Position Paper
for SNACC Residency: April 11-16, 2001
"Knowing Bodies" - Feminist issues
in health care, medicine, and biotechnology.
“The time is
ripe for a new women-centered feminist health care movement.”
ASK WOMEN WHAT
THEY WANT—DON’T TELL WOMEN WHAT THEY NEED
FIGHT SCIENCE
WITH SCIENCE
Our
[biological] bodies have always been culturally constructed and technologically
modified or extended. Alteration of human bodies and the environment began with
technologies like tool making, agriculture, textile production, metallurgy,
pottery, cooking, chemistry, medicine, tattooing, language, and writing. Today,
however, new biological beings are being created through molecular biology,
genetic engineering, and transgenic technologies. Laboratory constructed humans, animals, plants and trans-species
are proliferating in our environment—often without our knowledge. These are
fleshed beings beyond any previously known category: Recombinant chimera, part
plant, part animal, part human; intelligent viruses, smart bacteria, clones,
lab grown organs and body parts, monstrous embryos, cryogenic ghost children.
Many
knowledge systems and practices intersect on this biotech frontier:
Visualization and computing technologies, science, religion, philosophy,
ethics, aesthetics, feminist and post-colonial theory, medicine, and genetic
research intertwine, clash, and collide in ways we have not previously
experienced. Whole new medical specialties and techniques are being created and
deployed experimentally.
The
complexity and speed with which this Second Genesis—a phrase employed by Jeremy
Rifkin in The Biotech Century to denote the new genetic creation-- is being
created is almost beyond our grasp and understanding. Yet there is very little
public debate or critical analysis that is actively engaging with the momentous
issues being raised by the new bio sciences.
Because the genetically altered creatures and entities introduce
irrevocable changes to currently existing life forms and ecosystems, it is
urgent that the debate become far more public and informed. Each one of us is
implicated because our environment and food supply are being radically altered;
each of us is challenged in different ways by these new conditions to activate
our creative and social imaginations.
Artists
operate in the field of representations in social, political, and cultural
life. They are working and researching across disciplines—most importantly
today they are collaborating with the hot new biological sciences of genetics
and molecular biology. The approaches artists are taking to biotech are very
different. Some, like Eduardo Kac, are exploring this area without mounting an
explicit critique and thus their work often normalizes and validates
experimental genetic engineering. Many are not really critical of science and
are not activists, but are more interested in exploiting daring new
possibilities for their own art work.
Increasingly however, many artists are looking for ways of making
activism their cultural work. By bringing together different research fields
and working with scientists and practitioners in many disciplines, some artists
are making consciousness raising performances and activist, participatory art
works which expand public thinking, and dialog about the biotech revolution.
Artists’ hands-on prophetic and visionary images and models can perhaps help
influence the ways in which bio technologies are developed and deployed for
better or for worse.
I
am interested in how feminist practice has often combined art, activism, and
social practice. To illustrate, I want
to use the example of the Feminist Women’s Health Movement in the US.
In
the 70s feminist activists staged an all-out rebellion against the institutions
of medicine. They attacked the heart of the bastion of patriarchal authority
which had over the centuries wrested away from women the proto medical
practices of healing, midwifery, herbal knowledge, and various bodily practices
such as poultices, compresses, baths, pelvic massage, bone setting, wound
cleansing and suture, pain relief, and the like.
The
Feminist Women’s Health Movement of the 70s was an unprecedented moment when
women not only researched and theorized the structures of patriarchal authority
which had oppressed them and deprived them of their history, but they also
actively built empowering alternative structures of woman-centered medical and
sexual knowledge, health care, counseling, education and treatment by and for
women. By the late 70s there was a
thriving network of Feminist health clinics throughout the country, which
offered women of all classes, ages, races, sexual choices, and economic backgrounds,
the revolutionary “menstrual extraction” method of early abortion; pelvic
self-examination and group pelvic examination; many methods of contraception;
“natural” and mid-wife assisted childbirth; reproductive counseling and family
planning; masturbation, orgasm and sexuality workshops, and the like. Feminist
artists and activists often worked in these clinics and disseminated new images
of female sexuality and anatomy in exhibitions, self-help workshops, and public
flyers. It was a stellar example of the theory/practice conjunction of the
signal feminist slogan of the 70’s “the personal is the political.” The Bible of the FWHM was the famous “Our
Bodies, Ourselves”, first published in 1971 by the Boston Women’s Health
Collective.
The
Feminist Health Movement was very successful in its influence for change in the
treatment of women in many traditional health centers in the US. Smart medical
officials recognized that more women-friendly services would lure women to
their institutions. While one can only be glad of any women-friendly gestures
from institutions, one cannot lose sight of the important question of who is
benefiting from this most, and point out that the medical establishment (I
refuse to use the word community) has not reciprocated what it gained from the
FWHM by, for example, helping to fund and assist alternative clinics for women
in especially needy localities, or putting feminists on their decision making
boards, or founding comprehensive care centers for women’s health.
To
the great loss of women everywhere, there has been an erosion of the activist
women’s health movement just at the moment when new bio genetic, medical,
reproductive and microsurgical technologies are precipitating an explosion of
the medicalization of women’s bodies and biological processes. Currently, all
areas of the female life cycle have been re-colonized and staked out as medical
territory.
A
new era of medicalization of women’s bodies began in the late 70s with the rise
of intensive research in genetics and biomedical technologies linked to
sophisticated new visualization and digital information technologies which
together made new reproductive technologies (NRT) or as they are now called,
Assisted or Advanced Reproductive Technologies (ART), possible. ART’s are a
powerful political and socio/economic instrument of control of women’s bodies,
particularly of their reproductive functions; and they have been developed as a
lucrative private enterprise by a capitalist medical consumer market to those who
have the resources to pay for these procedures.
In
the early 1980s feminist biology professor Ruth Hubbard warned the American
Association for the Advancement of Science about the NRT’s which she felt had
not been tested enough, and she was also concerned that InVitro fertilization
“required extremely costly and prolonged experimentation with highly skilled
professionals and expensive equipment ‘distorting our health priorities and
funneling scarce resources into a questionable effort.’” Neither Hubbard’s
warnings, nor those of many other feminist biologists, theorists,
gynecologists, health workers, and sociologists, have prevented full steam
ahead developments which have actualized many of the procedures only speculated
about in the 80s. This has been achieved almost exclusively through private
funding from fees of willing clients who have given entrepreneurial fertility
doctors and genetic scientists unrestricted access to the innermost molecular
and physical structures of their bodies
as a eugenic experimental theatre; and this has helped to naturalize the idea
that creating a child by any means possible is a right which can be exercised
by any individual in any way he/she sees fit, without regard to the threats
these procedures might pose to the genetic welfare of their offspring, to the germ lines of future generations, to
health and environmental resources; and to a just human social development for
those who have no access to the range of choices ART presents.
How
did this happen so smoothly and seamlessly with so little resistance from the
general public, and from feminists, for that matter? A major reason has already
been mentioned: the fact that ART is conducted almost entirely in the private,
“elective” medico/consumer realm. Another, is the compelling ideology of
consumer choice and desire. Since it is now technologically possible to choose to improve one’s genetic success
and that of their offspring through purchase of ART technologies, a compelling
new desire has been created. Many people do not understand how their
“individual choices” are fueling this flesh machine. Propelled by new eugenic consciousness and consumer marketing,
this machine has opened the possibility for calculatedly and permanently altering
the diversity of human germ lines. The exciting adventure of re-engineering the
human race from the genes up is presented as a solution to the tragic personal
”medical problem” of infertility; and those who question and critique these
procedures are made to feel churlish indeed.
WEBsite or Zip disk of
SmartMom. Project during next portion.
The example of the entrepreneurial
development of ART is only one of the many
new
flesh frontiers proliferating in the medicalization of women’s bodies. It was
chosen as paradigmatic example by the cyberfeminist collective subRosa to call
attention
to how women’s bodies have become the sites of new rationalized and eugenic bio
genetic reproductive and medical procedures which represent an even greater and
more subtle colonization of women’s bodies than ever before.
(We want to show you some of our larger performative project: Sex and
Gender in the Biotech Century as an example of the combination of art and
activism responding to biotechnology which subRosa is trying to practice)
Show: SR web page images
and images from Sex and Gender Ed webpage during the text below.
SubRosa
believes that resistance, critique, and activating the public to understand the
processes and implications of advanced reprogenetic technologies are vitally
important. As cyberfeminists and
artists we are using the framework of participatory performance as an
information theatre of pedagogical art which models various tactics for
intervening and commenting on the seductive representations of the flesh
machine. The powerful desire for rational control over non-rational life forces
must be countered and de-constructed. Scientific representations promising
genetic success, reproductive enhancement, and immortality must be de-coded and
processed through a corrective lens which will reveal their hidden distortions
and will to power. Let’s turn the speculum back on its creator!
SubRosa hopes to develop its public
information theatre to dispute and
disrupt the unquestioned authority of private ART theatres—though this will
mean operating outside the art world. While subRosa is not anti-technology it
does believe that some technologies should not be further deployed until far
more testing of long-term biological and environmental consequences has taken
place. By informing themselves about
the reprogenetic sciences, deploying their knowledge and expertise, withholding
their bodies and body parts, refusing to act as self-interested individuals and
organizing in solidarity, women scientists, doctors, nurses, educators,
artists, data entry workers, day care workers, computer scientists, ecologists,
nutritionists, etc. could take the lead in shaping ART’s future development and
use. It seems reasonable to demand that such life-altering technologies can
only be employed under the scrutiny of full public information disclosure, and
a thorough understanding, and debate regarding their implications and
consequences. subRosa’s tactical works are aimed at helping to initiate this
debate. SubRosa also wants to join other groups to issue a call for complete
disclosure of all commercial interests and involvement of biotech and drug
companies in scientific R and D of genetically altered life-forms.
Over
this weekend we hope to engage in discussions of some of the urgent health care
issues facing women in Canada and the US today. We want to initiate an open
ended exploration of cross-disciplinary projects between artists, activists,
and scientific/medical practitioners and health officials. Following are some
of the most important issues we might address:
2. The most
important local (Canadian) issue is the lack of female General
Practitioners
which speaks to a basic issue of equal representation. (Also speaks to the
breakdown of the feminist self-help movement and the lack of alternative care
options, as well as increasing specialization in the medical system).
3. The biotech
revolution's impact on women's bodies, especially in reproduction.
Medicalization of women's bodies and biological processes generally, and the
problems of specialization, authority, and technologizing all medical
procedures.
4. (In the US )
Reform of health-care delivery to reflect women’s needs: universal access to
care, affordability, comprehensive health care centers. Coverage for care by
nurses, nurse midwives, alternative care practitioners, preventive care,
reproductive health, and long-term care. Giving patients information and copies
of their medical records. Making sure the feminization of medicine (more women
doctors) changes the way it is practiced and delivered.
5.(In the US)
Creation of specialties in women’s health care in medical schools and
practices; or alternatively, creation of comprehensive care centers for women.
6. (In the US)
Monitoring the way medical and drug testing is done to make sure all studies
also test women and include the factors of biological difference. The ethical considerations of medical and drug
testing in developing countries.
7. (In the US)
Redirecting the priorities of research funding and how medical research is
done: For example, high tech lab sciences are more attractive to researchers
than every-day life sciences such as studying diet, life-styles, and habits and
their influence on health. And yet the latter has far more positive impact on
health and the costs of health care.
8. The new
"diseases of technologization" such as speed-up stress, repetitive
strain injuries, Chronic Fatigue syndrome, eye-strain and failure, Internet
addiction, etc. which are particularly attacking women of all classes and
professions and geographical regions because they are still bearing the double
burden of production and reproduction.
9. Studying and
educating about the local, national, and global entwinements of issues of
production, reproduction, and health.
10. Sexual, gender,
and reproductive education in the biotech century. A new kind of ecological,
difference-conscious education about bodies, sexuality, health, reproduction,
genetics, the environment, and resource allocation, in colleges, high schools
and grade schools.