When, where, how, and to whom what thoughts and feelings about sex become important need to be explained.
At 7:49 AM -0800 3/30/03, andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>I presume your alternative is that political behavior is to be
>explained exclusively by reference to class interests.
The alternative is a theory capable of accounting for both historical changes and synchronic cultural differences in the "psycho-sexual" among other politically interesting phenomena, with or without direct references to class interests as explanans. The "psycho-sexual" as explanans, in my view, cannot explain historical changes and synchronic cultural differences.
At 7:49 AM -0800 3/30/03, andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>Luker's account of the importance of motherhood in the abortion wars
Luker examines the "psycho-sexual" as explananda, but she doesn't use it as explanans. I've already described her descriptions and explanations and offered what political insights we may gain from them:
As for conceptions of motherhood, the "pro-life" ideology values the _idea_ of motherhood, and "pro-life" activists are ready to sacrifice even the _very lives_ of actual mothers to prevent the devaluation of the _idea_ of motherhood: "[T]o accept abortion _even when it is undertaken to save the life of the mother_ would be a potentially devastating concession for pro-life groups. It would imply acceptance of one of two premises: that embryos belong to a different moral order from people who have already been born or (more perniciously, from the pro-life point of view) that embryos are persons, but some persons (women) have more rights than others (embryos). To tolerate any abortions at all, even abortions to 'save the life of the mother,' would be the first step on a 'slippery slope,' the beginning of a long slide away from the logic of their moral position" (Kristin Luker, _Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood_, U of California P, 1984, p. 230). The question is what causes such a conception of motherhood at the expense of actual women who are mothers.
Luker, for instance, explains the rise of anti-abortion ideology by describing nineteenth-century medical doctors' attempts at professionalization and male domination of medicine; and she explains "pro-life" activists' opposition to the pro-choice ideology by doing research on what arguments about "choice," the "quality of life," etc. mean in working-class lives. Luker says: "What pro-life people fear is that if the pro-choice view of the world is adopted, then those who are less socially _productive_ may be deemed less socially _valuable_. For pro-life people, many of whom have situational reasons to fear how pro-choice people would assign them a social price tag, such a prospect is a nightmare" (_Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood_, p. 190). Luker's research, in my view, does not point to psycho-sexual explanations or solutions, either in her description of the rise of anti-abortion ideology or in her ethnography of today's "pro-life" activists. Instead, her work suggests two things:
(1) Highlighting the idea of "choice" in _separation_ from efforts to create conditions that make many good "choices" available to working-class women doesn't make "choice" attractive to poor working-class women, since the only available jobs for them pay low wages, offer few benefits, and come with poor working conditions and present no room for creativity and intellectual development -- getting married to a "good man" may sound like a better economic prospect than having a "choice" to have an abortion and keep a dead-end job. Therefore, efforts to defend and expand reproductive rights and freedoms cannot be divorced from larger efforts to improve all aspects of lives of working-class women.
(2) Arguments based upon the conception of "quality of life" judged by the ability to perform wage labor, which some "pro-choice" activists explicitly advocate and many of them implicitly uphold, sound menacing to the poor and/or the disabled -- and understandably so, as such "quality of life" arguments at least implicitly and sometimes explicitly devalue the unemployed, the underpaid, the disabled, the pregnant, etc. Such arguments should be avoided. Instead, make arguments for reproductive rights and freedoms based upon the premise that the work of production, of which wage labor is a part, is no more and no less socially valuable than the work of social reproduction.
You've yet to offer a better account of Luker's work than mine.
At 7:49 AM -0800 3/30/03, andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>psychosexual impulses that cause the racist effects
(1) A question of historical change: what makes you think that psychosexual impulses caused racist effects, rather than the other way around, i.e., racist oppression (itself caused by class interests of the white planter class) giving rise to racist ideology and "psycho-sexual impulses" that had not existed before? (2) A question of synchronic cultural differences: what makes the radical difference between individuals -- presumably equipped with more or less the same physiological make-up -- living in the same racist society, e.g., between white individuals who would lynch black men suspected of sleeping with white women, and white individuals who wouldn't dream of doing any such thing? -- Yoshie
* Calendar of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://solidarity.igc.org/>