European Women's Movements and Body Politics

The Struggle for Autonomy

J. Outshoorn

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781349674831, 9781137351654
• eBook ISBN: 9781137351661
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Social Sciences

This book examines how feminist movements have contested the dominant discourses and state politics that have impeded women's autonomy over their bodies since the late 1960s. It deals with two important facets of this struggle, prostitution and the right to abortion, as they relate to the Czech Republic, the Netherlands, Portugal and Sweden.

1

Women’s Movements and Bodily Integrity

Joyce Outshoorn, Radka Dudová, Ana Prata and Lenita Freidenvall

Introduction

‘Citizenship is not a word I would use’ was the phrase that best summarised the major findings of the analysis by Line Nyhagen Predelli, Beatrice Halsaa and Cecilie Thun in the project Gendered Citizenship in Multicultural Europe (FEMCIT) of how women’s movement activists viewed the concept of citizenship (Nyhagen Predelli et al., 2012:188). The activists used other framings to formulate their demands, using the language of human rights, equality or social justice. This central finding corresponds with the findings of the FEMCIT project, which focused on bodily citizenship (Outshoorn et al., 2012:135–138). The activists engaged in the campaigns for abortion rights framed the issue in terms of autonomy and self-determination, while those involved in changing prostitution legislation used self-determination alongside competing framings of gender equality, power between the sexes or human rights. Paralleling the gap that Nyhagen Predelli et al. noted between the concept of citizenship in feminist theory and the ‘lived experience’ of activists (2012:208–210), there is a gap between the central notion of bodily integrity underlying the claims of autonomy and self-determination, and the usual understandings of citizenship which do not include women’s claims to bodily integrity.

The political ideas and practices women developed across a range of ‘body’ issues since the beginning of second wave feminism in the late 1960s in Western European democracies and later in the post-transition states of Southern and Eastern Europe did not draw on the concept of citizenship, but sought to establish women’s autonomy regarding the body. In this way they revealed the genderedness of ‘universal’ concepts such as citizenship, human rights and justice, which were originally based on a false universalism taking the male as norm. In this book, our aim is to analyse the contribution of women’s movements in four different European countries to realising the right to bodily integrity for women, and to argue that the concept of bodily citizenship is both important in this political struggle and a productive tool for the analysis of women’s issues in politics and public policy.

Our research for this book originated within the FEMCIT project, which looked at the impact of women’s movements in Europe since the late 1960s on social and political change in 2007. As was stated by the editors of the first book, Remaking Citizenship in a Multicultural Europe, ‘women’s struggles for social, political and cultural inclusion, for redistribution and recognition, for autonomy and self-determination, were analysed through the lenses of intimate, economic, social, bodily and political citizenship’ (Halsaa, Roseneil and Sümer, 2012:5). The study explicitly includes ‘the claims and experiences of women from minoritized and racialized groups in its analysis of women’s movements’ (ibid.:2). By adding intimate and bodily citizenship as crucial aspects of modern citizenship, the FEMCIT project departed from the mainstream classification and discussion of citizenship as originally set out in the classic work of T.H. Marshall (1963). It also drew on the feminist critique of the modern conceptualisations of citizenship as based on the nation state. This critique argues that, while the individuals within a state have rights and obligations as well as a legal status that is bestowed on them as full members of the state, national citizenship is also an exclusionary concept, defining those who are entitled to citizenship. Moreover, it argues that rights, obligations and legal status are not equally distributed among women and men, the point of departure for the feminist critique of citizenship.

The concept of citizenship

Marshall (1963) identified three major types of citizenship: civil, political and social. Civil citizenship concerned the fundamental rights and freedoms extended to individuals, including freedom of speech and freedom of religion. Political citizenship referred to the right to vote and stand for election. Social citizenship included the right to minimum standards of living and social security. According to Marshall, the three types of citizenship and the rights that were connected to them developed gradually: civil rights were introduced in the 1700s, political rights in the 1800s and social rights in connection with the development of the welfare states in the 1900s. Also, all individuals on whom a citizenship status was bestowed were to be regarded as equal pertaining to rights and duties, although, de facto, they might have different access to these rights.

Feminist researchers have criticised the concept of universal citizenship as developed in the mainstream literature. Carole Pateman (1989, 1992), for instance, shows that women’s struggle for civil, political and social rights has not followed the model identified by Marshall. In Marshall’s model, she argues, women have been regarded as passive citizens; they have received social rights as mothers before they have received civil and political rights. Ruth Lister (1997) follows up Pateman’s critique of the ideal of the abstract universal citizen as based on a male norm, which implicitly means that the apparently gender-neutral concept of ‘citizen’ de facto refers to white, heterosexual and middle-class man. She sets out the dilemma of women’s struggle for an equal citizenship: should women strive for a gender-neutral view on citizenship enabling them to participate in society as equal partners (universalism) or should they pursue a more gender-differentiated model based on women’s needs and responsibilities (particularism)? Should women’s demands for inclusion be based on equality or difference, universalism or particularism, or on justice (the ethic of justice) or equal worth (the ethic of care)? Rejecting the false universalism in theories of citizenship, Lister calls for a combination: ‘a universalism that stands in creative tension to diversity and difference and that challenges the division and exclusionary inequalities, which can stem from diversity’ (1997:66). For her, a more ‘women-friendly’ conceptualisation of citizenship combines gender-neutral and gender-specific strategies, while being sensitive to differences between women. Hence, a more inclusive conceptualisation of citizenship is both plural and relational.

Ann Shola Orloff (1993) focuses on how states affect gender relations, concentrating mainly on social citizenship rights, but she makes the crucial point that the right to control one’s body and sexuality are taken for granted for men, but contested for women. She underlines that the control of women’s bodies in the family, workplace and public spaces undermines their abilities to participate as ‘independent citizens’ in the polity, ‘which in turn affect[s] their capacities to demand and use social rights’ (1993:309). Julia O’Connor (1993) criticises Marshall not only for using an undifferentiated category for members of a community, thus losing sight of those who are not equal in rights and duties. She also points to the fact that the image of the ideal citizen evolved at a time when women were denied citizenship, which raises questions about the conceptualisation of citizenship and ‘what constitutes taken for granted citizenship activities’ (1993:505).

Other feminists share the critique of the classic conceptualisations of citizenship for not taking into account the ways in which gender intersects with structures such as class, race, ethnicity, sexuality and age. Birte Siim (2000), for instance, maintains that a simple focus on inequality between women and men may disregard other forms of inequality, exclusion and discrimination, and argues for a plural citizenship, including the rights and responsibilities of minority and marginalised women. Nira Yuval-Davis (2007) connects citizenship to identity, addressing the subjective sides of citizenship – to feel that you are and to identify yourself as a citizen. More recent feminist conceptualisations of citizenship, consequently, focus on three main aspects of citizenship: rights and responsibilities, participation and practice, and belonging. They argue that a feminist view on citizenship should transgress dichotomies and prioritise the ‘lived experiences of citizenship’ in multicultural and transnational contexts (Strasser, 2012:25).

Surprisingly, given the central place of the body and sexualities in the campaigns and writings of women’s and feminist movements, the feminist work on citizenship has hardly developed the idea of bodily citizenship (see, for instance, Phillips, 1991a; Squires, 1999; Siim and Squires, 2007). The major strands of feminist thought used the liberal idea of self-determination and autonomy to make the case for bodily integrity, as Rian Voet has observed (1998:98–108). However, there are some starting points for developing the idea of bodily citizenship. Ruth Lister has made a convincing case for including bodily integrity in the concept of citizenship, arguing that it is a precondition for the other citizenship rights (1997:126–128). Sheila Shaver (1994) made a distinction between the formal recognition of body rights in law (often partial), specifically the right to abortion, and abortion as a medical entitlement. The latter retains medical control over abortion, but in effect allows a liberal abortion practice by inviting less political contestation and more adequate public funding. Bacchi and Beasley (2002) make the distinction between those who are assumed to have control over their bodies – full citizens – and those who are regarded as being controlled by their bodies and can thus be deprived of their citizens’ rights. This important idea definitely has a gender dimension, but also has consequences for children (minors) and those defined by the state as deviating from ‘normality’.

The dimension of bodily citizenship

The FEMCIT project set out to study all the dimensions of citizenship to assess the contribution of women’s and feminist movements towards equality and gender justice. This included the original triad of Marshall – civil, political and social citizenship – but in the project, bodily, economic, intimate and multicultural citizenship were also taken up as new dimensions. Research projects were developed covering all these dimensions: on the political representation of women and the agency of women politicians, gender inequalities in paid work, notably in care for the elderly, the organisation of intimate life, such as partnership, parenting, sexual identities and sexual violence, the autonomy of women’s bodies, the arrangement of child care and parental leave, and the multicultural citizenship experiences of women from majority and minoritised groups. In Remaking Citizenship in a Multicultural Europe, Halsaa, Roseneil and Sümer (2012:4) observed that these dimensions are never empirically separable and the boundaries of each are contestable. Two instances can illustrate this observation: the multicultural dimension in fact runs through all the other dimensions of citizenship, and the demarcation between bodily and intimate citizenship is indistinct and not easily resolved by a definition. Ken Plummer, who coined the concept of intimate citizenship, defined it as ‘the decisions people have to make over the control (or not) over one’s body, feelings, relationships; access (or not) to representations, relationships, public spaces, etc; and socially grounded choices (or not) about identities, gender experiences, erotic experiences’ (2003:14, emphasis in original). His ideas were developed against the backdrop of the changes in personal life and the new arenas of public debate forming around these issues (2003:x) and how these are shaped by public institutions, redrawing the public sphere.

Originally, the research on bodily citizenship was to include sexuality, as reflected in the selection of the two issues for studying the impact of women’s movements and bodily citizenship: abortion (standing for reproductive rights) and prostitution (involving sexuality). In the research on intimate citizenship, sexuality and reproductive rights could hardly be ignored given the focus on partnership and sexual identities. In the course of the FEMCIT project, a division of labour developed in which sexuality, including reproductive rights, was also studied as part of intimate citizenship. In the conclusions of our research on bodily citizenship, we observed that prostitution can be regarded as part of bodily integrity if one regards it as violence, as many feminists claim it to be, but we also argued that it can be seen as an economic issue involving workers’ rights, as many other feminists have argued (Outshoorn et al., 2012:140). No consensus in the overall project developed on the issue as to whether bodily citizenship ought to be regarded as a separate category or be subsumed under the category of intimate citizenship.

On the basis of our empirical work in four continental European countries, all four with a strong state tradition, we developed the view that bodily citizenship should be a separate category. Plummer’s perspective focuses on the individual level, paying little attention to the state, government and law, which cannot be equated to changing public arenas. He developed his ideas about intimate citizenship from an Anglo-American context, and although he discusses the globalisation of intimate citizenship, it is too anecdotal to pass for a systematic analysis of the issues involved, both empirically and conceptually. Finding overwhelming evidence for state control of and intervention in the issues we studied empirically, abortion and prostitution, we concluded that bodily citizenship for women was still limited, and, given states’ strong interest in bodies, that it should be a distinct, separate dimension.

Our choice was also informed by the work of Michel Foucault and Nikolas Rose. Foucault developed the concept of ‘bio-power’, which began in the 18th century (1980a:139), linking it to the rise of national states, which have generally not regarded bodies as purely private. States developed a vested interest in the bodies of their citizens for demographic, military, public health and eugenic reasons. Bio-power is a normalising power, with the objective of ensuring the preservation and reinforcement of society against ‘non-normal’ or potentially dangerous individuals, mainly through the progressive medicalisation of ‘non-normality’ (Malette, 2006:49–50). The mechanisms of bio-power are exercised by preventively monitoring any potential signs of disorder originating from their biology (Foucault, 1999:44). Foucault distinguishes between bio-power as a global strategy and disciplinary power as an individual strategy; the former is directly linked to the advance of medical power into the sphere of political control over the population. In the case of disciplinary power, technology is applied to the body of the individual, and its primary objective is to bring him/her round to accepting generally widespread ideas in conformity with the imperatives of industrial and capitalist society (Foucault, 2004:122, 144). The objective is not just to punish but to ‘retrain’ and adapt the individual, and this is achieved by acting on his/her body, his/her time, his/her physical gestures and his/her everyday habits. In bio-power, the mechanisms of power no longer rely on the disciplining and punishing of individual bodies. Instead they are finely entwined with the technologies of security. In contrast to blocking, bending and destroying forces, bio-power aims at producing them, helping them to grow and organise. The attention is shifted from the body of the individual to environmental, genetic and intergenerational factors. While the legal punishments of women who undergo abortion represent an example of a disciplinary power mechanism, the state-wide programme of preventive gynaecological checks applied to the whole female population is an example of the functioning of bio-power.

Disciplinary mechanisms and the mechanisms of population regulation are thus overlapping and interconnected. As Sawicki notes, ‘disciplinary technologies control the body through techniques that simultaneously render it more useful, more powerful and more docile’ (1991:83). Bio-power manifests itself as a political economy, which is applied to the entire population in an all-pervasive manner, yet it integrates random and individual elements and reconstitutes them as a strategy of the whole (e.g. birth rate, ageing and illness). Disciplinary power here no longer acts on the individual body but on the totality of the human species, the effort being to ensure that it remains balanced and regular. Examples are efforts to reduce the mortality rate, prolong life expectancy, stimulate fertility or reduce congenital and hereditary diseases (Malette, 2006:53). According to Foucault, bio-power normalises, intending to preserve and reinforce the social system against ‘non-normal’ individuals. It exerts a positive influence on life by improving and optimising it, and by submitting it to control, regulation and careful monitoring (Foucault, 1980a:137). In this way bio-power was essential to the development of capitalism, which could only evolve by integrating the human body into production and by adapting the population to the economic process (ibid.:141).

Following Foucault’s idea of bio-power, Rose and Costas have coined the word ‘biological citizenship’ (Rose and Novas, 2004; Rose, 2007) to ‘encompass all those citizenship projects that have linked their conceptions to beliefs about the biological existence of human beings, as individuals, as men and women, as families and lineages, as communities, as populations and races, and as species’ (Rose, 2007:132). According to them, this biological citizenship is fundamentally changing in the new bio-politics which has developed since the biotechnological revolution at the end of the 20th century, with its discoveries in genomics and reproductive technologies. As Rose later notes, ‘bare life’ itself has become ‘the basis of citizenship claims and protections’ (ibid.:133), leading to a new vital politics. Previously, states were involved in the politics of health: births, death, diseases and their control (ibid.:3), and bodies in this way were public matter. But today there is a devolution of the power of states ‘in managing health and reproduction to quasi-autonomous regulatory bodies’ (ibid.), while at the same time citizens are urged to become ‘active and responsible consumers of medical services and products’ (ibid., 4). In this way biological citizenship is changing in form and content, and is leading to new kinds of politics, with pharmaceutical companies dealing with genetic material as major players, and new types of activism around diseases and other health issues. Prior to Rose, Deborah Heath, Rayna Rapp and Karen-Sue Taussig coined the term ‘genetic citizenship’ (2004) for this new emerging field of health politics, participation and contestation, but Rose points out that genetics is only one axis of the ways in which the biological make-up can become a political issue (2007:137). We agree with this analysis, and it underlies our argument of recognising ‘the politics of life itself’, as the title of Rose’s book has it, as a separate category of citizenship. However, we prefer to call it ‘bodily citizenship’, mainly because the concept of biology is open to many interpretations, and in common parlance is too often regarded as mere matter, while it is crucial to remember that people are always embodied.

The present book goes beyond our first analysis of women’s movements’ contestation of state governance and dominant political discourses about the female body in three respects. Firstly, we shall be analysing our cases in a stricter comparative way, showing how earlier policy legacies structured the political context which the new women’s movements encountered and which influenced their framings, strategically or otherwise. Secondly, by drawing on the rich material gathered in the original research, we shall be explaining how, despite past legacies, policy changes proved possible in the context of changing political configurations and discursive changes and the challenge of women’s movements. Thirdly, we shall use our findings to elucidate the concept of bodily citizenship. While aware of the concern that a proliferation of categories of citizenship might undermine the strength of the concept, we shall maintain that bodily integrity ought to be a distinct category of citizenship, for both theoretical and political reasons. For this purpose we will be drawing on the work of Michel Foucault and his concept of bio-power and on Nikolas Rose’s (2007) recent work on contemporary bio-politics.

As mentioned, issues concerning the body have been central to the new women’s movements that have arisen in Western Europe since the 1960s. States had a legacy of curtailing women’s reproductive capacities and regulating their sexualities, as well as upholding patriarchal control by the institutionalisation of marriage and inheritance laws. Violence against women was generally regarded as a family affair and here the state also delegated its monopoly on violence to the heads of households to control their families. Since the 19th century, women’s bodies have been central to processes of demographic projects of states, both of a qualitative and quantitative nature. The regulation of fertility and reproduction at the social level is common to all types of state systems. As Alena Heitlinger has written: ‘All societies intervene in procreati...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• List of Abbreviations
• 1. Women’s Movements and Bodily Integrity
• 2. Constructing Bodily Citizenship in the Czech Republic
• 3. The Struggle for Bodily Integrity in the Netherlands
• 4. Contesting Portugal’s Bodily Citizenship
• 5. In Pursuit of Bodily Integrity in Sweden
• 6. Women’s Movements and Bodily Autonomy: Making the Case for Bodily Citizenship
• References
• Index