Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Textbook Knowledge As Resistance The Feminist International Network of Resistance To Reproductive and Genetic Engineering 1St Edition Stevienna de Saille Auth Ebook All Chapter PDF
Textbook Knowledge As Resistance The Feminist International Network of Resistance To Reproductive and Genetic Engineering 1St Edition Stevienna de Saille Auth Ebook All Chapter PDF
https://textbookfull.com/product/religious-resistance-to-
neoliberalism-womanist-and-black-feminist-perspectives-1st-
edition-keri-day-auth/
https://textbookfull.com/product/chemical-resistance-of-
engineering-thermoplastics-1st-edition-erwin-baur/
https://textbookfull.com/product/sabbath-as-resistance-new-
edition-with-study-guide-saying-no-to-the-culture-of-now-
brueggemann/
https://textbookfull.com/product/photography-as-power-dominance-
and-resistance-through-the-italian-lens-marco-andreani/
The University as a Site of Resistance: Identity and
Student Politics Gaurav J Pathania
https://textbookfull.com/product/the-university-as-a-site-of-
resistance-identity-and-student-politics-gaurav-j-pathania/
https://textbookfull.com/product/resistance-band-workout-for-
seniors-complete-guide-to-resistance-band-workouts-for-
seniors-1st-edition-julia-warman/
https://textbookfull.com/product/new-framings-on-anti-racism-and-
resistance-volume-2-resistance-and-the-new-futurity-1st-edition-
joanna-newton/
https://textbookfull.com/product/genetic-testing-in-reproductive-
medicine-1st-edition-rajender-singh/
knowledge
as resistance
The Feminist
International
Network of
Resistance to
Reproductive
and Genetic
Engineering
stevienna de saille
Knowledge as Resistance
Stevienna de Saille
Knowledge as
Resistance
The Feminist International Network
of Resistance to Reproductive and
Genetic Engineering
Stevienna de Saille
Institute for the Study of the Human
University of Sheffield
Sheffield, UK
Cover illustration: t h a l I a Australian Visual Poet. Concrete Poem titled “Passionately Forward”
especially written for members of FINRRAGE Australia. Copyright 1986
I had definite concerns about the way third-party reproduction was too
often framed in ways which pitted biological against social parentage and
ignored the biographical needs of the child. FINRRAGE seemed like a
perfect PhD topic, focusing on issues I wanted to better understand,
without being directly personal. Eventually, I suggested this to Jalna, who
responded enthusiastically. She helped organise agreement from Renate
Klein and Maria Mies to gain access to the Australian and German
archives as well, and in October 2008 I began my PhD in the School of
Sociology and Social Policy at Leeds.
Initially, I kept trying to find an analytical approach in the social move-
ment literature; however, it quickly became apparent that FINRRAGE
was not going to fit any of its theoretical models particularly well. There
were no dues, no membership lists, it was neither a single organisation
nor did it really seem to constitute a social movement on its own. Instead,
as I began to read my way through the organisational documents in the
FINRRAGE collection and tried to identify potential interviewees, I
noticed two unusual trends. One was that these were not simply feminist
activists; they were also doctors, lawyers, scientists, academics and social
workers, bringing that expertise into the network. The other was that,
rather than choosing protest as a tactic, they had instead chosen to create
knowledge. Not just the kind of knowledge that activists would usually
create—the newsletters and manifestos and statements which outline a
position of resistance and why it’s important to take it. This I was familiar
with from my own years in the direct action environmental movement.
But FINRRAGE did something different, something more. Boxes and
boxes and boxes of more; articles and books and conference papers, docu-
ments that I thought the women had been reading to inform themselves
about the technologies they opposed, which turned out actually to have
been written by the women in the network. Whether their analysis had
been right or their efforts a success was far less interesting than trying to
understand who they were, and how they had created all this together,
what it meant to use the process of knowledge creation itself as a protest
tactic, as a form of organised resistance. While knowledge creation has
always been a feminist weapon of choice, rarely has it been directed at a
topic so technical, while it was emerging on a global scale.
Preface ix
These were the questions that set me off on a project it has taken almost
a decade—from the first interview in 2008 until the last in the spring of
2017—to complete. There are now 28 women from 14 countries whose
stories are woven throughout this book; each of them with their own
partial perspective, each touching upon dozens of other stories which
remain untold. While I have tried to at least mention as many of the
women as I could to acknowledge their work, I am also painfully,
apologetically aware that there will be some inadvertently left out, some
whose names I did not know, and many more whose names appear on
book chapters, articles and conference attendance lists who I could not
locate, or whose identification as FINRRAGE members I could not con-
firm. I cannot, therefore, claim this book to represent anything more
than a story about FINRRAGE, one refracted through the murky lenses
of distance and time and told by someone who was not there to see events
unfold. I can only try to tell it well.
This book has been through a number of stops and starts since it origi-
nally began as a doctoral project in October 2008. Funding was provided
through a PhD bursary from the School of Sociology and Social Policy at
the University of Leeds, and the Worldwide Universities Network
Research Mobility Programme, which allowed me to undertake a visiting
fellowship at the University of Sydney for four months in 2010. My
thanks go to Anne Kerr and Paul Bagguley, for their patience, advice,
editorial comments and the occasional kick-start when the thesis seemed
overwhelming, and to Maureen McNeil and Angharad Beckett, for their
insight and suggestions. I would also like to thank Catherine Waldby,
Melinda Cooper and Lindy Gaze for warmly hosting me at the University
of Sydney. Additional thanks to the archivists in Special Collections at
the University of Leeds, and to the volunteers at Feminist Archive North,
who taught me about the importance of preservation and how to do it.
Thanks are also due to the many other people who gave me books,
papers and ideas which nudged my thinking in completely unexpected
directions: Donna Dickenson and the members of the IAS/WUN
Biopolitics Symposium; Sally Hines, Zowie Davy and Maria do Mar
Pereira for reminding me why I am still a feminist; the Postgraduate
Forum on Genetics and Society for leading me into STS and especially
Rachel Douglas-Jones for sticking it out till the end; Sandra González-
Santos for continually urging me back to the topic; Yuuka Sugiyama and
xi
xii Acknowledgements
Chiaki Hayashi for their help with Japanese translation; and Noemie
Bouhana for academic advice given in between marathon bouts of crit-
ters, zombies and things that go boom in the night. My thanks as well to
Susan Molyneux-Hodgson for taking the newbie in hand, and to my
colleagues in the Institute for the Study of the Human (iHuman) at the
University of Sheffield, and especially Paul Martin, for giving me the time
and space I needed to finish.
A particular and extremely heartfelt thank you goes to the women of
FINRRAGE, for their generosity, hospitality and years and years of
patience. To say ‘I could not have done it without you’ is a vast under-
statement. I would also like to thank t h a l i a for use of her illustration,
and my editors at Palgrave, particularly Joanna O’Neill.
Last, but not remotely least, my thanks to Imona Haninger for con-
tinuing to put up with the madwoman in the attic, and all my friends and
family who accepted being ignored for months on end with grace and
affirmations of confidence. I hope to make it up to all of you soon.
Portions of this book were previously published in de Saille, Stevienna.
2014. ‘Fighting Science with Social Science: Activist Scholarship in an
International Resistance Project’. Sociological Research Online 19 (3): 18,
available at http://www.socresonline.org.uk/19/3/18.html. Used with
permission.
Contents
1 Introduction 1
2 Emergence 29
3 Expansion 69
4 Abeyance 133
xiii
xiv Contents
References 261
Index 291
Abbreviations
xix
List of Figures
xxi
1
Introduction
Tell them stories of action and reflection, these things belong together.
Maria Mies, Germany
In July 2011, while I was attending Women’s Worlds for the first time, I
had the chance to see a recently released documentary on the develop-
ment of the surrogacy industry in India. The film, Google Baby (Brand
Frank 2009), provides a clear and detailed look at the ways in which the
general movement to outsource labour more cheaply to India and the
availability of gametes over the Internet had combined into a new and
fast-growing business model, where poor and often illiterate Indian
women were contracted to carry babies for rich Westerners while housed
away from their families in closely packed dormitories where their behav-
iour was strictly controlled. Filmed without narration and without seek-
ing to direct the audience one way or another, it is a startling portrait of
the ways in which technology, poverty and the very human hope for a
better future combine within a deeply interconnected, vastly unequal,
globalised world.
It was also not at all unpredicted.
from the human body and ever more precisely control the processes of
reproduction emerge. This represents the primary focus of this book.
Whatever one’s ‘position’ on the technologies in question, the emergence
of an organised feminist response aimed at producing woman-centred
knowledge about new reproductive technologies (NRT),5 during the
period in which IVF was becoming institutionalised as ‘treatment’ for
ever-widening categories of people, is an important episode for both fem-
inist history and for the study of science and technology in society, and a
rare opportunity to explore the ways in which actors in strongly opposi-
tional movements develop sufficient knowledge to productively engage
with complex scientific issues.
At the same time, the conceptual division of knowledge into the binary
categories of ‘expert’ and ‘lay’ tends to belie the lived reality of social
movements by placing professional experts outside the social movement
field, even when the same professionals are clearly within it. Knowledge
in social movement theory (SMT) has generally been approached through
categories such as collective identity formation (Friedman and McAdam
1992) and framing (Snow et al. 1986). As a more recent analytical con-
cept, it may refer to organisational practices and negotiation of meaning
(Kurzman 2008; Casas-Cortes et al. 2008), embodied experience of one’s
own position in society (Esteves 2008) or simply information. In science
and technology studies (STS), however, movements and movement
actors are acknowledged both as having important role to play in the way
scientific knowledge is translated into society (Habermas 1987), and as
having the capacity to challenge the way scientific knowledge itself is
developed and warranted. In studies of scientific controversy, they can be
considered as knowledge-creators in their own right, most notably in
health-based and environmental justice movements, which often base
their knowledge-claims on activist-collected empirical data (see Epstein’s
groundbreaking 1995 study of ACT UP, or Martinez-Alier 2011 on the
effect of activist knowledge on the field of ecological economics). It is also
acknowledged that scientists, as well as STS scholars, can be movement
participants in their capacities as credentialed knowledge-holders (see
Woodhouse et al. 2002; Frickel 2004). The STS argument that science is
not value-free, nor are the individual humans who produce it, owes much
to early feminists who had the relevant expertise in biology, philosophy
4 1 Introduction
had chosen to take part in the research. Thus, while differences in the
positionality of researcher and respondent will inevitably shape the pro-
cess of an oral history interview, the life course approach did indeed sup-
port the more collaborative project I desired. Power turned out to be a
particularly flexible commodity in this project, as some of my partici-
pants had literally written the book on feminist methodologies (Klein
1983; Mies 1983), and so the dynamics of our positions were frequently
reversed by my real-world position of doctoral student versus well-known
professor. Knowing that they would read my work with both a partici-
pant’s right of response and the eyes of established academics has cer-
tainly made writing about the research somewhat daunting, but it has
also offered an invaluable level of scrutiny to ensure that, despite the
difficulty of trying to honour multiple and sometimes conflicting
accounts, I would represent the overall history of the network in a way
that felt authentic to all. This, for me, was crucial, particularly as they had
all agreed to participate under their own names. However, it is also cru-
cial to acknowledge there are dozens of women with equally pertinent
stories to tell who are not represented here, and who may have changed
the overall account in ways that cannot be known.
As an international network of organisations as well as individuals,
FINRRAGE included hundreds of women during its international period
(1985–1997) and had national contacts in 37 countries on every conti-
nent except Antarctica. However, although many of the women have
maintained connections to each other, particularly those still working
professionally on issues around reproductive and genetic technologies, in
most parts of the world the international network has been quiescent
since the late 1990s. FINRRAGE may also be unrepresentative of the
majority of grassroots feminist organisations in terms of the general level
of education of the participating women. In addition to sociologists, phi-
losophers, economists and historians, the network included lawyers,
medical doctors, biologists and geneticists. This mix of women trained in
the natural or social sciences and women who would normally be consid-
ered the ‘lay public’ also creates an unusual opportunity to question defi-
nitions of ‘expert’ and ‘lay’ and to develop a more nuanced understanding
of the kinds of expertise social movement actors may call upon in the
course of creating movement knowledge.
A Brief Introduction to the Research 7
expertise was apparent across all the countries, richer or poorer, and
included a distinct group of social scientists who had merged their activ-
ism with their professional career, developing a high level of authority
outside the network itself.
The second trend I quickly noticed was that the women of FINRRAGE
had collectively produced a very large body of published works in a num-
ber of languages, as well as an academic journal. My questions now began
to clarify around the ways in which the women had developed the net-
work as a collective knowledge project, at a time when reproductive and
genetic technologies were still niche areas little understood even by other
scientists. As I was working inductively, my potential interviewees were
chosen for their potential to shed light on these processes, based on a
number of factors including geographic area, diversity of network roles
and organisational visibility, recommendations from others and occa-
sional serendipity such as receiving conference travel grants to Japan and
Brazil, which allowed me to come face-to-face with women I could not
have interviewed by phone or Skype. Sampling was also partly dictated
by the logistics of locating people 25 years after the events, which ulti-
mately skewed the sample towards academics, for whom I was more likely
to find a webpage with a current email address. Overall, 24 interviews
were carried out between 2008 and 2011, with a further 4 added between
2015 and 2017. However, it should be noted that the most regretted
limitation to this project is that the cohort I was able to gather were
largely white, middle-class European women. Overall, it turned out to be
extremely difficult to identify possible respondents in developing nations,
as some women were representing organisations which no longer exist or
did not identify as FINRRAGE members, having simply attended a local
conference, while others could not be contacted. Although I have tried to
make up for this as much as possible using the archival documents, I do
not, therefore, claim to have fully described the history of FINRRAGE
on its international level as there were clearly groups in Spanish-speaking
South America, Norway, Ireland, New Zealand, Thailand, Zambia and
other countries about which there was little information beyond a name
and address on the national contacts list. Documents are produced in a
specific context for a specific purpose (Clemens and Hughes 2002), and
because the bulk of these were collected by one person, they must be
10 1 Introduction
we are not able to see what, if anything, may be unique to the way knowl-
edge is deployed through social movements, despite the claim that ‘pro-
duce knowledge’ is precisely what social movements are meant to do
(Habermas 1981). This has meant that ‘knowledge’ in SMT can describe
a variety of processes, including, as Kurzman (2008, 5) suggests, ‘any
other understandings that we may choose to identify’.
Studies from the field of STS show quite clearly that activists can
indeed insert themselves into the process of creating verifiable factual
knowledge. Epstein’s (1995) work on ACT UP provides an exemplary
case study of the complexities of expertise in protest movements that
engage directly with the foundational premises of science. In this instance,
activists were not protesting a technoscientific innovation but were
instead attempting to insert themselves into the process of developing a
new treatment for AIDS that would respond to their needs, not merely
to the dictates of ‘pure’ science. While most of the movement’s knowledge-
claims were delivered to the medical elite through credentialed interme-
diaries, some members of ACT UP were eventually able to gain a seat at
the researcher’s table in their own right through becoming ‘a new species
of expert that could speak credibly in the language of the researchers’
(ibid., 417). Some were speaking from lived experience, both with the
disease and as participants in clinical trials—forms of embodied expertise
which were not directly accessible to the research professionals. Others
learned to connect their claims to long-standing arguments in the litera-
ture of clinical trial design. Through these forms of ‘lay’ expertise, activ-
ists were able to systematically gather evidence about the ways in which
the design of gold-standard double-blind clinical trials induced wide-
spread non-compliant behaviour in the participants, such as exchanging
medication in the hope they could avoid receiving the placebo at least
some of the time, calling into question the very methodology by which
supposedly ‘clean’ data about the effectiveness of AZT was being pro-
duced. However, Epstein’s research also suggests that while non-
credentialed activists can ‘in certain circumstances become genuine
participants in the construction of scientific knowledge’ (ibid., 409), they
are still structurally barred from the institutions which would allow them
real control. Even had they attracted the funding and developed the clini-
cal skills to run their own trials, ACT UP as an organisation would not
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
Mais suivons le récit. Hercule périt par ses propres passions. Les
démons intérieurs se montrent. D’autres maux, sans mesure, collés
à nous comme la brûlante tunique ; les cris d’Hercule emplissent le
monde. Qu’est cela, sinon le crime aimé et détesté, la fraternité et la
haine ensemble, la puissance de police et d’industrie se détruisant
elle-même ? C’est à quoi nos travaux d’Hercule nous ont conduits, et
c’est la guerre à l’état de pureté, vertu contre vertu, et le meilleur,
ouvrier du pire. Conflit de soi avec soi. Ici est l’hydre dont les têtes
revivent, à peine coupées. Ici périt la force disciplinée, par la force
disciplinée, et sans fin. Par quoi ? Par l’opinion seulement. La seule
opinion a tué dix millions d’hommes en ces temps-ci.
Une autre vie se montre, puissante sans aucune puissance. Un
autre athlète, par le jugement seul. La puissance de César attend le
consentement et le culte ; mais le consentement et le culte lui sont
refusés. Un autre salut préoccupe l’homme divin ; il ne regarde qu’en
lui-même, au désir, à l’amour, à l’ambition, à l’avarice, pour les
subordonner. Nullement satisfait de l’ordre politique, qui donne
apparence de raison à toutes ces choses, mais annonçant au
contraire que si on leur donne quelque peu du consentement
intérieurs on leur donne tout. Plus profondément, discernant que les
forces au service de l’esprit déshonorent l’esprit ; que l’esprit vaincra,
mais seul, et désarmé ; que tout le bien extérieur possible viendra de
ce refus et de cette retraite de l’esprit en lui-même, et de cette
purification au sens propre du mot. Enfin la puissance est déchue de
son droit divin. Si l’instrument du supplice, adoré dans le temple
nouveau, signifie quelque chose, il signifie, à n’en pas douter, que la
puissance n’est plus un attribut de Dieu. L’on saisit ici la vertu de ces
grandes images, sur lesquelles le discours n’a pas de prise. Que de
sophismes théologiques en vue de rassembler l’esprit et la force, et
de composer une même prière pour l’un et pour l’autre ! Mais le
Signe reste ; il attend nos pensées.
XXXV
IDOLATRIE
Il faut croire d’abord. Il faut croire avant toute preuve, car il n’y a
point de preuve pour qui ne croit rien. Auguste Comte méditait
souvent sur ce passage de l’Imitation : « L’intelligence doit suivre la
foi, et non pas la précéder ; encore moins la rompre. » Si je ne crois
point qu’il dépend de moi de penser bien ou mal, je me laisse penser
à la dérive ; mes opinions flânent en moi comme sur un pont les
passants. Ce n’est pas ainsi que se forment les Idées ; il faut vouloir,
il faut choisir, il faut maintenir. Quel intérêt puis-je trouver dans une
preuve, si je ne crois pas ferme qu’elle sera bonne encore demain ?
Quel intérêt, si je ne crois pas ferme que la preuve qui est bonne
pour moi est bonne pour tous ? Or cela je ne puis pas le prouver,
parce que toute preuve le présuppose. De quel ton Socrate
expliquerait-il la géométrie au petit esclave, s’il n’était assuré de
trouver en cette forme humaine la même Raison qu’il a sauvée en
lui-même ?
Il ne manque pas d’esprits sans foi. Ce sont des esprits faibles,
qui cherchent appui au dehors ; mais il n’y a point d’appui au dehors.
La Nature est trop riche pour nous ; elle dépassera toujours nos
idées. Penser sans hypothèses préalables, raisonnablement
formées, et fermement tenues, c’est combattre sans armes. Cette
misanthropie profonde, qui vise l’homme en son centre, dessèche
celui qui la reçoit, et les autres autour de lui. On ne peut croire en soi
si l’on ne croit en l’Homme ; penser pour soi-même, c’est déjà
instruire. Si vous manquez à l’esprit, l’esprit vous fuira.
Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur ? Du noir sur du blanc, si vous n’osez pas
croire. Platon lui-même se vide de pensée devant ces esprits
chagrins qui font des objections au troisième mot. Jurez d’abord et
par provision que Platon dit vrai ; sous cette condition vous pourrez
le comprendre. Mais sans cette condition vous perdez votre temps à
le lire. Ce serait trop commode si Platon versait ses idées en vous
comme l’eau en cruche. Noir sur blanc, je vous dis. Vit-on jamais un
homme déchiffrer une inscription en prenant comme idée directrice
que cette inscription n’a point de sens ?
Les anciens n’avaient pas tiré au clair cette condition première,
qui est la Foi. Les plus courageux pensaient esthétiquement ; il leur
semblait plus beau de penser. « Beau risque », disait Socrate. Aussi
c’est le sceptique qui termine cette scène de l’histoire, le sceptique
qui veut qu’on lui prouve qu’il y a une preuve de la preuve. Et le Dieu
de Pascal, qui est caché, et qui veut qu’on croie sans la moindre
preuve, est l’héroïque négation de cette négation. Métaphore
violente, qui remet l’homme sur pied, et la Volonté en sa place. Ce
grand moment domine la pensée moderne, et, en ce parti
désespéré, la vraie Espérance se montre, et nos pensées
s’ordonnent à partir du serment initial. Ainsi, devant le regard Positif,
toute religion finit par être vraie.
XXXVII
LES VERTUS THÉOLOGALES