history and involvement, most existing scholarship and political agendas continue to center RJ in the U.S. context. Jallicia Jolly (2016) and Sharon Yam (2021) have called for more uptake of the RJ framework to interrogate transnational oppressions of multiply marginalized women and queer people of color and to cultivate coalitions across national contexts. While this article attempts to address this gap by exploring queer and reproductive justice outside of the United States, it is limited by the scope of existing scholarship and research.

In recent years, LGBTQ+ and RJ advocacy groups have been building coalitions to address shared concerns and intersecting structural oppressions. For example, SisterSong collaborated with the National LGBTQ Task Force and Ipas—an international organization on safe abortion rights and contraception—to put together an interactive online database that ranks different U.S. states based on their laws on reproductive and LGBTQ+ rights (National Organization for Women, 2006). In addition to queer reproductive justice activists like Miriam Zoila Pérez, who advocates for coalitions between the LGBTQ+ movement and RJ, a recent article in Out made the case that the two movements were interconnected, as queer people of color often face barriers in accessing inclusive and gender-affirming reproductive healthcare; LGBTQ+ people of color also face tremendous legal difficulties and prohibitive costs when they try to foster, adopt, or have biological children (Berg, 2019). Moreover, as Blas Radi (2020) explained, gender-affirming care is often pitted against reproductive rights: “For trans people in many countries, the resignation

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of their reproductive capacities has been, and still is, a condition to access the legal recognition of gender identity” (p. 398). Radi and others insisted that a reproductive justice framework was critical to addressing the complexity of reproductive oppression for queer people. Monica Simpson, the current executive director of SisterSong, explained that she came to RJ organizing after working, respectively, in prison reform and in an LGBTQ+ community center. She states:

In doing LGBTQ+ work, it couldn’t hold my Blackness. In doing work around the prison industrial complex, you couldn’t talk about queerness. [With RJ,] you didn’t have to check off the boxes at the door. . . . The Reproductive Justice Movement felt like my political homecoming.

(Cited in Berg, 2019, para. 6)

The reproductive justice framework has proven itself both powerful and nimble—a theoretical framework capable of understanding oppression as complex and multifaceted and an organizing strategy poised for unprecedented coalition building. Leading RJ scholars and activists Loretta Ross and Rickie Solinger have referred to reproductive justice as “open-source code,” encouraging others to draw on and expand its capacity, to use it well in order to build better worlds (Ross & Solinger, 2017, p. 71).

ART, Queer Family Formation, and Reproductive Justice

Reproductive justice meets a critical edge in its consideration of LGBTQ+ lives: Individuals for whom the ability to decide when, whether, and with whom to create a family is less straightforward. First, for LGBTQ+ couples who are interested in biological reproduction, many lack the physiological capacity to do so without some form of fertility assistance. Additional barriers stem from homophobic and transphobic beliefs that queer people will make unfit parents. Significantly, similar arguments about “fitness” have long been used to curtail the reproduction of poor women, women of color, immigrant women, and women with disabilities (Roberts, 1997; Solinger, 2007). Thus, myriad questions related to reproductive rights and justice emerge as a result. The second and third pillars of reproductive justice—“the right to have a child” and “the right to parent children in safe and healthy environments” (Ross & Solinger, 2017, p. 9)—are most central to LGBTQ-specific reproductive justice (RJ) struggles and thus the focus of this section.

The Right to Have a Child

Because the family and the nation-state are figured through White heteronuclear ideals in Western imaginaries, LGBTQ+ people face immense sociopolitical barriers when trying to exercise their right to have children (Wingard, 2015). While the European Court of Human Rights ruled in 2017 that sterilization requirements for trans people who seek legal recognition constitutes a human rights violation, as of April 2018, 14 countries in Europe still either explicitly or implicitly required trans people to undergo sterilization before they could change their gender

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markers on legal documents (Transgender Europe, 2018). In addition, fertility preservation for trans people is widely misunderstood, costly, and unlikely to be covered by medical insurance, thus rendering it inaccessible to many (Cheng et al., 2019; Nixon, 2013). Thus, while basic human rights protections based on sexual orientation and gender identity have recently garnered greater international attention (Human Rights Watch, 2016), eugenic practices such as these have been largely ignored.

In addition to structural barriers that bar trans reproduction outright, some reproductive justice advocates focus on LGBTQ+ individuals’ limited access to assisted reproduction, adoption, and surrogacy. For lesbians and other queer people who lack sperm but are able to carry a pregnancy, access to assisted reproductive technologies (ART) is a primary site of concern. The specific concerns regarding access vary based on locale, but include some combination of expense, legal barriers, clinic restrictions, and health care provider bias. For example, ART in the United States lacks federal regulation and oversight. As a result, accessibility is determined by a patchwork of state laws, uneven insurance coverage, and private fertility clinic policies—all of which are shaped by various biases that prioritize the reproduction of wealthy heteronuclear families. Assisted reproduction is expensive—one vial of donor sperm generally costs $800–$1,000 and a single round of in vitro fertilization averages $10,000–$15,000 in the United States. ART is not uniformly covered by insurance policies; even among states that mandate coverage, some deliberately exclude LBGTQ families by barring the use of donor gametes (Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology, 2020).

Trans and nonbinary people experience additional obstacles and discrimination in the context of assisted reproduction, pregnancy, childbirth, and postpartum care (e.g., Cheng et al., 2019; Darwin & Greenfield, 2019; Lee, 2019). While existing research on trans people’s opinions on fertility and desires to reproduce remains scant, several studies have shown that many trans people would like to parent biological children, but their desires are often hampered by the lack of legal protections and gender-affirming treatments such as hormonal therapy and surgeries that include fertility preservation (Tornello & Bos, 2017; Wierckx et al., 2012). Recent research further demonstrated that when trans and nonbinary people obtained access to reproductive health and prenatal care, they faced “rampant discrimination, harassment, lack of provider knowledge, and even refusals of care” (National LGBTQ Task Force, p. 6). Overt hostilities were compounded by cis-sexist norms that structured patient encounters and the near-exclusive reliance on feminine vocabulary for prenatal and—case in point—“maternity” care. Thus, reproductive and birth justice includes significant changes in the material conditions of reproduction and childbirth, such as the provision of a culturally competent healthcare provision for trans and nonbinary birthers and addressing the forms of structural racism that disproportionately bar Black, Indigenous, and Latinx people from accessing health care (National LGBTQ Task Force). RJ also includes discursive shifts to encompass the diversity of gender experience and identity in the context of reproduction. Transmasculine advocates, scholars, and parents have directed necessary attention toward these matters (Aizura, 2019; Fixmer-Oraiz & Wehman-Brown, 2020; Pérez, 2012; Wehman-Brown, 2018).

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Trans women are less visible in the cultural conversation around assisted reproduction for trans and nonbinary people, as Micha Cárdenas (2016) noted in her art installation, Pregnancy, which traces her experience as she temporarily suspended femininizing hormones in order to produce gametes. A queer reproductive justice framework demands attention to the fertility and reproductive desires and experiences of transfeminine individuals and trans women. Current medical research has shown conflicting results on the extent to which feminizing hormonal therapies might hinder fertility due to “impaired spermatogenesis” (Cheng et al., 2019, p. 209). While technologies of fertility preservations are available, trans people—especially trans women of color who are multiply marginalized—often lack the financial resources and social support to benefit from them (Mitu, 2016). Moreover, many medical experts and providers have questioned whether trans people are fit as parents and, in particular, whether trans parents negatively impact the psychological development and mental health of their children (Freedman et al., 2002; Gómez-Gil et al., 2008; Murphy, 2012). The Ethics Committee of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (2015) has issued a statement refuting these concerns. Taking this refutation a step further, a queer reproductive justice framework would recognize these concerns as stemming from eugenics ideologies that deem any nonnormative bodies unfit for reproduction.

Some research demonstrated that many LGBTQ+ adults preferred adoption as a path to parenthood and that the number of lesbian and gay adoptive parents has doubled in recent years (Wrobel et al., 2020). Still, adoption by LGBTQ+ individuals and couples remains controversial in many places. Ample research and case studies have shown that cis-gay couples faced significant barriers in fostering and adopting children both domestically in the United States and abroad due to homophobic laws and policies (Baumle & Compton, 2017; Goodfellow, 2015; Mamo, 2007). Laws that govern adoption by LGBTQ+ couples in the European Union are inconsistent among member states and create legal precarity for transnational couples and families in particular. As scholars and activists have argued, because the barriers LGBTQ+ people face in adoption are structural in nature and disproportionately affect multiply marginalized communities, they are examples of reproductive injustices that fall within the purview of the RJ framework (National Women’s Law Center & Law Students for Reproductive Justice, 2011; Nixon, 2013; Russell, 2018).

The right to have a child, however, is fraught when fertility and biogenetics are not in one’s favor (e.g., LGBTQ+ people and straight people who cannot biologically reproduce). Moreover, the terrain itself is uneven—scholars have noted profound asymmetries in access to assisted reproduction between lesbians and gay male couples, asymmetries linked to gendered assumptions about parenting that privilege motherhood over fatherhood (Imaz, 2017). One common avenue for gay and lesbian parents to have a child is through foster care and adoption. However, a number of RJ scholars and activists have raised significant concerns regarding foster care and adoption as systems that profit from the destruction of families who lack social, political, or economic power. For instance, Laury Oaks (2015) argued that while baby safe haven laws allowed parents to relinquish a newborn anonymously to a specified institution, they did not help structurally marginalized people, such as poor women of color and others culturally labeled as “bad mothers,” to raise their children. Laura Briggs (2020), Dorothy Roberts (2012), and Rickie Solinger (2007) have examined how the state has long used foster care and adoption systems to

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remove children of color from their parents in lieu of offering resources and support for these children to be raised in their families and communities of origin. The current foster and adoption systems also harmed LGBTQ+ people as they were often marked as undesirable parents and prohibited from having and raising children (Baumle & Compton, 2017). The second pillar of the RJ, hence, encompasses critiques of policies and systems that regulate parenthood and family formation outside of the White heteronuclear ideal. The right to have a child also entails advocacy for all forms of family formation, including those that are crafted outside of heteronuclear biogenetics that are not readily recognized by the state, such as LGBTQ+ chosen families, young (“teen”) parents, and othermothering (Collins, 2008; Newman, 2019; Vinson, 2017).

Similar to the foster care system and the adoption industry, many scholars who study ART have demonstrated that the fertility industry many LGBTQ+ people rely on to form biological families often employs practices that perpetuate stratified reproduction and reproductive injustice. For example, studies of assisted reproduction in various locales underscored the structural privileging of lesbian motherhood over cis-gay and trans parenting; many noted this pattern as a residual effect of the deep-seated gendered ideologies undergirding heteronormativity and compulsory motherhood (Hašková & Sloboda, 2018; Imaz, 2017; Willems & Sosson, 2017). In short, for lesbians who do not struggle with fertility or finances, biological reproduction is increasingly accessible—a fact that other queer-identified people do not (yet) enjoy. Researchers have also called attention to the unjust conditions that shape commercial gestational surrogacy, particularly in the case of surrogates from developing countries who provide service to clients from wealthy countries like the United States (Bailey, 2011; Deomampo, 2013; Fixmer-Oraiz, 2013; Khader, 2013; Markens, 2007; Rudrappa, 2015). International labor markets facilitate exploitative and racialized reproductive relationships between brown women and wealthy White clients, including middle-upper class gay men (Mamo, 2007; Mamo & Alston-Stepnitz, 2015; Pande, 2014). As a result, common practices of commercial surrogacy fuel stratified reproduction due to the expense of the process, power imbalances between clients and surrogates, and—in some cases—constraints that pivot on citizenship status (e.g., in the United Kingdom, only citizens and permanent residents can access surrogacy). As Judith Stacey pointed out, “reproductive justice discourse is primarily critical of the stratification of assisted reproductive technology” in which only those who fit in the normative model of ideal citizens are encouraged to reproduce, often by relying on the reproductive labor of low-waged, racialized subjects (Stacey, 2018, p. 5). As Stacey noted, “generally, the types of family created through transnational surrogacy are not queer families in the affirmative sense” because the technology and process tended to reify and reproduce the nuclear family ideal (Stacey, 2018, p. 6).

The vexations of adoption and surrogacy leave gay men (and all who struggle with infertility regardless of sexual orientation) in a web of contradictions within the RJ framework. Camisha Russell (2018) argued that the RJ framework did not apply to gay men who sought biological kinship, particularly if they were affluent enough to purchase the service of a gestational surrogate. Distinguishing dysfertility (“a relationship within which biological children cannot be reproduced without a third party”) from infertility, Russell cautioned against using “justice” to discuss gay men perusing surrogacy as it problematically implied that someone, most likely a woman with limited financial resources, had a duty to serve as an egg donor and a gestational

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surrogate. She argued instead for a productive expansion of Roberts’ concept of “procreative liberty” in order to “emphasize the creative nature of family formation, affective bonds and kinship, whether biological or not” (Roberts, 1997, p. 312; Russell, 2018, p. 138). This way of thinking encourages gay men who want biological children to form alliances with women of color fighting for RJ through their shared goal of reimagining forms of procreation and family that fall outside existing norms.

As Smietana, Thompson, and Twine summarized, queer reproduction is connected to RJ because “self-identifying as LGBTQ+ should not place exceptional demands or restrictions upon one’s access to reproductive care and services, any more than one’s class, race, gender, nation, disability, religion, infertility, or relationship status should”; at the same time, one cannot lose sight of the fact that the fertility industry many queer couples rely on to form biological families is deeply entrenched in “racial ideologies, heteronormativity, gender logics, and European neocolonial practices” (Smietana et al., 2018, p. 119). Queer reproductive justice, therefore, must take into account not only the structural barriers LGBTQ+ people face in family formation and reproductive health care, but it must also acknowledge the inequities in transnational bioeconomies and hold privileged stakeholders accountable for the material conditions transnational reproductive laborers like gestational surrogates and egg donors face (Mamo, 2018).

The Right to Parent Children in Safe and Healthy Environments

The third pillar of reproductive justice directs one to broader intersectional considerations. Barriers to safe and sustainable parenting are compounded for poor queer people of color who are multiply burdened by interlocking systems of oppression, with much overlap among LGBTQ+ communities and their straight and cis peers. Parenting in safety and dignity includes addressing environmental racism, police brutality against racialized minorities, mass incarceration in the United States in particular, poverty and housing insecurity, disparities in education and health care, and the abuse of migrants and refugees by the state.

Poverty, for example, limits one’s ability to parent in a safe environment. As political science researcher Virginia Eubanks (2019) has noted, the government often equates parenting while poor with poor parenting: Children whose parents are in poverty are much more likely to be taken into the foster care system. Socioeconomic marginalization disproportionally affects LGBTQ+ people. According to recent research conducted on the poverty rate of LGBTQ+ people in the United States (Badgett et al., 2019), LGBTQ+ people have a poverty rate of 21.6%, much higher than the 15.7% among cisgender straight people (p. 2). Within the LGBTQ+ community, transgender people experience poverty at the highest rate of 29.4% (Badgett et al., 2019, p. 2). Queer people who are young, disabled, non-White, and live in rural areas are the most likely to be in poverty (Badgett et al., 2019, p. 3). These intersecting vectors of marginalization diminish LGBTQ+ people as parents and caregivers in the mainstream familial imaginary—limiting their right to have children and to parent in a secure and safe environment.

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In addition to poverty, various forms of state and transphobic violence also create barriers for queer people, particularly trans people, to parent safely. For trans women who experience disproportionally high rates of violence, murder, and premature death, their opportunity to form families and parent children may be shortchanged or foreclosed entirely (Bailey, 2013). Because trans people are often barred from participating in formal economies due to transphobia and stigma, they are more likely to participate in underground economies in order to survive, including theft, drug sales, and sex work (Zavidow, 2016). Trans people are also more likely to be unjustly profiled by law enforcement and targeted by the criminal justice system (Strangio, 2014). Once incarcerated, trans men who can become pregnant suffer additional forms of reproductive injustices, such as the denial of prenatal treatment, shackling during birth, forced feminization, and coercive sterilization (Ross & Solinger, 2017). By incarcerating poor trans and gender nonconforming people during their most fertile reproductive years, the state is destroying the potential for queer people to reproduce and parent (Arkles, 2008). For queer and trans people who do become parents, they continue to face struggles due to social and legal transphobia—for instance, they are more likely that their cis peers to be embroiled in custody disputes over their children (Smietana et al., 2018). LGBTQ+ people who are constantly worried that their children will be taken away lack the reproductive right to feel safe while raising their children.

Queer(ing) Kinship and Family

The framework of reproductive justice (RJ) acknowledges that the biogenetic heteronuclear familial ideal is often mobilized to oppress people and families who exist outside of it, such as the practice of “othermothering” by Black women (Collins, 2008, p. 13; Gumbs et al., 2016). Those barred from reproducing the heteronuclear norm will experience more reproductive freedom when various forms of families are recognized and accepted just as they are. Dismantling the heteronuclear family ideal, therefore, is a matter of reproductive justice (Fixmer-Oraiz, 2019). Sociologist Joshua Gamson (2018) observed that family justice, “self-determination in the making of our families and in the use of our bodies in the creation of kinship, free from coercion and stigma,” was intimately connected to RJ because “unconventional family creation,” which included families formed by LGBTQ+ people with their biological or nonbiological kin, often faced structural barriers that prevented such families from thriving (Gamson, 2018, pp. 1–2). For example, single parents and queer people both experienced frequent discrimination and stigma in their family structure (Baumle & Compton, 2017; Dowd, 1996; Palmer-Mehta, 2016; Suter et al., 2016); the prohibitive costs of ART in the United States barred poor people—both queer and straight—from accessing the technologies (Smietana, 2017; Thompson, 2016). The latter connected LGBTQ+ people who desired biological offspring with Black women as Black women were much more likely than their White counterparts to experience infertility and were less likely to seek medical help due in part to stigma and racism (Wellons et al., 2008).

This confluence of shared concerns has prompted scholars like Gamson (2018) and Luna (2018) to advocate for cultivating solidarities among people who form nonnormative families through the RJ framework. In particular, they have argued that while these families faced different forms of marginalization, they can form alliances by recognizing their shared struggles against the

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heteronormative nuclear familial ideal. Public intellectual Alexis Pauline Gumbs (2016) noted that queer Black feminists have long engaged in nonnormative mothering and family-building as a form of revolutionary resistance. For Gumbs, nonnormative families challenged the property model of patriarchal relationships, thus allowing parents and children who may or may not have biological and legal ties with one another to function as autonomous subjects. The intersectional and coalitional spirits of RJ provide an avenue for connection among families and kin ties that are not readily recognized by the state.

While there is coalitional potential between RJ and queer family formation, scholars have long debated whether all families that involve LGBTQ+ people are by default queer. As Luna wrote, the perennial question was whether queer was “a political stance that can include anyone of ‘deviant’ reproductive modes or [if it] only describes people engaging in particular sexual practices” (Luna, 2018, p. 97). Drawing on Lisa Duggan’s oft-cited work on homonormativity, Lasio et al. (2019) noted that “equal rights politics under neoliberalism have resulted in a new gay normality that privileges the normative family model over radical social change or a critique of heteronormativity” (p. 1059). Similarly, Judith Stacey argued that as the mainstream movement focused increasingly on the legalization of gay and lesbian marriage and parenting rights for married couples, the families queer people formed “are decreasingly queer, and increasingly normative and exclusionary” (Stacey, 2018, p. 5). For Stacey and others, many families created through ART, from intrauterine insemination (IUI) to commercial surrogacy, were not queer by its political definition even when queer-identified people were involved.

Some ethnographic research bolsters this claim. Focusing on lesbian motherhood through the lens of reproductive justice, Sandra Patton-Imani’s (2020) research found that, despite the legalization of same-sex marriage and adoption in the United States, poor women of color continued to experience structural barriers as they navigated family-making. Other scholars (Baumle & Compton, 2017; Mamo, 2007; Smietana, 2017) demonstrated that gay couples tended to reproduce the existing norm of nuclear families in order to minimize legal precarity and to be granted recognition by dominant publics and the state. Studying the relationships between gay men and their surrogates in the United States, Smietana (2017) observed that both parties tended to hold tight to the conventional ideal of family: Neither parties engaged in relationships that would form politically queer kin against the heteronuclear grain. Smietana attributed this to the financial contracts between the gay men and the surrogates, which de-kinned the surrogates’ parental claim (Smietana, 2017, p. 9). This form of financial de-kinning also occurred in commercial gamete donation through donor anonymity as the dominant industry norm. As a result, commercial surrogacy rarely resulted in families that deviated from the nuclear model.

Outside of biogenetic reproduction through surrogacy, Alison Shonkwiler (2008) observed that gay parents who chose to adopt were also increasingly assimilated into hegemonic familialism. This is not surprising because, as David Eng pointed out, “the possession of a child, whether biological or adopted, has today become the sign of guarantee not only for family but also for full and robust citizenship—for being a fully realized political, economic, and social subject in American life” (Eng, 2003, p. 14). In order to gain state legibility and protections, in other words, queer people must reproduce the heteronuclear family structure.

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Thus, the “ideology of familialism” compels LGBTQ+ conformity as a way to counter the exclusions they face (Shonkwiler, 2008, p. 19). These familial norms, ironically, reside at the heart of long-standing anti-LGBTQ sentiment, discrimination, and violence. In this way, there exists a deep coalition potential between queer family formation and RJ. In one example, historian Don Romesburg (2014) offered “queer transracial family” in order to attend to the “power constellations”—including racism and poverty—that make his family (and, of course, many other families) possible. He wrote: “By articulating the historical, structural, cultural, and political processes through which we constantly renegotiate belonging, it seeks to narrate where we come from in ways that make personal and social justice possible for more people” (2014, p. 3). For Romesburg and his partner, this meant defining their family—in name and in practice—to include not only himself, his partner, and their foster-adopted daughter, but also their daughter’s family of origin. Nonnormative family formations enacted by differentially marginalized people, Romesburg argued, functioned as a praxis that “contests colorblindness, homonormativity, and the consumerist, privatized family” (Romesburg, 2014, p. 1). Other examples might include the building of donor sibling registries, the embrace of voluntary kin, and the uptick in people parenting solo by choice (Fixmer-Oraiz, 2019). The queering of family formation, hence, opens up coalition potential across axioms of marginalization, which is a main tenet of the RJ framework.

Indeed, scholars on queer reproduction and family formation have been interrogating the ways in which LGBTQ+ people can form alliances that help advance the RJ agenda. For example, Mamo and Alston-Stepnitz argued that as LGBTQ+ people “negotiate and, at times, reinforce these contours [of marketplaces, notions of belonging, and inequalities], they also participate in new kinship forms as they demand inclusion in one of the most durable and supported social practice: having children” (Mamo & Alston-Stepnitz, 2015, p. 521). Mamo and Alston-Stepnitz (2015) pointed out that by deviating from the opposite sex two-parent familial model, LGBTQ+ people were already reinventing family structures in a significant way. Mamo’s earlier research (2007) showed that when selecting sperm donors, lesbians took into consideration not only physical resemblances, but also a sense of affinity through shared interests and values. Kinship and families, in other words, were not merely defined by biological ties, but were formed by a constellation of choice, biological, and social connections that Mamo called “affinity ties” (Mamo, 2007, p. 205). Hence, Mamo and Alston-Stepniz posited that rather than focusing solely on the ways in which LGBTQ+ people reinforced reproductive inequalities and heteronuclear family structures through ART, it was more productive to queer the RJ framework by interrogating how “queer bodies and lives participate in the global form of reproduction in ways that enhance and limit power imbalances” (Mamo & Alston-Stepnitz, 2015, p. 528). By paying attention to the “structural intimacies” in transnational queer reproduction, RJ activists and scholars can better understand how marginalized actors negotiate intersecting power dynamics and social structures in ways that simultaneously produce power and precariousness (Mackenzie, 2013, p. 7).

While LGBTQ+ people and communities have historically, out of necessity and commitment to justice, engaged in practices that most readily destabilize the heteronuclear family ideal, scholars such as Gamson (2018) and Anthony Kwame Appiah (2016) have argued that they should not be

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obligated to shoulder all the responsibilities in promoting family justice. Rather, a queer reproductive justice framework demands communities and advocates from different positionalities to collectively reimagine and expand family structures and formations while remaining in solidarity with LGBTQ+ families who continue to negotiate their precarity. In one example of this, some scholars in family communication have questioned the centering of biogenetics within dominant imaginings of kin and explored other ways that families narrate their sense of belonging to and with one another beyond shared genetic material (Baxter, 2015; Braithwaite et al., 2010; Suter et al., 2014, 2016).

In another example, activists in the RJ movement have been advocating for greater recognition and celebration of family diversity. Founded in 2005, the Strong Families Network challenges conservative heteronormative representations of families; their advocacy connects diverse families with immigration and queer politics, as immigrant and LGBTQ+ families are often not readily recognized by the state (Zavella, 2020). Emerged from the movement building group Expanding the Movement for Empowerment and Reproductive Justice (EMERJ), the Strong Families Network “is committed to creating the culture and conditions necessary for all families to thrive,” including families that are outside of the normative national imaginary (Zavella, 2020, p. 55). This initiative is an example in which the intersectional framework of RJ effectively bolsters and supports queer family justice.

Conclusion

As an expansive and intersectional framework that recognizes the experiences of differentially marginalized people, reproductive justice (RJ) highlights the coalition potential among queer people, women of color, and people who struggle with poverty—in fact, RJ reminds people that these marginalizing positionalities often overlap with one another through intersecting systems of oppression. As this article has illustrated, multiply marginalized queer people often face structural barriers when they try to build families outside of heteronuclear norms, whether through biological reproduction, adoption, or through a more expansive definition of kin. Chosen families face great precarity as they are largely illegible to the state; still, even the embrace of more familiar family formations (e.g., the use of assisted reproduction by an LGBTQ+ couple to reproduce biologically) often involves confronting various forms of discrimination, hostility, and legal challenge. Much of reproductive health care—whether in research or in the provision of care —neither understands nor accommodates gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans, and nonbinary people, and mainstream reproductive rights discourse often fails to consider the unique challenges trans and nonbinary pregnant people face.

Despite the promise of coalition potential between RJ activists and LGBTQ+ people advocating for reproductive freedom, tension remains. As noted, critics have questioned whether some families created by queer people are, by default, politically queer, or whether they partake in homonationalist ideologies in ways that bolster rather than subvert the existing paradigm (Puar, 2007). Citing geopolitical power imbalance in commercial surrogacy and gamete transactions, some remain concerned that LGBTQ+ people who want to form biological families perpetuate transnational power imbalances (Lewis, 2019; Smietana, 2018).

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Queer(ing) reproductive justice sharpens the critical edge of RJ, prompting new horizons in research and activism. Queer sensibilities may facilitate an RJ-informed expansion of belonging and relationality in ways that challenge the primacy of biogenetics and, relatedly, the entanglement of family and neoliberal capital. Reproductive justice, in turn, provides a critical framework, organizing tool, and set of alliances through which to interrogate myriad reproductive oppressions experienced by LGBTQ+ communities. By attending more to transnational mobilities, circulations, and networks of reproductive politics, queer(ing) reproductive justice could disentangle competing interests and further identify grounds for solidarities across differences. This nexus, rich with possibility, fuels the capacity of researchers and activists alike to advance reproductive freedom, bodily autonomy, and expansive understandings of what it means to form family.

Further Reading Baumle, A., & Compton, D. R. (2017). Legalizing LGBT families: How the law shapes parenthood. New York University Press.

Enke, A. (2007). Finding the movement: Sexuality, contested space, and feminist activism. Duke University Press.

Gumbs, A. P., Martens, C., & Williams, M. (Eds.). (2016). Revolutionary mothering: Love on the front lines. PM Press.

Mamo, L. (2007). Queering reproduction: Achieving pregnancy in the age of technoscience. Duke University Press.

Mamo, L., & Alston-Stepnitz, E. (2015). Queer intimacies and structural inequalities: New directions in stratified reproduction. Journal of Family Issues, 36(4), 519–540.

Nixon, L. (2013). The right to (trans) parent: A reproductive justice approach to reproductive rights, fertility, and family-building issues facing transgender people. William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice, 20(1), 73.

Roberts, D. (1997). Killing the black body: Race, reproduction, and the meaning of liberty. Vintage.

Ross, L., & Solinger, R. (2017). Reproductive justice: An introduction. University of California Press.

Silliman, J., Fried, M. G., Ross, L., & Gutiérrez, E. (2016). Undivided rights: Women of color organizing for reproductive justice (2nd ed.). Haymarket Books.

Smietana, M., Thompson, C., & Twine, F. W. (2018). Making and breaking families—Reading queer reproductions, stratified reproduction and reproductive justice together <https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rbms.2018.11.001>. Reproductive Biomedicine & Society Online, 7, 112–130.

Thomsen, C., & Morrison, G. T. (2020). Abortion as gender transgression: Reproductive justice, queer theory, and anti- crisis pregnancy center activism <https://doi.org/10.1086/706487>. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 45(3), 703–730.

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Related Articles Queer Healthcare Communication

https://doi.org/10.1086/706487

https://doi.org/10.1089/lgbt.2016.0153

https://tgeu.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/MapB_TGEU2018_Online.pdf

https://www.autostraddle.com/bearing-life-with-and-alongside-on-masculinity-pregnancy-and-medical-trauma-438219/

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.fertnstert.2007.09.056

https://doi.org/10.1093/humrep/der406

https://www.vera.org/blog/gender-and-justice-in-america/transgender-people-at-higher-risk-for-justice-system-involvement

https://oxfordre.com/communication/viewbydoi/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.013.1188

Queer(ing) Reproductive Justice
Queer(ing) Reproductive Justice

Summary
Introduction
Keywords
Subjects

Queer(ing) Reproductive Justice

The Reproductive Justice Framework

Queer(ing) Reproductive Justice
Queer(ing) Reproductive Justice
Queer(ing) Reproductive Justice

ART, Queer Family Formation, and Reproductive Justice

The Right to Have a Child

Queer(ing) Reproductive Justice
Queer(ing) Reproductive Justice
Queer(ing) Reproductive Justice
Queer(ing) Reproductive Justice

The Right to Parent Children in Safe and Healthy Environments

Queer(ing) Reproductive Justice

Queer(ing) Kinship and Family

Queer(ing) Reproductive Justice
Queer(ing) Reproductive Justice
Queer(ing) Reproductive Justice

Conclusion

Queer(ing) Reproductive Justice

Further Reading

Queer(ing) Reproductive Justice

References

Queer(ing) Reproductive Justice
Queer(ing) Reproductive Justice
Queer(ing) Reproductive Justice
Queer(ing) Reproductive Justice
Queer(ing) Reproductive Justice
Queer(ing) Reproductive Justice

Understanding Reproductive Justice: Transforming the Pro-Choice Movement

Author(s): Loretta Ross

Source: Off Our Backs , 2006, Vol. 36, No. 4 (2006), pp. 14-19

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reproductive justice

Understanding Reproductive Justice: Transforming the Pro-Choice Movement By Loretta Ross

eproductive Justice is the complete physi cal, mental, spiritual, political, social and

JL ^Ljeconomic well-being of women and girls, based on the full achievement and protection of women's human rights. It offers a new perspec tive on reproductive issue advocacy, pointing out that for Indigenous women and women of color it is important to fight equally for (1) the right to have a child; (2) the right not to have a child; and

It is important to fight for (1) the right to have a child; (2) the right not to have a child; and (3) the right to parent the children we have.

(3) the right to parent the children we have, as well as to control our birthing options, such as midwifery.

We also fight for the neces sary enabling conditions to realize these rights. This is in contrast to the singular focus on abortion by the pro-choice movement.

Reproductive Justice says that the ability of any woman to determine her own reproductive destiny is linked directly to the conditions in her community?and these conditions are not just a matter of individual choice and access. Reproduc tive justice addresses the social reality of inequal ity, specifically, the inequality of opportunities that

we have to control our reproductive destiny. One of the key problems addressed by Repro

ductive Justice is the isolation of abortion from

other social justice issues that concern communi ties of color: issues of economic justice, the envi ronment, immigrants' rights, disability rights, dis crimination based on race and sexual orientation, and a host of other community-centered concerns.

These issues directly affect an individual woman's decision-making process. By shifting the focus to reproductive oppression?the control and exploi tation of women, girls and individuals through our bodies, sexuality, labor and reproduction?rather than a narrow focus on protecting the legal right to abortion, we are developing a more inclusive vision of how to build a new movement.

Because reproductive oppression affects women's lives in multiple ways, a multi-pronged approach is needed to fight this exploitation and advance the well-being of women and girls. There are three main frameworks for fighting reproductive oppression: 1. reproductive health, which deals with

service delivery 2. reproductive rights, which addresses legal

issues, and 3. reproductive justice, which focuses on

movement building. Although these frameworks are distinct in their

approaches, they work together to provide a com prehensive solution. Ultimately, as in any move ment, all three components?service, advocacy and organizing?are crucial.

Reproductive Justice focuses on organizing women, girls and their communities to challenge structural power inequalities in a comprehensive and transformative process of empowerment. The Reproductive Justice analysis offers a framework for empowering women and girls that is relevant to every American family. Instead of focusing on the means?a divisive debate on abortion and

birth control that neglects the real-life experiences

14 off our "backs vol 36 / no 4

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reproductive justice [j^^^j of women and girls?the reproductive justice analysis focuses on the ends: better lives for

women, healthier families, and sustainable com munities. This is a clear and consistent message for the movement. Using this analysis, we can integrate multiple issues and bring together con stituencies that are multi-racial, multi-generational and multi-class in order to build a more powerful and relevant grassroots movement.

How Reproductive Justice Can Transform the Pro-Choice Movement There is virtually no city or town where local pro choice women are not grappling with how to work together across fissures of race and class, espe cially white women working with women of color.

Reproductive justice builds a theoretical bridge between these two forces. Despite the growing documentation and analysis of and by women of color and our role in the movement, the central

question now is can women of color come from an autonomous space, work collectively together, and move beyond the "turmoil, confusion, and political struggle" (M. Fried) that characterizes the pro-choice movement? Can we avoid replicating these tensions among women of color? The forces of competition are much stronger than the forces of collaboration in this current funding and politi cal climate. SisterSong is the fifth and longest lived attempt since the 1980s to build a national coalition of women of color in the reproductive rights/health/justice movement.

It is not SisterSong's role to be the only or even the primary vehicle for mobilizing women of color or transforming the mainstream for that mat ter, but we see a specific role we can play in help ing to revitalize and unite the domestic movement.

We organize from the margins to the center, rather than from the bottom to the top, to create long term changes in ways people think about race, rights and reproduction. Our work will produce a specific benefit: connecting issues and working across social movements because issues that affect

the reproductive health of women are large and varied. Reproductive justice is no universal solu tion, but it is a fresh approach to creating unifying and intersectional language with which to build bridges. It is SisterSong's intent to start conversa tions about reproductive justice in political organi zations, religious groups and marginal groups.

We expect the reproductive justice analysis to be controversial because it involves new patterns of thinking. Many people in the pro-choice movement

are understandably resistant to having the choice/ privacy framework disputed within the movement. As explained by a woman of color organizer for the March for Women's Lives: "When we try to explain how choice is an inappropriate term even for

many white women, some allies?especially older feminists?take offense. They feel as though they had been fighting for "choice" for the past 30 years and that it was insulting to tell them that choice

was not inclusive of many women of color, low income, and gay and lesbian communities." Some critics

believe that by expanding to a more inclusive definition of

Reproductive Justice, women of color are signaling reduced support for abortion rights.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Expanding support for abortion rights can best be done by bringing in new voices and perspectives to the

movement and connecting to other social justice issues?a process of inclusion, rather than the politics of ex clusion women of color have experienced.

Reproductive justice is not an exclusive analy sis that only applies to women of color. To achieve broad social change that drives the political and legal decision making in our country, it must be inclusive so that the mainstream and the marginal ized find common ground. This is one of the slow est processes of social change, but is ultimately required. This is similar to how the Civil Rights

movement required the participation in and ac ceptance by white society until the value of racial equality became normative. Reproductive justice draws attention to cultural and socio-economic

inequalities because everyone does not have equal opportunity to participate in society's cultural discourses or public policy decisions based on cultural and economic values, such as abortion,

midwifery and mothering. For example, SisterSong believes that one of

the key elements driving restrictions on abortion is race-based thinking by opponents influenced

by the white supremacist movement. They are visibly agitated about controlling the sexual and reproductive behaviors of white youth, with a special focus on young women. Their mixed mes sages of abstinence coupled with restrictions on abortion and access to contraception can lead to only one outcome: more children by uninformed

Some critics believe that by expanding to a more inclusive definition of Reproductive Justice, women of color are

signaling reduced support for

abortion rights. Nothing could be further from the truth.

vol 36 / no 4 off our backs 18 This content downloaded from

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reproductive justice

young people that actually increases birth rates and the transmission of sexual diseases. The

participation of white allies in SisterSong's base is not only desired, but required, to achieve the normative quality in American society we wish Reproductive Justice to achieve.

One of the tensions within the reproductive rights community is the uneasy alliance between those who support fertility control for women as a

means of women's empowerment as their pri mary goal, and those who support fertility control for women as a means of controlling population growth. Both sectors are, of course, united in their opposition to those who oppose women's rights and family planning, albeit for different reasons. SisterSong is hoping for a political realignment of groups in the reproductive rights movement: those

supportive of fertility control vs. those supportive of reproductive justice. This may shift the bound aries of the debate from the pro-choice/anti-abor tion divide because SisterSong is modeling how to gain and keep people who are personally opposed to abortion in the reproductive justice movement.

Significant changes in the pro-choice move ment that will provide opportunities for Sister Song will probably be brought about by many factors that causally affect each other. It is beyond the scope of this article to detail all of these. It is

equally difficult to predict any one theory or factor that will change the pro-choice movement. There is no singular or mono-causal explanation that can help SisterSong develop a predictive model that leads directly from training to transformation.

Nor is there a magic bullet with which to bring

Beginning in 1973 with the Roe v. Wade decision,

women of color (e.g., the National Council of Negro

Women) saw some problems with the term "choice" popu

larized by the mainstream women's movement. "Choice

has masked the ways that

laws, policies and public officials punish or reward

the reproductive activity of

different groups of women

differently," states historian

Rickie Solinger, affirming

the skepticism of women of color.

Prior to the 1980s,

women of color reproductive

health activists organized

primarily against sterilization abuse and teen pregnancy,

although many were involved

in early activities to legal ize abortion because of the

disparate impact illegal abor tion had in African American,

Puerto Rican and Mexican communities.

The 1980s and 1990s

was a period of explosive

autonomous organizing by women of color establish

ing their own reproductive

health organizations. Women

of color mostly refrained

from joining mainstream

pro-choice organizations, but preferred to organize autonomous women of color

organizations more directly

responsive to the needs of their communities.

Women of color searched for another

conceptual framework that

would convey our multiple

values: the right to have and not to have a child?the

many ways our rights to be mothers and parent

our children are constantly threatened. We believed these intersectional values

separated us from the

liberal pro-choice move ment in the U.S., which was

preoccupied with maintain

ing the legality of abortion

and privacy rights. We were also skeptical about the motivations of some in the

pro-choice movement who seemed to be more interest

ed in population restrictions than in women's empow

erment. They promoted dan gerous contraceptives and coercive sterilizations, and

were mostly silent about

the economic inequalities and power imbalances between the developed and the developing worlds that constrain women's choices.

Women of color felt clos

est to the progressive wing of the women's movement

that did articulate demands

for abortion access who

shared our class analysis, and even closer to the radi

cal feminists who demanded an end to sterilization abuse

and who shared our critique

of population control. Yet we lacked a framework that

aligned reproductive rights

with social justice in an

intersectional way, bridging the multiple domestic and

global movements to which

we belonged.

We found the answer

in the global women's

health movement through the voices of women from

the Global South. Women of color from the U.S.

participated in all of the international conferences

and significant events of

the global feminist move ment. Often supported by the International Women's

Health Coalition, the Women's Global Network

for Reproductive Rights,

and visionary funders like Ford and the Ms. Founda

tion, women of color from the U.S. were able to form

small but significant delega tions to these meetings.

The SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Health Collective was formed in

1997 by sixteen autonomous women of color organiza tions, using human rights

as a unifying framework for

the Collective. Human rights

CONTINUED ON PAGE 18

16 off our backs vol 36 / no 4

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reproductive justice ^^^^^ about the changes quickly. It is also impossible to predict the precise processes and mechanisms of social transformation that will be achieved by using the reproductive justice framework.

Among the external and internal factors to be considered are (1) increased repression of the

American public (the Patriot Act, the War Against Terror, domestic wiretapping, economic hardship); (2) pressure from the right (increasing restric tions on abortion and birth control); (3) pressure

from within the movement (the Saletan articles on moving to the right); (4) leadership changes (Cecile Richards is now head of Planned Parent

hood, replacing Gloria Feldt, while Nancy Keenan is now head of NARAL

Pro-Choice America replac ing Kate Michelman); (5) organizing by women of color such as through Incite!; and (6) organiz ing by young women, such as in the Young Women's Collaborative. Each of these factors deserves examina

tion, but probably one of the most significant internal factors promising change in the pro-choice move

ment from SisterSong's point of view is the recent leadership transitions at the top of two pro-choice organizations because these are major develop

ments within our base.

We are working in collaboration with several mainstream organizations, and many Planned Parenthood women of color leaders are also

members of SisterSong. We believe that Planned Parenthood and NARAL are coming to their own conclusions about the limitations of the choice

framework. That may be one of the reasons that the progressive wing of Planned Parenthood seized the opportunity to sponsor the "Reproduc tive Justice for All" public policy conference in

November 2005 at Smith College. Another primary precipitating pressure will

be the advances made by opponents of women's rights, such as the confirmations of Samuel Alito and John Roberts to the Supreme Court. Legisla tive, judicial and electoral losses may act as cata lysts to either further divide the pro-choice move

ment or unite it. Social change in the reproductive health/rights/justice movement can either move to the right or the left, toward further population control for targeted groups of people or increased freedom for more women. Factors such as politi

Instead of focusing on the means? a divisive debate on abortion and

birth control that neglects the real-life experiences of women

and girls?the reproductive justice

analysis focuses on the ends: better lives for women, healthier families and sustainable communities.

cal repression, violence against abortion provid ers, restrictions on pregnant women and distrac tions such as the War on Terror will help decide both the direction and pace of these changes.

Another significant factor is the way technology is changing how we organize our base, particularly in terms of print vs. electronic communications. The 2003 SisterSong national conference was the first event we've ever organized that was mobilized nearly entirely by the Internet, and it produced more than 600 attendees. We were forced to use the Internet because of our limited resources for

printing and mailing. We were very concerned that we would not reach a sig nificant portion of our base if we did not use more tra ditional forms of outreach

because of the widely-prov en digital divide in com

munities of color. In fact, we were mildly surprised at how electronic commu

nications were augmented by local activists using the more traditional means of

local meetings, telephone outreach, and printed mate

rial. Another technological aid was the use of free conference call services to host monthly national conference calls to mobilize for the March for

Women's Lives. Although a great deal of resources were spent on travel and speaking tours as neces sary, the Internet mobilized the overwhelming

majority of the March participants. In fact, we were very nervous in the March national office because the phones were eerily silent in the days leading up to the March. Our staff did most of their organiz ing over the Internet, probably because they were relatively younger than the March leaders and more familiar with and dependent on the technology.

While this development was certainly effective, it does raise the question of whether we are losing anything in these ubiquitous enabling technologies in terms of face-to-face and spoken communica tions. Although technology is speeding up the changes we experience, it can't do it on its own. Building a base must have a spark?an idea?that is enormously appealing. That is the role we see the concept of Reproductive Justice playing. More than 25,000 Internet hits on the term "Reproduc tive Justice" is gratifyingly significant, but we are in the processing of determining precisely what that number means in terms of building move

ment. This may represent an insurgent political

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I v reproductive justice

movement without discrete stages of development or change. What is clear is that it will not be led by the elites of the pro-choice movement, but instead builds on our collective structural power as women of color?the fact that our locations are

in the various socio-economic-political structures that lie at these intersections, along with our allies in the mainstream who understand that we are

compelled to move forward with a new vision to guide our movement. While most resources are located in the hands of the mainstream pro-choice organizations (our own elite), it is grassroots organizations like SisterSong that offer the most promise for significant social change.

In the three years since our 2003 national

conference, the phrase "Reproductive Justice" has undergone instant proliferation. An example is the previously mentioned Planned Parenthood Federa tion conference in November 2005 called "Repro ductive Justice for All" which brought together 400 attendees. SisterSong was invited to give one of the

opening presentations at the conference to help set the defining platform for the deliberations, but we felt like conductors whose train had left the station

without us because while we were offering our re productive justice analysis for consideration by the movement, we are concerned about the unequal dis tribution of power and resources in the movement

and the potential for co-opting our vision without respecting the leadership of women of color.

This conference, among other events, is compel ling SisterSong to focus on providing Reproductive Justice trainings to both our base within SisterSong and to our allies among other women of color networks such as Incite! and our allies in the pro choice movement because our fear is that they will not fully integrate the intersectional, human rights based approach SisterSong promotes, but merely substitute the phrase "reproductive justice" where previously they said "pro-choice." If this is allowed to happen, this will be a significant setback, be cause reproductive justice will be watered down to

education was provided to all collective members and

integrated from the outset

into SisterSong's work. We

also integrated both self-help

and community organizing into our foundation.

The phrase "Reproductive

Justice" became prominent in our first national confer

ence, which we held in November 2003 in Atlanta.

The conference was called

the SisterSong National

Women of Color Reproduc

tive Health and Sexual Rights Conference based on our

experiences internationally,

where the reproductive health

and sexual rights framework

was powerfully articulated. At that 2003 conference,

we sponsored plenary and

workshop sessions to explore the concept of Reproductive

Justice. Among the great

thinkers we were privileged

to have worked on this were

Dorothy Roberts, Eveline

Shen, Byllye Avery, Malika Saada Saar,Luz Alvarez Martinez, Jatrice Gaithers,

Adriane Fugh Berman, Jael Silliman, Rosalinda Palacios, and Barbara Smith. After

the conference, SisterSong decided to use the concept of

Reproductive Justice as our

central organizing strategy for work in the United States

because it emerged as a uni fying and popular framework among our base.

The current organiza tional structure of SisterSong

reflects our origin as a union

of pre-existing, autonomous

women of color organiza tions. SisterSong does not have chapters as do NARAL and NOW, or linked affiliates

the way Planned Parenthood

does. Instead, SisterSong sparks new organizations,

such as Pittsburgh New Voices for Reproductive Justice and the Boston

Women of Color Coalition for

Reproductive Justice. Some

groups have re-organized to

reflect a reproductive justice focus, due to the influence

of SisterSong: Asians and Pacific Islanders for Repro ductive Health re-named

themselves Asian Communi

ties for Reproductive Justice,

and the Los Angeles Repro ductive Justice Coalition also

changed its name and focus. However, newer activists

within SisterSong who do not

belong to an existing woman

of color organization in their

city are asking SisterSong to consider the development of a chapter structure to

clone SisterSong locally. We are considering how to address this unmet need

among our base.

SisterSong is pioneering the application of our intersec

tional analysis to the repro

ductive rights movement, and

we are spreading our ideas to

other social justice move ments. This is familiar terrain

for women of color because

we have a long history of

oppositions politics in terms

of the mainstream pro-choice movement. We are also

sparking new leadership in

the reproductive justice move

ment that is challenging the

paradigm of individualism and

privacy that is sacred in the

pro-choice movement. We are

also creating bridges for the

traditional civil rights move

ment to develop language

affirming their support for

women's rights. It is extremely

significant that groups like the NMCP and MALDEF are

now using reproductive justice

language in their work.

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reproductive justice

where it is conflated with the previous pro-choice paradigm and lose its potential for building new movement. Thus, we are at a critical historical junc ture?a teachable moment?for which SisterSong will work to develop the tools, the materials, and the resources to help guide this transformation.

Conclusion In order to address the needs and issues of a

diverse group of women while acknowledging the layers of oppressions that our communities face, particularly those who do not have access to privi lege, power, and resources, we must build a new

movement for Reproductive Justice in the United States. This movement must work to protect ev eryone, including those who have more privilege. It also must integrate the needs of grassroots communities into policy and advocacy efforts and create opportunities for new leaders to emerge within our communities to increase the capacity, effectiveness and scope of our movement. Perhaps

most importantly, SisterSong must infuse the movement with creativity, innovation and vision.

The key strategies for achieving this vision include supporting the leadership and power of the most excluded groups of women, girls and individuals within a culturally relevant context. This will require holding ourselves and our allies accountable to the integrity of this vision. We have to address directly the inequitable distribution of power and resources within the movement, holding our allies and ourselves responsible for construct ing principled, collaborative relationships that end the exploitation and competition within our movement. We also have to build the social, politi cal and economic power of low-income women, Indigenous women, women of color, and their communities so that they are full participating part ners in building this new movement. This requires integrating grassroots issues and constituencies that are multi-racial, multi-generational and multi class into the national policy arena, as well as into the organizations that represent the movement.

SisterSong is building a network of allied social justice and human rights organizations who integrate the reproductive justice analysis into their work. We have to use strategies of self-help and empowerment to help the women who receive our services understand that they are vital emerg ing leaders in the determining the scope and direc tion of the social change we wish to catalyze.

The next SisterSong national event for mobi lizing women of color through the reproductive justice framework will be our second national

conference in celebration of our 10th anniversary in 2007. Entitled "Let's Talk About Sex," the conference will be held May 31-June 2, 2007, in Chicago, Illinois hosted by African American

Women Evolving, and more than 1,200 people are expected to attend.

Since the right to have sex is a topic rarely discussed when addressing reproductive health and rights issues, SisterSong believes that sexual prohibitions are not only promoted by moral con servatives in this country, but also by reproductive rights advocates who fail to promote a sex-posi tive culture. Sex is not just for pro-creation and sexual pleasure?it is a human right. We would like to create a pro-sex space for the pro-choice

movement and we hope you will join us. Reproductive justice is the result of 20 years of

creative envisioning by women from around the world who understand that reproductive health issues cannot be separated from the interlocking systems of oppression women face globally. By bringing these lessons home to the United States, SisterSong is hoping to win concrete changes on the individual, community, institutional and soci etal levels that will improve the lives of women, our families and our communities. #

loretta j. ross is a founder and the national coordinator of the SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Health Collective, composed of 70 women of color organizations across the country. She was the codirector of the April 25, 2004, National March for Women's Lives in Washington B.C., the largest protest in U.S. history. She is also the co-author o/Undivided Rights: Women of Color Organizing for Reproductive Justice (2004, South End Press), reviewed on page 82 of this issue.

"Let's Talk About Sex" May 31-June 2,2007

The next SisterSong national event for mobilizing

women of color through the reproductive justice framework will be our second national conference in

celebration of our 10th anniversary.

For information on SisterSong's Reproductive Justice

trainings scheduled around the country, contact

[email protected].

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Contents

p. 14
p. 15
p. 16
p. 17
p. 18
p. 19

Issue Table of Contents

Off Our Backs, Vol. 36, No. 4 (2006) pp. 1-108

Front Matter
CORRECTION TO LAST ISSUE [pp. 1-1]
in the news

BURMA/MYANMAR: indigenous women targeted by military [pp. 2-2]
INDIA: a rape victim's plea to the president [pp. 2-2]
ISRAEL: arab lesbians hold conference [pp. 2-2]
IRAN: more women's rights demonstrators arrested, journalists denied visas by U.S. government [pp. 2-3]
JAPAN: comfort women demand justice [pp. 3-3]
ITALY: government moves on rights for same-sex couples, then backs off [pp. 3-4]
PORTUGAL: vote favors abortion, but turnout too low [pp. 4-4]
CANADA: Canadian high court protects women-only space [pp. 4-4]
GUATEMALA AND MEXICO: femicides in progress [pp. 4-5]
MEXICO: Mexico City expected to legalize abortion [pp. 5-5]
UNITED STATES: report finds sexualization harms girls [pp. 5-5]
UNITED STATES: Massachusetts lawmakers to vote again on lesbian/gay marriage [pp. 5-6]
UNITED STATES: doctors say fashion industry must not use super-thin models [pp. 6-6]
UNITED STATES: Marilyn Frye receives phi beta kappa romanell award [pp. 6-6]
BRAZIL: model dies of anorexia [pp. 6-6]
CHILE: morning after pill distributed [pp. 6-6]

in memoriam

Shakespeare Got It Right [pp. 7-8]
Lee Lightning [pp. 8-8]
Maricla Moyano [pp. 9-9]

special issue: women of color and reproductive justice

[Introduction] [pp. 10-11]
Reproductive Justice: The Ultimate Political Countermove for Black Women [pp. 12-13]
Understanding Reproductive Justice: Transforming the Pro-Choice Movement [pp. 14-19]
My Divine Right To Choice [pp. 20-24]
Forging NEW ALLIANCES: Mobilizing Hip Hop Activists for Reproductive Justice [pp. 25-26]
Women Warriors Help Stem the Tide in South Dakota [pp. 27-29]
SECRET CONFESSIONS OF A Childless Black Woman! [pp. 30-31]
What We Deserve [pp. 32-32]
Pro-Voice: A Vision for the Future [pp. 33-36]
IMMIGRANT RIGHTS: Are Women's Rights [pp. 37-40]
It's Time We Recognize: Young Women of Color Who Have Sex with Women Are at Risk for HIV Too! [pp. 41-43]
LGBT Reproductive Rights: An Interview with Carmen Vazquez [pp. 44-47]
Where the Whores Aren't: Examining the Lack of Prostituted Women's Voices in News Reporting [pp. 48-50]
How Many Do You Know? [pp. 51-52]
Doctor, Don't Judge Me: African American Women and Reproductive/Preventive Health Care Experiences [pp. 53-55]
IMPLANON A New and Improved Bullet? [pp. 56-58]
Time to Take Care of Our Children [pp. 59-60]
Globalization and The Politics of Native Breastfeeding [pp. 61-64]
Midwives &Native Tradition [pp. 65-68]
Prisons as Sites Of Reproductive Injustice [pp. 69-71]
Violent Interruptions [pp. 72-76]
Doing What Is Medically Necessary [pp. 77-81]

in review

Undivided Rights: Women of Color Organize for Reproductive Justice [pp. 82-83]
Color of Violence: The INCITE! Anthology [pp. 84-85]
Pregnancy and Power: A Short History of Reproductive Politics in America [pp. 86-87]

for reference

Women of Color and Reproductive Justice Resource List [pp. 88-89]

on nwsa

NWSA Looks at Resistance to Empire [pp. 90-93]

in review

Death, Grief and Suffering: Sinister Wisdom, Issue Number 68/69 [pp. 94-95]

on the calendar

wOMEN'S fESTIVALS 2007 [pp. 96-97]

Dykes To Watch Out For: who's your daddy? [pp. 99-99]
Dykes To Watch Out For: Off Message [pp. 100-100]
Dykes To Watch Out For: love &other calamities [pp. 101-101]
Dykes To Watch Out For: FLUX [pp. 102-102]
Dykes To Watch Out For: THE USES OF INTELLIGENCE [pp. 103-103]
Dykes To Watch Out For: togetherness [pp. 104-104]
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letters to oob [pp. 106-106]
Back Matter

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