In July 2011, while I was attending Womenâs Worlds for the first time, I had the chance to see a recently released documentary on the development of the surrogacy industry in India . The film, Google Baby (Brand Frank 2009), provides a clear and detailed look at the ways in which the general movement to outsource labour more cheaply to India and the availability of gametes over the Internet had combined into a new and fast-growing business model, where poor and often illiterate Indian women were contracted to carry babies for rich Westerners while housed away from their families in closely packed dormitories where their behaviour was strictly controlled. Filmed without narration and without seeking to direct the audience one way or another, it is a startling portrait of the ways in which technology, poverty and the very human hope for a better future combine within a deeply interconnected, vastly unequal, globalised world.
It was also not at all unpredicted.
The Feminist International Network of Resistance to Reproductive and Genetic Engineering (FINRRAGE) was a mixture of Anglo-European feminists, often drawing on ideologies learned as part of the womenâs liberation movement in the 1970s and anti-population policy activists from the global South. Most active between 1984 and 1997, the networkâs trajectory also reflects some of the broader currents in feminist history and can be seen as a microcosm of global feminist activism | during this time. Its stated purpose was to develop a particular âpositionâ of resistance to in vitro fertilisation (IVF), prenatal diagnosis , and even some forms of birth control. However, as I hope to show, âthe FINRRAGE position â was far more complex and far more internally diverse than it might appear from the most publicised writings. Above all, FINRRAGE represents a rare period of intense collective feminist engagement with an emerging platform technology with profound implications for humanity as a whole, one which depends absolutely on access to some of the most difficult-to-reach cells of a womanâs body.
It is also an area where mainstream feminist organisations are often still reluctant to engage. Despite the proliferation of academic feminist literature on the topic, some organisations continue to maintain that the science is too intimidating and assisted reproduction is of interest only to the small group of women who might need it; therefore it is not part of their political agenda (Gougon 2008). In the meantime, outcomes which were initially dismissed as science fiction, such as babies with four, five or even six parents1; children created to be tissue-compatible organ donors; womb transplants2; surrogacy industries in poorer nations; a brisk international market in eggs, sperm and embryos3; anti-pregnancy âvaccinesâ; and various techniques for genetic validation of the embryo and foetus have all now moved from the laboratory into the global clinic. The recent development of techniques which promise to reliably engineer heritable changes into the human embryonic genome makes it imperative to consider how access to womenâs bodies and womenâs reproductive tissue has always been crucial to the development of these fields.4 Whether one does or does not approve of the result, it is no longer science fiction, and quite possibly never was. Thus, the issues which FINRRAGE called into question have only become more relevant as new fields, new techniques, and new problems based on the ability to separate the embryo from the human body and ever more precisely control the processes of reproduction emerge. This represents the primary focus of this book. Whatever oneâs âpositionâ on the technologies in question, the emergence of an organised feminist response aimed at producing woman-centred knowledge about new reproductive technologies (NRT),5 during the period in which IVF was becoming institutionalised as âtreatmentâ for ever-widening categories of people, is an important episode for both feminist history and for the study of science and technology in society, and a rare opportunity to explore the ways in which actors in strongly oppositional movements develop sufficient knowledge to productively engage with complex scientific issues.
At the same time, the conceptual division of knowledge into the binary categories of âexpertâ and âlayâ tends to belie the lived reality of social movements by placing professional experts outside the social movement field, even when the same professionals are clearly within it. Knowledge in social movement theory (SMT) has generally been approached through categories such as collective identity formation (Friedman and McAdam 1992) and framing (Snow et al. 1986). As a more recent analytical concept, it may refer to organisational practices and negotiation of meaning (Kurzman 2008; Casas-Cortes et al. 2008), embodied experience of oneâs own position in society (Esteves 2008) or simply information. In science and technology studies (STS), however, movements and movement actors are acknowledged both as having important role to play in the way scientific knowledge is translated into society (Habermas 1987), and as having the capacity to challenge the way scientific knowledge itself is developed and warranted. In studies of scientific controversy, they can be considered as knowledge-creators in their own right, most notably in health-based and environmental justice movements, which often base their knowledge-claims on activist-collected empirical data (see Epsteinâs groundbreaking 1995 study of ACT UP, or Martinez-Alier 2011 on the effect of activist knowledge on the field of ecological economics). It is also acknowledged that scientists, as well as STS scholars, can be movement participants in their capacities as credentialed knowledge-holders (see Woodhouse et al. 2002; Frickel 2004). The STS argument that science is not value-free, nor are the individual humans who produce it, owes much to early feminists who had the relevant expertise in biology, philosophy and sociology to problematise male bias in the production of scientific knowledge (excellently collected in Harding and OâBarr 1987; Keller and Longino 1996). However, even within STS, analyses and epistemological perspectives developed by feminist scholars still often go unacknowledged (Whelan 2001). How activists produce knowledge, in particular how they develop evidence to support their resistance when science has little interest in their questions, represents the second focus of this book. In the following sections, I will first sketch out the development of the research, before considering how my questions look when formulated through an approach which centres on movements as knowledge-producers in their own right. Here, I will introduce an approach which considers âresistanceâ as a complex interplay of different forms of oppositional consciousness, and which informs my exploration of FINRRAGE as a cognitive praxis, creating and disseminating knowledge about NRT.
A Brief Introduction to the Research
The field of qualitative research has changed substantially in both demographics and methods of representation since Ann Oakley (1981) argued against the standard approach to conducting âneutral and objectiveâ interviews. If traditional paradigms were androcentric, and could only produce androcentric data, then women had to be free to invent tools that could incorporate intuition, emotion, connection and other elements of the research experience which were traditionally frowned upon as subjective and biased (Acker et al. 1983). Methodological innovation was key to the development of womenâs studies (Cook and Fonow 1986), as it has been key to my own research. In general, it has been argued that what makes a research project feminist (rather than simply a gendered analysis) are its emancipatory aspectsââa transformative view of womenâs destinyâ (Rose 1987, 267), the inclusion of women and womenâs lives in studies of the social world (DeVault 1996) and a legitimation of womenâs ways of âdoing knowledgeâ, including producing knowledge in a form which ordinary women could access (Acker et al. 1983); in other words, research which is for women, not merely about them (Stanley and Wise 1990). I see the âfeministâ in this particular project as having an interpersonal dimension, reaching towards âtheory derived from experience analytically entered into by enquiring feministsâ (Stanley and Wise 1990, 24), as it is essentially a story told in multiple voices, including my own. Although the research did not have a directly empowering aspect, such as gathering data to directly address a social problem, there is a form of empowerment which comes from the opportunity to tell a story the women clearly wanted to tell. Overall, the women I interviewed were proud of their accomplishments in FINRRAGE, and frequently reiterated how glad they were that someone wanted to talk to them about it. This aspect of the project, of making visible what was felt to be a piece of feminist history in danger of being lost, wasâand continues to beâimportant to all of us.
From the beginning, then, the intellectual interests of the network have helped to guide the way I have studied it. In this sense, I view my position as something more akin to the director of a play, where I retain an overview of the âbig pictureâ and a significant level of control, but the final product is made richer through creative contribution from all. I chose a life history approach to my interviews, as this is both more satisfying for the participants, who get to tell their stories largely uninterrupted, and because it is a longer process which allows researcher and researched to come to know each other beyond the interview setting (Armitage and Gluck 2002). It is also a technique often used in social movement research, particularly when studying past action, for its ability to uncover the reasoning processes used by activists as part of their involvement (Della Porta 1992). FINRRAGE then becomes part of the overall trajectory of an activist life, rather than an isolated instance of collective action, so that the interviews were not merely about filling in the blanks left by archival documents or verifying their accuracy, but were instead focused towards the role FINRRAGE h...