The Miracle of Life (Devalued)?

 

When I hear about someone not being able to have children my heart breaks. Being infertile is one of my greatest fears in life because I want to be a mother so badly. My aunt and her husband were trying to have a baby for years and she ended up never getting pregnant. After seeing how terrible being infertile is for her, I could not ever imagine something to terrible happening to me. That is why when I think about surrogacy and medical technology that aids people in having babies if they are having trouble I am immediately filled with compassion and awe. Helping someone have a baby when they cannot or are having trouble getting pregnant seems to be such an honorable thing to do. The biggest favor of all favors. Those women deserve everything and more. Except in Outsourcing the Womb, France Twine explains how gestational surrogacy and other forms of surrogacy has become a commercialize marketplace especially for those of low socioeconomic backgrounds as well as a system of based on privilege.

            “Today it is relatively easy to use the Internet to research and identify agencies that will provide one-stop shopping for assistance in conception including the purchase of genetic material (ova, sperm) and to find a surrogate to hire. For example, www.iwanttogetpregnant.com is a website that offers services in India. The Internet now provides access to online shopping for a surrogate-an international database of women will sell their ova or their reproductive services.”(Twine, 2011,30)

This quote from Twine made me cringe. I go on the internet to online shop or look up information for school or check movie times. I do not associate going online with “one-stop shopping” for assistance in conception. Having an international database of women that will sell their ova or reproductive services is terrifying to me for a few reasons. 1) Because it seems that the miracle of life is being forgotten or devalued if it is being turned into a consumer culture. 2) Having an international database full of women really takes away from the whole process. It reminds me of anonymous websites. Or shopping using a debit or credit card. There is an invisibility associated with online databases which is blurring out these women as people.  And finally, 3) The idea that a woman’s body has now become even more commercialized. Yes women’s bodies have been sexualized for years but now that the consumerism has reached a whole new level of using a woman’s body for childbirth? This goes beyond the loss of a woman’s subjectivity because their personhood is completely and entirely nonexistent based on this consumer culture of google babies.

The last way that the consumerism of the womb devalues the miracle of life is the knit picking of certain traits. “In the commercial egg and sperm market individuals select and purchase genetic material (egg and sperm) based on the physical and social characteristics include age, skin color, height, hair color, eye color, body shape, and perceived racial or ethnic origin.”(Twine, 2011, 33) These consumers are making choices about the desirability of the egg and sperm based on those factors listed above. While yes, I still view giving up your reproductive services as a gift, this process is just shopping for a child. I view childbirth as this amazing thing that happens that gives us all life. But picking an egg or sperm based on those factors seems way too much like shopping and not enough like what is supposed to happen naturally. This process just seems like me picking out the color and size of my Christmas sweater except it is not a sweater it is a human child. It is just so unnatural. I understand that all medicine is technically unnatural but this system is messing with birth in such an invasive and unnatural way.

            Because the woman’s womb has become a place for consumerism and has entered a process that is like “shopping for your baby” I found the perfect video to share that explains why “shopping for a baby” rubs me the wrong way. An expecting mother emailed a Down syndrome advocacy group asking what to expect because her baby has Down syndrome. This video basically shows many of the things a child with Down syndrome is able to do and will do. I know mothers of children with Down syndrome and many other mental disabilities and they all love their children just like any other mother. I fear the concept of “shopping for a baby” because it erases natural processes that could occur and while yes having a child with Down syndrome is difficult, “isn’t every child difficult”? If a couple or person is shopping for a certain type of child what would happen if that baby turns out to be flawed in any way? Especially when legal documents are in place. I just think that just because you can’t have a baby of your own does not give you the right to pick out your future child’s specific eye color or body type.

Pregnancy: The Extent of Body Integrity

 

 

 

I am from Seattle, Washington and before I came to college I had never met anyone who was against abortions or even gay rights. Many people think that the people at Allegheny College are extremely liberal and too left winged but to me, Allegheny College is actually kind of conservative. I am extremely thankful to go to this college because not only have my peers and professors taught me and showed me new ways to think but coming here has shaped who I am and what I believe in. I am a strong believer that women should have the rights to their body. Anybody should have rights to their own body. But I also know that if I became pregnant I do not know if I could ever abort that baby. But that is me, that is my choice, and everybody deserves the right to choose. Because of my strong beliefs in the ownership of my own body, my own history working with abused and neglected babies, and my maternal instincts I hit a rock and a hard place when it comes to being or becoming pregnant and Susan Bordo’s argument.

In Susan Bordo’s Unbearable Weight: Are Mother’s Persons? Reproductive Rights and the Politics of Subjectivity, Bordo examines pregnant women from an intersectional feminist perspective. She explains that her argument does not stem from pro-life or pro-choice but from the body and bodily integrity. Bordo’s central argument is that when a woman becomes pregnant society, medicine, and the law instantly treats her as a “fetus incubator”. As a now “fetus incubator”, pregnant mothers lose their subjectivity while the infant becomes the “super subject”. This means that a mother instantly becomes a baby maker and a baby maker only. Her purpose is stripped only to “baby maker” which is dehumanizing and irrational. She claims that being pregnant should not impact a women’s subjectivity and body integrity but it is a sad fact that those things are lost once a woman becomes pregnant. Society expects women to give up their subjectivity and that a woman will give it up willingly.

What I want to examine here is the fetus as the “super subject”. This is where I became extremely confused in what I believe. In my heart I have a strong sense of self. My body is my own. In other words: I have bodily integrity (right now at least, as a non-pregnant woman). BUT…I also have an intense emotional attachment already to the baby or babies I have not had yet as well as the many babies and children I have worked with in the past. When I read Bordo’s listing of cases of fetal abuse I find myself questioning why is the law wrong here?

“A Massachusetts woman who miscarried after an automobile accident in which she was intoxicated was prosecuted for vehicular homicide of her fetus. A Connecticut woman was charged with endangering her fetus by swallowing cocaine as police moved to arrest her. A Washington judge sent Brenda Vaughan to jail for nearly four months to protect her fetus, because a drug test, taken after she was arrested for foraging a check, revealed cocaine use. In 1990, a Wyoming woman was charged by the police with the crime of drinking while pregnant and was prosecuted for felony child abuse. In South Carolina, a dozen women have been arrested after the hospitals they went to for maternity care tested them for cocaine use and turned them into the police for fetal abuse.” (Bordo, 1993)

I have known all my life that I want to be a mother. I love children and babies more than anything. In fact, people that know me say I have a special gift with children. I have such a connection to little kids and babies that I got a job working as a teacher at a Therapeutic Child Care Center for abused and neglected children (infants through age 5). There I worked with many babies and children whose mothers had abused a variety of drugs while they were in utero. I understand that teratogens really matter in terms of how much, how often, and when (stages of prenatal development) which should definitely be taken into account in legal matters. But I also have worked with these children and seen their struggles because of their mother’s choices “for her own body”? This is my struggle. When you are pregnant you are responsible for another being. A being that is incapable of speech and of making decisions for itself yet.

I understand that a woman’s subjectivity is taken when they become pregnant and that the fetus becomes higher on the hierarchy of importance. I believe that women should be able to maintain their bodily integrity…to an extent. Because when you become pregnant you are automatically giving up a slice of your bodily integrity because you are not only making decisions for yourself but you are making decisions that affect the tiny person inside you.

This means that if I were to see a pregnant woman smoking or drinking I would simply stay quiet because I respect her body. I see her as more than just a “baby incubator”. But in my head I will also be cringing and my heart will be aching for the baby inside her.

What I find interesting is the fact that a woman’s body is seen as not her own when she is pregnant but when the baby comes out her body is still not hers. Her body is still subject to harsh criticism, especially when baring signs of previous pregnancies. I found an article about a woman whose Facebook status went viral. She went to the beach and some young people were making fun of her stomach which was covered in stretch marks from baring five children. I find it ironic that our society places such an emphasis on a mother being a “good” mother and being held to such a high standard when you become pregnant but the bodily changes your body goes through because of that process are frowned upon and seen as “gross” by many.

Skinny Privilege

 

Hi, my name is Sam Green and I have something I like to call skinny privilege. I do not think this term exists yet, at least I have not heard of it, but I know I have it. I have it every time I walk into a class and can feel comfortable sitting in the chairs. I have it when I have no fears about taking off my clothes in the locker room or showering with the volleyball team because I know my body will not be judged. I have it every single time I walk into a store with the intent to buy clothes or underwear because I know that wherever I go I will find clothes that fit me. I have skinny privilege everywhere I go and I realized this while reading and doing my homework.

In class we have started reading Kathleen LeBesco’s book called Revolting Bodies? The Struggle To Redefine Fat Identity. I decided to focus on her fifth chapter called Revolution on a Rack: Fatness, Fashion, and Commodification for this blog post because this chapter put fat challenges and fat oppression on the table in a way that I could not ignore. In this chapter, LeBesco examines the relationship between fat women and consumer culture, representations of fat women and consumption in media texts, and the role of the fat woman spectator as a consuming subject. (LeBesco, 2004, 66)

Reading this chapter made me feel a little guilty because I benefit from being skinny and embarrassed that I had never thought about the ways in which fat people are oppressed. Moving passed those initial feelings of guilt and embarrassment I realized that I have never thought about this or had this conversation because I have never experienced being fat. And even though I do have friends who are considered fat, being fat is not talked about, in my experience, in any way other than something to lose or something to not be.

I can understand how advertisers and clothing companies would not want to feature fat models because our culture looks at fatness as ugly, “…advertisers may want to avoid the association of their products with the stigma of fatness, as negative connotations have the power to undo a company” (66) But at the same time the United States is the second most obese nation in the world. From a marketing standpoint wouldn’t it make more sense to start marketing their clothes using models of all sizes because not only does one size not exist but statistics are showing that that one size that is represented is not the norm.

The next part of the chapter I wish to discuss is LeBesco’s inclusion of Mariko Tamaki’s critique for her fashion revolution because her words are extremely important and my reaction to those words validate her point even more. “I’ll take my naked body to the streets in protest. I’ll pummel the public with what it insists on denying and avoiding: tons of mountainous, sexy flesh. I’ll bare my bare boobs and squish my sweaty bum at strangers. I’ll squeak against every surface available and leave strange marks to embarrass the public. I’ll gather an army of fat angry naked soldiers and we’ll take to the streets. We’ll go to the Gap and touch all their clothes and use up all their perfume samples till they agree to stock size 16 to 30 as standard practice. Look out…the revolution is coming.”(LeBesco, 2004, 69) Mariko’s words illustrated such confidence that the passage was almost uncomfortable to read. It was uncomfortable for me because yes on one hand I wish for bodies to not be so criticized, especially fat ones. I wish for all women and men, myself included, to love their bodies. But at the same time, her passage made me uncomfortable because if I had her body I cannot see myself loving it. Typing this down and even thinking it inside my head makes me cringe because that is so messed up how anti-fat our culture has molded everyone, including me, to be. Which is why Mariko’s “revolution” is so necessary!!! I agree with LeBesco’s idea for how this revolution should take place, “The fashion industry won’t feature fat models because the public apparently won’t accept them, but the public stands little chance of being able to accept fat models until the fashion industry portrays them in the same flattering light they shine on their slimmer sisters. (71,72) LeBesco is calling for more variety for the public eye in terms of models shown as well as how they are shown in similarity to skinnier models. I like what she says because she is not making being skinny illegal or wrong, she is just probing the fashion community to accept fat women which will then allow for the public to begin to accept fat women in terms of acceptable beauty standards.

I personally think I am skinny. Sometimes I look down when I am wearing jeans and simply hate the roll of fat that hangs over my pants. Sometimes I don’t want to be intimate with my boyfriend because I wish I looked a different way. I am not invalidating my own feelings just because I am a skinny woman. That just because I am not fat I am not allowed to feel how I sometimes feel.  I am pointing out that the way I feel, so many other people feel the same or worse. Everyone not only receives criticism from our culture and the media but from ourselves. And those voices inside our heads when we look in the mirror, that is our worst enemy. So I found a short video online of a beautiful spoken word poem on UpWorthy about someone else’s personal experience with their body. I loved this poem because it wasn’t some happy “I always love my body I am beautiful” happy go lucky song and dance. Her poem shows a true and realistic struggle and within that struggle she finds inner peace and love of herself.

You Can't Sit With Us

        

              When I came to college last year in the fall I was not expecting to be hit with as much sexism as I was. After my first semester it became clear to me that I had been a little blind in high school to the insane amount of sexism that surrounds me and my peers every day. I say a little because I did notice how it felt to be a woman but I never put a name or definition to how I was feeling and my beliefs until I came to college. When I came to college is when I started to realize that I am a feminist. I took Intro to Woman’s Studies with our very own B-Shaw and fell in love with the feminist movement and Woman’s Studies. After my first semester in that class I decided to make Woman’s Studies my minor and after that first semester I also had to go home to Seattle for winter break. During winter break is when I had to answer all the family questions about college and the most common asked question was “What is your major and minor?”. I proudly would answer Psychology Major and Woman’s Studies Minor to which I received awkward laughs and rude jokes after I would give a brief explanation of what Woman’s Studies is all about. My cousin Taylor, a recent graduate of Williams College, gave me a dirty look and said “That’s bull, why isn’t there a Men’s Studies class” and my dad said, “Whatever makes you happy.” Although he continuously made jokes about himself “oppressing” me by opening doors for me or ordering for me at restaurants. When I came back for my sophomore year at Allegheny I noticed that I am reluctant to even say that my minor is Woman’s Studies because I am sick of my own peers here at school let alone my family making me feel like feminism is a dirty word.

         Because the people around me have been making me feel like a lesser person for being a feminist, I chose to focus on Julia Serano’s chapter in her book The Whipping Girl called Bending Over Backwards: Traditional Sexism and Trans-Woman Exclusion Politics because this chapter made me think about feminism more critically and made me feel more secure in who I identify as, a feminist. This chapter focuses on the issue of trans-woman-inclusion in lesbian and woman-only spaces and how many famous feminists have included anti-trans woman remarks in their work. What was so enraging about this chapter was the discussion of discrimination that trans woman have to face from a feminist community that should be opening their arms with love and acceptance. At first I asked myself why a group that I look up to be so exclusive to a sexual minority? The chapter frustrated me because as I was reading it I was starting to question being a feminist. I was thinking, if this is what feminists believe then I want no part of it. Serano offers an explanation for my question by offering the idea that this was a case of cultural transphobia that happened to permeate the lesbian and feminist community. To my dismay Serano continues to explain in this chapter that the discrimination of trans women didn’t end in the past but that it continues to exist today. I am not oblivious to the fact that the trans community faces discrimination but I was completely in shock by those who were perpetrating the discrimination.

            Serano talks about how trans women are dismissed because they are considered “less of a woman”, and that they aren’t considered “real women”. This notion of “realness” and “authenticity” based off of past “maleness” made me sick to my stomach. This idea made me think of the people who preach that only real women have curves. I just wanted to scream! Women can come in all shapes and sizes with varying sexualities, histories, identities, and even genitals.

While trans women are being frowned upon for being men in their past, in my eyes they should be considered special nuggets of knowledge because of what they can potentially bring to the table. They should be included in woman only spaces because I believe their experience of crossing over from male to female is extremely valuable. Serano even talks about her experiences during her physical transition of starting to be recognized as a woman as being appalling. “I was surprised by how often male strangers told me to smile…Needless to say, I found these remarks condescending, as nobody dared to tell me that I should smile for them back when I was perceived as a male.”(322) As someone who identifies as a woman, so much of what it means to be a woman in American society and culture is ingrained in my brain. Serano’s brief explanation of her experience with being told to smile shows that she noticed something teeny tiny about being a woman that I probably would have never picked up.  

Reading Serano’s chapter made me feel put off by feminism because of some feminists discrimination against trans women. This chapter made me realize that feminism as a whole isn’t all hugs and love. I realized that there are many different kinds of feminists and that feminism is something that I have to define for myself without listening to my peers or my family. Because some feminists chose to be mean girls and say “You can’t sit with us” doesn’t mean I have to do the same. Because this chapter made me criticize feminism and brought to my mind how other people perceive me as a feminist I want to show Emma Watson’s speech at the UN as a recently named UN Women Goodwill Ambassador. Her speech is important because she calls for thousands of men and boys to join together in the HeForShe campaign which aims to make males advocates for gender inequality. Her speech as well as her whole campaign is bold, brave, and gave me the courage to stand up and not be afraid to identify as a feminist.

Is it a boy or is it a girl?

 

 

In our Bodies in American Culture class we have started out the semester by reading and having discussions about sex, intersex, and gender. So far we have read authors such as Elizabeth Reis and Anne Fausto-Sterling. A reading by Elizabeth Reis, called Divergence or Disorder?: the politics of naming intersex, was the one reading that stood out to me the most.

Reis says on page 536, “In this paper I explain the ongoing debate and suggest a new term, divergence of sex development, that might reduce some of the conflict and satisfy intersex people, their parents, and physicians.” Not only was her main argument compelling and interesting, it struck me personally because she backs up her proposed change from “disorders of sex development” to “divergence of sex development” with reasoning from the disability rights movement. This reasoning explains that the word disorder connotes a need for repair and that maybe unusual sex anatomy doesn’t need surgery or hormonal correction. I grew up with people in my family and in my neighborhood that had severe mental and physical disabilities so I was never shy or scared of people with disabilities and I hold the whole disabled community close to my heart. Because of my background, I am extremely interested in the disability rights movement and using that reasoning and applying it to intersex people and their so called “disorders” really made me feel attached to the reading. So not even four pages in and I was already hooked personally, but the most important parts of this reading that inspired me to blog about it were the parts that made my brain stretch. Reis’s paper proposed ideas and facts that I had never thought of or knew before.

Firstly, Reis explains that infant genital surgery is possibly unnecessary on page 538, “there is little evidence that infant genital surgery does what it has been assumed to do: improve attachment between child and parents, ease parental distress about atypical genitals, ensure gender identity development in accordance with the assigned gender, or eliminate the intersex condition.” She even goes on to say that the normalizing genital surgery does not “cure” the intersex condition and is often simply cosmetic and that it sometimes does more harm than good. And that many of the people who have undergone these surgeries do not end up leading happier or more successful lives than those who avoided surgeries. I read the book Middlesex by Jeffery Eugenides my senior year of high school and we had many discussions about intersex anatomy so I was already aware that people were born intersex. But the way it was taught in class made the surgeries seem like they were what was supposed to happen when Reis made me think about it in a new way. Her paper made me think about medicine in a new way because in my mind the medical world is supposed to fix injuries and make right of what is wrong but being born intersex is not wrong.

Secondly, on page 538 and 539 Reis talks about how our culture gets in the way of what is medically necessary as well as normal and natural by saying, “Using the word disorder elides a crucial point that some of these surgeries, such as clitoral recession, have primarily social rather than medical goals. As Suzanne Kessler (1998) declared, “gender ambiguity is ‘corrected’, not because it is threatening to the infant’s life, but because it is threatening to the infant’s culture”. Reis later states on page 539, “The ways in which intersex bodies have been scrutinized and pathologized have been negative, harmful, and based, not on medical necessity but on social anxieties about marriage, heterosexuality, and the insistence on normative bodies (Matta 2005; Reis 2005) The prevention of homosexuality has long motivated surgical and nonsurgical sex assignment in this country…Those with atypical genital anatomies have had their bodies reshaped and sculpted to look (and presumably act) more typical, even though evidence suggests that many of those who have undergone such life altering surgeries have not had more successful outcomes and happier lives than those who have avoided surgery.” So yes I was aware of the intersex community I just didn’t know enough of the medical information to realize that maybe these surgeries are unnecessary and are completely an act based on cultural beliefs. I always just thought that you were either a boy or a girl because that’s what I grew up surrounded by because that is our culture. I love the quote Reis got from Suzanne Kessler that talks about how gender ambiguity is corrected because it threatens the infants culture not its life. Kessler is completely right. If I had a child I would want it to be happy and healthy. Unfortunately parents are horrified when their babies pop out with ambiguous genitalia and to be honest I would be too, because that’s how I was raised. To only see pink and blue.

            Lastly, on page 539 she explains a new way to think about sex and gender, “Some have corroborated the feminist supposition that we should think of sex, like gender, on a continuum, as something more flexible than strictly female or male.” This reading taught me that being born intersex is natural and thinking of sex as only male and female is what is not natural. This part of her paper really caught my attention because I know it is talked about in psychology all the time that sexuality and gender should be understood as fluid, flexible, and on a spectrum. So it was really easy to wrap my head around the idea that sex should be looked at on a continuum but it was really hard to digest because all I am thinking about is what I know and grew up with: is it a boy or is it a girl?

            After reading Reis’s paper I kept feeling the same way every time I would finish a paragraph. I honestly felt like a little kid finding out Santa is not real. I felt like I had almost been lied to my whole life. It is not like being born intersex is some mysterious thing! But I kept coming back to this same question of why is it treated as some secret? As some taboo topic that I didn’t hear of until senior year of high school or when I entered college. And when will intersex not be such a hush hush conversation? I believe that intersex is so taboo because we are so used to and comfortable with one or the other: a boy or a girl. Imagining naming your baby as something else seems terrifying because it is breaking what our culture knows to be true. I also believe that it will take a long time for this idea of sex on a continuum to even enter conversations. Because I was fascinated by this topic being kept secretive and taboo I found someone breaking that barrier online. Phoebe Hart challenged the “culture of silence” by making a documentary about her personal experience with androgen insensitivity disorder and other people whose bodies don’t fit into our cultures idea of a normal body.