Stolen
Rhetoric: The Appropriation of Choice by ART Industries
subRosa
Biotech industries currently expanding
globally, but especially in the U.S., have opened new frontiers for colonizing
bodies––and commodifying and patenting
life––at the molecular and genetic level. Gamete harvesting and
freezing, In Vitro Fertilization (IVF), Intra Cytoplasmic Sperm Injection
(ICSI), pre-implantation embryo screening, and genetic manipulation of embryos,
are just some of the new techniques transcending previous limits of
reproductive intervention that have profound repercussions for human genetic
heritage. Under the guise of optimizing reproduction––and “improving” human
beings––ART (Assisted Reproductive Technologies) are rapidly being naturalized
in every day life. As feminist theorists have pointed out, the new biotech
reproductive order has territorialized the female body as a pre-eminent
laboratory and tissue mine for a lucrative medical/pharmaceutical industry (1).
The
women’s liberation movement of the early ‘70s formulated a politics of women’s
autonomy and control over their sexuality and reproduction that included the
right to safe contraception and abortion. By the late ‘80s, after almost two
decades of abortion wars, the politics of autonomy and liberation had been
transformed into a rhetoric of “choice” typified by the slogan: “A woman’s
right to choose,” which became identified with the pro-choice movement. Since
then, the rhetoric of “choice” has become firmly associated with reproductive
liberalism.
Using
strategic marketing, a seductive consumer industry intent on normalizing ART in
every-day life has appropriated the rhetoric of “choice” in order to appeal to
a broad constituency of progressive consumers ready to produce “children of
choice.” Marketers of new reprogenetic technologies (Reprotech) were quick to
capture this rhetorical territory, cashing in on the expectation that it would
appeal to liberal, educated, middle class consumers schooled by feminist
activism to be proactive in personal health care. ART industries, principally
driven by profit making motives and embodying eugenic ideologies, have
recuperated the politicized rhetoric of “choice” only by concealing a deeply
embedded conflict between the macro politics of rationalized reproduction in
late capital and a micro politics that capitalizes on individual desires.
Despite
the highly invasive and risky body processes of ART, many feminists have
explicitly welcomed the development of Reprotech for its promises of an
expanded range of reproductive choices for women. Others have recognized that
Reprotech represents not only an ultimate form of body colonization, but that
its practices and ideologies reinforce patriarchal systems of scientific and
medical authority, control, and rationalization of reproduction––contradicting
feminist philosophies of women’s autonomy.
Recuperation
of radical feminist rhetoric and practices by liberals and conservatives alike
became rampant in the abortion movement. In the ‘70s, the nationally mobilized
Feminist Women’s Health Movement (FWHM) developed clinics that offered a wide
array of feminist health care services to women. Most controversial were their
abortion services—especially the technique of menstrual extraction pioneered by
the Los Angeles Feminist Women’s Health Center. This vacuum suction procedure
could be done by lay practitioners and was often used as a form of early
abortion. Abortion services made feminist health clinics the target of vicious
attacks from anti-abortion and right-to-life fundamentalist groups like
Operation Rescue. These groups appropriated many of their confrontational
direct action occupation and blockage practices, as well as their spectacular
visual tactics––such as their use of the fetus––from leftist activist
movements including feminism. “Pro-choice,” “anti-choice,” and “pro-life” are
rhetorics that now signifiy a divisive, often anti-feminist, partisanship.
Diverse and bitterly contradictory feminist positions on abortion have been
subsumed under the liberal rhetoric of “choice.”
Abortion
became such a loaded political and cultural issue that the medical profession
tried very hard to wash its hands of it as much as possible. Clearly, abortion
could not be made to suit capitalist ends. No sexy consumer market of clinics and
products could be developed around the “choice” of abortion. But the rhetoric
was perfect for the purposes of the new infertility industry that promises to
be a lucrative new flesh frontier––some have estimated the potential IVF market
alone at $40-$50 million a year. It is time to call into question the
capitalist marketing strategies of Reprotech and the imbalance of macro and
micro politics masked by the stolen rhetoric of “choice.”
Models
of Choice
Many
feminists and bio ethicists have argued that despite their risks the new
reproductive technologies represent greater reproductive choices for women (and
men)—most notorious among the latter is John A. Robertson whose passionate
advocacy of “procreative liberty” concludes: “There is no stopping the desire
for greater control of the reproductive process. …There is no better alternative than leaving procreative
decisions to the individuals whose procreative desires are most directly
involved” (2). Such arguments appeal to
the deepest democratic beliefs of Americans, but they overlook the way
entrepreneurial marketers and fertility services providers are exploiting the
rhetoric of choice to naturalize ART. Their clinic brochures, fertility
advertisements, and WEB pages pitch the many reproductive choices and
techniques available to satisfy the desires of different sectors of the
population—including people who are not biologically infertile. Rather than
selling ART principally as a set of biomedical procedures designed to cure or
circumvent severe cases of infertility, Reprotech marketers highlight its many
benefits for those who want the control made possible by scientifically managed
reproduction. ART is represented as a means to realize life style choices and
support career goals––key factors in reifying its use in every day life.
For
example, an advertisement from the Genetics & IVF Institute offers a “large
choice of fully evaluated and screened donors who are immediately accessible,”
and a “revolutionary technique enabling men with long-term vasectomies to
father children” (3). Though never mentioning any of the risks involved, such
ads imply that almost anyone (who can afford it) can “make” a baby with
purchased donor eggs and/or sperm, and the use of a hired gestational womb. ART
would therefore seem to be the ideal choice for people living in
“non-traditional family” configurations, as this group includes single women or
men, older couples, affinity groups, lesbians and gays. Thanks to
entrepreneurship––although most fertility books are aimed squarely at married
couples––there is a thriving niche market of reproductive choices. There seems
to be a specialized clinic for almost every group; for example, there are
feminist and gay sperm banks and insemination clinics, as well as those that
specialize in male infertility problems, or treating older women. ART is also
sold as the reproductive solution for couples or singles who have pursued
career goals and postponed childbearing. Healthy people considered at risk for
certain diseases, or exposed to environmental hazards at work, can choose to
use ART procedures such as gamete banking before
they are ready to reproduce as insurance against future infertility.
ART
procedures promote new eugenic consciousness (4). Marketers sell IVF as a
family building technology; infertile couples are encouraged to bypass adoption
and instead “make” a child of their “own.”
IVF is a eugenic procedure because it involves screening and selection
of ‘fit’ gametes and embryos. The discovery of individual gene functions through
sequencing of the human genome, facilitates ever increasing use of genetic
screening and manipulation. Parental “choice” now encompasses so much more than
whether to have children, or not. Consumers can purchase a wide selection of
pre-screened and tested human gametes that come with detailed profiles of donor
characteristics promising improved success and health for offspring. IVF
produces excess embryos, and multiple embryos are usually inserted to ensure
implantation of at least one. By using the technologies of pre-implantation
embryo screening and selective reduction, parents can select precisely which
embryo is to be gestated. Selective reduction––a euphemism for abortion––is
justified by the (eugenic) argument that it is the necessary means by which
only ‘fit’ embryos are selected to be carried to full term. Here the rhetoric
of choice is firmly bound to an individualistic micro politics of manipulating
consumer desire. (Note: we are not making an argument for or against abortion
here, but wish to note how the rhetoric of choice is used to make controversial
issues acceptable.)
The
liberal rhetoric of “choice” has long been used in the mass media to imply that
women can “have it all” no matter what the personal or social costs.
Infertility discourse similarly promotes the idea that everyone has a right to
choose to have a child using whatever methods s/he can afford (procreative
liberty). ART can be used to tame recalcitrant bodies. The titles of
infertility books clearly tell the story of the enterprise of conquering
(in)fertility, for example: Overcoming
Infertility; How to Get Pregnant with
the New Technology; RESOLVE Infertility; Taking Charge of Infertility. The
imperatives to “take charge” and “overcome” urge the individual woman to take
control of her body––with the help of her doctors, of course. What she learns
by reading further is that ART requires her to surrender her body to
disciplinary medical manipulation, surveillance, and invasion. While clients
are urged to shop around for clinics with the best specialists and success
rates for particular procedures, they are given virtually no tools to assess
the risks associated with ART. Instead, ART brochures and books highlight the
hundreds of healthy babies that have been born using IVF. The models of “choice” offered by ART
promote neither anti-authoritarian social and political values, nor do they
liberate women from their biology. Rather, they reify cultural values of
compulsory motherhood, and represent an intensified control of women’s bodies.
In this context, the notion of choice is appropriated to promote corporate
economic interests rather than personal autonomy.
Reproduction
and feminist Utopian Thinking
Understandably,
feminist analyses or critiques of Reprotech are rarely mentioned in mainstream
ART literature. Feminist responses to assisted reproduction are too complex to
be summarized here. However, contradictory strands of utopian feminist thinking
regarding reproduction and maternity are well illustrated by two very different
texts; the first, the extraordinary feminist utopian novel Herland (1915) written by the prominent socialist feminist
Charlotte Perkins Gilman during the height of the first wave of feminist
suffrage struggle; the second, The
Dialectic of Sex (1969) by Shulamith Firestone, a fiery socialist feminist
tract that inspired women during second wave feminism.
Gilman’s
Herland presents a country populated
solely by women. Over the course of several thousand years they have created a
rational, stable, peaceful, prosperous economy and social order––including
voluntary eugenic reproductive practices––based on exaltating the social principle of Motherhood. The
grand task of Herlanders is “Making People” in every sense of the word. There
is no individual ownership of children. All the women act as nurturing and
social mothers to all the children, who are all girls. There is no sexual
intercourse and no “sex feeling”. To solve problems of population control each
adult woman is allowed to bear only one child. When born, this child––who is
engendered by the intense inner desire and preparation of the mother-to-be,
becomes part of the community, not part of a nuclear family. In Herland women can only get pregnant
because of their great desire for a child. For the good of the community, some
women voluntarily defer or forgo motherhood, satisfying their desire for it by
tending the communities’ babies. In Herland
hundreds of years of rational, diligent attention to the problems of weeding
out undesirable characteristics and choosing good characteristics by voluntary
eugenics have paid off in a population that is strong, healthy, beautiful, and
multi-talented.
Gilman
was simultaneously a radical socialist
feminist, and a believer in “positive eugenics.” Her writings call for women
to be liberated from the biological burdens of compulsory reproduction,
motherhood, and domestic work. Gilman believed in “female values” of
co-operation rather than competition, sharing skills and property, and the
labor of raising children. Though she welcomes technology to liberate women
from backbreaking labor, in Herland
Gilman solves the problems of fertility and reproduction with social
engineering and the development of a strangely mythic reproductive biology––a
kind of parthenogenesis, like that practiced by creation Goddesses. In her
utopia, reproductive self-repression for the good of the community takes the
place of autonomy, as the solution to overcoming the constraints of biology and
sexual reproduction.
In
The Dialectic of Sex, on the other
hand, Shulamith Firestone is adamant that technology––and technology
alone––will provide human mastery of matter and free women from the tyranny of
biology. …”The biological family unit has always oppressed women and children,
but now, for the first time in history, technology has created real
preconditions for overthrowing these oppressive “natural” conditions, along
with their cultural reinforcements”(5). Only women’s technological control of
their biology will change the patriarchal balance of power. Firestone was
writing in the late 60s, a time when research on reproductive technologies was
developing rapidly. Astoundingly, by the mid-80s many of the reproductive
techniques she anticipated were already in place. Firestone speculates that the
invention of an artificial womb will solve the vexing problem that women are
still the sole bearers of children; pending this, she suggests that women pay
other women as surrogate mothers. Concluding her feminist socialist analysis of
the biological and material causes of women’s oppression, Firestone calls for a
feminist revolution based on the creation of a humanly controlled ecological
balance using cybernetic feedback systems and artificial reproductive
technologies. Today, though the technologically based systems she advocated are
highly developed, the feminist “revolution” is bogged down in conflicted
debates about the impact and consequences (for women) of the purportedly
liberating new technologies. In different ways, both Gilman and Firestone pin
their utopian dreams to women freeing themselves from traditional
(heterosexual) and “natural” biological reproductive processes. However,
neither Gilman’s eugenicism, nor Firestone’s techno-utopianism (which is also
racist) are defensible, since both depend on repressive or rationalized bodily
and social processes, anathema to the goals of feminist autonomy.
Individual
Desire and Reproduction in Late Capital
From
the mid ‘60s onward, women’s liberation, widening use of the birth control pill
and availability of abortion, began to give large numbers of women the
experience of separating sex from reproduction. Feminist health and abortion
services supported a politics of female autonomy and helped to change women’s
attitudes toward childbearing and motherhood. Books like Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born, and Nancy Chodorow’s The Reproduction of Mothering, provided
generative theoretical studies of female ambivalence toward societies’
constructions of reproductive functions and the institution of compulsory
maternity. Crucially, they questioned and challenged the assumption that the
desire to bear children is a “natural” and innate one common to all women.
The
following three decades saw significant changes in women’s reproductive
patterns and choices. Many women began to defer child-bearing to pursue higher
education and careers. Many opted for single life-styles, childfree marriages,
lesbian relationships (with or without children), or experimented with
collective household and child sharing arrangements. The entrepreneurs of new
Reprotech took advantage of these new cultural and social patterns. Deferring
childbearing lowered women’s fertility rates, and ART was ready to step into
the breach with techniques of ovarian hormone stimulation, IVF procedures and
egg donation. During this time new definitions of infertility were established
by medical authorities, and “infertiles”––supporting a growing culture of
infertility––demanded that it be recognized as a disease or disability whose
treatment should be covered by insurance. (At present infertility treatments
and ART are financed almost entirely by the private monies of mostly
middle-class and affluent users, who often mortgage houses, sell stocks, or
raise bank loans to pay for treatments). Fertility doctors have supported this
move, for example, the American Society of Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) and
RESOLVE
(an infertility support group) have joined in endorsing the “FAITH” (Fair
Access to Infertility Treatment and Hope) Senate Act that calls for insurance
to pay for up to four IVF treatment cycles and promises “minimal impact on the
cost of health insurance”(6). While such legislation may seem like a
progressive move to make ART widely accessible to all economic classes, it does
not acknowledge that it still won’t benefit the majority of Americans who have
no health insurance at all.
American
commodity desire is immediate, and is fed by the belief that science can
provide technological solutions for every biological problem. The still highly
experimental technologies of assisted Reprotech have a low success rate, and
their long-term safety and biological and genetic risks have not begun to be
adequately assessed or studied. But ART is being driven by the twin engines of
(manufactured) consumer desire for new technologies, and the enormous profits
to be made off the infertility business. At the macro level of politics the
function of reproduction in late capital is to produce compliant workers and
successful consumers to serve and feed a global commodity economy. Non-rational
desire and autonomy are uncontrollable and conflict with biotech’s corporate
imperative to colonize and patent genes, germ lines, and life processes.
Rationalized and optimized methods of new eugenic reproduction are far more
efficient than the random chance method of sexual intercourse, because they can
be controlled under the seductive guise of offering improved human
characteristics and successful offspring. Even though the success rate of ART
(between 15-22.5 % of IVF cycles result in take-home babies) is still very low,
its spectacle is one of scientific authority and control. The ideology and
practice of new eugenic principles that is part of the macro discourse of ART
has been masked by the (micro) discourse of individual choice. Many sperm banks,
for example, accept only certain categories of donors—Nobel Prize winners,
successful professionals, heterosexuals, non-artists, athletes––and all require
extensive genetic, medical, and racial background profiling. Desirable and
highly paid egg donors must be young, intelligent, college educated, from
selected ethnic and racial backgrounds, healthy, good-looking, and able to pass
a battery of psychological tests.
Radical
Ideas and Normalized/Naturalized Process
In
order to be territorialized by capital, radical ideas and processes must be
normalized/naturalized in every day life, and their dangers rewritten as
benefits. This is done through literature, art, and mass media representations.
Religious indoctrination works this way, as does political propaganda. Science
too, relies on these instruments to make it appear rational, humanistic, and
necessary, rather than outlandish and threatening. In the consumer culture of
late capital, public acceptance of formerly frightening or taboo scientific
ideas is managed through carefully orchestrated propaganda campaigns that
domesticate the previously unthinkable with promissory rhetorics of
“improvement” and “choice”, and with seductively aestheticized images of
scientific processes, products, and services.
The
often extreme biotechnological procedures of ART have been naturalized in this
way within a few short years. Starting with the birth of Louise Brown, the
first IVF baby, in 1978, in Britain, the new reproductive technologies were at
first sensationalized and glorified in the media, often by use of apocalyptic
language, or dire warnings about the monstrous experiments scientists were
conducting in their labs. These media reports played to the fears and fantasies
of people worried about becoming guinea pigs in an authoritarian scheme to
remake human-kind. The media revisited all the classic archetypes and eugenic
myths from Frankenstein to Brave New World. The icon of the baby in the
bottle—literally in vitro, in the
glass––was updated with pictures of doctors mixing gametes in petri dishes, and
hundreds of frozen embryos crammed into cryotanks (7).
ART
doctors and entrepreneurs entered the battle of representation, writing their
own books and launching WEB sites that present reassuring images, human interest
stories, and descriptions of ART in matter-of-fact and easily assimilated ways.
For example, detailed diagrams of the interior of the female pelvis and
reproductive organs are often shown with a vision machine or surgical
instrument in place. These cyborgian images help to normalize the idea of
technological intervention into the reproductive body. The literature is
usually directed at the (white) educated, middle-class, professional couple, or
career single; it is reassuringly scientific (i.e. it gives assurances that ART
is cutting edge medicine, not stitching corpses together), affirmative, and
upbeat. It represents ART as an exciting creative venture any couple could
undertake with their doctor.
ART
literature also paints a picture of how clients can integrate these processes
into their everyday lives (i.e. ‘our clinics open early and close late so you
can come in for your tests every day’), and helps them work out payment plans.
Crucially, this literature pitches its utopian and promissory rhetoric in the
non-sensationalized, calmly authoritative voice of the expert: “I helped to
create the United States’ first pregnancy produced from a frozen embryo” (8).
This approach benefits capital and reinforces scientific authority disguised as
consumer advice.
Consumer
persuasion also works by aestheticizing scientific processes. An iconic
representation of ART that has recently been circulated widely is a colorized
microphotograph of ICSI (Intra Cytoplasmic Sperm Injection), a delicately
precise micro manipulation process in which a single carefully screened,
washed, and capacitated sperm is inserted through the zona pellucida of a
selected egg by means of a hollow glass needle. This is an image of willful
creation every bit as compelling as Michaelangelo’s iconic Sistine Chapel image
of God creating Adam. It is simultaneously the ultimate image of scientific
control and triumph, and a secular visualization of miraculous creation. Most
viewers have no understanding of the precise biotechnological process this
image demonstrates, but the ideological reading is clear: Technological control
over life processes. Further, it is an image of (eugenic) “choice” that brings
one superior egg and one fit sperm together in a technologically mediated act
of fertilization. Without needing to spell it out directly, the ICSI picture
has become an unparalleled poster child for the new eugenic processes of
genetic screening and manipulation. Such consumer friendly representations have
been effective in helping to naturalize the often frightening and extreme
processes of ART in every day life.
The
abstract beauty of the aestheticized scientific ICSI image is made possible by
sophisticated new visualization instruments including sonography, hysteroscopy,
laparoscopy, microphotography, tunneling microscopy, PET, and MRI. After all,
the breakthrough step of being able to “see” the fetus in the womb opened the way for it to become a tragic
icon in the abortion battles. Both ART and abortion foreground the fetus or
take-home baby, not the mother or the woman. Since the fetus icon was contested
territory already claimed by anti-abortion crusaders, ART adopted the image of
the radiant bio-tech baby––the child of choice––as a central icon. After all,
what ART was promising was a live baby, not just an unformed fetus. (Hard
statistics of ART success are measured in “take-home-babies” not pregnancies).
These iconic baby pictures have helped to domesticate strange and threatening
technologies that were previously unthinkable.
Conclusion:
New Practices, New Rhetorics
The
micro and macro politics of the public discourse of ART are unbalanced;
currently the forces of market capitalism have won the field with the consumer
friendly appropriated rhetoric of “choice.” Research in assisted Reprotech is
still advancing rapidly, and increasingly there are contestatory interests at
stake. An ever growing body of feminist cultural theory and literature, as well
as new media practices and art works play with concepts of the cyborg body and
recombinations of women and machines. The ‘80s saw strong feminist activism,
both in the U.S. and internationally (groups such as FINNRAGE), that critiqued
and opposed new Reprotech using many classic activist feminist arguments and
tactics. But currently there is a wide gap between academic theory and activist
(radical) feminist practices in the domains of biotech and ART. (Cyber)feminist
artists working with these domains must expose the ways in which the marketing
of ART promotes the colonizing interests of late capital, rather than the
critical goal of women’s autonomy.
New
developments in ART, genetics, and biotechnology, are constructing new
rhetorics and practices. This places critical artists who desire to counter the
recuperation of political and cultural rhetoric by a consumer economy in a
quandary. On the one hand they must learn enough about the new biological
science to understand its implications and risks; on the other, they must
maintain a critical stance and create a non-specialist public discourse that
debunks the capitalist propaganda of corporate biotech. One way to do this is
through cross-disciplinary collaborations of artists, scientists, doctors, and
health practitioners, in which expertise is shared to create a participatory
discourse. Rather than producing aestheticized representations or objects
celebrating biotech (as many artists are now doing), such collaborations
involve participants in a critical and pedagogical process––an information
theatre––in which they can develop informed, critical responses based on actual
learning and experience.
The
challenge for feminist activist/artists is to create strategies to
deterritorialize biotech’s control of the female body. In Women as Wombs,
Janice Raymond suggests separating science from technology in order to create a
new feminist science of reproduction that doesn’t depend solely on risky high
tech solutions (9). (This is not because of technophobia, but because it is the
money to be made off technologizing of science that attracts the interests of
capitalist entrepreneurs). Such a science would recombine diverse sources of
knowledge, and interdisciplinary practices, to create wholly new solutions that
take into account women’s differing conditions and desires––and it would be
based on a criteria of what is good for women’s autonomy. New feminist
reproductive science would have to devise a workable distribution mechanism,
perhaps based on a combination of electronic networking and performative
practices. As in the autonomous method of menstrual extraction practiced by lay
people (and bypassing the medical authority system), new approaches to
reproductive science could enlist feminist activists as informed,
non-specialist practitioners using methods that foster principles of autonomy
and embodiment.
subRosa
has activated a resistant cultural practice based on the goals discussed above.
Initially, we have focused on aspects of ART that have largely been silenced in
public discourse. We hope to disrupt the current “choice” discourse of ART; to
initiate an interventionist debate and practice among diverse non-specialist
audiences; and to further probe and expose biotechnologies’ far-reaching
repercussions for women’s health and bodily autonomy worldwide. Following is a
brief listing of subRosa projects to date: 1) “Does She or Doesn’t She”,
“SmartMom”, and “Vulva De/Reconstructa” expose gender differences in ART
practices, and highlight the effects of high tech body invasion on women’s
health and bodily autonomy. 2) “Expo EmmaGenics” and “The Economies of ART”
question and challenge the ways in which market forces drive the research,
development and deployment of Reprotech’s products and ‘services’ through an
analysis of the economies of ART; and 3) “Sex and Gender Education in the
Biotech Century” interrogates the intersecting ideologies and practices that
serve to normalize and naturalize ART, exposing their historical connections to
eugenics and colonial ideologies.
Notes:
1.
For a bibliography on women and biotech, see: www.artswire.org/subrosa.
2.
John A. Robertson, Children of Choice: Freedom and the New Reproductive
Technologies (New Jersey: Princeton University Press) 1994, p. 235
3.
New York Times Magazine, July 21, 2000. p. 42
4.
For discussion of “new eugenic consciousness” see Critical Art Ensemble, Flesh
Machine: Cyborgs, Designer Babies and New Eugenic Consciousness (New York:
Autonomedia) 1998.
5.
Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution.
(New York: William Morrow) 1970, p. 193
6.
See http://www.resolve.org/RELEASE_FaithBill.htm)
7.
Susan M. Squier, Babies in Bottles: Twentieth-Century Visions of Reproductive
Technology (New Brunswick:Rutgers University Press) 1994
8.
Marrs, Bloch, and Silverman, Dr. Richard Marrs’ Fertility Book, (New York: Dell
Publishers) 1997, xiii.
9.
Janice G. Raymond, Women as Wombs: Reproductive Technologies and the Battle
over Women’s Freedom (New York: HarperCollins) 1993
Biographical
Note: subRosa is a (reproducible) cyberfeminist cell of cultural
producers and researchers. Current subRosa
projects focus specifically on examining the intersecting pancapitalist
economies that serve to normalize and naturalize ART, and on exposing their
historical connections to eugenics and colonizing ideologies.