Читать книгу The Movement for Reproductive Justice - Patricia Zavella - Страница 10

When formed in 1997, SisterSong consisted of sixteen organizations representing the major racial-ethnic groups in the United States: Blacks/African Americans, Latinas/Hispanics, Native Americans/Indigenous peoples, and Asian/Pacific Islanders, as well as Arab and Muslim women.⁴⁴ Initially it was challenging to organize women of diverse commitments—Loretta Ross, one of the founders of SisterSong, tried five times to form a national coalition before SisterSong was formed. Indeed, there was opposition and doubt that women of color could build a movement centered on women’s lived experience—what Cherríe Moraga calls “theory in the flesh” that emphasizes women’s skin color, place, and sexuality.⁴⁵ However, these reproductive justice advocates mindfully navigate collaboration. They acknowledge the relationality of racial categories in the United States, in which, as Laura Pulido argues, “the status and meanings associated with one group are contingent upon those of another.”⁴⁶ Specifically, reproductive justice organizers are concerned about well-known racial inequalities that are manifest in social determinants of health and limit access to health care.⁴⁷ Simultaneously, they recognize “differential racialization,” in which, Pulido suggests, “various racial/ethnic groups are racialized in unique ways and have distinct experiences of racism.”⁴⁸ Thus, some reproductive justice organizations work with particular racial-ethnic categories—for example, Black Women for Wellness (which works with women from the African diaspora), California Latinas for Reproductive Justice (which works mainly with Latinas), and Tewa Women United (a multiracial organization whose constituencies are predominantly Native American women). Women of color complicate the notion of differential racialization by pointing out how race is coconstitutive with gender, class, sexuality, ethnicity, age, embodiment, legal status, ability, religion, and other power relations in changing historical contexts that shape women’s everyday lives and their identities. Other reproductive justice organizations emphasize the collaboration of women of color in their organizations’ names, like Young Women United or SPARK Reproductive Justice NOW. Further, virtually all of them have participants who are not members of their racial-ethnic group—TWU, for example, works with Latinas; YWU, an organization focused on women of color, had a white woman who participated regularly in their activities; COLOR had an Arab Muslim woman working with them during one season, and so on. As we will see, the identity “women of color” is contingent and deployed strategically in relation to external forces and internal organizational dynamics in which movement activists value cultural capital.⁴⁹ This book explores the following questions: What are the benefits and tensions related to collaborating as women of color on reproductive justice while working locally in organizations that are largely racially-ethnically specific? How do organizational staff and participants, particularly young women, experience collaboration across difference?

Like so many social movements around the globe that work on behalf of women’s rights, not all reproductive justice advocates identify publicly with feminism.⁵⁰ While every reproductive justice organization with which I conducted staff interviews are women centered and include women in their mission statements, none of them identify as feminist organizations, although many individuals working in reproductive justice organizations call themselves feminists. The tension related to identifying as a feminist as a woman of color has a long history, since feminism is associated with racial, class, and heterosexual privilege. Indeed, some women prefer using the term “Third World women” to signify their transnational solidarity with struggles in the Global South.⁵¹ The writer Alice Walker suggests the term “womanist,” and the artist Ester Hernández uses the Spanish form, mujerista, for those who advocate on behalf of women’s rights but do not identify as feminist.⁵² The Native American sociologist Luana Ross prefers “indigenous/feminism,” which is “grassroots, in-the-trenches, and activist.” She elaborates: “My notion of indigenous/feminism seeks to empower communities. It includes female, male, and other genders. My indigenous/feminism privileges storytelling as a way to decolonize and empower our communities.”⁵³ I never heard anyone in the reproductive justice movement identify as womanist or as mujerista. I did hear plenty of ambivalence toward mainstream feminist leaders and organizations. We will see how reproductive justice activists practice a form of unnamed feminism in which they frame advocacy on behalf of women of color by distancing themselves from white feminism and, as the indigenous scholar Dion Million says, “choosing strategies and language that locates them within the heart of their own experiences.”⁵⁴ As one RJ activist told me, “I consider myself a feminist but don’t claim that identity. It doesn’t make sense to place that label [feminist] on us, and ‘women of color’ captures our politics in a way that doesn’t negate any of our identities.” It seems that “women of color” is a phrase that reflects low-income racialized women’s political subjectivity even as they retain strong racial-ethnic-national, gendered, sexual, and other identities.

An important turning point in the movement for reproductive justice took place in 2004, when women of color refused to join a national march initially using the word “choice,” which seemed to limit the politics to abortion and excluded non-English speakers. Loretta Ross recalled, “We women of color felt that the abortion framework, the choice framework, was just too narrow a vessel to talk about the threat to women’s lives. We were dealing with the [George W.] Bush administration, an immoral and illegal war in Iraq, the Patriot Act, poverty—all these things would not be challenged by just talking about freedom of choice. I mean, if we made abortion totally accessible, totally legal, totally affordable, women would still have other problems. And so reducing women’s lives down to just whether or not choice is available, we felt was inadequate.”⁵⁵ Jessica González-Rojas, executive director of NLIRH, pointed out, “You can’t even translate that word [choice] into Spanish in the same context. Sometimes you say ‘pro derechos’ [pro rights], but it’s just not the same; not everyone knows what you mean. Like when you say ‘pro-choice’ [in English], everyone knows what you mean. So, there were a lot of cultural things that we were putting into that conversation.” Indeed, these activists would agree with Iris Lopez’s critique: “The ideology of choice is the basis of the fundamental ideal underpinning American society: that we live in a free society, that as individuals we have an infinite number of options from which to choose, and that because all individuals are presumed to be created equally, regardless of race, class, or gender, we all therefore must have equal opportunity to choose.”⁵⁶ After threatening to boycott the march, women of color negotiated their participation in what became the March for Women’s Lives, in which over a million people demonstrated on behalf of women’s rights.⁵⁷ Mindful of the power of framing, reproductive justice activists take care when using the phrase “reproductive rights,” which they see as often representing the mainstream, that is, the experiences of white, middle-class women.⁵⁸ Cristina Aguilar, former executive director of COLOR, clarified how reproductive justice framing is important: “Reproductive justice asserted that women of color and low income women, marginalized groups, do not have the power that ‘choice’ implies and that we needed the movement that was working to eradicate the barriers that get in front of women’s ability to enact ‘choice.’”

A key process of reframing also occurred in a position paper issued in 2005 by Asian Communities for Reproductive Justice (which later changed its name to Forward Together) and SisterSong.⁵⁹ They offered an expanded definition of reproductive justice: “reproductive justice will be achieved when women and girls have the economic, social and political power and resources to make healthy decisions about our bodies, sexuality and reproduction for ourselves, our families and our communities in all areas of our lives.”⁶⁰ This definition emphasizes the structural bases of inequality experienced by women and girls of color and challenges neoliberal thinking about “individualized and independent notion of access” to reproductive health care and “instead views access as collective and interdependent.”⁶¹ Eveline Shen, executive director of Forward Together, recalled, “At that time the national movement was starting to consolidate. Reproductive justice groups were saying, ‘We’re pretty different in terms of how we’re doing reproductive rights.’ That paper was really saying, ‘Actually we’re pretty different in terms of how we define the problem, the solutions, and who are our primary constituencies, and we need to work together.’ That [report] catapulted us to the national scene. We got a lot of requests to talk about reproductive justice and to partner.” The position paper clarified that reproductive justice organizations differ from two other sectors working on women’s reproductive health: those providing reproductive health services, such as access to contraception, prenatal care, birthing support, or abortion provided by organizations such as Planned Parenthood, and those working on reproductive health policy, such as efforts for comprehensive sex education in schools or to change legislation related to abortion, such as those promoted by NARAL Pro-Choice America.⁶² Reproductive justice advocates often collaborate with those who are working on reproductive health services and reproductive health policy; indeed, many reproductive justice organizations include those who work in reproductive health policy and reproductive health services on their boards of directors.⁶³ Cristina Aguilar pointed out the importance of clarifying the unique approach offered by reproductive justice: “What’s really important for us is that we’re defining it every time we use it to ensure that it is something that is lifted up as an empowering term.” Indeed, as we will see, a strengths-based approach is key to reproductive justice organizing. Several prominent reproductive health organizations, such as Planned Parenthood, now use the term “reproductive justice,” rather than “reproductive rights,” according to the sociologist Zakiya Luna, “suggesting a continued impact [of the reproductive justice movement] on the women’s movement.”⁶⁴

Asian Communities for Reproductive Justice and SisterSong included an image in their paper that represents how reproductive justice intersects with other social justice movements (see plate 1).⁶⁵ This image reminds me of a Tibetan prayer wheel and indicates the ways in which the reproductive justice movement pivots so as to collaborate with other social movements. The ongoing efforts to join forces with other social movements is exemplified in the webinar series Collective Voices, which Monica Simpson, executive director of SisterSong, characterized as “moving our framework further, wider and deeper, looking on the intersection of reproductive justice and other social justice issues.”⁶⁶

By 2017, Forward Together expanded the definition of reproductive justice so it was even more inclusive: “All people having the social, political, and economic power and resources to make healthy decisions about their gender, bodies, sexuality, and families for themselves and their communities.”⁶⁷ Other organizations followed suit and explicitly began including men. In 2017 SisterSong announced its #WECOMMIT project, “A Declaration of Response and Responsibility from men regarding rape culture, racism, and toxic masculinity, led by a cis gender male staff member.”⁶⁸ Black Women for Wellness organizes an annual “Bring a Brother to Breakfast” event that gives awards to men for their hard work in the Black community. And Forward Together and ICAH include young men in their youth programs, while CLRJ and TWU explicitly reach out to men.

When I conducted interviews with staff working in nonprofit organizations and activists who focus on reproductive justice, I asked whether there were organizing models or concepts they followed. I heard time and again that they do not follow specific theories of change—one executive director even said, “I hate the idea, theory of change!” Instead, they incorporate two broad approaches to praxis that engage human rights with the theoretical/political framework of intersectionality that feminists of color in the United States began articulating in the 1960s and 1970s.⁶⁹ Women’s publications at the time reported on women’s and liberation movements in the Third World and celebrated International Women’s Year in 1975, linking local struggles to those abroad.⁷⁰ While women have participated in many international fora, the United Nations World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995 was pivotal, as was the United Nations World Conference against Racism in 2001 and the United Nations Committee to Eliminate Racial Discrimination in 2008.⁷¹ At these conferences, women of color collaborated with activists from the Global South who were using a framework that linked racism, xenophobia, violence, and poverty with gender discrimination and homophobia. They recognized that human rights activism should be enacted in the United States as well.⁷² Indeed, the National Asian and Pacific American Women’s Forum was founded, according to former executive director Miriam Yeung when participants in Beijing realized that “there was no organized voice for Asian or Pacific Islander women from the United States to participate in the official UN conference,” and they formed the multi-issue NAPAWF in 1996.⁷³ Reproductive justice activists followed the path that Amitra Basu observed: “the UN international conferences enabled women from around the world to meet and collaborate, forming relationships that lasted long after the conferences ended.”⁷⁴ The need for situating women of color within a global perspective on women’s rights is articulated by Loretta Ross and colleagues: “Whether through the neglect of health care delivery systems or through aggressive population control strategies, the reproductive health rights of women of color are constantly compromised by poverty, racism, sexism, homophobia, and injustice.”⁷⁵

The reproductive justice social movement integrates human rights and intersectionality to make political claims in three ways. First, it engages in the Gramscian war of position, which entails long-term countermovement by civil society with the goal of subverting mechanisms of ideological diffusion.⁷⁶ This work includes base-building, in which reproductive justice nonprofits conduct grassroots organizing in communities of color. As we will see, particular campaigns reach out to specific categories of women—such as undocumented Latinas, minors, or Black women—and may last for several years, or campaigns may arise in response to proposed legislation. Reproductive justice organizations build their bases through community education, training low-income women of color regarding their human right to access health care through forums and curricula presented in workshops, institutes, or cafecitos (coffee klatches), where the setting is smaller and informal, which allows for deeper engagement. Some reproductive justice organizations have set up chapters or paid membership bases. Organizational supporters or members can be mobilized for lobbying events, demonstrations, or other activities like get-out the-vote campaigns or cultural activities. Activists in the movement for reproductive justice take great pride in their grassroots organizing; indeed, they see this work as distinguishing them from those who are working on reproductive rights or reproductive health policy.

A second line of reproductive justice organizing is “culture shift work,” which begins with critiques of deficit thinking and negative representations about people of color. Instead, reproductive justice activists situate their work in a framework that also draws on the strength, resiliency, and spirituality of people of color. Culture shift work also includes working with artists to strategically offer alternative theories, narratives, or representations about women of color in specific campaigns in which the goal is to educate the public, including particular communities. Again, drawing on Gramsci, culture shift work entails knowing oneself in the context of history; practitioners name and expand on individual concerns and strategize for their collective experience.⁷⁷

The third level of work by reproductive justice organizations is policy advocacy at the federal, state, or local levels. Policy work includes crafting legislation and working with legislators to sponsor and shepherd bills through legislative bodies, conducting research, writing position papers, submitting amicus briefs for lawsuits, or testifying before legislative bodies or for court cases. Reproductive justice organizations also lobby public officials for implementation of policies already on the books or to support the allocation of resources to make those policies effective.

There is a great deal of overlap, so that grassroots organizing, culture shift work, and policy advocacy are linked by reproductive justice organizations. Indeed, several organizations conduct primary research to understand the views of women of color on reproductive health issues or to identify the issues they deem important, and then use those findings to inform their community education, culture shift work, or policy advocacy. González-Rojas emphasized the movement’s overall goal: “When you say community mobilization, policy advocacy, and education through culture shift—we’re building power. That’s what we’re doing, and we are going to use that language moving forward.… Our role is to be agents of change.”

Like other social movements, reproductive justice activists self-consciously construct a collective identity that emerges through the actions they take together. The term “women of color” emerged in the 1980s and is associated with the path-breaking book This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa.⁷⁸ Through poetry and self-reflexive essays in this book, women of quite diverse identities powerfully expressed their pain and the ways they cope with oppression. “Women of color” signals “a political identity, a way of acknowledging our interconnections, reflecting upon our common contexts of struggle, and recognizing the different ways that structures impose violence, separation, and war on each of us.”⁷⁹ Indeed, identifying as women of color is a step toward consciousness-raising and seeking the empowerment of communities of color.

Collective identity also emerges out of common experiences that distinguish women of color from the dominant society, such as being targets of policing practices, as in the case of the #SayHerName movement, which raises awareness for Black female victims of police brutality and anti-Black violence in the United States or the xenophobia that views immigrant women’s fertility as a threat to the nation.⁸⁰ In addition to forming a collective political identity out of social action and differential treatment, collective public identity also is dynamic since it requires engagement with participants’ multiple identities. Like some other social movements, reproductive justice constructs a public collective identity around the logic of inclusiveness. Thus, this intersectionality approach leads reproductive justice activists to use the term “women of color,” which has a long history of embracing women of quite diverse racial, ethnic, national, gender, or sexual identities. The use of “women of color” is visible in Facebook posts by different organizations as well as in different reproductive justice convenings.

Simultaneously, many reproductive justice organizations honor historically specific racial and ethnic identities such as Native American, Asian American, African American, and Latina. Yet within these collective identities there are political impulses to problematize them.⁸¹ The movement recognizes internal diversity by national origin for migrants. For example, Senait Admassu, founder of the African Communities Public Health Coalition, which works with the African diaspora, presented at a reproductive justice conference. She pointed out that African migrants hail from fifty-four different countries in Africa, “which makes linguistic and cultural sensitivity hard.” The movement is also attentive to the particular experiences of indigenous peoples as well as Blacks and those of mixed race.

Activists also began using “Latinx” rather than “Latina/o” to signal the questioning of binaries related to gender and sexuality and to include those whose sexual or gender identity is fluid. Strong Families New Mexico cited an article explaining the significance of using “Latinx”: “The x makes Latino, a masculine identifier, gender-neutral. It also moves beyond Latin@–which has been used in the past to include both masculine and feminine identities—to encompass genders outside of that limiting man-woman binary.”⁸² Activists and scholars have debated the emergence of the term “Latinx” or the more general “womanx.” Some view “Latinx” as gender inclusive, foregrounding gender-nonconforming people;⁸³ others argue that it silences gender struggles;⁸⁴ and a third group of scholars see “Latinx” as demonstrating “a continuity of internal shifting group dynamics and disciplinary debates.”⁸⁵ Similarly, some organizations, like Tewa Women United, deliberately avoid gender-neutral language, according to executive director Corrine Sanchez:

We’re gender-inclusive in recognizing the LGBTQIA spectrum and continuum of identities and sexualities; however, we’ve been challenged because in reproductive justice and identity politics, our transgender siblings want us to be gender neutral; we push back because our experiences are not neutral in any way, shape or form. We’ve experienced what we’ve experienced as Native women because we’re Native women, and to erase that and put a gender-neutral frame on that is erasing our experiences again. It is a hard conversation, and, to me holds a lot of privilege. In other words, in this conversation you have the privilege of saying, “I’m going to be X” or “I’m not going to be this and that.” Whereas, as Native women, we’ve never had that privilege to say we’re not women; and the truth is, our violence is happening to us because we are women.⁸⁶

Informed by the passion and logic of these debates, in this book I use “Latinx” in place of “Latina/o” and use “Latina” when discussing women-specific issues.

The movement is also attentive to other differences within racial-ethnic communities, such as age (some programs are oriented to youth, while others honor the elders) or educational level (those with college degrees approach reproductive justice differently from immigrants with limited formal education). Thus, organizations continually strategize how to recruit particular constituents. Christina Lares, former community engagement manager of CLRJ, points out that they continually ask, “What is the best way to reach out to the community? How should we work with different groups?” Their strategies include deciding which language to use—Spanish or English. Reproductive justice organizations also must vet the location of venues depending on the specific audience they are trying to reach, whether it is accessible by public transportation, and how those who live in rural communities have different needs from those who live in big cities. As we will see, like Latinx activists, Native American, Asian American, and African American reproductive justice activists are attuned to differences within racial-ethnic categories related to age, national origins, language, location, or legal status. This movement’s attention to diversity, then, is not about bringing outsiders into previously white institutions but about ensuring that activists are continually paying attention to the specific needs of all women of color and fine-tuning their organizing methods accordingly.

The movement for reproductive justice goes far beyond advocating identity politics. Reproductive justice activists recruit those who are marginalized by institutions—low-income women, women of color, LGBTQ people, the undocumented, rural women, or youth who have limited legal rights—for purposes of accessing the human right to health care and advocating for social justice.⁸⁷ Reproductive justice activists especially work on behalf of the structurally vulnerable who experience state violence directly. Indeed, there are calls to queer reproductive justice by making explicit how LGBTQ people also need an array of reproductive health-care services as well as bodily autonomy and freedom to express their sexual identities.⁸⁸ Yet each of the thirteen reproductive justice organizations with which I conducted research incorporates LGBTQ issues into its work, and five of the executive directors are lesbians. Through community organizing, policy advocacy, and culture shift work, the RJ movement moves beyond vague notions of racial disparities by pursuing specific rights and resources that would fundamentally restructure societal treatment of all women of color.⁸⁹

To analyze the activism of women of color within the movement for reproductive justice, I build on the scholarship that emphasizes women’s flexibility and skilled navigation of multiple social fields or borderlands.⁹⁰ These are women whom the lesbian writer-theorist Gloria Anzaldúa calls “Nepantleras” since they contend with borders between nation-states or categories of power as well as spiritual syncretism constructed when hegemonic cultures are imposed through violence.⁹¹ This scholarship demonstrates women’s ability to negotiate multiple forms of subjugation and the formation of coalitional consciousness—concrete practices intended to sustain collaboration despite members’ differences in identities, constituencies, and resources.⁹² Indeed, Angela Moreno, board member of SisterSong, says, “What draws me to RJ is the Nepantla of it: that it is continuously in motion; that it is in between even though it has room for absolutes; and the way that it is a map and also a continuous confirmation that nothing is static and everything is relational and interdependent. So, in a world where systems cause harm, applying RJ principles prevents this from being made monolithic. It requires that all of us are seen and heard for our great complexities.” The activists working in the movement for reproductive justice develop organizing skills and coalitional consciousness as well as teach us how to construct strategic collaboration by problematizing difference within structural conditions.

In the current era in which resistance by diverse participants seems to flourish in mainstream politics, reproductive justice advocates take care to acknowledge that they have a long history of negotiating difference among participants.⁹³ Further, reproductive justice proponents take care to distinguish themselves from other social movements by focusing on women of color. As Marsha Jones puts it, “Part of being unapologetic is not asking permission to do the work.”⁹⁴