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A Sexy New Twist: Reproductive Technologies and Feminism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 December 2018
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- Review Essay
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- Copyright © American Bar Foundation, 1990
References
1 Davis v. Davis, N.Y. Times, Sept. 22, 1989.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
2 See I. Marcus, “Talking About Talking About Reproductive Technologies” (work in progress, 1990). I am indebted to my colleague Betty Mensch for the suggestion that such issues are primarily theological ones and that nothing in our legal mode of analysis can resolve them.Google Scholar
3 See Marcus, I., “Locked In and Locked Out: Divorce Law Reform in New York,” 38 Buffalo LR. 2 (1989), for a discussion of the gendered nature of discourse and its impact on domestic relations law reform efforts.Google Scholar
4 Toril Moi distinguishes Anglo-American feminist theory, with its belief in the authority of experience, from French feminist theory, which not only questions the category of experience but even that of the “experiencer”-the female subject herself. Moi, T., ed., French Feminist Thought: A Reader 5 (1987).Google Scholar
5 Such efforts have been criticized as falsely universalistic because they “tacitly presuppose some commonly held but unwarranted universalistic and essentialist assumptions about the nature of human beings and the conditions for social life. In addition they assume methods and/or concepts which are uninflected by temporality or historicity.” N. Fraser & L. Nicholson, “Social Criticism Without Philosophy: An Encounter Between Feminism and Postmodernism,” 10 Communication 354 (1988). See also E. Spelman, Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought (1988) (“Spelman, Inessential Woman”).Google Scholar
6 Rosaldo, , “The Use and Abuse of Anthropology: Reflections on Feminism and Cross Cultural Understanding,” 5 Signs 389 (1980).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
7 The feminist “argument is that the molding, direction, and expression of sexuality organize society into two sexes, women and men. This division underlies the totality of social relations; it is as structural and pervasive as class is in Marxist theory, although of course its structure and quality of pervasion are different. … As the organized expropriation of the work of some for the use of others defines the class, workers, the organized expropriation of the sexuality of some for the use of others defines the sex, woman. Hetero-sexuality is its predominant structure, gender is its social process, the family is a congealed form, sex roles are its qualities generalized to two social personas, and reproduction is a consequence.”Mackinnon, C., Feminism Unmodified 49 (198).Google Scholar
8 “Where does feminist theory start? I answer: Within the process of human reproduction. Of that process sexuality is but a part. I intend to argue that it is not within sexual relations but within the total process of human reproduction that the ideology of male supremacy finds its roots and its rationales. More controversially, I argue that it is from an adequate understanding of the process of reproduction, nature's traditional and bitter trap for the suppression of women, that women can begin to understand their possibilities and their freedom.”O'Brien, M., The Politics of Reproduction 8 (1981).Google Scholar
9 S. de Beauvoir, The Second Sex 33–36 (1953) (“de Beauvoir, Second Sex”). For de Beauvoir “the individuality of the female is opposed by the interest of the species.” E. Baruch, “The Female Body and the Male Mind-Reconsidering Simone de Beauvoir,”Dissent, Summer 1987, at 351. For a critique of de Beauvoir, see Spelman, Inessential Woman at 57–59.Google Scholar
10 De Beauvoir, Second Sex.Google Scholar
11 S. Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (1970).Google Scholar
12 Id. at 2.Google Scholar
13 Id.Google Scholar
14 Id. at 10–11. This demand for freeing women from the tyranny of their biology is repeated in the final chapter (“The Ultimate Revolution”) at 205–42.Google Scholar
15 Id. at 199.Google Scholar
16 Id. at 201.Google Scholar
17 Fraser & Nicholson, 10 Communication at 354–55 (cited in note S), view Firestone's analysis as an “ingenious tactical maneuver … [using] biologism to establish the primacy of the struggle against male domination rather than to justify acquiescence to it.”Google Scholar
18 D. Dinnerstein, The Mermaid and the Minotaur: Sexual Arrangements and Human Malaise (1977).Google Scholar
19 N. Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (1978). For a critique of Chodorow, see Spelman, Inessential Woman 80–113.Google Scholar
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21 L. Gordon, Women's Body, Women's Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America (1977).Google Scholar
22 R. Petchesky, Abortion and Woman's Choice: The State, sexuality, and Reproductive Freedom (1984).Google Scholar
23 M. O'Brien, The Politics of Reproduction (1981).Google Scholar
24 “Reproductive experience is not differentiated by the division of labour and subsequent social class formations, which is the historical form of development of production. Reproductive experience is differentiated at its most fundamental level in terms of gender.”Id. at 44–45.Google Scholar
25 Id. at 21.Google Scholar
26 Id. at 29–30.Google Scholar
27 Id. at 22–23.Google Scholar
28 Id. at 206.Google Scholar
29 Martin discusses her odyssey as an anthropologist moving from the traditional study of “exotic” societies, where the challenge to the anthropologist is understanding through immersion, to the painful recognition of her acceptance of customs and beliefs in her own society as self-evident and, therefore, not in need of explanation or translation (at 4–5, 10–11).Google Scholar
30 Martin readily admits that the use of interviews meant that she “gave up the rich, multilayered texture of life” she would have experienced by total immersion in the community (at 9).Google Scholar
31 From the ancient Greeks to the late 18th century it was an accepted notion that male and female bodies were structurally similar, though the sexes were not equal because males possessed more “heat” and were therefore more perfect than females. Nineteenth-and 20th-century metaphors of the body posited fundamental differences between the sexes, envisioned the body as a set of economic processes of spending and saving and of women's bodily functions as lacking a male analogue and therefore pathological, or described the body and its functions as a model of industrial society (at 27–52).Google Scholar
32 E.g., Martin reviews contemporary obstetrical literature on labor and delivery that juxtaposes images of the uterus as a machine that produces the baby or woman as laborer who produces the baby and, in either case, the doctor as supervisor or foreman of the process (at 58–65.) For an interesting essay on the social construction of science and technology, see T. J. Pinch and W. Bijker, “The Social Construction of Facts and Artifacts: Or How the Sociology of Science and the Sociology of Technology Might Benefit Each Other,” in W. Bijker, T. Hughes, & T. Pinch, eds. The Social Construction of Technological Systems (1987).Google Scholar
33 E.g., Middle-class women are more likely to use dominant medical images of menstruation as failed (re)production—a teleological perspective (at 105–7). Working-class women account for it as a life change (at 108–10). Martin asks why this difference exists and speculates that “working class women, perhaps because they have less to gain from productive labor in the society, have rejected the application of models of production to their bodies” (at 110). Later in the book Martin takes these findings that working-class women resist dominant cultural images of failure to produce and suggests that they support Alison Jaggar's argument that the standpoint of the oppressed is more critical of existing society, more impartial, and more comprehensive than that of the ruling class (at 190–91).Google Scholar
34 At 156–65, with an accompanying series of extraordinarily moving photographs at 162–63.Google Scholar
35 Pregnancy, abortion, adoption, infertility, disability, child care, fatherhood, and surrogacy.Google Scholar
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37 She states that our “debates must be located within an understanding of the biologically determinist direction of modern science and medicine which contain within them fixed notions of woman's and man's nature … [and] seek the causes of infertility and genetic imperfection and their solutions in the individual [not by chance primarily in the woman] rather than in an ecologically grounded concept of the individual in her or his natural and social contexts” (at 172).Google Scholar
38 G. Corea et al.Google Scholar
39 S. Cohen & N. Taub, eds.Google Scholar
40 As the title indicates, Field recognizes that the issues encompass far more than legal doctrine. Nevertheless one is left with the nagging concern that the “and” suggests that law is separate and apart from presumably the vast range of what are designated as human issues.Google Scholar
41 See I. Marcus, “Talking About Talking About Reproductive Technologies” (work in progress, 1990).Google Scholar
42 Field identifies him also as the biological father and the one who has signed the contractual arrangement (at 151), though we know the two are not necessarily coterminous.Google Scholar
43 Surprisingly, Field does not believe that the possibility that women might decide to retain custody would substantially deter such contractual arrangements. She foresees greater likelihood that they will choose to retain visiting rights (at 152). I must confess that I find this conclusion counterintuitive.Google Scholar
44 L. Andrews.Google Scholar
45 R. D. Klein.Google Scholar
46 E. Kane, Birth Mother: The Story of America's First Legal Surrogate- Mother (1988). Kane, a signatory to a gestational and parenting contract, gave birth to a child in November 1980.Google Scholar
47 M. B. Whitehead, A Mother's Story: The Truth About the Baby M Case (1989).Google Scholar
48 See, e.g., M. Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale (1985), which one reviewer has characterized as a “sort of gynecological 1984.” Judith Rossner, id. n.p. (Paperback ed. 1986).Google Scholar