Читать книгу The Movement for Reproductive Justice - Patricia Zavella - Страница 15

Let’s commit to naming the risk instead of blaming young people for the violence they experience, or calling young people resilient without acknowledging we need culturally safe support.

—Alexa Lesperance, Native Youth Sexual Health Network

Through arts … we can become more in touch with our full humanity.

—INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, SisterFire tour

The framing of contentious issues is a critical process by social movements and shapes how supporters and critics attribute meaning to their interventions.¹ Reproductive justice advocates are well aware of the need to frame issues from the perspective of women of color, as illustrated in the epigraphs. They are familiar with deficit thinking, influential views by political leaders and scholars that see social problems as originating in low-income people themselves. Deficit thinking includes concepts introduced by scholars, like “culture of poverty,” “matriarchal Black family,” or “urban underclass,” all which view individual intelligence, behavior, decision-making, or cultural orientation by those with low incomes as predictors of poverty and poor health outcomes.² Even supposedly neutral frames that gloss over social inequalities, such as “colorblind,” “not racism,” or appeals to “individual responsibility” while ignoring structural impediments, are problematic for critical thinkers.³ Deficit thinking also includes misleading stereotypes about women of color, such as “welfare queens,” which circulated long before Ronald Reagan but continues despite the fact that during his administration 62 percent of recipients were white.⁴ The notion of a “welfare queen” was a cover story for reducing government spending on social welfare programs while silencing the actual experiences of those who need support.⁵ A more recent stereotype is immigrant mothers producing “anchor babies” to gain legal permanent residency through their US citizen children. Conservatives have proposed legislation that would deny the children of immigrants their US citizenship, which, the anthropologist Leo Chavez argues, views these women and their children’s citizenship as undeserving.⁶ According to the feminist historian Laura Briggs, these blaming discourses against women of color produce dual effects: “the illegitimacy of some families” and ongoing efforts to eliminate benefits to support them.⁷ Indeed, the neoliberal notion that people with low incomes are irresponsible is widely accepted: in a poll conducted by the Pew Research Center, for example, 60 percent of respondents agreed that “most people who want to get ahead can make it if they are willing to work hard.”⁸ Health inequities often are linked to particular populations rather than cast as structural features of the US health-care system. Thus, when access to health care is limited or particular social categories experience health-care problems, attention is deflected away from structural causes.⁹

Mindful of the power of representation, reproductive justice activists view framing, which articulates dissent and presents new perspectives in ways that create shared identity, as critical for generating long-term change. Their framing takes on conservative ideologies such as “strong family values” or “children having children” and views social problems as based in structural inequalities that marginalize women of color. Reframing also entails seeing adversity in a positive light, according to Yamani Hernandez, former executive director of ICAH:

I often tell the story of … when my parents separated before their long divorce. We lived without utilities for many, many months. My mother never phrased [that experience] to me as adversity. She gave us cool survival backpacks with flashlights and snacks and told us that we had been selected for the test of Jedi training and that we would win. I look back on that and I don’t discount the pain and difficulty that she must have felt as a single parent with three children under 6 trying to make us feel secure. But seeing her resourcefulness and the magic of her reframing is training that stays with me as well.¹⁰

The meaning of resiliency to reproductive justice activists goes beyond people’s ability to withstand or endure hardship and includes how they frame life challenges to incorporate people’s creativity in coping with them. In this social movement that links intersectionality and human rights, reproductive justice activists insist on contesting hegemonic frames and offering representations and messages that link macro political and economic issues with the resilient lived experience of multiple generations of people of color, which they term “cultural shift work.” Such reframing differs from the individualist notion of resiliency and has a long history in social movements.¹¹ Further, the movement for reproductive justice takes framing further by recognizing women’s full selves with a balance between mind, body, and spirit (see chapter 4).

Scholars suggest that framing includes “ways of packaging and presenting ideas that generate shared beliefs, motivate collective action, and define appropriate strategies of action.”¹² When used by social movements, framing encompasses four processes: frames define a social problem in relation to specific values, identify the causes of the problem, render moral judgments about the causal agents or forces, and identify remedies to address the problem as well as predict their likely effects.¹³

Culture shift work resonates with the conceptual work of scholars that illuminates how marginalized people survive institutional mistreatment and pejorative discourses by drawing on their cultural values and norms as well as their experience of lived resilience. For example, Gloria Anzaldúa calls our attention to “la facultad,” the perceptual and interpersonal skills that allow border dwellers to assess uncertainties, power differentials within social relations, and tensions related to social meaning, as well as to negotiate them by drawing on their complex identities.¹⁴ Inés Casillas and Jin Sook Lee argue that language other than English should be nurtured since it sustains the cultural heritage of youth of color and enables them to express their complex identities and social agency.¹⁵ Lorena Garcia documents young Puerto Rican and Mexican heterosexual and lesbian women’s strategies for safer sex and self-respect.¹⁶ Norma González and her colleagues offer the concept “funds of knowledge,” based on the premise, “People are competent, they have knowledge, and their life experiences have given them that knowledge.”¹⁷ Sofia Villenas reflects on Latina migrant mothers’ narratives of dignity and moral education in rural North Carolina.¹⁸ And Tara Yosso views “cultural capital” as incorporating marginalized people’s aspirations and resiliency, recognition of family and kinship as including community members, ability to leverage social networks and community resources, ability to navigate through social institutions and communicate through multiple languages and expressive forms, and ability to use their knowledge and skills to challenge inequality.¹⁹ These scholars emphasize how people of color find resiliency despite structural inequalities and pejorative discourses that objectify us. Reproductive justice scholar-activists frame how we conceptualize social inequalities and incorporate the dialectics related to historical memory, critical consciousness, fortitude, survival, and social transformation. The psychologist George Ayala and colleagues, who work with HIV-positive clients who are mainly Latinxs, illustrate how strengths-based cultural shift work frames people of color: “A strengths-based approach is crucial because it … values … individuals and communities as key social actors who not only face dilemmas, uncertainties, and responsibilities but also possess considerable agency, brilliance, and creativity.”²⁰

This chapter discusses the cultural politics constructed by activists in the movement for reproductive justice as well as their praxis in which they frame the family and women of color in public discourse. We explore how reproductive justice organizations engage in culture shift work, framing that uses a strengths-based approach that is organically constructed from their experience working in communities of color.²¹ In everyday use, reproductive justice organizers refer to culture shift as “shifting the frame,” “culture shift messaging,” or “flipping the script.” Further, cultural work is broader than framing. Reproductive justice organizations use cultural notions and the experiences of people of color with resiliency in their political praxis as well.

We will consider the multivocality of social movement discourse through five cases: (1) the theorizing of culture shift by the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health, which launched a “Soy poderosa [I am a powerful woman] and my voice matters” campaign; (2) the “somos chingonas” (rough translation: “we’re badass women”) messaging of California Latinas for Reproductive Justice; (3) the critique of strong family values discourse and Strong Families Network led by Forward Together with organizational support by Strong Families New Mexico and Western States Center; (4) the critique of teen-pregnancy discourse and advocacy for young parents by CLRJ and Young Women United; and (5) the Black Mamas Matter Alliance led by SisterSong. I argue that these organizations deploy framing that incorporates strength-based narratives to motivate collective action, to define appropriate strategies of action, and to shape dominant discourses about women of color.