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Experimental Futures
Seizing the Means of Reproduction: Entanglements of Feminism, Health, and Technoscience
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.
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.
280 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2012
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January 1, 2021
Well, this was an unfortunate book. It’s another relic of my “history of the women’s health movement” class that I definitely did not read at the time it was assigned. Well, to be fair, I did read some of it — though not, apparently, enough to realize that it was the work of either a genius or a madwoman (or perhaps both).
“Seizing the Means of Reproduction” is the work of Michelle Murphy, Professor of History and Women and Gender Studies at the University of Toronto. Love the title and definitely love the front cover, which features what I can only assume is the do-it-yourself “menstrual extraction” device popular in some feminist circles in the 1970s. Yet the subtitle contains Murphy’s favorite word: “entanglements.” If you’re not sure what this word means, don’t worry; she uses it approximately 800 more times in the book itself.
“Seizing the Means of Reproduction” is about the intersection of technology, science, medicine, and feminism in the 1960s through approximately the 1980s. Murphy starts the book by claiming that she’s interested in a particular type of feminism as expressed by radical feminists in the state of California. Why she decided to focus on this highly specific subgroup is never explained. But that’s not really what she does. Instead, each chapter focuses on a different medical and technical procedure that was claimed by feminists as a way of asserting newfound bodily and social autonomy. In each case, the feminists achieve a partial, but never a total, victory.
This all sounds interesting enough. I have a background in medical anthropology and I’m working on my MPH, so feminist takes on medicine and science are definitely of interest to me. However and unfortunately, this book is just about unreadable. Maybe it’s just been a while since I’ve engaged with this kind of academic writing, and I’ve forgotten how to interpret it. For this is the very definition of inaccessible, academic writing. A review by Erin Fitzpatrick of the University of New Hampshire, Durham notes that “Murphy could have made her argument stronger if the ethnography communicated evidence in a more readable way. Being a very dense book, some of her strong pieces of evidence lost strength in the complex language used.” Absolutely. For the first 100 pages or so, I honestly wondered at times whether Murphy was making any sense at all. Oh, don’t worry. I will provide you with an example.
“Though it may be tempting to take ‘experience’ as a self-evident ordinary point of explanation - as that which explains, not that which needs to be explained - I want to attend to how claims to represent experience operate by taking as given and already constituted the identities of those whose experiences are being represented; whereas the task of the critical historian is to excavate the production of subjectivities through the ways the evidence of experience is imbued with an authentic primacy.” (p. 82)
I mean?? That sentence is maybe genius on some level, but in a practical sense it comes across as gobbledygook. Murphy’s idiosyncratic language is also incredibly repetitive. She loves creating compound words like “subject-figure” or “problem-space” or, her very favorite, “living-being.” The latter is used probably at least 50 times in the book, but for the life of me I cannot figure out what Murphy is trying to convey through the use of this phrase. I even looked it up to see if it stems from some branch of feminist philosophy. It does not. Murphy apparently likes this term so much that she has used it in previous books as well. I think she just wants to say “living” or “life,” but thinks those terms are too simple. Here’s an example in-situ:
“Materializing reproductive embodiment as a highly valued, dynamic, and generative domain of variation and affect, through practices explicitly considered radical, nonetheless had a synergistic relationship with new modes of valuing living-being, particularly in research with biotechnologies indebted to the reproductive sciences.” (p. 97)
In addition to these highly irritating and arguably meaningless compound words, Murphy also drawn on a set of little-used vocabulary that she deploys time and time again to underscore her arguments. “Entanglements” from the front cover is used upwards of 3 or 4 times per page when Murphy really gets going. “Epistemic” is often invoked, as is the very-little-used version of the word “immanent”. And don’t even think about getting yourself imbricated in the affects of collective economies.
Ok, enough complaining. What is the book actually about? In chapter 1, Murphy discusses protocol feminism. This was one of the impenetrable chapters, but I believe the point Murphy is trying to make here is that feminists essentially borrowed and reconfigured the medical concept of a “protocol” to suit their feminist aims. Feminists across the country and indeed across the globe could participate in a shared set of meaning-making activities by virtue of following a specified protocol, such as how to conduct a vaginal exam or how to administer a Pap smear. This was a revolutionary act because it took something esteemed and inaccessible, like a medical protocol, and put it in the hands of ordinary women who wanted to, as the title says, “seize the means of reproduction.”
Chapter 2 is about the vaginal self-exam. Props for the awesome historical photos of vaginas and speculums (no I am not being sarcastic, these images are actually super cool and I haven’t seen many like them before). This chapter is probably where Murphy goes most off of the rails by politicizing and theorizing and problematizing and of course entangling things, but the crux of her argument is that by participating in self-exams, women were transformed into “immodest witnesses.” Immodest because they refused to play the traditional role of the “good patient” who passively accepted medical advice as dispensed by a patriarchal system. Witnesses because they were literally looking at themselves. This was a powerful way of asserting that individual subjectivity—that is, individual knowledge—was just as valuable a form of “knowing” as was objectively derived medical knowledge.
With Chapter 3, Murphy takes back the reins a bit. This is a much better chapter, devoted more to recounting the history of the Pap smear than to endlessly theorizing. The Pap smear was initially heralded as a significant achievement by feminists because it allowed for the early detection of cervical cancer, a particularly deadly form of cancer to women. Very quickly, the medical establishment and feminists alike began calling for routine yearly screening of all women with the Pap smear. In so doing, Murphy writes, all women were re-configured as “potentially sick” or “not-sick-yet,” thus greatly expanding the scope of gynecology. As with other medical technologies, feminists tried to turn the Pap smear into a do-it-yourself procedure. Their activism had a limit, though — although they could obtain the swabs themselves, they were insufficiently trained to examine the cells under a microscope. In the end, they relied upon the same industrial laboratories to process their results as did doctors and hospitals, an irony which I found particularly hilarious. In an interesting turn of events, the Pap smear also brought to light for the first time the huge disparities in cervical cancer deaths between Black women and white women in particular. The Pap smear helped anthropologists and other groups craft a new definition of race, which was not rooted in biology but was instead a proxy for a combined social, economic, and cultural position inhabited by newly raced groups. This is the definition we continue to use to this day, even though looking at other demographic variables, such as socioeconomic status, might be a better choice.
In the fourth and final chapter, Murphy discusses the Menstrual Extraction device, which was rather hilariously marketed as “not an abortion device” (although of course that is what it was often used for). It had the effect of evacuating a woman’s monthly period, and potentially at the same time, removing a fetus that could not yet be detected by standard pregnancy tests, thereby circumventing anti-abortion laws since it was not possible to prove whether the woman had been pregnant in the first place. A prominent feminist developed a version of the device that could be assembled using easy-to-find materials, enabling women in a variety of circumstances to perform Menstrual Extraction if they so desired. For a time, federal U.S. aid programs paid for the manufacture and distribution of Menstrual Extraction devices to developing countries, though this was abruptly curbed with the passage of the Helms Amendment in 1973, which to this day still prohibits federal funding of abortion. Finally, Murphy observes that feminism became incorporated into NGOs, and a worldwide trend of focusing on reproductive health was perhaps its ultimate legacy.
Although the histories behind some of these devices and procedures are interesting, the book is ultimately a very narrow look at a particular branch of the women’s health movement. I could have learned a lot more from, not to mention would have greatly appreciated, a more straightforward text. But the purpose of this book is to “advance scholarship” and “create new forms of knowledge,” aka purely academic pursuits. The point is not to have people actually read it. And whether the endless theorizing is the work of a genius or simply someone with an insane and idiosyncratic take on the English language may never be determined.
“Seizing the Means of Reproduction” is the work of Michelle Murphy, Professor of History and Women and Gender Studies at the University of Toronto. Love the title and definitely love the front cover, which features what I can only assume is the do-it-yourself “menstrual extraction” device popular in some feminist circles in the 1970s. Yet the subtitle contains Murphy’s favorite word: “entanglements.” If you’re not sure what this word means, don’t worry; she uses it approximately 800 more times in the book itself.
“Seizing the Means of Reproduction” is about the intersection of technology, science, medicine, and feminism in the 1960s through approximately the 1980s. Murphy starts the book by claiming that she’s interested in a particular type of feminism as expressed by radical feminists in the state of California. Why she decided to focus on this highly specific subgroup is never explained. But that’s not really what she does. Instead, each chapter focuses on a different medical and technical procedure that was claimed by feminists as a way of asserting newfound bodily and social autonomy. In each case, the feminists achieve a partial, but never a total, victory.
This all sounds interesting enough. I have a background in medical anthropology and I’m working on my MPH, so feminist takes on medicine and science are definitely of interest to me. However and unfortunately, this book is just about unreadable. Maybe it’s just been a while since I’ve engaged with this kind of academic writing, and I’ve forgotten how to interpret it. For this is the very definition of inaccessible, academic writing. A review by Erin Fitzpatrick of the University of New Hampshire, Durham notes that “Murphy could have made her argument stronger if the ethnography communicated evidence in a more readable way. Being a very dense book, some of her strong pieces of evidence lost strength in the complex language used.” Absolutely. For the first 100 pages or so, I honestly wondered at times whether Murphy was making any sense at all. Oh, don’t worry. I will provide you with an example.
“Though it may be tempting to take ‘experience’ as a self-evident ordinary point of explanation - as that which explains, not that which needs to be explained - I want to attend to how claims to represent experience operate by taking as given and already constituted the identities of those whose experiences are being represented; whereas the task of the critical historian is to excavate the production of subjectivities through the ways the evidence of experience is imbued with an authentic primacy.” (p. 82)
I mean?? That sentence is maybe genius on some level, but in a practical sense it comes across as gobbledygook. Murphy’s idiosyncratic language is also incredibly repetitive. She loves creating compound words like “subject-figure” or “problem-space” or, her very favorite, “living-being.” The latter is used probably at least 50 times in the book, but for the life of me I cannot figure out what Murphy is trying to convey through the use of this phrase. I even looked it up to see if it stems from some branch of feminist philosophy. It does not. Murphy apparently likes this term so much that she has used it in previous books as well. I think she just wants to say “living” or “life,” but thinks those terms are too simple. Here’s an example in-situ:
“Materializing reproductive embodiment as a highly valued, dynamic, and generative domain of variation and affect, through practices explicitly considered radical, nonetheless had a synergistic relationship with new modes of valuing living-being, particularly in research with biotechnologies indebted to the reproductive sciences.” (p. 97)
In addition to these highly irritating and arguably meaningless compound words, Murphy also drawn on a set of little-used vocabulary that she deploys time and time again to underscore her arguments. “Entanglements” from the front cover is used upwards of 3 or 4 times per page when Murphy really gets going. “Epistemic” is often invoked, as is the very-little-used version of the word “immanent”. And don’t even think about getting yourself imbricated in the affects of collective economies.
Ok, enough complaining. What is the book actually about? In chapter 1, Murphy discusses protocol feminism. This was one of the impenetrable chapters, but I believe the point Murphy is trying to make here is that feminists essentially borrowed and reconfigured the medical concept of a “protocol” to suit their feminist aims. Feminists across the country and indeed across the globe could participate in a shared set of meaning-making activities by virtue of following a specified protocol, such as how to conduct a vaginal exam or how to administer a Pap smear. This was a revolutionary act because it took something esteemed and inaccessible, like a medical protocol, and put it in the hands of ordinary women who wanted to, as the title says, “seize the means of reproduction.”
Chapter 2 is about the vaginal self-exam. Props for the awesome historical photos of vaginas and speculums (no I am not being sarcastic, these images are actually super cool and I haven’t seen many like them before). This chapter is probably where Murphy goes most off of the rails by politicizing and theorizing and problematizing and of course entangling things, but the crux of her argument is that by participating in self-exams, women were transformed into “immodest witnesses.” Immodest because they refused to play the traditional role of the “good patient” who passively accepted medical advice as dispensed by a patriarchal system. Witnesses because they were literally looking at themselves. This was a powerful way of asserting that individual subjectivity—that is, individual knowledge—was just as valuable a form of “knowing” as was objectively derived medical knowledge.
With Chapter 3, Murphy takes back the reins a bit. This is a much better chapter, devoted more to recounting the history of the Pap smear than to endlessly theorizing. The Pap smear was initially heralded as a significant achievement by feminists because it allowed for the early detection of cervical cancer, a particularly deadly form of cancer to women. Very quickly, the medical establishment and feminists alike began calling for routine yearly screening of all women with the Pap smear. In so doing, Murphy writes, all women were re-configured as “potentially sick” or “not-sick-yet,” thus greatly expanding the scope of gynecology. As with other medical technologies, feminists tried to turn the Pap smear into a do-it-yourself procedure. Their activism had a limit, though — although they could obtain the swabs themselves, they were insufficiently trained to examine the cells under a microscope. In the end, they relied upon the same industrial laboratories to process their results as did doctors and hospitals, an irony which I found particularly hilarious. In an interesting turn of events, the Pap smear also brought to light for the first time the huge disparities in cervical cancer deaths between Black women and white women in particular. The Pap smear helped anthropologists and other groups craft a new definition of race, which was not rooted in biology but was instead a proxy for a combined social, economic, and cultural position inhabited by newly raced groups. This is the definition we continue to use to this day, even though looking at other demographic variables, such as socioeconomic status, might be a better choice.
In the fourth and final chapter, Murphy discusses the Menstrual Extraction device, which was rather hilariously marketed as “not an abortion device” (although of course that is what it was often used for). It had the effect of evacuating a woman’s monthly period, and potentially at the same time, removing a fetus that could not yet be detected by standard pregnancy tests, thereby circumventing anti-abortion laws since it was not possible to prove whether the woman had been pregnant in the first place. A prominent feminist developed a version of the device that could be assembled using easy-to-find materials, enabling women in a variety of circumstances to perform Menstrual Extraction if they so desired. For a time, federal U.S. aid programs paid for the manufacture and distribution of Menstrual Extraction devices to developing countries, though this was abruptly curbed with the passage of the Helms Amendment in 1973, which to this day still prohibits federal funding of abortion. Finally, Murphy observes that feminism became incorporated into NGOs, and a worldwide trend of focusing on reproductive health was perhaps its ultimate legacy.
Although the histories behind some of these devices and procedures are interesting, the book is ultimately a very narrow look at a particular branch of the women’s health movement. I could have learned a lot more from, not to mention would have greatly appreciated, a more straightforward text. But the purpose of this book is to “advance scholarship” and “create new forms of knowledge,” aka purely academic pursuits. The point is not to have people actually read it. And whether the endless theorizing is the work of a genius or simply someone with an insane and idiosyncratic take on the English language may never be determined.
April 18, 2016
Michelle Murphy goes in for the throat punch, and she’s not pulling any other punches. In Seizing the Means of Reproduction: Entanglements of Feminism, Health, and Technoscience, Murphy historicizes the women’s health movement, taking technologies and historical moments as the apparatuses for her analysis. From the introduction, it’s clear that these entanglements are largely engaged with bio- and necro-politics, and this is shown in how biopolitics plays out and is foregrounded in her remaining chapters. Murphy takes protocol feminism, the self-exam, the pap smear, and menstrual extraction as the loci of analysis to build her historical analysis of the women’s health movement, feminisms, and biopolitics. Despite her clear involvement and indebtedness, Murphy provides a thorough analysis of the workings of the movement, including criticism and praise. This provides a full picture of the period, the technologies, and the entanglements that Murphy has set out to make clear.
I’m particularly interested in how the idea of protocol feminism is entangled throughout Murphy’s book as well as throughout history. It seems to me that feminism is reappropriating practices from the male-dominated medical field to learn about their own bodies, but it also seems like feminisms and their practices are being appropriated by the neoliberal state. Women’s health and women’s education become important as a means of population control. The idea that science isn’t objective and innocent is incorporated more broadly. Ultimately, illness becomes an industry with the “not-yet-sick” and the patient who “is never discharged.” In the US, for example, the yearly pap smear is maintained because it makes gynecology more important.
The idea of the “good patient” also appropriates feminist self help methodologies. It’s not expected that patients are informed and knowledgeable about their bodies, their health, and various diseases and illness, though the internet complicates this. To me, this seems to have begun with the women’s health movement and feminist self help which focused on the epistemological privilege of knowing her own body. She is able to observe it each day to see what is “not uncommon” and what requires medical attention. Similarly, the well patient now must know her/his own body and understand what is “not uncommon” to decide when to visit a doctor or how to use over-the-counter medication. I think there’s room for further discussion of the medical-industrial-complex and big pharmacy to see how this is also entangled with women’s health, feminist self help, neoliberalism, and capitalism, which I think Murphy begins to touch on; however, I don’t think this is a large part of her project.
Two questions underlie Murphy’s discussion of me:
(1) Is this safe? There are clearly medical practitioners involved, but part of the idea is taking yourself as an object and a research subject; but, you might not have the same knowledge and could cause more harm; and
(2) how are trans women included in women’s health and as part of the collective/aggregate of women?
I’m particularly interested in how the idea of protocol feminism is entangled throughout Murphy’s book as well as throughout history. It seems to me that feminism is reappropriating practices from the male-dominated medical field to learn about their own bodies, but it also seems like feminisms and their practices are being appropriated by the neoliberal state. Women’s health and women’s education become important as a means of population control. The idea that science isn’t objective and innocent is incorporated more broadly. Ultimately, illness becomes an industry with the “not-yet-sick” and the patient who “is never discharged.” In the US, for example, the yearly pap smear is maintained because it makes gynecology more important.
The idea of the “good patient” also appropriates feminist self help methodologies. It’s not expected that patients are informed and knowledgeable about their bodies, their health, and various diseases and illness, though the internet complicates this. To me, this seems to have begun with the women’s health movement and feminist self help which focused on the epistemological privilege of knowing her own body. She is able to observe it each day to see what is “not uncommon” and what requires medical attention. Similarly, the well patient now must know her/his own body and understand what is “not uncommon” to decide when to visit a doctor or how to use over-the-counter medication. I think there’s room for further discussion of the medical-industrial-complex and big pharmacy to see how this is also entangled with women’s health, feminist self help, neoliberalism, and capitalism, which I think Murphy begins to touch on; however, I don’t think this is a large part of her project.
Two questions underlie Murphy’s discussion of me:
(1) Is this safe? There are clearly medical practitioners involved, but part of the idea is taking yourself as an object and a research subject; but, you might not have the same knowledge and could cause more harm; and
(2) how are trans women included in women’s health and as part of the collective/aggregate of women?
May 5, 2020
Very timely and agitating (in a good way)
June 28, 2023
Great book but very dense
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews