labrys, études féministes/ estudos feministas
juillet /décembre / 2014  -julho/dezembro 2014

Labor Pains:

A Feminist Foucauldian Analysis of the Links between Transnational Production and Reproduction

Margaret A. McLaren

Abstract:

I argue that Foucault’s concepts of biopower and governmentality are especially useful for a transnational feminist analysis of reproductive policies and labor.  Feminists have successfully demonstrated a connection between production and reproduction.   I demonstrate that Foucault’s work further articulates this connection: biopower can illuminate the relationships between population, political bodies, and women’s individual bodies as producers and reproducers.  Moreover, the concept of governmentality enhances our understanding of transnational relations and the formation of subjectivity.  Feminist analyses benefit from Foucault's more expansive notion of politics that illuminates the ways that policies and information govern groups, as well as provide frameworks for the formation of subjectivities and practices of resistance.

Keywords: Foucault, biopolitics, governmentality, reproduction, labor, globalization

Feminists find many useful tools in Foucault’s work.  Many feminists find Foucault’s analytics of power--which encompasses the link between the social body and the individual body—extremely useful for discussing issues of sex, gender, and sexuality. Early feminist work on Foucault focused on his concept of discipline, and the way that it shaped individual bodies and practices, especially practices of femininity (Bartky, 1990, Bordo, 1993).  Recently feminists engage Foucault’s concepts of biopower, biopolitics and governmentality to analyse social processes and policies.  While the concept of discipline addresses the way that power operates on individual bodies, the idea of biopower concerns the way that power functions through the social body.

Biopower involves the control of populations with the aim of regulating birth, death, reproduction, health, life expectancy, and migration (Foucault 1980b: 139–40). Biopower and biopolitics operate at the state level and must be seen in the context of the management of state and local forces. According to Foucault, biopolitics

“[...]aims to treat the ‘population’ as a set of coexisting living beings with particular biological and pathological features, and which as such falls under specific forms of knowledge and technique” (Foucault, 2007: 367).

The knowledges and techniques of biopolitics serve the interests of capitalism. Foucault claims:

“This biopower was without question an indispensable element in the development of capitalism; the latter would not have been possible without the controlled insertion of bodies into the machinery of production and the adjustment of the population to economic processes” (Foucault 1980a:141).

Biopower – the control of life through policies, practices, and regulations – arises within the context of the increase in knowledges and administration. It clearly articulates a connection between the microphysics of power (bodies, identities) and macro-power (populations/identity categories). Although Foucault explicitly states that biopolitics is a strategy at the state level, in the context of globalization in the twenty-first century it is also used at the transnational level, and operates through a variety of institutions: economics, laws, policies, and social norms.

Like the concept of biopolitics, Foucault’s work on governmentality links the idea of state power to individuals; the state operates upon individuals through tactics and strategies. However, Foucault explicitly distinguishes his idea of governmentality from government or state.  Governmentality on Foucault’s account does not replace a sovereign state or a disciplinary society but exists in tandem with them. He describes the relationship among sovereignty, discipline, and government as a triangle that works through apparatuses of security and whose primary target is the population (Foucault, 1991: 102). Governmentality includes a range of strategies and tactics used to achieve certain ends, such as population control or public health. This may include laws, policies, institutions, programs, or the circulation of specific information.

Foucault’s idea of governmentality makes sense in light of globalization and the changing role of the state, because it encompasses a broader notion of government than politics or the state; it includes government, population, and political economy. Hence governmentality is a form of power that exceeds state boundaries and is not primarily legislative or judicial. It is a form of power that precedes the formation of the state (Foucault, 2007: 109). As a form of power not confined to state territory or limited by exercising forms of state power, the idea of governmentality is useful for analysing the ways power operates both within and across state boundaries.

The spread of global capitalism, the increase in transnational corporations, and the regulation by international institutions such as the IMF, World Bank, and World Trade Organization lead some to argue that the sovereignty of the nation-state has been undermined. Foucault, too, questioned the importance of the state:

“But the state, doubtless no more today than in the past, does not have this unity, this individuality, and rigorous functionality, nor, I would go so far as to say, this importance. After all, maybe the state is only a composite reality and a mythicized abstraction whose importance is much less than we think” (Foucault, 2007: 109).

Certainly, the state alone is not responsible for all the institutions that regulate the life of its citizens, however, it can play an important role.  Here I examine the complex interplay of reproductive policies, transnational labour flows, and their effects on women’s work and reproduction.

Foucault’s concepts of governmentality, biopower, and biopolitics are useful for analysing the effects of reproductive and labor policies on women in the context of globalization because the relationship between populations, government, and political economy transcends national borders and state regulation.  The gendered effects of globalization particularly in regard to the impact of Structural Adjustment Programs on women are well known.  Here I focus on the interplay between labor and reproductive policies, which includes transnational flows of labor.  In fact, migration plays a key role in the global labour market. Increasingly, it is women who migrate to take up jobs outside their home countries.

“Throughout the 1990’s women outnumbered men among migrants to the United States, Canada, Sweden, the United Kingdom, Argentina, and Israel. Moreover, women make up over half the Filipino migrants to all countries, and 84% of Sri Lankan immigrants to the Middle East” (Ehrenreich & Hochschild, 2002: 6). 

The gendered nature of migration reflects the sexual division of labour; women often migrate to perform care work, domestic work, or sex work.  Even when women do not migrate outside their country of origin for work, their opportunities are constrained by larger structural issues and the institutional trends of multinational corporations, as well as normative gender discourses.

Discourses of gender normativity operate in relation to citizenship, work, and motherhood.  It is both because of their bodily “difference” from men and their socially prescribed gender roles that women have not only been excluded from the category of citizen but also excluded from the category of the political altogether;

“t[...]he tradition of Western political thought rests on a conception of the political that is constructed through the exclusion of women and all that is represented by femininity and women’s bodies“ (Shanley & Pateman, 1991: 3). 

In the past four decades, women have entered the paid workforce in record numbers.  Of course, women’s participation in the workforce varies by race and class. But as Teresa Amott and Julie Matthaei report in their multicultural economic history of women’s work in the United States,

“[…] [c]hanges in the supply of and demand for labor brought increases in women’s labor force participation rates for all racial-ethnic groups and classes during the twentieth century… “ (1996: 304).

Globally women’s participation in paid employment increased dramatically as well, often because of the new employment opportunities offered by multinational corporations.

This relatively recent increase in women’s participation in the paid labor force counters the historical trend of excluding women from the public sphere.  Historically, justification for women’s exclusion from the public sphere of politics and paid labor was often based on their role as mothers (or potential mothers):

“Childbirth and motherhood have symbolized the natural capacities that set women apart from politics and citizenship; motherhood and citizenship, in this perspective, like difference and equality, are mutually exclusive” (Pateman 1991: 18).

 Until passage of the Pregnancy Discrimination Act in 1978 in the United States, women could be forced to take unpaid leave months before and after the birth of a child, with no guarantee of employment when they returned. Recalling the 1960s, Sarah Weddington, the attorney who argued Roe v. Wade before the Supreme Court, said,

“If you were a school teacher in Texas, you could be told you had to quit if you got pregnant, or you’d be fired” (quoted in Rowland, 2004: 157). 

This control of women’s sexuality and reproduction by prohibiting employment for pregnant women continued into the 1980s when multinational corporations located in the Global South gave pregnancy tests to women job applicants. In some cases, not only does the ideology of motherhood pose an ideological barrier to women’s participation in the public sphere, but also laws and policies prevent mothers’ full participation. Here we can see one of the ways that the biological “facts” about females’ capacity to bear children gets transformed into restrictive normative social roles and expectations, motherhood as liability. Similarly, stereotypes of femininity were sometimes used to exclude women from work, for example, femininity equals weak, vulnerable, passive, dependent, fragile, docile, delicate.

Globalization is not a gender-neutral phenomenon; it serves both to re-create and re-shape traditional gender roles. Not surprisingly, because women are placed differently in particular cultures and societies than men, globalization has a differential effect on women. With the rise of multinational corporations and the switch to “light industries” of clothing and electronics manufacture as opposed to the “heavy industries” of construction and mining, women became the preferred employee. Multinational corporations prefer to employ women for a variety of reasons. Seen as supplementary workers rather than as the main wage earners, they are paid less than men. Women are also viewed as more “docile” and better suited to tedious repetitive tasks.

“Multinationals want a workforce that is docile, easily manipulated and willing to do boring, repetitive assembly work. Women, they claim, are the perfect employees, with their ‘natural patience’ and ‘manual dexterity’” (Fuentes & Ehrenreich, 1983: 12).

Sometimes states collude with corporations, trading on the same gender stereotypes. For example, the Malaysian government published an investment brochure boasting that:

“The manual dexterity of the oriental female is famous the world over. Her hands are small and she works with extreme care… Who, therefore, could be better qualified by nature and inheritance to contribute to the efficiency of a bench-assembly production line than the oriental girl?” (Kabeer, 2000: 6)

 Women are presumably sought after for their “natural feminine” qualities of patience and small hands with nimble fingers. But in actuality employers target women as employees because they can be paid less than men and are less likely to strike or organize unions. As evidenced by the Malaysian government brochure, it is the state as well as employers that reinforce this ideology of the natural feminine abilities of young women as workers. This ideology serves the interests of global capitalism and goes well beyond the state. The ‘nimble fingers’ discourse is used to justify the hiring of women in Mexican maquiladoras, Malaysian assembly lines, the Colombian flower industry, and as we shall see, in Spanish strawberry fields.

In addition to using the stereotypes and discourse of femininity to justify preferential hiring of women to low-paid, exploitative factory work, multinational corporations seek to regulate women’s reproduction as well. Employers prefer not just any women, but young, single women without children. In fact, some companies give pregnancy tests to potential employees, prefer to hire women who have been sterilized, or even offer prizes to women employees who undergo sterilization (Fuentes & Ehrenriech, 1983). This regulation of reproduction through practices and policies can be understood as an instance of Foucault’s biopower.  Keep in mind, biopower and biopolitics– the control of life through policies, practices, and regulations—serve the interests of capitalism, in this case, by ensuring an available family-free workforce.  Single female workers can be more easily forced to work long hours, for less pay, and are expected to be compliant even in the face of sexual harassment or abuse. 

In contrast to the preference for young, single women to work in the factories in the FTZs (Free Trade Zones) and the EPZs (Export Processing Zones), strawberry farmers in Spain prefer to hire married Moroccan women with young children to perform the seasonal agricultural work. Antonio Martin Gonzalez, a strawberry farmer in Cartaya, Spain says:

“We don’t take women without children because we run the risk they’ll run away, that they will remain in Spain and not return to Morocco” (der Spiegel, May 11, 2007).

Far from being the exploitative policy of a single individual or business, the idea of “circular migration,

”[…] temporary legal migration for seasonal workers, is supported by both the Spanish and Moroccan governments. Workers are recruited in Morocco and given temporary three- to nine-month legal contracts to work in Spain. Some in the European Union see circular migration as a solution to the need for cheap labor and a way to control illegal immigration" (der Spiegel, May 11, 2007).

"Indeed, the circular migration program between Morocco and Spain was supported with 1.2 million euros in funding from the EU" (OSCE, 2009: 53).

Interestingly, the same nimble fingers discourse that justifies young, single, Mexican women working in maquiladoras is used to justify the choice of married Moroccan mothers as strawberry pickers. As the mayor of Cartaya told the Moroccan press,

“Experience has shown that Moroccan women are sensitive and hard-working and with their slender hands that is something the strawberries really appreciate” (quoted in Zeneidi, 2011: 5).

Although it is not clear the strawberries appreciate the slender hands of the Moroccan women, it is clear that the discourse of femininity that characterizes women as well suited to repetitive tasks that require manual dexterity as well as characterizing them as docile, and easy to control is employed transnationally in various contexts and in different working situations (agriculture, textiles, electronics manufacturing). It is a discourse with global circulation.

Although motherhood is an explicit criterion for selection of the Moroccan women workers, pregnancy or birth during the time that they are working in Spain is prohibited and results in immediate dismissal from the job (Zeneidi, 2011). In 2008, twenty-five Moroccan women were sent back to Morocco after giving birth in Huelva, Spain (Thomas, 2009). Here we can see how their status as mothers functions in a complex and ambivalent way: it both qualifies them for work (albeit exploited labor) if they already have children and disqualifies them from work if they have children while employed. In this way reproductive capacity is controlled through the distribution of opportunities, policies, and expectations. The individual body (micropower) is controlled through the social body (biopower/biopolitics). Moreover, the policy to select mothers to work puts pressure on women to have children in order to qualify as a seasonal worker.

“These women face demands to have children so that they will be eligible for immigration. This condition creates problems. The negative repercussions include divorce and family break-up” (Ali, 2011).[1]

While women in Morocco are pressured to have children in order to qualify for job opportunities in Spain, men and women in India are threatened with job loss if they do not consent to sterilization (Brown, 1984).  In her study of a Bangladeshi refugee community in India, Carolyn Brown discovered that 38% of all men over 30 had undergone sterilization.  For men 41-45 years of age, the percentage was even higher; over 50% of men had been sterilized.  Many of these sterilizations took place during the period of the Indian Emergency (1975-77) under Indira Gandhi’s rule. 

The Indian Emergency was characterised by: the undermining of Parliamentary rule, the weakening of the multiparty system, the control of the media, the jailing of political opposition, and the loss of constitutional freedoms, including reproductive freedom.  The excesses of the Family Planning Program during the India Emergency, such as forcing poor women to undergo forced sterilization against their will, outraged many.  During this time, 8.3 million sterilizations were performed, often in sterilization camps; 75% of these were vasectomies.

 However, involuntary sterilization neither began nor ended during the Indian Emergency period (it was just more visible and zealous).  In fact, in 1952 India was the first country in the world to institute a Family Planning Program with the explicit aim of population control; it was largely funded by the Ford Foundation in the United States (Singh, et. al. 2012 and Hartmann, 1987).  Not coincidently at this same time, foreign development aid from Sweden and Norway was directed toward family planning, specifically sterilization programs (Hogberg, 2008).  Under the guise of the Family Planning Program, sterilization for both men and women was introduced in 1966, and by 1967 the government was providing cash incentives for sterilization. 

By the late 1970’s-early 1980’s the focus of sterilization programs had shifted to women, in spite of the fact that vasectomies are simpler and less dangerous medical procedures than tubal ligations.  The reasons for the shift are many: men felt that their masculinity was tied to their fertility, and therefore compromised by sterilization; men typically make the decisions in the family, including about who should be sterilized; and international development programs became women-centered, preferring to provide goods and services to women rather than men (Brown, 2004, Buckingham, 2006, and Singh, et. al. 2012). 

This focus on women, in particular on female fertility, was linked to international efforts to curb population growth.  In the early 20-century British colonialists in India even blamed India’s social and economic stagnation on the ‘population problem’ (Buckingham, 2006).

 Influenced by Malthusian ideas about population, fitness, and productivity the population problem was directly related to the increase in the number of ‘non-productive’ people; in the context of India this meant poor agricultural labourers.  Sterilization was related to labor and productivity in other ways, as well.  In addition to cash payments, people were threatened with job loss if they did not agree to be sterilized.  Government workers and civil servants are the most susceptible to this threat, as they hold government jobs and the government carries out the sterilization program.  For instance, at Madan Mill, a government owned factory, and the main employer in the small town of Hastinapur the majority of men have had vascetomies because they feared losing their jobs.

 Those who refused were suspended for a week, and some had their salaries withheld for three to four months (Brown, 1984).  It is not only the working poor who are subject to the threat of losing their jobs over sterilization; the government health professional/workers must recruit a certain number of sterilizations per month, if they do not meet this quota they can lose their jobs.  Even though the ostensible reason for pressuring individuals to undergo sterilization is population control, in itself an instance of Foucault’s biopolitics, examining who is targeted for sterilization reveals the insidious class, caste, ethnic, racial and national bias. 

 The community of Bangladeshi refugees in Hastinapur were settled there with the explicit intention of providing labor at a government owned mill: “only refugees selected and sponsored by the government are allowed to migrate to Hastinapur; those selected moved at the government expense and ensured at least one job in the factory per household.  In actuality there has been a good deal of secondary unsponsored migration, providing a much larger labor pool than the mill can employ, with consequent serious unemployment and underemployment in the community (Brown, 1984: 50).

 Here we see the complex interplay between the regulation of individual bodies through migration, employment, and sterilization.  And the regulation of the social body, through the geographic segregation of Bengalis as an ethnic and religious minority within the Indian state of Utter Pradesh, limited and controlled employment opportunities, and selective population control.  Reproductive control, employment and population are linked together through laws, policies, practices, and conceptual and discursive frameworks.  Although the state regulates the specific content of reproductive laws, population control is a transnational concern, and international theories, policies and practices shape what happens at the state level.  For instance, as mentioned the shift in focus from sterilizing men to women in India resulted from a global shift toward women-centered development. 

However, in this case women-centered does not necessarily benefit women, it simply means that international and development agencies targeted their projects towards women.  So, one must ask: Does the wide availability of, and rewards for, sterilization benefit women?  Is it a broadening of reproductive rights, or a narrowing?

If free sterilization were simply an available option for women, then it would arguably increase their reproductive choices.  However, aggressive sterilization campaigns have been carried out in India, especially targeting poor women and men.  As mentioned earlier, some people are threatened with loss of livelihood for refusing to get sterilized, or their wages are withheld.   Cash incentives to undergo sterilization, although better than punishment, bring up another set of issues.  Offering desperately poor people cash to undergo surgery that irreversibly affects their future is a form of coercion. 

Other issues that arise are informed consent and the conditions under which the surgery is performed.  The Indian Journal of Medical Ethics has brought attention to the fact that often sterilizations are carried out in unhygienic conditions with poor equipment by inexperienced doctors, resulting in the patient’s death.  And a report by the Indian Health Ministry revealed that some poor women are forced to undergo sex-selective abortions followed by sterilization.  Even in situations where force or coercion is not involved, women are not always informed that sterilization results in the inability to have children.  The tubal ligations that women undergo are difficult and expensive to reverse.  Although the sterilization is covered under the health plan of the Indian government, reversible operations are not.  So for the poor women who are encouraged to get sterilized, it is effectively irreversible.  A recent study found that one third of the women who had been sterilized had not been informed that it was irreversible (Singh, et. al., 2012).

Make no mistake; sterilization abuses are certainly not unique to India or the Global South.  The United States has a long history of using sterilization ostensibly to reduce population while targeting racial and ethnic minorities, and the poor.  In the US sterilization was widely used in the 1930s and 40s on people considered ‘feeble-minded’ and or those with ‘criminal tendencies.’ This type of eugenics weeded out those who were considered undesirable.  Usually these sterilizations took place in institutions, and were often a condition of being released from confinement.  At the time, laws supported sterilization with or without the patient’s consent. 

In 1927 in the infamous case of Buck v. Bell the United States Supreme Court ruled that states could sterilize people if it believed their offspring would be a burden on society.  Carrie Buck was portrayed as an “imbecile” by the Court, but was more likely singled out for sterilization because her mother was a prostitute and was viewed by the community as a moral degenerate.  The majority opinion of the Supreme Court justified its decision in part by stating that, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough” (Lee, 2009).  We can see through these examples that social control through forced sterilization focused on those who were institutionalized.  The justifications emphasized their unfitness as parents, the burden that would be placed on society if the ‘unfit’ were allowed to procreate, and the benefit of ‘weeding out’ those perceived as criminal or lacking average intelligence. 

In other words, sterilization focused on the socially marginalized.  Those justifications often cloaked other reasons for sterilizations, such as class and racial bias.  Eugenics boards made decisions about who should be sterilized on the basis of very little information, but it usually included IQ rating and social and economic background.  According to one Eugenics Board member: “We may well have sterilized some folk who weren’t that much retarded” (Stern, 2005, 154). 

The majority of those recommended for sterilization were poor and uneducated, yet only a few were mentally retarded which served as the ostensible reason for the sterilization at that time.  In the mid-1970’s eugenic sterilization because of mental illness or mental retardation was no longer supported by most states’ laws, nor by popular opinion.  However, a new sterilization campaign was being waged, targeting poor women and women of color.  In 1973 two young Black girls, the Relf sisters ages 12 and 14, were sterilized without their knowledge by Montgomery, Alabama Community Action Council’s Family Planning Clinic.  The reason for their sterilization—social workers had seen them with boys, and wanted to prevent the possibility of future pregnancy if the girls were to become sexually active.

 The girls’ mother, who was uneducated and illiterate signed a form that she believed gave permission for her daughters to get birth control.  Once she discovered that her young daughters had been sterilized, she was outraged and the Southern Poverty Law Center filed a lawsuit on her behalf.  This brought widespread attention to the sterilization abuses that were rampant in the US at that time.  For example, in the mid-1970s a class action was filed on behalf of working class women of Mexican origin who underwent involuntary sterilization in California.  In this case, the women had been persuaded to undergo sterilization just after delivering their babies by Caesarean section.

  The women were in pain and still under the influence of anesthia from the surgery, clearly not ideal circumstances for making irreversible life decisions.  In three of the cases no consent was obtained and in the other cases, consent was granted under duress, or patients were lied to or misinformed.  These circumstances mean that informed consent was not obtained in any of the cases.  In addition to the element of coercion present in these involuntary sterilizations, they were funded by federal agencies as part of the family planning initiatives included in the strategy of the “war on poverty” (Stern, 2005: 200).  Additionally, medical residents pressured the women into getting tubal ligations so that they could meet the quota necessary for their medical training.

 This mirrors the issues in India of coercion, lack of informed consent, and health care workers forced to meet sterilization quotas.  In 1979 the state of California finally struck the statute that allowed for involuntary sterilization from state law, after it been on the books since 1909.  Alabama and California were not alone in retaining involuntary sterilization laws until the 1970s, and there are a number of sterilization abuses recorded.   Low-income women of color were specifically targeted for these federally funded sterilizations; one judge estimated that in the early 1970s alone, “100, 000-150 000 low-income women had been sterilized under the auspices of federal programs” (Stern, 2005, 202).  In 1973, 43% of all government sterilizations had been carried out on African-American women.  Native Americans, too, suffered disproportionately under this genocidal program of forced sterilization, between 1973-1976 more than 3,400 Native American women in just four states had undergone federally funded sterilization; by the late 1970s between 20-50% of all Native American women of childbearing age had been sterilized without their consent. 

Likewise, Puerto Rican women both on the island and in New York City reported large numbers of non-consensual sterilizations.  Because many of the sterilizations targeted poor women, one tactic used by social workers, medical professionals and government officials was to threaten to eliminate welfare benefits if the surgery was refused.  So, economic coercion was a useful strategy to ensure the compliance of women who would have otherwise refused to be sterilized. 

Involuntary sterilizations became less widespread after the public exposure through highly visible court cases, media attention, and organizing and protest of its multiple excesses and abuses by some of the targeted groups.  However, with the popular acceptance of birth control and the legalization of abortion in 1973, voluntary sterilization became the birth control method of choice for many American women;

“[…]in 1973 sterilization was the most common method of birth control by Americans in the thirty to forty-four age bracket” (Stern, 2005, 200).

  Since the 1970s voluntary sterilization as well as other methods of birth control have become easier to access and more affordable in the US.  However, the widespread of acceptance of voluntary sterilization brings with it another set of problems.  Currently, in the US a group called Children Requiring a Caring Kommunity (acronym CRACK) offers cash to drug addicted women who agree to get sterilized.  Founded in 1997 by a California housewife who adopted four children from a drug addicted mother, the organization put up billboards advertising the $200 payment for female drug addicts to get sterilized.  The group even touted the slogan, “Don’t Let a Pregnancy Interfere with Your Drug Addiction” (Largent, 2008, 145). 

In this case, although sterilization is portrayed as a choice, cash incentives to drug addicted women amounts to economic coercion.  In this contemporary example in the United States, we see a similar pattern to that in India, and other countries; it is the putatively undesirable who are the target group for sterilization, the poor, the mentally retarded, the disabled, the drug addicted, social misfits, and ethnic, religious, and racial minorities.  In Foucault’s terms, it is the marginalized, the subaltern that are the target of violence, both social and physical. 

As Foucault illustrates in many of his genealogies, norms operate through exclusion.  Sometimes groups are targeted based on their ethnicity or race; for instance, Native Americans in the USA and indigenous people in Brazil and Peru (Cook, 2000).  And sometimes groups are formed by the policy itself, as in the case of compulsory sterilization in Sweden.  Compulsory sterilization was common in Sweden between 1935-1975, during this time 63,000 persons were sterilized. 

The laws at that time supported sterilization in the case of those who were mentally retarded or physically disabled, or those who were judged unable to properly care for their children.  But when the laws were applied, doctors and social workers included those living like vagrants as candidates for compulsory sterilization.  Torbjorn Tonnsjo tries to distinguish Sweden’s compulsory sterilization policy from the eugenic policies of Nazi Germany.  He defends Sweden’s policy as not having a racist motivation, in contrast to that of Germany.  However, he goes on to say:

“[…] when the sterilization laws were actually applied, some racist tendencies surfaced even in Sweden.  Some people were accused by doctors and social workers of living like ‘vagrants’, and some of those who lived like vagrants were held to belong to a special group of people commonly called ‘tattare’.  Tattare was not a racial group, it was not even what we would call today an ethnic group, only some people singled out because of their vagrancy.  These people were characterized as ‘tattare’ simply because of their way of life.  But some people implementing the sterilization laws, having prejudices against the tattare, seem to have believed that tattare was a race” (Tonnsjo, 1998: 237). 

So, Tonnsjo concludes that some sterilization decisions may have been informed by racist beliefs, and that this was wrong.  But regardless of whether the tattare was a race, or was only believed to be a race by the authorities implementing the sterilization program, they were targeted because of their socio-economic class and marginalized lifestyle.  In this case, an already marginalized group were racialized, and then judged as unfit to bear children.  Here we see the multiple intersections of social control, reproductive control, and population control, and the making-over of the non-productive body as the non-reproductive body.      

A Foucauldian analysis helps to illuminate the many layers and levels of power that traverse society and transcend national borders—migration, multinational corporations, agribusiness, neo-Malthusian ideas about population and productivity, medical discourse, neoliberal ideas, policies and practices, social and professional norms, and the relationship between the individual reproductive body, the productive body, and the body politic.  Foucault’s toolbox also provides novel ways to conceptualize resistance.

Transnational feminism often mobilizes human rights discourse to secure women’s rights. While utilizing rights discourse is a significant strategy to promote gender equality and ensure women’s safety, Foucault’s concept of governmentality can help to explain the ways in which oppressive policies and practices can produce resistance to them, at both the individual and collective level.  The Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women (GAATW)

“[…]has consistently promoted and defended the human rights of all migrants and their families with a special focus on women, against the threat of an increasingly globalized labor market” (Thomas, 2009: 6).

Nerea Thomas authored GAATW’s report on the situation of temporary migrant workers in the strawberry sector in Spain which discusses the shift from male undocumented workers in the agricultural sector to circular migration schemes with Poland, Bulgaria, and Romania (until they were admitted into the EU) and since then, the change to a circular migration agreement with Morocco. This increasing feminization and ethnification of the strawberry sector relies on the use of gender stereotypes (women are more careful, work harder, and are less problematic than men) and cultural stereotypes (Moroccan women are less problematic than Eastern European women) (Thomas, 2009).

Thomas notes that the requirement of marriage and children for Moroccan strawberry workers discriminates not only against women who do not meet both of these requirements, such as single mothers, but also against men. Protecting women’s rights in this case means recognizing that some, but not all, women benefit from preferential hiring. But it also means examining the conditions of the work for which married women with children are hired, and advocating for better labor conditions.

The language and strategies of human rights discourse prove useful in battling discrimination and promoting gender equality.  However, human rights operate mainly at the level of the state, and rely on state power to secure and enforce rights.  As I have demonstrated, economic changes due to globalization, state policies and interstate agreements, regional alliances, and gender ideology about femininity (women’s work) and motherhood all contribute to shaping the opportunities available to poor, rural Moroccan women.

 Foucault’s concepts of governmentality and resistance encompass this variety of macro- and micro-powers.  Both literally and metaphorically, their subjectivity is formed through a politics of location: as women, as mothers, as rural, as poor, as Moroccan, and as (temporary) immigrants.  However, migrating alone means that the women may be living on their own for the first time. And some enjoyed this newfound independence and not being subject to traditional gender roles and male scrutiny. They “[…]found temporary relief in being able to escape their traditional roles at home.” As one interviewee said: “Nowadays girls’ lives resemble boys lives: they have to fight, they travel to find work and earn a living” (Zeneidi, 2011: 11).

Ironically, the gender traditional role of motherhood qualifies Moroccan women for the non-traditional gender roles of wage earner, traveller, and independent woman. Changes in location, situation, and circumstances may help to contribute to new possibilities for constructing identity. Or it may provide opportunities for exercising agency by choosing to return to Spain for seasonal work, or to not return to Morocco after the seasonal contract is over.  Foucault’s concept of resistance helps to explain these new forms of subjectivity that were engendered by oppressive practices.

The complex construction of subjectivity through discourses, institutions, policies, and social location serves not only to enable individual agency, but also to promote collective action. The experience of being a wage earner mobilized some women; in March 2009 Moroccan women participated in a demonstration in Seville, Spain demanding labor improvements in the agricultural sector in Andalucia, Spain where they worked.

On returning to Morocco, some women who had worked in Spain demanded higher wages for their agricultural work in Morocco, saying:

“How come you are only paying us 3 Euros a day? We know you can’t pay as much as in Spain, but our salary is ridiculous. We won’t work for less than 10 Euros a day” (Thomas, 2009: 28).

The policies that selected married Moroccan mothers as seasonal agricultural workers because of their “feminine qualities,” including docility and attachment to their children, seem to have transformed their identities into workers able to engage in collective action and make demands.

However, in this situation where circular migration itself is targeted toward women, there remain questions about whether it protects rights by providing a legal contract for work and a visa before leaving one’s country of origin or whether the requirement of return and the prohibition against having children while employed violates rights. In this case transnational feminist activism must negotiate the contradictory effects of particular policies as well as the complex intersections of the processes of global economics and discourses about gender, labor, and migration.

Sama, a women’s health advocacy network in India, provides another example of feminist resistance to oppressive reproductive policies.  Sama--meaning equality in Sanskrit--was founded in 1999 by women with a history in feminist activism and health.  Their mission statement directly challenges a neo-liberal view of choice in the absence of power relations and social and economic conditions.  Instead it invokes a Foucauldian, feminist approach that takes into account the intersection of identities and the diversity of social locations, and examines the power relations that contribute to exclusion and marginalization:

“Sama believes that equality and empowerment can be ensured only when poverty, curtailment of capabilities, lack of livelihood rights, lack of health services and access to health care, illiteracy and multiple forms of discrimination based on caste, class, gender religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation and many other rubrics are structurally challenged. Our commitment is to integrate the gender, caste, class and rights analysis within the wider context of other social relations in order to emphasize the complexity of existing power relations that work towards exclusion and marginalization.” http://www.samawomenshealth.org() 

Sama has been involved in a number of projects and studies in India concerning reproductive issues, including a study of the two-child norm, a study of the effects of Depo Provera, and the rapidly growing use of ARTs (Artificial Reproductive Technologies) in India.  Their research addresses specific reproductive issues in India, and their effects on women.  But their approach links the situation of the Global North together with that of the Global South, and challenges the imperialistic relationship between the two perpetuated through neo-liberal globalization and the unbridled profit-seeking of multinational corporations.  For instance, in their study on Depo Provera, an injectable contraceptive long known to be linked to health problems, they document that it was marketed without all the required drug trials, and that it was administered to women without informed consent, and regardless of known health risks, such as diabetes. 

The work that Sama is doing provides an excellent opportunity for coalition building across national borders.  Women from the United States (headquarters of the multinational corporation that produces Depo Provera) and other countries that produce and market similar drugs should be aware that dangerous contraceptives are being exported and promoted to India as well as other countries in the Global South.  They could put pressure on these multinational corporations to at least adhere to the same standards of testing and protocols of administering Depo Provera and other dangerous drugs in the Global South as in the Global North.

Sama trenchantly critiques the ideology of choice that accompanies both the promotion of contraceptives, such as Depo Provera and the expansion of ARTs. They question the promotion of Depo Provera seeing it not as expanding women’s reproductive choices, but rather as a form of population control, and control of women in general. 

“Women’s groups involved in the campaign against new reproductive technologies have consistently been raising their voices against the sudden concern of the establishment – which is otherwise intensely anti-women – for ‘women’s choice’. Why a choice in contraception alone, they argue; why shouldn’t women be given choices in employment, food, education, access to health care, civic amenities, or, at a more basic level, to have equal rights as men in the family and society or to not be killed in the womb?” (Sama, 2003, 7)

   Their insight that reproductive choice cannot be promoted in the absence of other choices for women frames reproductive choice not as an individual issue, but as a matter of comprehensive social justice.   Furthermore, they see choice itself as an ideological smokescreen that fails to address the material conditions in which choice is shaped.

“Also, an urgent need has been felt to demystify the concept of choice, which has worked to promote ARTs. Since these technologies are propagated within the parameter of choice it is critical to evaluate the concept of choice itself. For example, it is difficult to distinguish between latent choice and social choice shaped by family, market, and other agents” (Sama, 2006, 101).

I have argued that feminists can use Foucault’s concepts of biopolitics, biopower, and governmentality to productively analyze the ways that production, reproduction, and migration are interrelated through processes of globalization.  In spite of the insidious forms of control and discipline exerted by policies of production and reproduction these cases of feminist resistance and activism by the female Moroccan strawberry workers, and Sama demonstrate that at least some can be countered and resisted.

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 Biography

Margaret A. McLaren received her M.A. and Ph. D. in philosophy from Northwestern University.  Since 1992 she has taught Philosophy, and Sexuality, Women’s and Gender Studies at Rollins College where she holds the George D. and Harriet W. Cornell Chair of Philosophy.  She is the author of Feminism, Foucault, and Embodied Subjectivity (2002, State University of New York Press).  Her articles on gender issues, women and human rights, multiculturalism, Foucault, feminism, and virtue ethics have appeared in several journals, including Social Theory and Practice, Journal of Developing Societies, Forum on Public Policy, Philosophy Today, and Hypatia, and book anthologies including, Feminism and the Final Foucault,  Feminists Doing Ethics, Florida Without Borders: Women at the Intersections of the Local and Global, and Gender & Globalization: Patterns of Women’s Resistance.