It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
70-year-old woman in Uganda gives birth to twins after getting fertility treatments
Safina Namukwaya gave birth to a boy and a girl on Wednesday via cesarean section at the hospital in the capital Kampala, said a hospital spokesperson
Dec. 1, 2023,
By The Associated Press
KAMPALA, Uganda — A 70-year-old woman in Uganda has given birth to twins after receiving fertility treatment, making her one of the world’s oldest new mothers.
Safina Namukwaya gave birth to a boy and a girl on Wednesday via cesarean section at the hospital in the capital Kampala where she had been receiving in vitro fertilization treatment, said Arthur Matsiko, spokesman for the Women’s Hospital International Facility Center
.
Safina Namukwaya. Women's Hospital International and Fertility Centre via Facebook
“She’s healthy. She’s talking. She’s walking around if they tell her to walk around the hospital,” Matsiko said Friday, speaking of Namukwaya, who had a daughter at the same facility in 2020 following IVF treatment.
Namukwaya is the oldest woman to deliver a baby at the hospital, whose proprietor is a prominent gynecologist in the East African region. The hospital specializes in helping couples who struggle to have children. Breakthroughs in research are improving success rates in IVF treatment. Notably, media reported that a 73-year-old woman in southern India gave birth to twin girls in 2019 after getting IVF care.
In THE DIALECTIC OF SEX: THE CASE FOR FEMINIST. REVOLUTION, Shulamith Firestone cuts into the prejudice against women (and children)—amplified through the.
(RNS) — Scientists have created a human embryo without the use of sperm or an egg — a true test-tube baby. Such embryos cannot (yet) develop into full-grown human beings. Even if transplanted into a uterus, the specimen could never attach to the uterine wall.
Yet, what we have here is still a (disabled) human embryo. Without parents.
Are you disgusted? We believe that if you have a well-formed conscience, this is a good and proper reaction to this development.
We cannot always and everywhere trust a reaction of repugnance; at times, such a reaction is simply the result of ingrained biases and stereotypes. But there is often a certain wisdom in our repulsion. Repugnance can assert itself as a moral alarm and response to real moral distress.
This is such a time.
The creation of a human embryo without sperm and egg shares some important similarities with other artificial reproductive technologies, such as in vitro fertilization and certain surrogacy practices that involve the creation of human embryos outside the human body. Perhaps most strikingly, the procedure overlaps the process of modifying genes using novel techniques such as CRISPR-Cas9. In both cases, a manufactured human embryo is the result of direct human intervention.
Tellingly, CRISPR-Cas9 has been known to be used only once on human embryos. The scientist who performed the procedure, He Jiankui, was roundly and firmly criticized by the medical and ethics community and served a prison sentence for his work. Meanwhile, leading scientists — including Emmanuelle Charpentier, one of the creators of the technique — have called for a moratorium on its use on human embryos.
The creation of a human embryo without sperm or egg also goes beyond what we have seen in previous artificial reproductive technology and genetic engineering techniques. In vitro fertilization and even CRISPR-Cas9 involve direct human intervention in the reproductive process. Yet, all of them work by modifying or intervening with existing human embryos or gametes.
The manufacture of a human embryo without sperm or egg, by contrast, aims to build a human embryo from scratch. The process is less a tweak to human reproduction or bending it to our own will than replacing it with something different altogether. Heretofore we have aimed to eliminate variability, inconvenience or inefficiency from human reproduction. With this new development, the aim is different: to swap human reproduction for a different process entirely.
The charge of playing God comes to mind. The charge is over-attributed and sometimes reveals more about our biases than something morally real, but in this case it is apt. There are at least two kinds of playing God: An overstepping by humans into spheres of action that should be reserved for the divine, and a hubristic attempt to meddle with the world in ways that our all-too-human intellects simply do not understand. In creating human embryos from scratch, we risk playing God in both senses.
One of us is a philosopher and the other a theologian. We are both convinced that a Catholic understanding of reproduction could be a cultural antidote to the toxic understanding of reproduction that has led to the development of an eggless, spermless embryo. Our position is not aligned with some kind of revisionist attempt to “take us back to the 1950s” (or some such dismissive phrase), but is rather at the heart of the perspective that Pope Francis and the Vatican reaffirmed just a few months ago.
As Christianity yields to a consumerist reproductive throwaway culture, the logic of the marketplace takes over. Instead of seeing the creation of new human beings as pro-creation with God (our ultimate creator), who offers them as an unmerited gift, we now think of it as yet another transaction between individuals. I have resources (money, insurance) and you have skills and facilities (medical training and fertility labs)? Well, then who is anyone to come between autonomous actors pursuing their self-interests?
Our post-Christian culture is already well advanced down this pathway, as couples, individuals and even “throuples” demand control over the embryos and future children they purchase in the marketplace. We’ve had decades, actually, of privileged people demanding the ability to purchase ova and sperm based on the donor’s IQ, attractiveness, participation in varsity athletics, and more. Sex selection is par for the course in many contexts. And of course our throwaway culture simply discards the prenatal human beings who don’t fit the market-based criteria.
But here again we have something that is genuinely new. Instead of modifying or intervening (albeit dramatically!) into the process God created for procreation, this new technology has the potential to obliterate it. Catholics, other Christians and all people of good will must make our voices heard on this and work to make creation of such embryos illegal.
It may seem, and we may be told, that we can trust the process to stay where it is — that no actual reproduction would ever take place using this new technology. But the history outlined above shows that is a very, very bad bet. In a culture that becomes more and more dominated by the logic of the marketplace and by a commitment to a kind of relativism that welcomes virtually any vision of the good, who are we to impose our view onto others who think differently? They should be able to make their transaction and we should butt out.
It will do us no good to pretend that this is a retreat to a kind of moral neutrality. The marketplace has its own logic and its own goods. It rewards the privileged while exploiting the marginalized. There is no view from nowhere on this question. No neutral place to hide. We can and must explicitly and firmly take a stand with a particular vision of the good. And the Catholic vision stands ready to provide precisely what is necessary in this context.
Unfortunately, there are forces even within the church itself that are apparently trying to undermine the Church’s teaching in this regard — precisely where it is so obviously and importantly true and needed the most. Those of us who agree with Francis’ vision of resisting a consumerist, throwaway culture with the logic of gift and openness to life must redouble our efforts to make our voices heard on this new and repugnant biotechnological development.
September 18, 2023
(Joe Vukov is an associate professor of philosophy and associate director of the Hank Center for the Catholic Intellectual Heritage at Loyola University Chicago. He is also the author, most recently, of The Perils of Perfection. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)
In THE DIALECTIC OF SEX: THE CASE FOR FEMINIST. REVOLUTION, Shulamith Firestone cuts into the prejudice against women (and children)--amplified through the.
July 11, 2023 Debates on gender, race, and class: How can the working class become hegemonic in struggles against oppression?
Intersectionality is a word that is frequently used in academia, among feminist activists, and in social movements. “Class, race and gender” are, as Terry Eagleton pointed out, the “contemporary holy trinity.”1 There is a lot of discourse about intersectionality, but the definition of the term is often unclear. Is it a theory or an empirical description? Does it operate in the realm of individual subjectivity or does it analyze systems of domination? And finally, what does it say about the causes of intersecting oppressions and, above all, about the paths toward emancipation?
Although reflections on the relationship between gender, race, and class had long existed in Marxist debates and among the left, the concept of intersectionality was defined for the first time as such in a 1989 article by Black lawyer and feminist Kimberlé Crenshaw2 that aimed to answer these questions in the context of U.S. anti-discrimination law. That origin undoubtedly marked the concept, as we will see later. However, its most important precedent is in the work of Black feminists of the 1970s, such as those of the Combahee River Collective, who offered an “intersectional” critique of liberation movements in the context of Second Wave feminism and the political radicalization of the time.
In this article, I briefly summarize the historical background of the concept, its first formulations, how it shifted with the rise of postmodernism, and the ongoing debate on the concept within today’s social movements. I also critically contrast the theories of intersectionality with Marxism. 1. The Combahee River Collective and Black Feminists
The Combahee River Collective Statement, published in 1977, took its name as a tribute to the brave military actions led by former slave and abolitionist Harriet Tubman in 1863, which led 750 enslaved people to liberation through enemy fire. She was the only woman to run an army operation during the U.S. Civil War.
Black feminists in the 1970s saw themselves as part of a historical tradition of Black women’s struggles dating back to the 19th century. In her book Women, Race and Class,3, Angela Davis referred to their role in the U.S. abolitionist movement. Sojourner Truth’s speech at the Ohio Women’s Convention for women’s suffrage in 1851 went down in history. One man had argued that women couldn’t vote because they were the “weaker sex,” to which Sojourner Truth gave a powerful response:
I have ploughed, and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man — when I could get it — and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery … And ain’t I a woman?
Her response was a rebuttal of the patriarchal narrative that constructed “femininity” based on the idea that women are weak, “naturally” inferior beings incapable of exercising political citizenship. But it also challenged the many white suffragettes who neglected the demands of Black and working women.
In the mid-1970s, a number of Black women, having had negative experiences in the white feminist movement and in organizations for Black liberation, decided to revive that tradition and form their own militant groups. With the publication of the Combahee River Collective Statement, Black feminists simultaneously questioned white feminism, the Black movement, and the bourgeois Black feminism of the National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO).
Their starting point was the shared experience of simultaneous oppressions rooted in the trilogy of class, race, and gender, to which they added sexual oppression. From there, they aimed their critique against the feminist movement that was hegemonized by radical feminism. This current of feminism interpreted social contradictions through the opposition between “sexual classes”4 and prioritized one system of domination — the patriarchy — over all others5. While questioning the preeminence of sexual or gender oppression over that of race and class, Black feminists also debated against the openly separatist tendencies that promoted a “war of the sexes,” which had gained strength in the feminist movement of the late 1970s. The Black feminists defined this type of feminism as a movement guided by the interests of white, middle-class women. They also maintained that any kind of biological determination of identity could lead to reactionary positions.
Although we are feminists and Lesbians, we feel solidarity with progressive Black men and do not advocate the fractionalization that white women who are separatists demand.
In her book Feminism Is for Everybody, Black feminist bell hooks argues that, in those years, “utopian visions of sisterhood” and the ahistorical definition of patriarchy were challenged by debates around race and class. Taking stock of this period, she asserts that “white women who had attempted to organize the movement around the banner of common oppression evoking the notion that women constituted a sexual class/caste were the most reluctant to acknowledge differences among women.” She also highlights the debate with the separatist currents within the movement:
They portrayed all men as the enemy in order to represent all women as victims. This focus on men deflected attention from the class privilege of individual feminist activists as well as their desire to increase their class power.6
The Combahee River Collective Statement characterized the struggle for the emancipation of Black women and Black people as inseparable from the struggle against the capitalist system. That is why its authors explicitly supported the fight for socialism:
We realize that the liberation of all oppressed peoples necessitates the destruction of the political-economic systems of capitalism and imperialism as well as patriarchy. We are socialists because we believe that work must be organized for the collective benefit of those who do the work and create the products … We are not convinced, however, that a socialist revolution that is not also a feminist and anti-racist revolution will guarantee our liberation.
In relation to Marxism, they asserted a fundamental agreement with Marx’s theory regarding “specific economic relations,” but they believed that the analysis had to be “extended further in order for us to understand our specific economic situation as Black women.” It should be noted that although they expressed the need for a socialist revolution, the practical tasks they proposed as a group were limited above all to self-awareness workshops and the struggle for the specific rights of Black women in their neighborhoods.
The notion of identity politics appears in the Statement as a response to the specific way in which Black women experience oppression. Recognition of one’s own identity is considered necessary for converging, a posteriori, with other liberation movements. There is tension between the constitution of a differentiated identity and convergence with other oppressed people to fight against a system that combines forms of economic, sexual, and racial domination.
A few years later, however, as the social, political, and ideological context drastically changed with the rise of neoliberalism and postmodernism, the concept of intersectionality would take on new meaning. With the radical transformation of society no longer on the horizon, the moment for collective action tended to dissipate, and differentiated “identities” and the demand for policies of recognition within capitalist society began to increase. 2. Intersectionality as a Category of Discrimination
Kimberlé Crenshaw first defined the concept of intersectionality in 1989. She highlighted that the separate treatment of race and gender discriminations as “mutually exclusive categories of experience and analysis” had problematic consequences for legal doctrine, feminist theory, and anti-racist politics. She thus proposed that a contrast should be drawn between “the multidimensionality of Black women’s experience [and] the single-axis analysis that distorts these experiences.”
She pointed out that any conceptualization based on a single axis of discrimination (whether it be race, gender, sexuality, or class) erases Black women from identification and the possibility of ending discrimination, limiting the analysis to the experiences of privileged members of each group. Racial discrimination tends to be viewed from the perspective of Black people with gender or class privileges, while with gender discrimination the focus is on white women with economic resources. Since “the intersectional experience is greater than the sum of racism and sexism, any analysis that does not take intersectionality into account cannot sufficiently address the particular manner in which Black women are subordinated.”
In her analysis, Crenshaw examines how several lawsuits brought by Black women were simply dismissed by the judiciary. In one case, DeGraffenreid v. General Motors, five women sued the multinational, alleging employment discrimination because as Black women they were denied promotions to better positions. The court dismissed the lawsuit, claiming that it was not possible to establish the existence of discrimination because they were “Black women,” as they did not constitute a group subject to special discrimination. Instead, the court agreed to an investigation of whether racial or gender segregation had occurred, but “not a combination of both.” Finally, it determined that since GM had hired women – white women – there was no gender discrimination involved. And since the company had also hired Black people – Black men – there was no racial discrimination involved either.
The Black women’s lawsuit was unsuccessful. The court claimed that its admission would open up a “Pandora’s box.”
Crenshaw points out that the objective of intersectionality is to recognize that Black women may experience discrimination that has complex forms, which the single-axis conceptual framework fails to address. In the late 1980s, the concept of intersectionality emerged as a category for addressing the complexity of experiences of “discrimination,” with the aim of establishing new case law that would allow “diversity policies” to be regulated by the state.
Later, U.S. sociologist and scholar of Black feminism Patricia Hill Collins defined intersectionality as “being constructed within an historically specific matrix of domination characterized by intersecting oppressions.”7 In her view, intersectionality defines a “social justice” project that seeks a convergence or coalitions with other “social justice projects.”
The concept of intersectionality was subsequently developed by many other Black, Latina, and Asian feminist intellectuals within the expanding framework of “Women Studies” in academia. Intersectionality became a buzzword at conferences and symposia, and in research departments. NGOs were created to develop intersectional studies in the fields of economics, law, sociology, culture, and public policy. Other vectors of oppression were added to the trilogy of gender, race, and class, such as sexuality, nationality, age, and functional diversity. But while this increased the visibility of the specific oppression faced by multiple groups and communities, it paradoxically developed in a climate of resignation to capitalist social structures, which had come to be perceived as impossible to challenge. 3. Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Multiple Differences
The rise of intersectionality studies in academia coincided with the beginning of a new historical phase that completely transformed the intellectual and political climate under neoliberalism. The period of “Bourgeois Restoration”8 or neoliberal boom saw generalized attacks on workers’ gains worldwide, with privatization and deregulation policies running rampant given the defection of the trade union and political leaderships of the working class. This led to an increase in the internal fragmentation of the working class and a huge loss of class subjectivity.
In this new context, the radicalism of the Black feminists and socialists of the Combahee River Collective gave way to a formulation of intersectionality in the framework of an increased fragmentation of subjects, from a postmodern perspective. The idea of intersectionality became more akin to that of “diversity” and “identity politics.” Such a formulation shifts the focus from the collective to the individual, from the material to the subjective, in a process of “culturalization” of the relations of domination. It generalizes the idea that the struggle of oppressed groups fundamentally involves acquiring self-awareness of their own identity — a “situated knowledge” — to ensure that privileged groups (men, white women, heterosexual women, etc.) “deconstruct” their privileges and recognize diversity. In the framework of the postmodern “cultural shift,” identities are presented as exclusively constructed in discourse, so the possibilities of resisting are restricted to the establishment of a counter-narrative.
This perspective, however, cannot be applied to class exploitation: Can we expect those who own the means of production — bankers and capitalists — to “deconstruct” their power through self-reflection? In reality, the proposition is also useless as a strategy for ending racism, heterosexism, and sexism, unless these “axes of domination” are considered to be separate entities that operate exclusively in the cultural or ideological sphere, rather than being intertwined with the material and structural relations of capitalism.
Conversely, the multiplication of an increasingly extensive series of oppressed identities, without considering the possibility of radically transforming the capitalist social relations on which these oppressions are based, gave rise to practices of “ghettoization” and separation in activism. Pratibha Parmar warned of this problem in her work:
There has been an emphasis on accumulating a collection of oppressed identities which in turn have given rise to hierarchy of oppression. Such scaling has not only been destructive, but divisive and immobilising. … [M]any women have retreated into ghettoised “lifestyle politics” and find themselves unable to move beyond personal and individual experience.9
As the counterpart to this impotence, the capitalist system appropriated the explosion of “diversity” as a market of identities, which it could assimilate as long as they did not challenge the social system as a whole. Terry Eagleton noted with regard to postmodernism:
One would be forced to claim that [given] its single most enduring achievement, the fact that it has helped to place questions of sexuality, gender and ethnicity so firmly on the political agenda, that it is impossible to imagine them being erased without an almighty struggle was nothing more than a substitute for more classical forms of radical politics which dealt in class, state, ideology, revolution, material modes of production.10
In a footnote, however, Eagleton clarified that it had not been postmodern intellectuals who had placed those issues on the political agenda, but the previous action of social movements through struggles in the 1960s and 1970s. Once that wave of political radicalization was defeated, the visibility of issues of race, gender and sexuality grew, while class became increasingly invisible (to the point that some authors have written about the disappearance of the working class as such). 4. The Retreat from Class Politics
In the class/race/gender trilogy, class tended to be diluted, or became just another identity, as if it were a category of social stratification (by income) or type of occupation. Citing Collins, Marta E. Giménez11 notes that one of the characteristic elements of intersectionality theories is the assumption that “in order to theorise these connections it is necessary ‘to support a working hypothesis of equivalency between oppressions’,” but that this leads to the elimination of the specificity of class relations.
Against this view, it is necessary to point out that race, gender, and class are not directly comparable categories. This does not mean that we must establish a hierarchy of grievances, or determine which is most important to people’s subjective experience; the goal is to achieve a greater understanding of the relationship between oppression and exploitation in capitalist society.
For example, class, race, and gender operate very differently in relation to “equality” and “difference.” Historically, the bourgeoisie has tried to camouflage class “social differences” as much as possible behind an “egalitarian” ideology of “free contract.” But it uses racism and sexism to establish “differences” that are attributed to biological or “natural” conditions to justify inequality in the distribution of resources and access to rights and to defend the persistence of a certain division of labor or, simply put, the enslavement of millions of people, dehumanizing them.
From an emancipatory perspective, the objective is to ensure that no difference in skin color, birthplace, biological sex, or sexual choice can be used as a basis for oppression, grievances, or inequality, while recognizing diversity and promoting the development of the creative potential of all individuals within the framework of social cooperation. But in the case of class differences, the aim is to eliminate them completely, as such. Through its struggle against capitalist social relations, the working class seeks to eliminate the private ownership of the means of production, which entails the elimination of the bourgeoisie as a class and the possibility of ending all class society.
What structures capitalist society is the social difference between the owners of the means of production and those who are forced to sell their labor power in exchange for wages, beyond all attempts to render this contradiction invisible. Patriarchal relations — which emerged thousands of years before capitalism — and racism are not ahistorical entities, but have taken on new forms and a specific social content in the framework of capitalist social relations.
Capitalism uses patriarchal prejudices to establish an unprecedented differentiation between the “public” and the “private,” between the sphere of production and the sphere of the home, where women sustain — through invisible work — a large part of the tasks of social reproduction of the labor power needed for the reproduction of capital. Institutions such as the family, marriage, and heterosexual normativity, reformulated under new social relations, socialize and naturalize this role for women. The multiple manifestations of gender oppression and the painful grievances that they imply for millions of women through violence and femicide are not “reducible” to class relations, but they cannot be explained without connecting the categories of oppression and exploitation.
Racism was used to provide an ideological justification for enslaving millions of human beings, while at the same time the Enlightenment elevated the ideas of “freedom,” “equality,” and “fraternity” as a basis for the “rights of man.” Racism accompanied and reinforced the massive colonialist endeavors of imperialist states, as well as internal genocides such that carried out in the United States against indigenous peoples. Since the U.S. Civil War and the abolition of slavery, racism has continued to be used to exclude of a large part of the country’s population, which is treated as “second-class citizens” and “second-class workers.” This promotes internal division within the U.S. working class. In turn, as Black feminists have pointed out, racial oppression and gender oppression are masterfully combined to maximize capitalist profits: it is a fact that there is a larger wage gap for Black and Latina women workers in the United States, just as there is disproportionate institutional and police violence against Black youth. It is also used to support racist and xenophobic policies against migrants in Europe, where they are treated as second-class workers and lack basic social and democratic rights. 5. Marxism and Intersectionality
In Capital, Marx wrote, “Labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded.” In an earlier work, he and Friedrich Engels had pointed out that “social progress, changes of historical periods, take place in direct proportion to the progress of women towards freedom; and the decline of a social order occurs in proportion to the reduction of women’s freedom”, paraphrasing the utopian socialist Fourier. In The Condition of the Working Class in England, Engels had specifically analyzed the reality of working women who were entering the sphere of capitalist production in large numbers and experiencing the twofold grievances of oppression and exploitation. In The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Engels continued the incomplete ethnological studies carried out by his friend to develop an analysis of the family institution in history and the oppression of women.
Revolutionary Marxism has analyzed the relationship between exploitation and oppression in other ways as well. For example, Marx and Engels maintained that the English proletariat could not be free if its rights were based on the oppression of Irish workers. Later, Lenin argued that a people that oppresses another people cannot be free, and defended the right to national self-determination as well as the fight against colonial oppression.
In her critique of intersectionality theories, Lise Vogel correctly argues that socialist feminists of the 1960s and 1970s had already highlighted the intersection between patriarchy, racism, and capitalism before the term intersectionality became popular. It is important to note, however, that a long tradition of socialist feminist thought had developed long before that period, from Flora Tristán to Engels and Clara Zetkin, the Russian revolutionaries, and many others. This led to important international socialist women’s conferences and programs and organizations of peasant and working women. The Transitional Program written by Leon Trotsky and adopted by the Fourth International in 1938, includes among its slogans the need to “Open the road to the Woman Worker! Open the Road to the Youth!” and to seek “support among the most exploited layers of the working class.”
Intersectionality theorists often criticize Marxism for what they consider to be “class reductionism.” But defending the centrality of a “class analysis” does not mean limiting it to the activity of unions in wage struggles. That is a corporatist, economist, or narrowly syndicalist perspective of class. It is true that the 20th-century practices of many of the Stalinized Communist parties, as well as the trade union bureaucracies, were based on these narrow corporate politics, thus deepening the divide between “class politics” and the struggle of movements against oppression. But only by falsely equating Stalinism with Marxism is it possible to assert that Marxism has not considered the “intersection” of class exploitation with gender oppression, racism, colonial oppression, and heterosexism.
A class analysis aims to reveal the relationships that structure capitalist society, based not only on the generalized expropriation of surplus value for the accumulation of capital, but also on the appropriation of women’s reproductive work in the home, as well as on the concentration of capital in large monopolies, the expansion of financial capital, and the competition between imperialist states that lead to global wars and plunder. It also examines how capital uses and establishes “differences,” fueling racist, misogynistic, and xenophobic ideologies to maximize exploitation and provoke divisions within the ranks of the working class. This class analysis, far from expressing an “economic reductionist” view, includes the interaction of political and social elements and allows a deeper understanding of the connection between class relations and racism, patriarchy, and heterosexism.
At the same time, it recognizes that if the working class — which in the 21st century is more diverse, racialized, and feminized than ever before — manages to overcome its internal divisions and fragmentation, it has the unique capacity to destroy capitalism and place the entire economy, industry, transport and communications system under its control as the basis for organizing a new society of free producers. The retreat from “class politics” actually means abandoning the struggle against the capitalist system, without which it is impossible to put an end to the terrible injustices caused by exploitation and oppression based on race, gender or sexuality.
Since the capitalist crisis of 2008, with the emergence of new resistance movements against neoliberal policies, some sectors of feminist activists, anti-racist, and the youth movements have been defending the idea of “intersectionality” in a new sense to form coalitions among various oppressed groups. The women’s movement that organized the March 8, 2018, strikes in the Spanish State, for example, has itself as an “anti-capitalist, anti-racist, anti-colonial, and anti-fascist” movement. This was undoubtedly a very important step forward toward the convergence of struggles and a countertrend to the logic of fragmentation. However, the sum or “intersection” of resistance movements is insufficient if they are not connected with a common strategy to defeat capitalism, without which it is impossible to end racism or patriarchal oppression.
It is not about counterposing “movements” or “identities” to an abstract and genderless working class. Never before in history has the working class been so diverse in terms of gender and race. Women already make up 50 percent of the working class, and of that Black, Latin, and Asian women are the majority. The key to a hegemonic strategy, then, is to return to the centrality of class politics that decisively incorporates the fight against all oppression based on gender, race, and sexuality. This means seeking to unite what capitalism divides, strengthening the internal unity of the working class, as well as adopting a policy of alliances with movements that fight against specific oppression. This perspective, along with the fight to expropriate the expropriators, is the only one that will allow progress toward a truly free society.
First published in Spanish on February 24, 2019, in Contrapunto.
Translation by Marisela Trevin
Notes
Notes↑1 Terry Eagleton, Against the Grain: Essays 1975–1985 (London, UK: Verso, 1986). ↑2 Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics,” in Feminist Legal Theory: Readings in Law and Gender, ed. by Katharine T. Bartlett and Rosanne Kennedy (New York, NY: Routledge, 1991). ↑3 Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race, and Class (New York, NY: Knopf, 1981). ↑4 Whether in terms of the radical feminism of Shulamith Firestone in a 1970 essay or the materialist feminism of Cristine Delphy from 1980. See Shulamith Firestone, “The Dialectic of Sex,” in Radical Feminism: A Documentary Reader, ed. by Barbara A. Crow (New York, NY, New York University Press, 2000); Christine Delphy, “The Main Enemy,” Feminist Issues 1, no. 1 (1980): 23–40. ↑5 As formulated by Kate Millet in Sexual Politics: A Surprising Examination of Society’s Most Arbitrary Folly (New York: Doubleday, 1970). ↑6 bell hooks, Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2000). ↑7 Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment (New York, NY: Routledge, 1990), 127. ↑8 Emilio Albamonte and Matías Maiello, “At the Limits of the ‘Bourgeois Restoration,’” Left Voice, December 24, 2019. First published in Spanish in 2011. ↑9 Pratibha Parmar, “Black Feminism: The Politics of Articulation,” in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. by Jonathan Rutherford (London, UK: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990), 107. ↑10 Terry Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism (Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing, 1996), 22. ↑11 Marta E. Giménez, Marx, Women, and Capitalist Social Reproduction: Marxist Feminist Essays: (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill Publishers, 2019.
First Australian uterus transplant changes future of infertility treatment
Sylvia Jeffreys and Lisa Brown
Feb 26 2023 FRANK REDWARD/SYDNEY MORNING HERALD Kirsty Bryant, right, received her mother Michelle’s uterus in a 16-hour surgery that may allow her to carry another child to term.
A 30-year-old woman has become the first Australian to receive a transplanted uterus in a medical breakthrough at the Royal Hospital for Women in Sydney.
Kirsty Bryant was told she’d never carry another baby after undergoing a life-saving hysterectomy during the birth of her daughter, Violet, in April 2021.
She now has a shot at defying that prognosis after undergoing marathon transplant surgery in January.
The organ was donated by Bryant’s 54-year-old mother, Michelle Hayton, who endured an 11-hour operation to remove her womb. Bryant told 60 Minutes she is still wrapping her head around the selfless gift from her mother.
“I am going to potentially, all fingers and toes crossed, carry a baby in the same uterus, in the same womb I was growing in,” Bryant said. “It will hopefully be a great story to tell my baby one day.”
Hayton met all the relevant criteria for a donor, including being fit, premenopausal and, crucially, willing to hand over her womb without expecting anything in return.
“Kirsty rang, she said to me, ‘Hi, Mum. What do you think about having a hysterectomy and giving me your uterus?’ I said, ‘Yep, it’s on. I have no problem with that’,” Hayton said.
The trial’s lead surgeon, Dr Rebecca Deans, who has spent years researching the project and securing ethics approval, described the 16-hour dual surgery as a success and one of the best days of her life.
“I couldn’t have been happier,” Deans said. “It was such a wonderful day to actually finally get there and be in that room. The buzz was amazing. And then it all went to plan, and Kirsty’s doing beautifully.”
Huge medical moment
The Swedish surgeon who performed the world’s first uterine transplant in 2012, Professor Mats Brannstrom, led the operations on Bryant and Hayton, sharing his expertise with the team at the Royal.
The donor surgery to remove Hayton’s uterus, which began at 7am, was by far the longer and riskier of the two operations, Brannstrom said.
“The difficulty is because the blood vessels are small, and you’re working in, like, a funnel. So, the access for you is very restricted. We dissect the organ, and that means that you actually remove all the other tissues around the uterus.
“There are small blood vessels going out, and we try to isolate those. The problematic thing is that there is a ureter on each side. And the ureter goes from the kidney to the bladder, and we cannot injure that.”
The uterus was lifted from Hayton’s body about nine hours in and was passed across to a table where it was flushed out over ice, before being stitched onto Bryant’s blood vessels using extremely fine threads almost too small for the naked eye to see.
The recipient surgery finished about 10pm, marking a huge moment in Australian medical history and opening an exciting new avenue in infertility treatment.
“Personally, professionally, it was just incredible, and I think everyone felt the same,” Deans said. “There were so many components to the team, the nursing staff, the anaesthetists, and everyone’s saying that they felt the same way, that they really felt like it was one of those moments you’ll reflect on professionally and never, ever forget.” No guarantee, but no regrets
While the operations were free of major complications, the recovery for both patients has not been easy. Bryant experienced significant blood loss 24 hours after the surgery and required transfusions, while Hayton suffered a serious infection and is yet to feel any sensation in her bladder.
However, a month on from the biggest day of their lives, Bryant and Hayton said they have no regrets – even though there is no guarantee of the reward of a baby.
“To not put my hand up and give it a go, I think would be a massive regret for myself,” Bryant said. “Even if it doesn’t go to plan, the research and the information that they will get from this, in Australia, is going to be worth it. I just want to give hope and give options for other women out there.”
The next step for Bryant is still resting on ice at the IVF lab at the Royal: six embryos frozen months before the operation. Deans will determine when she is ready for the transfer, but the early signs are that the uterus is responding well and Bryant could be pregnant by Christmas.
“It could be somewhere between three and six months from the surgery where we can start implanting those embryos… and each of those embryos has a 30 to 50 per cent chance of success.”
‘I’m going to dream big’
While transplanted wombs are typically removed after five years, some recipients overseas have managed to carry two pregnancies in their donated organ; an opportunity that Byrant is very much open to.
“If we can dream a little, I’d love to carry two more pregnancies. After my hysterectomy, that was something that I really had to mourn – the fact that I wouldn’t be able to be pregnant again. And then to get that chance, yeah, I’m going to dream big.”
While the anxious wait for a baby begins for Bryant, the Royal will forge ahead with plans for 11 more transplants. However, the hospital’s foundation will need to raise a further AU$1 million to fully fund the three-year research trial, and to achieve Deans’ goal of one day making uterine transplants as mainstream as IVF.
“There is a good number of women coming forward saying, ‘I really would love to do this. I don’t have other options. We desperately want to have another child and we’d really love to be considered.’
“I’d love to be able to offer this to women in Australia.”
This article originally appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald and has been republished with permission.
In THE DIALECTIC OF SEX: THE CASE FOR FEMINIST. REVOLUTION, Shulamith Firestone cuts into the prejudice against women (and children)--amplified through the.
Tuesday, February 07, 2023
Backlash over idea to use 'brain dead' women for surrogate pregnancies
Jennifer Savin Mon, February 6, 2023 Backlash at 'brain dead women' as surrogates ideaGetty Images
An idea put forward by a professor to help those struggling with fertility issues has been met with major backlash: Professor Anna Smajdor suggested that 'brain dead women' could have their bodies used to house surrogate pregnancies for those unable, or unwilling, to carry a baby of their own.
Some objecting raised concerns that, should the hypothetical proposal ever be put in place in the real world, that women could have their bodies used without consent, however this is not the case put forward by Smajdor in her study (which was published in the medical journal Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics). Due to some viral tweets on the matter, some of which appear to be ill-informed due to poorly worded tabloid stories, it's certainly sparked a wider conversation on the ethics around surrogacy and organ donation.
The associate professor floats the idea of a set-up similar to the organ donor register, in that a woman would need to consent to having her body used for pregnancy prior to such a thing taking place. Smajdor calls her idea "whole body gestational donation" or WBGD – and says it is one "deserves serious consideration". The idea was also shared by the Colombian Medical College, who later backtracked and apologised for doing so.
In her paper, Smajdor argues that "we already know pregnancies can be successfully carried to term in brain dead women" and suggests "there is no obvious medical reason why initiating such pregnancies would not be possible", referencing the question of ethics within the world of surrogacy as it exists today.
Getty Images
Continuing on, the professor said, "Since we are happy to accept that organ donors are dead enough to donate, we should have no objections to WBGD on these grounds. WBGD donors are as dead as other donors – no more, no less. Since we are happy to prolong the somatic survival of already pregnant brain-dead women, to initiate pregnancy among eligible brain-dead donors should not trouble us unduly.
"Of course, this proposal may seem shocking to some people. Nevertheless, as I have shown, if we accept that our current approach to organ donation and reproductive medicine are sound, WBGD donation seems to follow relatively smoothly from procedures that we are already undertaking separately."
The definition of brain dead (via the NHS) is "a person who is brain dead is legally confirmed as dead, they have no chance of recovery because their body is unable to survive without artificial life support".
Tweeting about the proposal from Smajdor, one person said, "Do we really live in a time where as a cis woman I have to state if I'm ever in a coma and ruled 'brain dead' I do not condone/consent/want my body to be used to grow babies as a surrogate? Denying my humanity and using me as a host? A strong no!"
Another, actor Nathalie Emmanuel, also commented on the proposal, tweeting, "Today, I saw a headline in the UK about whether women who are 'brain dead' could have their bodies used to grow babies in their bodies as surrogates without their consent. A second about prisoners in the US potentially being able to reduce their sentence by donating organs… We are done for. This is some dystopian… sci-fi… scary sh*t. This was too much for one day." [N.B: In Smajdor's proposal, consent would need to be obtained from women before any attempt at a surrogate pregnancy]
Colombian member of Congress, Jennifer Pedraza, described the argument as misogynistic, saying, "Women are not utensils to be thrown away after use, women have human rights, even if some people forget this."
Others raised concerns over how healthy a pregnancy via a surrogate in such poor health could really be.
In THE DIALECTIC OF SEX: THE CASE FOR FEMINIST. REVOLUTION, Shulamith Firestone cuts into the prejudice against women (and children)--amplified through the.
by M Lane-McKinley · 2019 · Cited by 3 — A key artifact of the political contradictions and utopian problematics of women's liberation and the tradition of radical feminism at the ...
In 1970, at the age of 25, Firestone published her utopian manifesto The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution before disappearing forever from the ...
Monday, December 12, 2022
Womb with a view: EctoLife baby farm eliminates pregnancy and labor
Push-button childbirth after an out-of-body pregnancy: it's going to be an option soon, says Hashem Al-Ghaili
Hashem Al-Ghaili
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The EctoLife Artificial Womb Facility envisages a controversial new way to be pregnant, with the baby growing in an idealized, but completely inhuman environment: transparent "growth pods" arranged by their hundreds in human baby farming operations.
To be clear from the outset: this is just a concept at this stage, the brainchild of Berlin-based "producer, filmmaker and science communicator" Hashem Al-Ghaili. There are no immediate plans to build an EctoLife facility, this is merely a piece of science fiction Al-Ghaili has extrapolated from the current state of fertility research.
It's designed to start a conversation and make an argument for a new model of parenthood that Al-Ghaili believes will be possible within years, and widespread within decades.
Al-Ghaili's argument goes something like this: pregnancy is not fun. It can be exhausting, painful, nauseating, intrusive, inconvenient and sometimes flat-out dangerous for a mother, and there are all kinds of ways it can be suboptimal for a baby. If you're pregnant and you smoke, or party, or stress too much, or catch certain diseases, or you simply don't play enough Mozart at your burgeoning belly, you might not be giving your child the best start you can.
Nothing dystopian going on here, honest
Hashem Al-Ghaili
The science isn't far off, says Al-Ghaili, from being able to replicate the ideal gestation conditions in a temperature-controlled, infection-free womb with a view. An artificial umbilical cord can provide oxygen and nutrition as the tot floats in artificial amniotic fluid, continually refreshed with precisely tailored hormones, antibodies and growth factors. Baby waste products can be removed, run through a bioreactor and enzymatically converted back into "a steady and sustainable supply of fresh nutrients." Yummo.
Little speakers can make sure the tyke is getting the best possible brain nutrition, too. We're talking all the classical music it can handle (which may be more than the parents can handle), as well as your own soothing voice piped in as well, to start building that invaluable bond.
Vital signs will constantly be monitored – as, rather forebodingly, will physical defects and genetic abnormalities. Real-time data on your little Tamagotchi will pop up through a phone app, along with a live HD fetus cam and the ability to scroll through time-lapse videos of your child's development from embryo to nine months...
...And potentially, beyond. Human babies are among the most helpless and underdeveloped in the animal kingdom. Why can't we pop out of the womb and take our wobbly first steps five minutes later, like a calf does? It's because our brains are too big for the human female hip gap; we're born undercooked, with soft, pliable skulls, several months behind other animals developmentally. But in an EctoLife EZ-Womb, there's no such biological limit. You could experiment with much longer gestational periods, the results might be terrific.
If this all sounds a little impersonal, cold and disconnected to you, Al-Ghaili has more technology to soothe your mind. Think you might miss the feeling of the baby kicking? Boom. A haptic suit can bring that sensation back for any parent that wants it, and only when they want it. Want to see the beginning of life from your kid's point of view? Whack on a VR headset and tune in to a 360-degree camera any time you like.
What's more, if you don't dig the idea of your precious bundle of joy being grown in a 400-pod baby lab, at a baby farm boasting 75 of those labs and pumping out 30,000 babies a year, you can have a battery-powered pod installed in your own home. Heck, keep it there post-birth to get some little brothers and sisters happening.
You might not have the same intensely human birthing suite experience as the billions of parents before you, but on the other hand, you'll arrive at your first day on the tough job of parenthood feeling physically fresh and well-rested, instead of having been gradually weighed down and latched onto by a parasitic organism that tends to leave rather a path of destruction upon its exit even in the best case scenario. Given the option, I'm sure some mums would choose to push a button and watch a little pod open up.
Once it's well-developed and available, it might start looking like a pretty attractive option for folk that like the idea of a baby but can't see why they should have to go through the ordeals of pregnancy and childbirth to get one. Heck, you might not even need a day off work, just hold hands with your significant other after a day at the office, head down to the baby farm and pop the lid on life as a parent. EctoLife will even hook you up with a free genetic test to make sure you're not heading home with the wrong kid.
That's the argument, in a nutshell, for growing your kids in an artificial nutshell. You can explore it in more detail in the extraordinary video below. I'm not gonna lie, I find this concept pretty twisted, inhuman and dystopian. But given the Matrix-reminiscent layout of the EctoLife facility and a certain Paul Verhoeven-esque quality in the narration, one gets the impression Al-Ghalil wants to provoke strong reactions.
And at the end of the day, if I search my heart, I've got two kids that I feel very connected with and close to, and I didn't have to go through pregnancy or labor; I left that bit to my wife. So I'm hardly in a position to criticize the idea. We'd be fascinated to hear your thoughts in the comments below.
EctoLife: The World’s First Artificial Womb Facility
In THE DIALECTIC OF SEX: THE CASE FOR FEMINIST. REVOLUTION, Shulamith Firestone cuts into the prejudice against women (and children)--amplified through the.
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