Abstract
In this chapter, I explore the written output of the network as a plethora of interrelated struggles, ideas, theories and relationships, rather than specific, historically fixed ‘positions’, looking at the many books, articles, journals and other writings they produced. I end with a more specific examination of the kinds of expertise the women brought to FINRRAGE and developed within it, suggesting that this is an area of the study of activism which needs further development.
FINRRAGE really did make an intellectual contribution, it was not just making a noise. So I think our main thing was the intellectual part of it, the analysis, the scientific part of it. That’s why FINRRAGE will never die. It may go on hibernation, it may go on maybe we need life support. Some saline, you know? But I think it will never die. It will never die.
Farida Akhter, UBINIG-Bangladesh, interview 2
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Notes
- 1.
Annette Burfoot , Britain/Canada, interviewed via Skype on 19 May 2010.
- 2.
Ana Regina Gomes dos Reis, Brazil, interviewed in Sao Paolo, 7 March 2015.
- 3.
Lublin (1998, 63), writing her history of the network, refers to both of these as FINRRAGE’s ‘virtual “bibles”’, which is not incorrect.
- 4.
As of May 2017, The Mother Machine is listed on Google Scholar as having been cited 1004 times.
- 5.
Gena Corea, USA, interviewed via Skype on 14 April 2017. Lebensborn refers to the Nazi programme which sought to increase the birth rate of children who were state-validated as ‘racially valuable’. Often born of unmarried women impregnated by SS soldiers, an unknown number of children were also taken from other countries and sent to Germany for adoption.
- 6.
In addition to UBINIG’s continued work in the population policy arena and the loose network of South Asian groups it maintains, there have been international campaigns against contraceptives such as Depo-Provera, Norplant and Net-en, and against RU-486 in which FINRRAGE played a part. More recently, FINRRAGE Australia has also helped to organise campaigns against egg donation for science (See Hands Off Our Ovaries at handsoffourovaries.com), and commercial surrogacy (www.stopsurrogacynow.com). However, I am not certain that the participants in these various campaigns, although often the same people and organisations, consider themselves to be a distinct anti-NRT movement.
- 7.
While Jyotsna Agnihotri Gupta considered the prediction ‘prophetic’ (interview, 13 September 2011), some aspects of Corea’s predictions have not materialised—for example, that poorer women would be sterilised before being used as breeders. Pande’s (2016) ethnographic work with ‘womb-mothers’ in India is an excellent examination of the real surrogacy industry, highlighting the complexities and paradoxes of a reproductive labour market in a country which otherwise goes to extensive lengths to keep women from breeding.
- 8.
Ultimately, the New Jersey Supreme Court overruled a lower court decision that the contract was enforceable, on the grounds that New Jersey law prohibited the sale of a child (Merrick 1990). Whitehead’s parental rights were eventually restored, but as her daughter had been living with the father for several years by that time, reversing custody was deemed not to be in the best interests of the child.
- 9.
The group included Elizabeth Kane, Mary Beth Whitehead, Alejandra Munoz, Patricia Foster and Nancy Barrass. Apart from Munoz, a Mexican woman who had been brought to the United States by family members for the express purpose of carrying their child, all had been contracted by wealthier strangers. All lost their custody battles to the commissioning fathers, although Whitehead and Munoz were granted visitation rights. Foster, Munoz and Whitehead also appeared as speakers at the launch of the National Coalition Against Surrogacy in 1987, which was covered by the cable news channel C-SPAN (and is still available at https://www.c-span.org/video/?57586-1/surrogate-mothers).
- 10.
Satoko Nagaoki , Soshiren/Japan, interviewed in Tokyo on 26 August, 2010 and Azumi Tsuge, Finrrage-no-kai/ Japan, interviewed on 28 August 2010. Nagaoki also notes that their prior translation of Test Tube Women did not meet with anything near the same response.
- 11.
Patricia Spallone, Britain, interviewed by phone on 8 September 2011.
- 12.
Edwards (1980 in Spallone, 95) writes that in animal surrogacy , the routine procedure was to ‘discard’ the egg donor (i.e. kill the animal) once it had served its function. Spallone notes that all the other elements of the procedure remained the same in embryo transfer between women (one could also argue that the donor is in effect still ‘discarded’ as there is no follow-up after egg retrieval.)
- 13.
Based on her initial research for Women as Wombs, Raymond went on to found the Coalition Against Trafficking of Women (CATW) , which has helped to uncover trafficking of babies of prostitutes, as well as women for the sex trade. Of doing this research she has said that ‘it is like working against nothing else that I have experienced. The industry has friends in high places… ’ (Raymond 2013, x).
- 14.
In her overview of FINRRAGE’s work, Klein (2008) notes that Edwards was now warning that the hormone drugs used for superovulation were damaging more than half the eggs, and studies showed higher rates of medical problems in IVF children, yet with rare exceptions there were still no long-term follow-ups on the women who had taken the drugs.
- 15.
Sarah Franklin , Britain, interviewed in London on 15 December 2011.
- 16.
Ibid.
- 17.
David Edge, who around this time was setting up the first British science studies unit at Edinburgh, described it as a desk with no books and no curriculum (Edge 1995).
- 18.
Although not a member of FINRRAGE herself, McNeil also draws upon a number of works by FINRRAGE women in her introductory chapter, noting the shortcomings of an analysis based on rights, which too often obscured the kinds of social relations which governed pursuit of such rights.
- 19.
Annette Burfoot, Britain/Canada, interviewed via Skype on 19 May 2010.
- 20.
Ibid.
- 21.
Aurelia Weikert, Austria, interviewed via Skype on 11 August 2010. The book was Schöne neue Männerwelt: Beiträge zu Gen-und Fortpflanzungstechnologien [Brave new world of men: Contributions to gene and reproduction technologies] (Weikert et al. 1987).
- 22.
Lene Koch , Denmark , interviewed by phone on 11 September 2011. Koch’s paper on the difficulties feminists and women using IVF were having hearing each other’s arguments is one of the most cited papers from IRAGE (Koch 1990).
- 23.
Renate Klein, letter to Phyllis Hall at Pergamon, 11 December 1986: FAN/JH/FIN 07/07.
- 24.
Janice Raymond , letter to Corea, Hanmer, Klein and Rowland , 8 February 1987: FAN/JH/FIN 02/04/01.
- 25.
Respectively, Jalna Hanmer, Britain, interview 1 (17 January 2008) and Annette Burfoot, Canada, interview on 19 May 2010.
- 26.
Penny Bainbridge, Britain, interviewed in Leeds on 19 July 2011.
- 27.
Jalna Hanmer, Britain, interviewed in Leeds 5 May 2010 (interview 3).
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de Saille, S. (2017). Demonstration in Publication. In: Knowledge as Resistance. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52727-1_5
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