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 aims to explore the complex relationships between the prevailing re/productive system in times of advanced capitalism and the legal regulations of access to sexual and reproductive self-determination, including assisted reproduction advanced technologies, for women and nonconforming subjectivities.

The intersections between normative context, political economy, technoscience and discursivity will allow for an understanding of the prevailing relationships between scientific theories, cutting-edge technologies, labor and exploitative markets, all the way into the tensions that inhabit the political spaces that open up between laws, national and international, and feminist and transfeminist struggles.

Hence, consistently considering reproduction as social reproduction -not only, therefore, reproduction of biologically conceived bodies-, the reproduction of political bodies will emerge as crucial in the materialization of intersectional geographies articulated by specific ideologies and the devices that reverberate and consolidate them back.

The first part of our course will be concerned with situating the reflections in the panorama of Marxist feminism, which, since the 1970s, has been investigating the relations between processes of naturalization and exploitation of reproductive, domestic and care work carried out primarily by women (Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Selma James, Silvia Federici, Leopoldina Fortunati).

The reflections of the Women for Wages for Housework on women’s labor will allow us to examine the intersections of patriarchy and the capitalist system, with particular focus on their intertwining in Fordism.

We will understand here how unpaid and unrecognized labor operates as the first indispensable link in the chains of surplus value.

Thus, the historical context in which in 1978 Law 194 concerning the voluntary interruption of pregnancy emerged in Italy will be explored, conducting us to an examination of the current political atmospheres regarding abortion, at the international level.

In a second step, we will trace the course of history to dwell on the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism, keeping track of the conceptual and economic-political shifts that have occurred since the 1970s with the convergence of feminist struggles and the ecosystemic crisis declared on the global political stage by the Limits to Development Report sponsored by the Club of Rome and compiled the Meadows Team at MIT Boston. We will figure out how the economic changes where women's struggles and ecological collapse impose a transformation of the re/productive system. So looking at the theorizations of the Chicago School of Economics and the postindustrial right wing, we will be working on the slabbing of the labor category, to the extent of explicitly including reproductive and care work that is now salaried as long as it is performed outside of family and loving ties. We will probe here the new market articulations as service work, cognitive work and especially biological work corroborate. The concept of feminization of labor (Donna Haraway, Precarias a la Deriva, Cristina Morini) will allow us to see how the conditions reserved for women in Fordism become in the post-Fordist landscape conditions of labor tout court. But as the life sciences continue to evolve in relation to new technologies, women would continue to occupy the margins of this precarious form of labor, becoming the bioworkers par excellence as their bodies' reproductive potential is put to value (Melinda Cooper, Catherine Waldby). We will then sink in on the new forms of exploitation of women's bodies in post-Fordism, keeping in mind the intersections of gender and race where they are open to the capture of the bioeconomy (Sunder Rajan). We will here investigate the legal, economic, and political conditions of oocyte vendors and gestational surrogates to understand how the laws governing these services -between prohibitions and their reduction to purely oblatory gestures - follow the different but intersecting paths of familistic morality and neoliberal deregulation. Alongside the sale of gametes and surrogacy, we will study the markets, legal and illegal, of gender selection, to follow again the relationships between economics, morality and national or international legislation, including legal vacuums and concessions to the use of new technologies that trace the patriarchal and capitalist scores of the sexual division of labor since before the birth of subjects (Rajani Bhatia).

The third part of this course will wish to engage with the shift from the notion of reproductive rights to the notion of reproductive justice (Loretta Ross, Michelle Murphy, Ruha Benjamin, Angela Balzano), following the critiques of racialized women at the UN Conferences. Always keeping in mind the intersectional geography of reproduction, we will follow women's struggles from abortion to a broader and systemic understanding of reproductive self-determination, moving beyond the limits of white feminisms towards black feminisms. While for white middle-class women, the right to abortion enshrined seasons of feminist struggles against the grip of capital and the suprematist reproductive injunction in order to claim the right to nonproduction (Angela Balzano), the struggle for reproductive justice thickened the narrative with the experiences of racialized women, in contact with forced sterilizations and in material conditions of deprivation and dispossession incompatible with the privilege of reproductive self-determination. Different welfare systems and different forms of income will be analyzed to complicate reproductive rights in the social fabric that co-implement legislation.

Finally, inhabiting the spaces of reflection and inquiry opened by the reproductive justice perspective as a criterion for the intelligibility of the political, we will follow its implications in the field of social reproduction to the challenges opened by abolitionist feminism (Angela Davis, Gina Dent, Erica Meiners and Beth Richie; Ruth Gilmore; Ruha Benjamin). If reproductive justice opens reflections to the economic, material and social conditions of those women placed on the margins by the vector of race, then today's prison and punitive system, marked by the encounter between its labor exploitative tendencies and the exponential percentage of racialized inmates, relocates the stake opened by social reproduction around the prison as a device of capture and discipline that reinvigorates the geographies of marginality, paying particular attention to the fallout of this system on women's bodies and lives. From here we will tackle questions of restorative justice and feminist and anti-racist transformative justice (Giusi Palomba, Adrienne Maree Brown). We will ask: what forms of recognition and redistribution, what forms of justice and compensation, for more breathable reproductive mechanisms?
*
On December 18, 2024, activists from Obiezione Respinta and Women on Web will be our guests. This invitation's intent is to account for the contibution of trans*feminist activism in repairing the damages caused by unjust economic, legal, and social systems, but also in prefiguring the worlds we need&desire.
To borrow Harsha Walia (No One in Illegal)'s words "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 horizon, the kinds of knowledge produced by activism and relationships among people who are denied bodily self-determination compose near-to-life and experiential forms of knowledge, namley situated knowledges whereby theory and praxis can never be separated.

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

For attending students, the final exam will consist of:

a) in-class presentation on one of the topics discussed during the lectures. The class will be invited to solicit those who presented with reflections and questions. It is necessary to discuss the topic with the professor in advance. *

b) short paper (indicatively 5/7 pages, but the professor is flexible to a small uptick in page numbers) beginning with some of the topics covered in the course. The choice of topic is always to be agreed with the professor: this dialogue is aimed at sharing a brief abstract and a summary bibliography to make the exchange fertile and to guarantee a fair evaluation of the projects.

(c) oral examination, i.e., discussion with the professor of the written paper: here the professor may invite the students to weave relationships between the final paper itself and other relevant topics addressed during the lectures.

* d) if for some reason some students are not in a condition to conduct a presentation in front of the class, please contact the lecturer to find a solution appropriate to the assessment but also to the specific needs.


Non-attenders: to be discussed in advance with the lecturer.

Office hours

See the website of Elisa Bosisio