Women’s Bodies as Battlefields

2021 ◽  
pp. 35-66
Keyword(s):  
Women's Bodies

Re-imagining Reproduction: Unsettling Metaphors in the History of Imperial Science and Commercial Surrogacy in India

Somatechnics ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 88-103 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kalindi Vora
Keyword(s):  
Assisted Reproductive Technologies ◽  
Reproductive Technologies ◽  
The Body ◽  
Body Parts ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Women's Bodies ◽  
Commercial Surrogacy ◽  
Art Practices ◽  
History Of ◽  
Travel Industry

This paper provides an analysis of how cultural notions of the body and kinship conveyed through Western medical technologies and practices in Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ART) bring together India's colonial history and its economic development through outsourcing, globalisation and instrumentalised notions of the reproductive body in transnational commercial surrogacy. Essential to this industry is the concept of the disembodied uterus that has arisen in scientific and medical practice, which allows for the logic of the ‘gestational carrier’ as a functional role in ART practices, and therefore in transnational medical fertility travel to India. Highlighting the instrumentalisation of the uterus as an alienable component of a body and subject – and therefore of women's bodies in surrogacy – helps elucidate some of the material and political stakes that accompany the growth of the fertility travel industry in India, where histories of privilege and difference converge. I conclude that the metaphors we use to structure our understanding of bodies and body parts impact how we imagine appropriate roles for people and their bodies in ways that are still deeply entangled with imperial histories of science, and these histories shape the contemporary disparities found in access to medical and legal protections among participants in transnational surrogacy arrangements.

Sin or Slim?

2013 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 92-109
Author(s):  
Hannah Bacon
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Research ◽  
Cultural Knowledge ◽  
Moral Discourse ◽  
Unhealthy Lifestyle ◽  
Women's Bodies ◽  
Lifestyle Choices ◽  
Popular Knowledge ◽  
Behavioural Condition ◽  
Fat Bodies ◽  
Theological Language

Is fat a sin? Popular ‘knowledge’ about obesity which frames fat as an avoidable behavioural condition would certainly suggest it can be blamed on the fat person. Discourses of health reproduced within public policy and media reporting assist in the pathologization of fat bodies, insisting that fat is the result of unhealthy lifestyle choices. It is, however, not simply medical interpretations of fat that facilitate this moral discourse. Religion also provides an important source of moral judgment. This paper draws on my qualitative research inside a UK secular, commercial slimming group to consider how the Christian moral language of sin functions within this setting to construct a politics of choice that holds the dieter personally responsible for her fat. Interpreting weight loss and weight gain as a measure of moral character, this theological language assists in the operation of ‘normative conformity’, conforming women’s bodies to cultural knowledge about fat.

The War on Women

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Caron E. Gentry
Keyword(s):  
Reproductive Health ◽  
International Society ◽  
Sexual Objectification ◽  
Women's Bodies ◽  
Legal Restrictions ◽  
National Coalition ◽  
Paternalistic Attitude

This chapter looks at how the War on Women is manifested in multiple vulnerabilities for women, namely economic, bodily, and reproductive health. The aim of this chapter is to demonstrate that the legal restrictions placed on women’s bodies and lives serves to police and limit women’s citizenship and contribution to America’s polis. A need to control women is an anxious response to women’s continued independence, which is seen as a threat to patriarchal structures. As such, the chapter turns to the language used by the National Coalition for Men, the Red Pill forum on Reddit, and Breitbart to describe women’s positions in US and international society, demonstrating the sexual objectification and violently paternalistic attitude toward women that helped promote the Trump campaign.

In the Light and on the Road

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Crabtree
Keyword(s):  
Rhode Island ◽  
Early America ◽  
Women's Bodies ◽  
Women's Ministry ◽  
The Road ◽  
Cultural Expectations ◽  
Female Autonomy ◽  
On The Road ◽  
One Year ◽  
Gendered Expectations

Patience Brayton (1734–94), a Quaker itinerant minister from Rhode Island, completed two extended journeys: one year-long trip covering the American seaboard and a four-year trek through Ireland and Britain. These journeys required her to leave her husband and young children, navigate hazardous travel conditions, endure incapacitating illnesses (often alone), and contend with those hostile to women’s ministry. This chapter contrasts these feats with post-Revolutionary ideas about the weakness of women’s bodies and minds, arguing Brayton’s narrative resolved this conflict by reiterating her own discomfort with these anomalous experiences and by attributing her strength and success to God. Thus, although her journal documented myriad examples of female autonomy and authority, descriptions of her travels, absences, illnesses, and silences conformed to gendered expectations. While ‘in the light’ Quaker women may have stretched gender norms in early America, they could not escape the gendered boundaries of cultural expectations while ‘on the road’.

scholarly journals The arrival of white women: Tourism and the reshaping of beach boys’ masculinity in Zanzibar

Ethnography ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 146613812110025
Author(s):  
Altaïr Despres
Keyword(s):  
White Women ◽  
Sexual Practices ◽  
Economic Power ◽  
Sexual Performance ◽  
Women's Bodies ◽  
Male Youth ◽  
Mass Tourism ◽  
Beach Boys ◽  
Intimate Relations ◽  
Key Aspects

Mass tourism in Zanzibar has been accompanied by a virulent denunciation of the dress, bodily, and sexual practices of white women, who have been accused of perverting the local culture. More specifically, they have been held responsible for the emasculation and feminization of Zanzibar’s male youth engaging in compensated intimate relations with them. In this article I argue that sexual relations between white women and Zanzibari men show the capacity of young Zanzibaris to recompose the balance between the two traditional axes in the construction of masculinity, namely economic power and sexual performance. While the economic power of Zanzibari men has suffered from capitalist globalization, sexual potency and expertise, as well as competition between men for access to women’s bodies have become key aspects of affirming masculinity.

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