Seizing the means of reproduction : entanglements of feminism, health, and technoscience

Author(s)
    • Murphy, Michelle (Claudette Michelle)
Bibliographic Information

Seizing the means of reproduction : entanglements of feminism, health, and technoscience

Michelle Murphy

(Experimental futures : technological lives, scientific arts, anthropological voices)

Duke University Press, 2012

  • : pbk

Search this Book/Journal
Note

Includes bibliographical references and index

Description and Table of Contents

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.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements vii Introduction: Feminism in/as Biopolitics 1 1. Assembling Protocol Feminism 25 2. Immodest Witnessing, Affective Economies, and Objectivity 68 3. Pap Smears, Cervical Cancer, and Scales 102 4. Traveling Technology and a Device for Not Performing Abortions 150 Conclusion: Living the Contradiction 177 Notes 183 Bibliography 219 Index 247

by "Nielsen BookData"

Related Books: 1-1 of 1
Page Top