Seizing the means of reproduction
Subtitle: entanglements of feminism, health, and technoscience
By: Michelle Murphy
Series: Experimental futures; Experimental futures
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 2012
Place of publication: Durham, NC
Language: eng
Number of pages: 259
ISBN-13: 9780822353317; 9780822353362
Subjects: Health and hygiene; Women's health services; Women's rights; Reproductive rights; Women; Feminism; History
Description: "In Seizing the Means of Reproduction, Michelle Murphy's initial focus on the alternative health practices developed by radical feminists in the United States during the 1970s and 1980s opens into a sophisticated analysis of the transnational entanglements of American empire, population control, neoliberalism, and late-twentieth-century feminisms. Murphy concentrates on the technoscientific means - the technologies, practices, protocols, and processes - developed by feminist health activists. She argues that by politicizing the technical details of reproductive health, alternative feminist practices aimed at empowering women were also integral to late-twentieth-century biopolitics.

Murphy traces the transnational circulation of cheap, do-it-yourself health interventions, highlighting the uneasy links between economic logics, new forms of racialized governance, U.S. imperialism, family planning, and the rise of NGOs. In the twenty-first century, feminist health projects have followed complex and discomforting itineraries. The practices and ideologies of alternative health projects have found their way into World Bank guidelines, state policies, and commodified research. While the particular moment of U.S. feminism in the shadow of Cold War and postcolonialism has passed, its dynamics continue to inform the ways that health is governed and politicized today."--Pub. desc.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Assembling protocol feminism; title: Immodest witnessing, affective economies and objectivity; title: Pap smears, cervical cancer, and scales; title: Traveling technology and a device for not performing abortion; title: Living the contradiction.