Assignement 5 SimoneLR Lit Review 2 REVISED-1
Assignement 5 SimoneLR Lit Review 2 REVISED-1
Assignement 5 SimoneLR Lit Review 2 REVISED-1
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.
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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).
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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Proposal Writing Seminar - Assignment #5
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.
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.
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.
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REFERENCES
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.
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
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Katz, C. (2001). Vagabond capitalism and the necessity of social reproduction. Antipode, 33(4),
709-728.
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.
Murphy, M. (2012). Seizing the means of reproduction : entanglements of feminism, health, and
technoscience. Duke University Press.
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.