Assignement 5 SimoneLR Lit Review 2 REVISED-1

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Simone Lavoie-Racine

Proposal Writing Seminar - Assignment #5

Literature Review #2: The Politics of Reproduction

Through the examination of certain illness and disability categories, we get to understand
how body, gender, and race differences (among others) are enacted. I regroup this set of concerns
under the broader concept of reproduction and reproductive politics. In this section, I will attend
to the broad concerns that the anthropology of reproduction brings up, and then to the more
particular ways in which the idea of illness fits into this discussion as well as within literature
about social reproduction.

Looking Back to the Anthropology of Reproduction

Works in the anthropology of reproduction have attended to social phenomena related to


the process through which social systems try to achieve continuity. This concern with the way
culture and society reproduce themselves with more or less variation has been at the centre of
early anthropological works and theories like functionalism, where reproduction is defined as
taking place through the social differentiation and complementarity of the sexes (Parsons, 1985)
or in culturally specific ways of ensuring that the gender/sex matrix ensures the perpetuation of
the group (Malinowski, 1922). In more recent years, the body of work preoccupied with these
questions has strongly been influenced by feminist theory and has turned to critically assess how
gendered bodies and their reproductive value are produced. Andaya and Kotni (2022) point out
that contemporary works in the anthropology of reproduction can be categorized in two main
ensembles: those concerned with cross-cultural experiences of the reproductive cycle, and those
interested in using the concept of reproduction to understand how social groups are reproducing
along a spectrum of features (race, class, gender, citizenship/nationality, sexuality…).
Underpinning these anthropological concerns, we then find Foucault’s (1980) theorization of the
conditions under which bodies are trained to be socially, politically and materially productive, as
well as feminist theory addressing the “fleshy, messy and indeterminate stuff of everyday life”
(Katz, 2001, p. 711) especially in the home and in relation to invisible labour performed by
women. Cindi Katz’s evocative turn of phrase brings our attention to the ordinary and naturalized
processed subsuming not only daily and long-term reproduction, most of which are gendered, but
also to the cultural forms and practices that constitute these processes—echoing anthropology’s

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Simone Lavoie-Racine
Proposal Writing Seminar - Assignment #5

long-lasting attunement to the “imponderabilia of actual life and behaviour” (Malinowski, 1922)
constituting the very fabric of social life.

With those concerns in mind, I take up Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp’s (1991)
conceptualization of reproduction. They define it as “a slippery concept, connoting parturition,
Marxist notions of household sustenance and constitution of a labour force, and ideologies that
support the continuity of social systems” (Ginsburg & Rapp, 1991, p. 311). Furthermore, these
authors situate the politics of reproduction at the interplay of local and global processes
constituting a variety of reproductive practices, policies, and politics that make up social life
(Ginsburg & Rapp, 1991; Ginsburg & Rapp, 1995). I use these definitions as a departure point to
examine how “problematic” reproduction (Rapp, 2001) and reproductive disruptions (Inhorn,
2007), in the form of endometriosis, “bear the marks of stratified reproducers” (Rapp, 2001, p.
472).

Disrupting the Life Cycle

Next, disability studies offer much in the way of theorizing the previously introduced
notions of “problematic” reproduction and “disruptive” reproduction. The very conceptualization
of disability in relation to power structure reveals the relevance of thinking through normative
ideas of reproduction in the areas in which it fails to account for all forms of life. This appears
more clearly in how disability studies concerned with political economy of the body define
disability. While feminist theory, and feminist disability studies have extended our understanding
of the body as a site of transgression, political economy analyses have been mostly absent from
that body of literature until the early 2010s. Building on the work of Nirma Erevelles, I
understand disability as “the very embodiment of the disruption of normativity that is, in turn,
symbolic of efficient and profitable individualism and the efficient economic appropriation of
those profits produced within capitalist societies” (Erevelles, 2000; 2011, p. 117). Chronic
illnesses that interrupt the biological life cycle, just as endometriosis does, thus sit as disruptive to
biological, social, and labour reproduction within that framework.

The measures taken to care for (and “redress”) these conditions uncover how the body
politic, and body governance, come into play in the case of such disruptions. Scheper-Hughes and
Lock (1987, pp. 7-8), define the body politic as contending with power and control through “the

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regulation, surveillance, and control of bodies (individual and collective) in reproduction and
sexuality, in work and in leisure, in sickness and other forms of deviance and human difference”.
This definition posits that bodies that escape domestication, either strategically or through
impairment, for example, are under heightened vigilance and ascribed culturally specific
meanings in order to make sense of their difference. Social and political orders are embodied in
more or less dramatic ways and through various rituals, among which the practice of biomedicine
has been increasingly theorized. I will expand on how social and political bodily orders are
discussed on the scale of the nation in the following section.

Reproduction and the Nation

Disability studies have also contributed to understanding under what conditions ideas of
citizenship are reproduced. The contingencies of public participation that are put into place in
liberal and neoliberal rest on individuals’ abilities to “conform to exacting standards of both
individual autonomy and practical/civic reason— ability” (Erevelles, 2011, p. 22). In other
words, traditional ideas of social citizenship are disrupted, in many respects, by chronically ill
and disabled people’ inability to conform. In broaching these issues, disability studies enter in
conversation with an already existing, rich body of literature addressing the questions of nation
and nationalism that characterize the nation as an imagined communities (Anderson, 1983), but
also as an incoherent, embodied whole that intervenes in subject-making in the everyday, beyond
metanarratives (Lyotard, 1983; Williams, 1983).

What I am interested in building upon are the ideas of belonging and being cared for that
are revealed through claims of citizenship made by social activists, and more specifically through
anthropological works on cultural citizenship as practices of dialogical subject-making (Ong,
1996). Going back into disability theory, Mitchell and Snyder (2015) discuss the power webs that
citizens are a part of by arguing that contemporary biopolitics of disability are characterized by a
neoliberalism that both commodifies disability (through capitalism) and excludes it (through
ableism). Mitchell and Snyder (2015) also introduce the concept of cultural rehabilitation to refer
to the “normalization practices at work within the neoliberal era through which nonnormative
(i.e., nonproductive) bodies become culturally docile.” (Mitchell & Snyder, 2015, p. 205). This
process of performative and fetishized inclusion transforms disabled bodies, previously rejected
objects, into objects of care that funnel projected accumulation (Harvey 2007 in Mitchell &
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Proposal Writing Seminar - Assignment #5

Snyder, 2015). Taken together, I suggest that the notions of cultural citizenship and cultural
rehabilitation highlight the “dual process of self-making and of being-made” (Ong, 1996, p. 738)
for disabled individuals and the communities they strive to create to subvert, and also to submit
to, under neoliberalism in Quebec.

In line with these authors, I challenge deterministic theories of the body/mind. In


conversation with disability and feminist scholars, I wish to emphasize the dialogic and
embedded quality of the experiences of chronic illness. At the intersection of failing biologies,
public health problems and sometime subversive forms of biosociality, literature on health
advocacy movements also highlights the political claims they make, offering insights into how
state governance, responsibilities and social contract materialize in relation to specific conditions
(Murphy, 2012), bringing to life the previously discussed practices of self-making and being-
made contained within cultural citizenship. In the case of endometriosis organizations in France, I
have explored how geographical claims related to the distribution of care hinge on the expected
distribution of social provisions by local health agencies. Moving chronic illness from the realm
of epidemiology to that of a public health problem also moves the suffering bodies from
individual ones to the realm of the body politic (Fassin, 2008)—where offering care for
endometriosis brings in concerns related to the gendered provision of care, but also solidifying
the purported etiology of the illness based on what kind of care is offered (Seear, 2014).

Public health is also theorized as a site where the nation and the state symbolically and
materially take form. Fassin (2008) points out that public health can be understood both as acting
upon individual bodies through targeted policies, and as an apparatus acting upon the collective
body. These practices, Fassin suggest, are the expressions of a government of life—he borrows
that expression from Foucault (2012)—that translates problems belonging originally to
biomedicine into sociosanitary ones. Under the cover of risk calculation and cost-efficiency
rationales, he demonstrates that public health is better characterized by the use of power onto
individuals to ensure their well-being, and not as an entity holding knowledge and expertise on
illness and populations (Fassin, 2008, p. 22). In putting together Fassin, Foucault and the
previously discussed perspectives on the dialogic process of subject-making within specific
locales, we get to a nuanced understanding of how the reproduction of illness and disability sit at
the intersection of seemingly biomedical epidemiological concerns, but also profoundly social
ones. For example, as endometriosis becomes a site for reproductive health advocacy, it also
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Proposal Writing Seminar - Assignment #5

gains entry into the realm of public discourse as a “problem” through its biomolecular impact on
the reproductive cycle—menstruation and ovulation stopped and started again, uteruses and
ovaries removed, hormones replaced—and is reduced to its fertility-related symptoms and
etiology. These concerns drag reproduction to the centre of endometriosis care, whether or not
that is what people living with the illness grapple the most with (Jones, 2020). State-sanctioned
and nationalistic scripts of which bodies should be reproduced, and which bodies should not,
intervene in the processes of getting medical care or not, of accessing biotechnologies or not, and
of being recognized as disabled and/or ill, or not (Davis, 2019).

As such, examining local (and geographically bounded) ways of caring for and defining
global chronic illnesses reveal the local logics of care and reproduction that are striven for.
Works like historian Sean Mills’s (2010) on decolonial movements in Montreal in the 1960s
provide additional and crucial elements to situate the province of Quebec in its nation-building
project, and ethnonationalist inclinations. These works will also contextualize relevant social
movements such as the emergence of women’s advocacy movement for greater access to
reproductive health technologies. For example, the historical significance of white women’s lack
of reproductive autonomy, on which hinged an important part of Quebec’s Catholic
ethnonationalist project before the Quiet Revolution in the 1960s (Jacquet et al., 2017; Mills,
2010), is important to consider in order to theorize bodily politics in Quebec.

To conclude, the politics of reproduction as a body of literature offers tools to understand


how experiences of chronic illness (endometriosis, in the case of my project) are intertwined with
normative national projects, care structures and public health policies—and what this reveals in
the way bodies and life sit at the centre of state governance. Building upon the insights of
anthropology, feminist theory and disability studies, I challenge the naturalization of the life
cycle by centring to disruptions as central to the formation of cultural scripts of (social)
reproduction.

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Proposal Writing Seminar - Assignment #5

REFERENCES

Andaya, E., & Kotni, M. E. (2022). The Anthropology of Reproduction. In A Companion to


Medical Anthropology (pp. 213-229).
https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119718963.ch12

Anderson, B. (1983). Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of


nationalism. . Verso books.

Davis, D.-A. (2019). Reproductive injustice: Racism, pregnancy, and premature birth. New York
University Press.

Erevelles, N. (2000). Educating unruly bodies: Critical pedagogy, disability studies, and the
politics of schooling. Educational theory, 50(1), 25-47.

Erevelles, N. (2011). Disability and difference in global contexts: enabling a transformative body
politic. Palgrave Macmillan.

Fassin, D. (2008). Faire de la santé publique (2e ed.). Éd. de l'École des hautes études en santé
publique.

Foucault, M. (1980). Power/knowledge : selected interviews and other writings, 1972-1977.


Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc.

Foucault, M. (2012). Du gouvernement des vivants : cours au Collège de France, 1979-1980.


EHESS.

Ginsburg, F., & Rapp, R. (1991). The Politics of Reproduction. Annual review of anthropology,
20, 311-343. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2155804

Ginsburg, F. D., & Rapp, R. (1995). Conceiving the new world order : the global politics of
reproduction. University of California Press.

Inhorn, M. C. (2007). Reproductive disruptions : gender, technology, and biopolitics in the new
millenium. Berghahn.

Jacquet, C., Pagé, G., & Pirotte, M. (2017). Continuités et ruptures dans le mouvement féministe
québécois francophone pour des droits sexuels et reproductifs. Nouvelles questions
féministes, 36(2), 16-33. https://doi.org/10.3917/nqf.362.0016

Jones, C. E. (2020). Queering gendered disabilities. Journal of Lesbian Studies, 1-17.


https://doi.org/10.1080/10894160.2020.1778852

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Proposal Writing Seminar - Assignment #5

Katz, C. (2001). Vagabond capitalism and the necessity of social reproduction. Antipode, 33(4),
709-728.

Lyotard, J.-F. (1983). La condition postmoderne: rapport sur le savoir. Minuit.

Malinowski, B. (1922). Argonauts of the western Pacific : an account of native enterprise and
adventure in the archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea. Waveland Press, Inc.

Mills, S. (2010). The empire within : postcolonial thought and political activism in sixties
Montreal. McGill-Queen's University Press.

Mitchell, D. T., & Snyder, S. L. (2015). Biopolitics of disability : neoliberalism, ablenationalism,


and peripheral embodiment. University of Michigan Press.

Murphy, M. (2012). Seizing the means of reproduction : entanglements of feminism, health, and
technoscience. Duke University Press.

Ong, A. (1996). Cultural citizenship as subject-making. Current Anthropology, 37(5), 737-762.

Parsons, T. (1985). Talcott Parsons on institutions and social evolution: selected writings.
University of Chicago Press.

Rapp, R. (2001). Gender, Body, Biomedicine: How Some Feminist Concerns Dragged
Reproduction to the Center of Social Theory. Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 15(4),
466-477. https://doi.org/10.1525/maq.2001.15.4.466

Scheper-Hughes, N., & Lock, M. M. (1987). The Mindful Body: A Prolegomenon to Future
Work in Medical Anthropology. Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 1(1), 6-41.
https://doi.org/10.1525/maq.1987.1.1.02a00020

Seear, K. (2014). The Makings of a Modern Epidemic : Endometriosis, Gender and Politics.
Ashgate.

Williams, R. (1983). Culture and society, 1780-1950. Columbia University Press.

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