26026 - Women And Law

Learning outcomes

Students will explore legal feminism and learn to engage critically with a range of ideas in a gender-sensitive way, tackling topics like law as a tool for freedom, gendered law, discrimination, and human rights.

Course contents

THIS COURSE WILL BE HELD ENTIRELY IN ENGLISH

This course explores the complex entanglements between the dominant re/productive system under advanced capitalism and the legal regulation of access to sexual and reproductive self-determination, including advanced assisted reproductive technologies, as they affect women and nonconforming subjectivities.

By examining the intersections of normative frameworks, political economy, technoscience, and discursivity, we will analyze the prevailing relationships between scientific theories, cutting-edge technologies, labor, and exploitative markets.
These relationships reveal tensions within the political spaces that emerge between national and international legal systems, and feminist and transfeminist struggles.

Approaching reproduction as social reproduction—not merely the biological reproduction of bodies—we will foreground the political reproduction of bodies as central to the formation of intersectional geographies shaped by specific ideologies and the material apparatuses that sustain them.

In the first part of the course, we will ground our reflections within the tradition of Marxist feminism, which, since the 1970s, has investigated the relationship between naturalization and the exploitation of reproductive, domestic, and care labor, primarily carried out by women (Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Selma James, Silvia Federici, Leopoldina Fortunati).

The Women for Wages for Housework campaign’s insights on women’s labor will guide our examination of the intersections between patriarchy and capitalism, with particular attention to their entanglement in the Fordist era. Here, we will uncover how unpaid and unrecognized labor functions as the foundational link in the chain of surplus value.
We will then situate Italy’s Law 194 (1978), which legalized voluntary interruption of pregnancy, in this historical context, and extend our inquiry to contemporary global political climates regarding abortion.

In the second phase, we will trace the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism, analyzing the conceptual and political-economic shifts that occurred from the 1970s onward—particularly as feminist struggles and the global ecological crisis (as framed by the Limits to Growth report commissioned by the Club of Rome and authored by the Meadows team at MIT) converged to reshape the re/productive system.
Drawing from theorizations of the Chicago School of Economics and the postindustrial right, we will explore the redefinition of the labor category to explicitly include reproductive and care work when it is waged and performed outside familial or affective bonds.

We will investigate how service, cognitive, and especially biological labor consolidate new market configurations. The concept of the feminization of labor (Donna Haraway, Precarias a la Deriva, Cristina Morini) will help us understand how labor conditions once reserved for women in Fordism have become paradigmatic in the post-Fordist world. As life sciences evolve in tandem with new technologies, women increasingly occupy precarious labor margins, becoming bioworkers par excellence, as their reproductive potential is commodified (Melinda Cooper, Catherine Waldby).

We will examine contemporary forms of exploitation of women’s bodies in post-Fordist contexts, focusing on the intersections of gender and race that enable their capture by the bioeconomy (Kaushik Sunder Rajan).
Through the cases of oocyte vendors and gestational surrogates, we will analyze the legal, economic, and political conditions under which these services are provided—navigating between prohibitions and reductive conceptions of them as purely altruistic acts.
Alongside gamete markets and surrogacy, we will investigate legal and illegal gender selection markets to trace the connections between economics, morality, and (inter)national legislation, including legal loopholes and permissive frameworks that reflect patriarchal and capitalist scripts of sexual labor division even before birth (Rajani Bhatia).

The third part of the course engages the shift from the framework of reproductive rights to that of reproductive justice (Loretta Ross, Michelle Murphy, Ruha Benjamin, Angela Balzano), foregrounding the critiques of racialized women at UN conferences.
Maintaining a focus on the intersectional geography of reproduction, we will follow feminist struggles from the demand for abortion rights toward broader, systemic understandings of reproductive self-determination—moving beyond the limits of white feminisms toward the contributions of Black feminisms.
While for white, middle-class women, the right to abortion represented a central feminist demand against capitalist and supremacist reproductive imperatives—claiming the right to nonproduction (Angela Balzano)—the framework of reproductive justice incorporates the experiences of racialized women subjected to forced sterilizations and living in conditions of deprivation that render reproductive autonomy unattainable.

We will analyze different welfare systems and forms of income support to understand how reproductive rights are embedded within the broader social fabric that co-produces legislation.

Finally, from the vantage point of reproductive justice as a framework for political intelligibility, we will explore its implications for social reproduction and the challenges posed by abolitionist feminism (Angela Davis, Gina Dent, Erica Meiners, Beth Richie, Ruth Gilmore, Ruha Benjamin). If reproductive justice centers the material conditions of women marginalized by racial capitalism, then today’s prison-industrial and punitive systems—characterized by labor exploitation and the disproportionate incarceration of racialized people—reframe the question of social reproduction around the prison as a disciplinary apparatus that reproduces geographies of marginality. We will pay close attention to the gendered and racialized impacts of this system on women’s bodies and lives.

From here, we will address the possibilities of transformative justice from feminist and anti-racist perspectives (Giusi Palomba, Adrienne Maree Brown), asking: What forms of recognition and redistribution? What forms of justice and compensation? How can we envision more breathable, life-affirming reproductive futures?

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On December 18, 2024, we will host activists from Obiezione Respinta and Women on Web. This invitation aims to highlight the contributions of trans*feminist activism not only in addressing the harms of unjust economic, legal, and social systems but also in prefiguring the worlds we need and desire.

To borrow Harsha Walia’s words (No One Is Illegal), “Prefiguration is the notion that our organizing reflects the society we wish to live in—that the methods we practice, institutions we create, and relationships we facilitate within our movements and communities align with our ideals.”

Against this backdrop, the knowledge produced through activism and through relationships among those denied bodily autonomy constitutes an embodied, near-to-life form of understanding—what Donna Haraway would call situated knowledges—where theory and praxis are inseparable.

Readings/Bibliography

Angela Balzano, “Biology Commodification and Women Self-determination. Beyond the Surrogacy Ban”, in Italian Sociological Review, 10 (3), 655-677, 2020.
---. “Escaping Pro-life Neo-fascism in Italy: Affirmative and Collective Lines of Flight”, in Rick Dolphijn and Rosi Braidotti (edited by), Deleuze and Guattari and Fascism, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2022.

Ruha Benjamin, "Black AfterLives Matter: Cultivating Kinfulness as Reproductive Justice", in Adele Clarke and Donna Haraway (edited by), Making Kin not Population, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2018. (or Michelle Murphy)

Elisa Bosisio, “Gender before Sex | Population before Subject”, in Scienza & Filosofia, 23, pp. 47-62, 2020.

Adrienne Maree Brown, We Will Not Cancel Us And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice, AK Press, Chico and Edinburgh, 2020. One chapter of your choice.

Melinda Cooper, "Life Beyond the Limits Inventing the Bioeconomy", in Life as Surplus. Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era, University of Washington Press, Washington, 2008.
---. "The Unborn Born Again. Neo-Imperialism, the Evangelical Right, and the Culture of Life", in Life as Surplus. Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era, University of Washington Press, Washington, 2008.

Melinda Cooper and Catherine Waldby, "Fertility Outsourcing. Contract, Risk, and Assisted Reproductive Technology", in Clinical Labor, Tissue Donors and Research Subjects in the Global Bioeconomy, Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2014.

Angela Davis, Gina Dent, Erica Meiners e Beth Richie, Abolition. Feminism. Now., Haymarket Books, Chicago, 2022. One chapter of your choice.

Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century”, in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, Routledge, New York and London, 149-181, 1991.

Michelle Murphy, "Against Population, Towards Alterlife", in Adele Clarke and Donna Haraway 8edited by), Making Kin not Population, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2018. (or Ruha Benjamin)

Louise Toupin, Wages for Housework: A History of an International Feminist Movement, 1972-77, Pluto Press, London, 2018. PART 1, Paragraph 2; PART 2.

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Suggested Readings

Battistoni, A., "Bringing in the Work of Nature: From Natural Capital to Hybrid Labor", in Political Theory, 45, 1, 2017.

Bowels, S., H. Gintis, "The Problem with Human Capital Theory – A Marxian Critique", in The American Economy Review, 65, 2, 1975.

Wilmette Brown, Black Ghetto Ecology, Housewifes in Dialogue, Londra, 1986.

Clarke, Disciplinig Reproduction. Modernity, American Life Sciences, and “the Problem of Sex”, University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles, Oxford, 1998.

Dickenson, D., Property in the Body. A Feminist Perspective. Second Edition, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge e New York, 2017.

Di Chiro, G., “Living Environmentalism: Coalition Politics, Social Reproduction, and Environmental Justice”, in Environmental Politics, 17(2), 276-298, 2008.

Franklin, S., "Life Itself. Global Nature and Genetic Imaginary", in S. Franklin, C. Lury, J. Stacey (a cura di), Global Nature, Global Culture, Sage Publication, Londra, 2000.
---. "Postmodern Procreation: A Cultural Account of Assisted Reproduction", in F. D. Ginsburg e R. Rapp (a cura di), Conceiving the New World Order. The Global Politics of Reproduction, University of California Press, San Francisco, 1996.

Ftouni, L., " 'They Make Death, and I’m the Labor of Love' . Palestinian Prisoners’ Sperm Smuggling as an Affirmation of Life, in Critical Times, 7, 1, 2024.

Hochshild, The Managed Hearth. The Commercialization of Human Feelings, University of California Press, Bekeley, Los Angeles e Londra, 1983.

Landacker, H., Culturing Life. How Cells Become Technologies, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 2007, pp. 25-26.
---. Living Differently in Time. Plasticity, Temporality and Cellular Biotechnologies, in “Culture Machine”, 7, 2005.

Lewis, S., Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family, Verso Books, London, 2019.

Krauss, C., Mothering at the Crossroads. African American Women and the Emergence of the Movement Against Environmental Racism. In F. C. Stedy (a cura di) Environmental Justice in the New Millennium. Global Perspectives on Race, Ethnicity and Human Rights, Palgarve MacMillan, New York, 2009.

Meadows, D. et al., The Limits of Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind, Pan Books, Londra, 1972.

Mezzadra, S., V. Gago, A Critique of Extractive Operations of Capital: Toward an Expanded Concept of Extractivism, in “Rethinking Marxism. A Journal of Economics, Culture, & Society”, 29, 2017, pp. 574-591.

Palomba, G., La trama alternativa. Sogni e pratiche di giustizia trasformativa contro la violenza di genere, Minimum Fax, Roma, 2023.

Precarias a la Deriva, Adrift Throught the Circuits of Feminized Precarious Work, in “Feminist Review”, 77, 2004.
---. A Very Careful Strike, in “The Commoner”, 11, 2006, pp. 39-40.

The Wages Due to Lesbians, Position Statement, https://riseupfeministarchive.ca/activism/organizations/wages-due-lesbians/wagesduecollective-position-document-toronto-ocr/, 1978.

Thompson, C., Making Parents: The Ontological Choreography of Reproductive Technologies, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2005.

Teaching methods

The course will be held in English.

70% lectures

10% seminars with outside experts

20% active class involvement (discussions, labs/readings)

Assessment methods

Final Assessment

For attending students, the final exam will consist of the following components:

a) An in-class presentation on one of the topics discussed during the course. The class will be invited to engage presenters with reflections and questions. Students are required to discuss their chosen topic with the professor in advance.

b) A short paper (approximately 5–7 pages; the professor is open to slightly longer submissions if needed), developing one or more topics addressed in the course. The topic must be agreed upon with the professor in advance. This preliminary dialogue includes sharing a brief abstract and a provisional bibliography, with the aim of fostering constructive exchange and ensuring a fair evaluation of the work.

c) An oral examination, consisting of a discussion with the professor of the written paper. During this conversation, students may be asked to draw connections between their paper and other relevant themes explored in the course.

d) If, for any reason, a student is unable to deliver an in-class presentation, they are encouraged to contact the professor in advance to arrange an alternative form of assessment that respects both academic integrity and individual needs.

Please note that the instructor has designed these three steps as distinct moments within a single, continuous process of elaboration. The structure is intended to:

• identify a topic around which to begin shaping a research project to be presented in class, allowing for early feedback and initial refinement;

• proceed with the writing of a paper, following a phase of development and collective discussion;

• conclude the process with a one-on-one discussion with the instructor for final evaluation.

However, students are free to choose to present on a topic different from the one they develop in their written paper and final discussion.

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For non-attending students: the exam format must be discussed in advance with the professor.

Office hours

See the website of Elisa Bosisio