A-Infos (en) Irish Anarchist Review no 8 - Inclusive, intersectional, anti-racist feminist class war - Many shades, second sex

I was recently in the National Maternity Hospital on Holles Street for an appointment with 
a gynaecologist. The doctor requested I get some blood work done, and so I was placed in a 
chair outside an intake room. After waiting a few minutes, three people emerged from the 
room, two in medical uniforms and another in religious clothing. ---- After the one in 
religious clothing had left the hall area, the two in medical uniforms looked at each 
other in shock. One of them then says to the other, “Well I never. . .” The other cuts 
across her, “Me neither. Where was she from?” “Iran. Wow.” ---- I giggled internally, and 
imagined the headline (from The Onion), “Two medical students were in shock today when an 
Iranian woman visits a maternity hospital after finding out she is pregnant.”

There was something interestingly post-modern about the situation as both the woman in 
religious clothing and myself are Iranians, but admittedly quite different in appearance. 
My multi-ethnic, US-born background means that difference for me is almost exclusively 
felt in these instances by medical professionals’ inability to pronounce my family name 
when calling me from the waiting area (this trip was no exception). I remember often 
apologizing profusely for the unintentional embarrassment caused by the ‘exoticness’ of my 
surname's combination of fourteen letters, and how grateful I was that my parents (who 
couldn’t agree on much but made a valiant effort when it came to assimilation), gave me a 
‘normal sounding’ first name.

I might be named after the wife of a brutal Middle East dictator, but at least White 
America can pronounce it! I do find it, however, oddly ironic that a professional class 
that regularly uses words like Anhydrohydroxyprogesterone, (26 letters, just saying) have 
failed throughout the years to even muster an attempt at my name.

Dismantle the master’s house!
Synthetic hormone aside, it was this experience in the National Maternity Hospital that 
got me thinking about the unique position people of multiple identities hold in the 
struggle for reproductive rights.

My early political formation happened primarily through the post-9/11 anti-war movement. I 
was an eager young person, just out of secondary school when I boarded my first 
international flight to Baghdad in protest of the economic sanctions. It is because of 
this experience that I became crucially aware of the lethal role imperialism played in the 
world, and the centrality of racism in the economic machinery of the U.S.

It was an experiential lesson in what Martin Luther King named the triplets of American 
pathology: racism, materialism (read capitalism), and militarism. The experience, however, 
also offered me a way to understand how different systems of oppression and injustice can 
work to reinforce each other in what is fancily called the ‘matrix of domination’. The 
matrix of domination is a concept that conceives the experience of being discriminated 
against as one that is different to different kinds of people. These differences include 
gender, race, class, ableness. . .

Social uprisings, art, collective campaigns, political organizations and national 
liberation struggles across the globe from the music of the Harlem Renaissance, to the 
example of the Zapitistas or Ejercito Zapatista de Liberacion Nacional (EZLN), to the 
movemento negro in Brazil, to the Association des Femmes Haitiennes pour l’Organisation du 
Travail in Haiti, to the Nyabingi movements in East Africa and the Caribbean, to the 
jamiaht-i nesvan-i vatan-khah women’s associations in Iran, to politicization of 
traditional practices such as Anlu in Cameroon, all gave voice and feet to a diversity of 
struggles from which scholars drew wider theories on subject areas such as 
de-colonization, national liberation, civil and political rights, post-colonialism, and 
feminism.

These 20th century movements and the scholarship that aimed at defining them (successfully 
or not!), gave rise to paradigmatic shifts in both – formulating a fundamental challenge 
to the authority of the nation-state, and providing activists from various struggles the 
possibility for transnational perspectives. This means in our present day lives that 
activists, like those demanding the right to abortion in Ireland, can catch courage and 
ideas from their comrades in Egypt demanding an end to the use of forms of gender based 
violence against protesters in Tahrir Square.

The idea of ‘bodily sovereignty’ and intersectional identities
The knowledge of these global movements assisted interventions in all kinds of social 
justice-centred campaigns, including that of the reproductive rights movement. In the 
North American experience, feminists organizing around suffrage and the framework of 
‘choice’ were consistently challenged by womanist, anti-racist and working class movements.

Notions of ‘bodily sovereignty’ and the ability to control reproduction, which formed the 
core of mainly White, middle-class reproductive rights organizing, had to be re-analyzed 
by activists in light of intersectional identities.
This made intersectional organizing for reproductive rights an essential element in 
re-framing reproduction as a matter of justice not choice.

For many in the North American experience, this kind of intersectional engagement was the 
direct result of a unique history of colonization and slavery, and the resistance of both 
Native Americans and Africans against these forms of domination. The central fact of 
slavery was the theft of another’s labour, be it through the forced form of internal 
reproductive work, or forced forms of external reproductive work in kitchens and cotton 
fields. Thus, the necessity to have sovereignty over the body has long been an economic 
justice issue.

The conception of bodily ownership and the need to deconstruct patriarchal, White 
supremacist notions of ownership over feminized bodies is not just an issue external to 
communities of colour. Black Panther Party member Kay Lindsey’s 1973 Poem was written 
specifically as a critique and intervention into a growing conception in the party of 
‘revolutionary motherhood’ as an ideal of Black womanhood. Revolutionary motherhood was 
the idea that black women should reject contraception and the legalization of abortion on 
the grounds that they were needed to create an ‘army of Black babies’ to fight for the 
emancipation of the ‘Black race’. Lindsey’s poem belies ‘revolutionary motherhood’ as an 
anti-imperialist practice, and instead connects the notion to the exploitation of African 
women’s bodies through the formation of the sex-obsessed ‘Jezebel figure’ brought to the 
Americas to ‘relieve Black men’ and produce more free labour. Lindsey writes:

“I’m not one of those who believes
That an act of valour, for a woman
Need take place inside her.
My womb is packed in mothballs
And I heard that winter will be mild.
Anyway I have given birth twice
And my body deserves a medal for that
But I never got one.
Mainly because they thought
I was just answering the call of nature.
But now that the revolution needs numbers
Motherhood got a new position
Five steps behind manhood
And I thought sittin’ in the back of the bus
Went out with Martin Luther King.”

In recognizing the historical relevance of ‘bodily sovereignty’ or ownership over one’s 
own body for women of colour, and sovereignty’s intimate connection to labour, the 
association of reproduction with ‘choice’ or ‘right’ takes on a more complex meaning.

Savita, Racism and Reproductive Justice
When Savita Halappanavar died late last year, the issue of reproductive rights, an issue 
that had gone twenty years without legislation, was put forward as the central legislative 
issue in the country. Social media was alight with arguments, right, left and centre on 
the debate over legislation. Expressions of grief and anger rang out over rallies, 
protests, pickets and marches across Ireland and the world, and Savita’s face became the 
symbol of the abortion rights movement.

Yet, what is troubling about the use of Savita’s image as the symbol for abortion rights 
in Ireland is how little her experience as a woman of colour has been examined by 
proponents of reproductive rights, and how this fact impacts the ways in which 
reproductive rights as a national discourse is defined, strategized and won.

I think nobody would deny that the haunting statement, ‘this is a Catholic country,’ made 
by the mid- wife in charge of Savita’s care was meant, not only as a means of establishing 
the role the Catholic church, but most prudently as a way of ‘othering’ Savita. Chicana 
activist and writer Gloria Anzaldua defined an other’ as ‘the attempt to establish a 
person as unacceptable based on certain criterion that fails to be met.’

Womanist poet Audre Lorde describes others in her work as ‘anyone that differs from the 
societal schema of an average, middle class, White male.’ Othering, in my opinion, gives 
rise to two different but related forms of social narcissism. The first is the 
establishment of another as ‘not one of us’. Perhaps in Savita’s case this meant not only 
that the viability of the foetus was put before her own life, but that her own life was 
not seen or valued as important in the same way as other patients because of her ethnicity.

The second form of social narcissism is a sort of hyper-identification, where another’s 
difference is the basis for their experiences being appropriated. I think this happens 
quite often on the left where we read situations with our own tribal/sectarian lens and do 
not allow the particularities of someone’s experience speak for itself. This happens very 
often in academic circles too, where people’s lived experiences of oppression become ways 
for academics to advance their careers and intellectually point-score, whilst their work 
reinforces dominating paradigms and further alienates their very own subjects.

Either by appropriation or devaluing an individual’s or a groups subjectivity, we 
formulate a myopic sense of the world that makes it difficult to achieve revolutionary 
aims. I think we combat othering by understanding the important roles difference plays in 
our movement – in this case the movement towards reproductive justice. Unity, rather than 
sameness, recognizes the compelling role cooperation across difference, or solidarity, 
plays in creating dynamic global justice movements.

Unity through difference
Audre Lorde once said, “It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to 
recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences,” that lead us towards tolerance 
instead of change. ‘Difference,’ Lorde teaches, ‘should act like polarities through which 
our creativity can spark like a dialectic.’

In our reproductive justice struggle, I wonder what it would mean to interrogate Savita’s 
experience from the perspective of a person of colour attempting to get care in hospital 
in Ireland? If the centrality of her identity as an Indian was the culminating force that 
gave rise to a national discussion on race relations, and treatment of those with 
contingent resident statuses like asylum seekers or refugees. I wonder if we believe 
Savita’s case would have captured the same level of recognition if she had been working 
class - a shop keeper, domestic worker or English language student, instead of a dentist. 
Or, indeed, what difference would it have made if she was White – would she still be alive?

An inclusive, intersectional, anti-racist feminist class war (wooh!) begins by the 
building of a compelling political vision with our minds and our feet. Free, safe, legal 
abortions are appropriately an aim worth winning, but the movement for reproductive 
justice needs to be more diverse than that if it is to include the experiences and 
specificities of all members of our movement. Bodily sovereignty and reproductive rights 
is a justice issue for refugees and asylum seekers, for transgendered and gender queer 
folk, for travellers and the differently abled.

Difference is a crucial strength in solidarity activism. Savita’s death and the hundreds 
more like her, make it ever more urgent that we see our struggles and need for cooperation 
across them as an imperative strategy in fostering deeper connections with each other and 
building tangible forms of solidarity.

Words: Farah Azadi
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