Feminist Studies

Preface

Before surrogate mothers or sperm sorting, the work of reproduction included African American midwives of the earlier twentieth century, whose stories are still being told and being revised to fit histories of female solidarity more beneficent than the women's actual experiences. [...] the essays in this issue demonstrate how the globalizing economy has restructured reproductive regimes and the negotiations of women within them.

Constructing Gender From the Inside Out: Sex-Selection Practices in the United States

Conversely, the applicability of these processes to sex selection may help validate the emerging concept of biomedicalization itself. Since the late 1990s several factors have led to an increased acceptance of sex selection in the United States, including the development of new marketable forms of prepregnancy technologies that do not require an abortion.

Pushing

Pain swelled from her upper arms and thighs, spent itself for an instant, then swelled again, like an accordion being played. Wasn't that supposed to be stuff that got you above the garbage and aching arms and into what Mama called the still and the alwaysas close to pure as flesh and bones could get in this world? Praise the Lord!" And then he'd drop his voice down low so he could drop the hammer: "Little girl, you better worry about makin' some money first. "Comin' in, B." A breeze blew ...

'At Least I Am Not Sleeping with Anyone': Resisting the Stigma of Commercial Surrogacy in India

[...] Floor, Hope Maternity Clinic, Anand, Gujarat, India. A work can be "dirty" because it is perceived as physically disgusting (like janitorial work and butchering), because it wounds dignity by requiring servile behavior (like domestic work or shoe shining), or it offends moral conceptions (as does sex work, topless dancing, and surrogate mothering).6 Some people may applaud certain kinds of dirty work (such as taking care of AIDS patients) while simultaneously remaining physically and p...

Downplaying Difference: Historical Accounts of African American Midwives and Contemporary Struggles for Midwifery

5 Although accounts of how race (and class) punctuated the elimination of African American midwives are well documented,6 this article further explores how downplaying the racial privilege of white midwives, medical personnel, and other figures in African American midwives' narratives has problematic implications for a contemporary midwifery movement that prides itself on inclusivity and its benefit to all women. INFLUENCES ON THE CONTEMPORARY MOVEMENT FOR MIDWIVES The continued emphasis on ...

Reproductive Technology: Of Labor and Markets

[...] a third theme is the focus on "reproductive disruption," borrowing a term from biology. The response to FINNRAGE, the effort to broaden out possible understandings of reproductive technology, have been rooted in feminist anthropology and the unexpectedly productive second career of Levi-Straussian kinship studies- rescued by feminist scholars such as Sarah Franklin from the attics where antique anthropological concepts are kept and used as a framework to explore the cultural meanings a...

Race, Class, and the Photopolitics of Maternal Re-Vision in Rickie Solinger's Beggars and Choosers

IN 2002, THE BIRMINGHAM CIVIL RIGHTS INSTITUTE hosted the debut of historian and curator Rickie Solinger's photography exhibition Beggars and Choosers. [...] the show's fifty-plus images of historically reviled maternal bodies have traveled and been exhibited in academic, artistic, and community venues all across the United States.

On and On, Over and Over: The Gender War in Child Support Enforcement Court

In between is a game of debt reduction or, sometimes of economic recovery for the parent whose child support obligation is reduced or forestalled for another month or for the parent who gets arrangements made for her child support payments to resume. First came the court date to set up child support, nearly four years after I first applied for it while supporting myself and my daughter on a graduate school stipend. Angered by an early court decision that awarded temporary sole custody to me...

'The Family Is a Factory': Gender, Citizenship, and the Regulation of Reproduction in Postwar Egypt

The dissemination of birth control was only one of a host of interventions into the intimate and everyday practices of ordinary Egyptians that aimed at creating reformed and modernized families and productive citizens. [...] the adoption of a population program based on contraception entailed the recognition of Egyptian women as reproductive subjects for whom using birth control was to constitute part of the duties of citizenship even as it simultaneously delineated the normative parameters ...

My Mother and the Bed

No, not that way she'd say when I was 7, pulling the bottom sheet smooth, you 've got to make, saying hospital comers I wet the bed much later than I should, until just writing this, I hadn't thought of the connection My mother would never sleep on sheets someone else had.

Other Women Cooked for My Husband: Negotiating Gender, Food, and Identities in an African American/Ghanaian Household

[...] this culinary collective or relationship of plurality in planning, preparing, and presenting meals reinforced the complex nature of food and the ways in which the quotidian language of cooking performs as a crucial mode of communicating identities. According to Durodoye and Coker, this is most likely due to the racial politics in the United States that views people of African descent as a monolithic group.2 Arguing against the myth of homogeneity among and between people of the African...

In Memoriam

The January 12, 2010, earthquake in Haiti took the lives of three prominent Haitian feminists, and a plane crash in Smolensk, Poland, on April 10 resulted in the deaths of nine influential feminists and activists both in government and in the women's movement. POLAND We thank Elzbieta Matynia, associate professor of sociology and liberal studies and director of the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies (TCDS) at the New School for Social Research (NSSK), in collaboration with NSSR's Ro...

Announcement

Myers's article, "Jane Doe v. Boeing Company," examines the ways that transsexuality challenged established masculine norms at the Boeing Company by focusing on one of the first cases to use state disability statutes to argue for employment discrimination based on transsexuality.

Guidelines for Contributors

Feminist Studies is committed to publishing an interdisciplinary body of feminist knowledge that sees intersections of gender with racial identity, sexual orientation, economic means, geographical location, and physical ability as the touchstone for our politics and our intellectual analysis. Whether work is drawn from the complex past or the shifting present, the pieces that appear in Feminist Studies address social and political issues that intimately and significantly affect women and men...