Seizing the Means of Reproduction

In Seizing the Means of Reproduction, Michelle Murphy's initial focus on the alternative health practices developed by radical feminists in the United States during the 1970s and 1980s opens into a sophisticated analysis of the transnational entanglements of American empire, population control, neoliberalism, and late-twentieth-century feminisms. Murphy concentrates on the technoscientific means—the technologies, practices, protocols, and processes—developed by feminist health activists. She argues that by politicizing the technical details of reproductive health, alternative feminist practices aimed at empowering women were also integral to late-twentieth-century biopolitics. Murphy traces the transnational circulation of cheap, do-it-yourself health interventions, highlighting the uneasy links between economic logics, new forms of racialized governance, U.S. imperialism, family planning, and the rise of NGOs. In the twenty-first century, feminist health projects have followed complex and discomforting itineraries. The practices and ideologies of alternative health projects have found their way into World Bank guidelines, state policies, and commodified research. While the particular moment of U.S. feminism in the shadow of Cold War and postcolonialism has passed, its dynamics continue to inform the ways that health is governed and politicized today.

"Seizing the Means of Reproduction offers a sophisticated, original, unromantic, and challenging account of feminist reproductive politics in the USA in the 1970s and 1980s, both in its national context and as it helped to shape international development programs and strategies. Teasing out the racial politics and embedded features of white privilege that many other scholars and activists have neglected, Michelle Murphy forges a very distinctive trajectory."—Maureen McNeil, author of Feminist Cultural Studies of Science and Technology, "Ambitious, thought-provoking, and utterly compelling, Seizing the Means of Reproduction reworks the history of modern feminism as 'technoscientific counter-conduct.' Michelle Murphy convincingly locates the politics of sex and reproduction at the junction where specific technologies—the plastic speculum, the Pap smear, manual suction abortion—collide with the global trajectories of political economy."—Steven Epstein, author of Inclusion: The Politics of Difference in Medical Research, "Brava! A sorely needed retheorizing of the movement of reproduction to the center of twentieth-century biopolitics and the consequences for the politicization of life. Attending to the disunity of feminisms, Michelle Murphy follows a panoply of appropriations and inventions that transformed sexed living being and the facts of life from the personal to the transnational. Feminist biopolitics—alternate forms of becoming and conditions of possibility—have revisioned the world. The book I truly wish I had written."—Adele E. Clarke, coeditor of Biomedicalization: Technoscience, Health, and Illness in the U.S., “By politicizing the technologies, protocols, and processes feminist health activists developed to empower women, Murphy demonstrates that the “control” of reproduction was fashioned with (not simply by) technoscience as a practical and pivotal feature of feminist politics. Seizing the Means of Reproduction is a must read for those interested in feminism, women’s health, the body, and medical sociology.”, “Reading of the book occurs at multiple levels – it is a fascinating account of the women’s self-help movement of the time; it is also a thought provoking analysis of ‘necropolitics’ with particular reference to the issues of race in the US. Finally, it situates the women’s health movement within the broader global context –where the practices, if not the protocols, were implicated globally in the policies around reproduction that were inserted into other countries in the form of US Aid. This is a challenging but extremely worthwhile read.”

Michelle Murphy is Associate Professor of Women and Gender Studies and of History at the University of Toronto. She is the author of the Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty, also published by Duke University Press.