For abortion and beyond abortion: for a liberated sexuality and society
For abortion and beyond abortion: for a liberated sexuality and society.
Rereading bell hooks, Feminism is for Everybody.
“The demise of an organised, radical, feminist mass-based political movement, coupled with anti-feminist backlash from an organized right-wing political front which relies on fundamentalist interpretations of religion placed abortion back on the political agenda. The right of female to choose is now called into question.
Sadly, the anti-abortion platform has most viciously targeted state-funded, inexpensive, and, when need be, free abortions. As a consequence women of all races who have class privilege continue to have access to safe abortions – continue to have the right to choose – while materially disadvantaged women suffer (…). If we return to a world where abortions are only accessible to those females with lots of money we risk the return of public policy that will aim to make abortion illegal. It’s already happening in many conservative states.
(…) The right of women to choose whether or not to have an abortion is only one aspect of reproductive freedom. Depending on a woman’s age and circumstance of life the aspect of reproductive rights that matters most will change. A sexually active woman in her 20s or 30s who finds birth control pills unsafe may one day face an unwanted pregnancy and the right to have a legal, safe, inexpensive abortion may be the reproductive issue that is most relevant. But when she is menopausal and doctors are urging her to have a hysterectomy that may be the most relevant reproductive rights issue.
(…) If women do not have the right to choose what happens to our bodies we risk relinquishing rights in all other areas of our lives. In renewed feminist movement the overall issue of reproductive rights will take precedence over any single issue. This does not mean that the push for legal, safe, inexpensive abortions will not remain central, it will simply not be the only issue that is centralized. If sex education, preventive health care, and easy access to contraceptives are offered to every female, fewer of us will have unwanted pregnancies. As a consequence the need for abortions would diminish.
(…) The anti-choice movement is fundamentally anti-feminist. While it is possible for women to individually choose never to have an abortion, allegiance to feminist politics means that they still are pro-choice, that they support the right of females who need abortions to choose whether or not to have them”
A few pages before bell hooks is even more explicit: “individual white women with class privilege identified most intimately with the pain of unwanted pregnancy. And they highlighted the abortion issue.” Only then giving up on illegal abortions altogether. “Often individual women with class privilege were too ashamed of unwanted pregnancy to make use of their more direct access to responsible health care. ”
With unmatchable and farsighted thinking, in these pages of Feminism is for Everybody, bell hooks rightly identifies how reproductive freedom for women was not conquered once and for all with the battles of the 60s and 70s. And she senses this starting from the battle for safe, legal, free abortion, seen as an important but partial achievement, which should fit into a broader and counter-hegemonic criticism of the patriarchal capitalist medical system. There were other reproductive issues that would have deserved more attention: basic sex education, prenatal care, preventive health care, forced sterilization, hysterectomies and/or unwanted caesareans, taboos related to the use of contraceptives by women, often considered “easy” by men, instead of cautious.
The core of bell hooks thinking dates back to 2000 with Feminism is for Everybody, yet the reflections cited above seem to perfectly comment on the US Supreme Court ruling on abortion on 24 June 2022, which upended the historic Roe Vs Wade case in 1973, ruling that there is no constitutional right to abortion in the United States. As a consequence, a 50-year-old legal right is put at the mercy of the legislators of the individual States, of their moral, religious, political orientation or, even worse, their propaganda agenda. Whatever the reasons for the sentence, broadly motivated according to the rites of patriarchal jurisprudence, so watchful of formal quibbles, it is a clear sign of the involution of freedom and equality’s principles of our democracies. The ruling demonstrates a long-standing regressive push, which will push women back into the deadly practices of clandestine abortion and in the near future will likely affect gay and contraception rights. What is outrageous is not the overturning of a previous ruling, technically possible, but the wound that the ruling inflicts in an increasingly divided society on the issue of voluntary termination of pregnancy: and it does so without taking into account the evolution of society over the last fifty years and the path of women’s emancipation. Denying a right instead of strongly confirming it and protecting it will pave the way to new divisions. The ruling, in fact, was welcomed by the pro-life associations (better said anti-choice) also in Europe.
bell hooks (1952-2021; her real name is Gloria Jean Watkins, but the name she chose reconnects her matrilineally to her grandmother and the lowercase initials highlight a long history of inferiority for people of African descent) was a pioneer of intersectionality. Originally from a small, racially segregated town in Kentucky, she grew up challenging male domination in her own patriarchal household (with six daughters and one son) but educated with white girls at Stanford University, bell hooks was among the first to understand how race, class and gender intertwine and multiply opportunities for marginalisation, colonisation, domination and stigmatisation, depriving women of their freedoms. She did so from the empirical experience of consciousness-raising groups of black and lesbian women who were already struggling against the fixed boundaries of class, race and gender (lesbian women in particular, having never imagined being dependent on a husband, were often much more aware of class issues, economic independence and wage equality: they are what bell hooks calls the “radical feminists” as opposed to white, reformist and mostly heterosexual feminists). With her books, her activism, her activity as a teacher, bell hooks has warned feminists all over the world of the risks of a white, supremacist, capitalist colonization, in a patriarchal word, of feminism. She did so not driven by a desire to oppose and divide black and white feminists, but from an authentic and generous sisterhood, capable of critically grasping contradictions, liberal washing, weakening, changes of course, sexist drifts or purely academic implosions (women’s studies institutionalized in colleges and universities, that is – as bell hooks says despite having become a university professor herself – in “conservative corporate structures”, based on careerism and on a sectored language that (de)politicizes feminism moving it away from its mass-base, while the masculine demagogy sows proselytes with a simple and understandable language for all). bell hooks very quickly grasped the mainstream misunderstandings on a global scale (such as that for which feminism is anti-men), she has indicated what is true gender justice and what are the equal rights for all, not to be confused with equality between men and women (for a few) within the current system: a vile barter, a concession of masculine and supremacist capitalism, which preferred equality for a few women privileged to full civil rights for blacks and minorities in general.
Collusion with class power proved to be for many women more important than feminism, destabilizing it, weakening it and inspiring a neocolonial paternalism led by the privileged reformist pseudo-feminists, unable to weave horizontal relationships with feminisms born all over the world.
A few more prophetic excerpts: “Nowadays females face so few obstacles inhibiting their expression of sexual desire that our culture risks burying the historical memory of patriarchal assault on women’s bodies and sexuality. In that place of forgetfulness, efforts to make abortion illegal can focus on the issue of whether or not a life is being taken without ever bringing into the discussion the devastating effects ending legal abortion would have on female sexuality. ”
“Despite sexual revolution and feminist movement we know that many heterosexual females have sex only because males want them to, that young homosexuals, male and female, still have no public or private supportive environment that affirms their sexual preference, that the sexist iconography of madonna or whore continues to claim the erotic imagination of males and females, that patriarchal pornography now permeates every aspect of mass media, that unwanted pregnancy is on the increase, that teens are having unsatisfying and unsafe sex, that in many long-time marriages and partnerships, whether same-sex or heterosexual, women are having no sex. All these facts call attention to the need for renewed feminist dialogue about sexuality (…). Erotic connection calls us away from isolation and alienation into community (…). Those practices may range from choosing promiscuity or celibacy, from embracing one specific sexual identity and preference or choosing a roaming uncharted desire that is kindled only by interaction and engagement with specific individuals with whom we feel the spark of erotic recognition no matter their sex, race, class, or even their sexual preference. ”
Beginning in the 90s, bell hooks writes, the most profound betrayal of feminist issues has been the lack of mass-based feminist protest challenging the government’s assault on single mothers and the dismantling of the welfare system over warfare (again so topical right now!) Privileged women, many of whom call themselves feminists, have often based their emancipation on the colonization of domestic and care work, carried out by immigrant women with poor wage and trade union protections. On the other hand, “a return to patriarchal male-dominated households where men are providers is the solution offered women by conservative politicians who ignore the reality of mass unemployment for both women and men, and the fact that jobs simply are not there and that many men do not want to provide economically for women and children even if they have wages.”
And even when “women work to make money to consume more rather than to enhance the quality of our lives on all levels, (…) more money does not mean more freedom if our finances are not used to facilitate well-being. Rethinking the meaning of work is an important task for future feminist movement.”
The most recent events, including the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, prove bell hooks right. And they reveal the flagrant relevance of this book, which remains a manifesto for future feminisms. Above all, they confirm that “without males as allies in the struggle, the feminist movement will not progress” and that “we need feminist studies based on community” and not just academia , so that the models of mutuality and equality can replace class elitism, conservative migration policies and contractual servitude, the old paradigms of domination and sexism injected both by men and women (and that exist everywhere, in the public spaces of geopolitics and economy and in the private space of the marital bed and the house, inspiring coercion, violence and censorship in relations between partners or towards boys and girls by parents of both sexes…).
“We will then be better able to envision a world where resources are shared and opportunities for personal growth abound for everyone irrespective of their class”.
Feminism means more rights, more choice for everyone. Those rights that today we see crushed or erased by both patriarchal jurisprudence and medicine.
Excerpts taken from Feminism is for Everybody – Passion for Politics – South End Press – Cambridge, MA
Further readings:
bell hooks, Feminist theory – from margin to centre
bell hooks, Teaching to transgress- Education as the Practice of Freedom
Claudia Mazzilli
