Abstract: Decolonizing Our Wombs: Gender Justice and Petro-PharmaCulture How we raise our children is critical to radical, collaborative social justice for women. In a patriarchal society, freedom of choice is illusory, operating through...
moreAbstract:
Decolonizing Our Wombs: Gender Justice and Petro-PharmaCulture
How we raise our children is critical to radical, collaborative social justice for women. In a patriarchal society, freedom of choice is illusory, operating through entanglements of institutional and symbolic state networks (El Saadawi). Biological events are reconfigured as medical crises, involving generic, reductionist protocols. The specificity of a woman’s body is dematerialized when petro-pharmacultural practices are indiscriminately insinuated through hetero-normativity—assimilationist consumerism, sanitary ideologies (Virilio). As co-founder of “Occupy Education, Pregnancy, Birth, Parenting,” I struggle to disentangle the roots of systemic corporeal and social violence—recognizing how pregnancy, birth, and mothering in the US function as officially sanctioned misogyny and ethnocentrism. My essay investigates neoliberal, de-historicized forms of consciousness in which women as citizen-subjects fail to recognize how we relinquish our civil rights and socio-political agency by succumbing to corporate fear tactics (Sandoval). I identify this failure as the violence-of-the-everyday and its corresponding sanctity of normalcy—a violence that perpetuates convenience-culture, maintaining misogynist infrastructural practices. Margaret Thatcher’s infamous declaration, “There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families,” belies our integrity as a global interdependent whole. Stripped of a tangible community (mommy-blogs are the most popular form of shared experience), parents are entrenched in how-to techniques (such as sleep-training) for raising infants capable of self-soothing. An alarming number of toddlers now have ready access to their caregiver’s iphone/iPad (often used as a surrogate baby-sitter). This Net-Generation is being initiated into the world as “self-reliant” infants and technologically literate babies—the neoliberal wet dream is our current reality. As a single mother raising my four year-old son I have intimately experienced intra-cultural impacts of our market-driven mediaocracy’s denial of corporeal, societal, and global interconnectedness (Spivak). Every day I make the conscious choice to deflect how this plutocrat-driven democracy, characterized by conformist laws-of-conduct, may impact my son. Petroleum-parenting, what I identify as the decisions parents make that overwhelmingly contribute to both environmental destruction and body-phobic institutional practices, reifies the status-quo and our myopic capacity to engage beyond our shame-based, accumulationist individualism. This ethnocentrism, an absence of empathy, spawns underlying meta-patterns that drive both petroleum and pharmaceutical use. Internalized fascism (one version of Foucault’s scientia sexualis) (Foucault and Parsipur), the pathologizing of motherhood, is so integral to our cells and psyches we are often not cognizant of its constitutive and formative mechanisms (Mernissi). In our petroleum-pharmaceutical-addicted cyber-world, our collusion with corporate forms of domination is infinite. Interlocking mechanisms among such infrastructures enable both complicity (perpetuating apathy and its concomitant loss of agency) and emancipation (allowing creativity and connectivity to flourish). Krishnamurti’s warning, “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society,” characterizes both our global crisis and our potential as parents to intervene in convenience-culture. Upon close scrutiny, the confluence of the violence-of-the-everyday in relation to petroleum-parenting may actually demonstrate sites in which we can occupy the maternal—practicing individual and collective ethical action toward a gender justice, a social ecology of empathy. Audre Lorde’s erotic politics embodies this decolonizing, liberatory practice of cultivating sustainable relationships.
