Re: population vs. technology/consumption (fwd)

Andy has made a very important point: the connection between population
control strategies and their class, gender and race implications,
particularly in the thirld world. I am a third world woman (although
coming from a capitalist country in the semi-periphery of the world
system), and I can understand what Andy means. 

first off, let me say that I am terribly unhappy with the white/western/
middle class discourses that depict third world world women as lactating
and over-reproducing. Evidently, third world women, just as western women
here, are struggling against their oppression too (African women's
struggle against female circumcision or South Asian women's struggle
against global sex industry). Furthermore, who can forget the British
imperialist policies of imposing adultery laws to "guarentee" the sexual
loyalty of African women in the absence of their husbands who were forced
to work in mines?

The opposite way of perceving the "other women" as traditional is not only
racist, but also sexist. It blames the victim (women) by already assuming
that certain people have certain charecteristics that come from their
culture. so you have different people, different cultures and different
women: Over-reproducing African women versus modernized western women. 
Women's victim status is explained in terms of the inability of "certain" 
cultures to "modernize" themselves, while white man's culture is taken as
the norm ("advanced"). Modernization is seen as the equivalent term of
capitalist development, so automatically reflecting women's status. The
more developed you are, the more liberated you are.  While it is obvious
that patriarcy is part of cultural practices, I seriously think that we
need to go beyond mere appereances to understand how women's oppression in
the thirld world is a product of local and global capitalism, and moreover
a product west's hegemonic position to control over the process of world
development on the basis of so called "scientific knowledge". 

for example, in India, when western birth control techniques (pills) were
tried on Indian women by state capitalist policies, many women were found
out to be infected because pills had a bad quality juged from the
perspective of health standarts. What happened was that men started
punishing women whom they thought became "so called" non-fertile.. Was
this an accident? I don't think so, since we know a lot of cases like
that. While core countries export their population control techniques to
other countries,the assumption is always that the "modern world" has to
get rid of inferior races because they consitute a population threat to
modern civilization. Women, as a second sex, suffer from these racist
policies because they are the ones whose bodies are sexualized and
controlled in the final analysis. We may not even need to go to third
world. I have heard many people here openly saying that African American
families "reproduce like cats". It is a BIG time to examine the role of
population strategies in legitimating the ideological reproduction of
racist and sexist practices..


Mine Doyran
Phd student
SUNY/Albany
Political Science

 ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Tue, 30 May 2000 19:45:44
-0400 (EDT)  From: Andrew Wayne Austin <aaustin@utkux.utcc.utk.edu> To: 
Judi Kessler <jukessle@weber.ucsd.edu> Cc: world system network
<wsn@csf.colorado.edu> Subject: Re: population vs. technology/consumption


Judi Kessler,

I have not suggested we deny women access to contraception, abortion, or
sterilization. I explicitly stated that this should be a right and that it
should be secured. Did you not read my post??

How can you presume to speak for African American women, but I cannot? Are
you not concerned that black women are sterilized at a rate dramatically
higher than white women? Does it not bother you that conservatives
celebrate the dramatic drop in black fertility? Or are you with Margaret
Sanger that a reduction in the number of the inferior races is a good
thing?

Your image of the black woman "pregnant and lactating most of her life" is
a disgusting racist remark. I don't think there are very many African
Americans who would consider that you have spoken for them, especially
black women.

African American women in my class come up to me after my lecture on the
racial disparity in sterilization and either thank me for talking about
issues that other white people don't (many black women are after all
conscious of these things - and it is not because they "heard it on the
grapevine") or thank me for telling them something that had not crossed
their mind.

I have an email (which I will not disclose here because I respect the
student's privacy) from a black woman who was involuntarily sterilized via
the same way method black women throughout the United States are. She was
mightily upset when I read aloud the testimony of a resident surgeon who
explained how he gets black women to undergo hysterectomies. The resident
use the exact same line that the surgeon gave her.

Evidently you are ignorant of history and present reality of eugenics in
the United States. You might want to study the problem before you attack
me for opposing racist sterilization.

Finally, your remark was deeply offensive for both its essentialism and
its racial stereotyping. You might consider an apology to the list.

Andrew Austin
Knoxville, TN