Gal and Kligman Chapter 2: Reproduction as Politics
abortion, childcare, sexuality all contentious
(if not always visible, or publicly articulated)
issues in post-Communist Europe
1) Political theory - sovereign/state
- health, virility of measured by the size and "health" of its population
ideals of the female "motherland" coupled
with the male "state"
States are always concerned with regulating
sex, gender relations, marriage, birth, childrearing, control over women's
bodies
Foucault calls this "biopolitics"
Is this true of Liberal societies such
as ours???? How does our state regulate sex, birth, childrearing???
2) nationhood - women as reproducing the
nation;
the patriotic woman is the selfless mother
swelling the population of her state
note,
e.g., here the policies of Ceausescu, Bulgaria (which allowed abortion for minority Turks and Romani, not for "Bulgarians")
3) reproduction as "coded morality of the
state"
especially true in Poland but there is
a sense of this in other policymaking in most of post-Communist world
Because the Communist regimes were illegitimate and immoral, what we do now must be morally sound, righteous, make-up for this illegitimate, sinful, horrible past
4)***the most political sciencey thesis:
that states define women as political
actors of a specific kind
- a deviation from or contradiction to the notion of the universal (i.e., male) citizen
State policy - unintended consequence for women as political actors - mobilizes them into protest, organization - very clearly in Poland, e.g., in response to making abortion illegal
Brunell and Johnson (2003) find this in DV policy – the benefits of a “gender crisis”
e.g. what?
Other examples - restricting abortion
in former East Germany - led to increases in sterilization; called a "birth
strike" in the media (31), which imputes a certain calculated, GROUP militancy
Was this a fair characterization of E German
women's motives?? Why are/were they opting more often for sterilization?
(Less willing or less able to have more children)