Feminist Swag: Sellouts or sell out?
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Have you ever wanted to tell the world you are a feminist without speaking? Have you ever wanted a t-shirt that shows what intersectional feminism can by by depicting Rosie the riveter as women of color, women wearing headscarves, tall women, short women, skinny women, fat women, women rocking wheelchairs?  Do you want a shirt for your pet?  Or perhaps some socks so you can flash some feminism when you bare your ankles? A onesie for a kid you know? Unisex t-shirts? Women’s t-shirts? Up to size 3XL?

IJFAB Blog does not endorse this product or line of products. We are not trying to get you to buy their stuff.

prettyBut we live in a world where where JC Penney recently sold a t-shirt in the girls’ section that says “I’m too pretty to do homework so my brother has to do it for me.”  There was a bit of a firestorm about it at the time, and Penney’s ultimately pulled it from the shelves. But at no point in the product design or ordering process did anyone apparently put the kibosh on it internally. Such attitudes are still accepted in this actual world.

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we can do itAnd in this actual world, we do indeed need more t-shirts like the one at left, which is marketed by Feminist Apparel as “Intersectional Rosie.” Every woman is dressed like Rosie the Riveter.  From left to right, you see a black woman rocking a natural, a very short white person with long blonde hair, an Asian woman with hair in a pony tail, a tall muscular woman who may be white, a white woman with white-blue hair in a wheelchair, a brown-skinned woman wearing a headscarf, and a fat white woman with a bouffant hairdo.

On the other hand, this IJFAB Blog editor notes that there is always a fine line to be walked when we are selling feminism, or buying products that we buy because of our ideology. This is sometimes called “femvertising.” Nonetheless, a world in which there are messages walking around on people’s bodies that counteract dominant narratives about gender and about women and about ability and about race… surely that world is better than one in which there are not?  What do you think?

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Bathrooms, Binaries, and Bioethics: Jamie Nelson takes on the American debate over gender and bathroom access
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Jamie Lindemann Nelson, PhD. Professor of Philosophy at Michigan State University.

Jamie Lindemann Nelson, PhD. Professor of Philosophy at Michigan State University.

With a blogpost over at Michigan State’s Center for Ethics and Humanities in the Life Sciences, feminist bioethicist Jamie Lindemann Nelson has dipped her toes into the acid bath that is the American debate over gender and bathroom access.  Nelson has long drawn attention to bioethics’ shameful silence on trans* issues. In “Bathrooms, Binaries, and Bioethics,” she takes on the medical and moral confusions implicated in, and at the root of, the USA’s current debate over bathroom usage.

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The Brave Response to Anti-Abortion Legislation
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In the wake of the anti-abortion legislation we’ve seen from Utah, Indiana, Florida, Texas, and multiple other states, people across the country are forced once again to examine their beliefs around the legality and morality of the issue, especially in light of the upcoming elections. This is the country’s 43rd year after Roe v. Wade, and we have seen the strictest abortion restrictions ever be proposed, passed, and signed into law.

As a native of Indiana and an OB/GYN, I am particularly outraged by my state’s recent efforts, which prohibit abortion for genetic abnormality. I described the bill’s impact on my practice and patients in an opinion essay for the Washington Post. I also spoke at a Rally for Women’s Rights, representing my view of the effect on the medical profession and doctor-patient relationship.

My husband and I discussed the possible impact on our family, our livelihood, our safety. We prepared for an onslaught of insults and threats, criticisms of both my work and my character, and fearing for my future. Together, we decided it was worth the risk.

The response has been incredible and not at all what I expected.

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Zika, the film
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Courtesy Debora Diniz (University of Brasilia).

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On The Costs of Simplistic Thinking: Reproductive Health Clinics Aren’t Just For Abortions
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The purpose of this post is not to argue against anti-abortion protesters. It is to narrowly and briefly explore what the harms done by principled, committed anti-abortion protesters when they assume that Reproductive Health Clinics, and procedures they perform, are primarily for the purpose of abortion.

Planned Parenthood - defund

This image shows a small subset of the roughly 500 anti-abortion protesters which gathered on August 22, 2015 near the Richmond, VA Planned Parenthood to advocate for the total defunding of the organization. The crowd appears to be almost entirely Caucasian, dressed for hot weather with hats and sunglasses. One man is holding a wooden cross. Many are holding signs. One reads “2,290 babies died here in 2014” while another says “women need love not abortion.” Many read “DEFUND PLANNED PARENTHOOD.” One says “DEFUND EVIL.” IMAGE CREDIT: P. Kevin Morely/Richmond Times-Dispatch

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“New York Just Created a Revolutionary New Family-Leave Policy”

The paid leave program will cover full-time and part-time employees. There will be no exemptions for small businesses. And to take advantage of the program, you only have to have been employed by the company for six months (advocates had been negotiating for four weeks, but six months is still half the time required by FMLA). The program will be funded on an insurance model, in which roughly a dollar a week will be deducted from employee paychecks; there is no employer contribution.

[….]
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What’s more, women and men will be entitled to paid leave. For both straight and same-sex two-parent households, this benefit could have a big impact on family finances and health, according to Dina Bakst, a lawyer and founder of A Better Balance, a legal advocacy group for working families. “It’s possible that parents could stagger their leaves,” she said, “which is crucial because infant care is so unaffordable and inaccessible. It would make a real difference to be able to hold off on putting a baby in day care until they are four or five or six months old, as opposed to four weeks old.”

Read more at New York Magazine. Some (admittedly quick) fact-checking indicates this is not an April Fools’ piece.

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Women: Not Faring So Well on Wikipedia

From The New Yorker, “A Feminist Edit-a-Thon Seeks to Reshape Wikipedia“:

In spite of the site’s ostensibly egalitarian, accessible format, more than ninety per cent of its editors are male, according to a study conducted in 2011 by the Wikimedia Foundation. Less than five per cent of its super-users—people with more than five hundred edits to their names—are women. Many causes have been suggested for this, from Wikipedia’s code-heavy editing interface to its contentious and sometimes hostile user culture. What results, however, is an indisputable failure to consider certain topics that are of particular interest to women. (Note that the entry for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a fictional team of martial-artist reptiles, is twice the length of the entry for Toni Morrison, a real-life Nobel Prize-winning author.)

I note in particular that Wikipedia’s “Bioethics” entry barely mentions feminism, and there is no entry for “Feminist Bioethics.” I leave it to you to assess the entries on “Feminist Philosophy” and “Feminist Ethics.”
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Also still very relevant: “Wikipedia’s Hostility to Women” at The Atlantic 

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Gendered Medicalization of Sexual Desire?
A Medical Sociologist Reflects on How “Women’s Viagra” Isn’t Like Viagra at All

The medical humanities have long drawn attention to the way that social power structures and value judgments affect diagnoses and the very disease categories on which those diagnoses are based. Peter Conrad famously discussed medicalization—the process by which a human condition comes to be seen as a medical one—as a form of social control, a facet of medical sociology he revisited in 2008. Indeed, as I have argued, medicalization can not only reinforce but also disrupt social categories.  It should come as no surprise that medications designed to treat sexual dysfunction in men, and now in women, are based on diagnostic categories which are heavily subject to construction by social norms and stereotypes.

Sociologist Alyson Spurgas addresses just this issue over at the SIUE Women’s Studies blog in “We’ve Come A Long Way, Baby? Pink Pills, Blue Pills, and False Equivalences in the Medical Treatment of Sexual Dysfunction.” In this provocative and long-form scholarly blog entry, Dr. Spurgas draws out curiously gendered distinctions between the DSM-V’s diagnostic criteria for men’s and women’s sexual dysfunction.  Spurgas argues that these contribute to the differences between established treatments for men’s sexual  dysfunction and brand new treatments for women’s sexual dysfunction, the former focusing on malfunctions in the body while the latter address the woman’s state of mind and receptivity to her partner’s advances, with problematic implications for women who have experienced sexual trauma or are in unsatisfactory relationships.
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I strongly recommend clicking through to read the article as a whole.  Dr. Spurgas closes with a recommendation:

 In this vein, we ought to remember that sexism and misogyny are still prevalent in a variety of insidious forms—within and outside of clinical medicine and scientific laboratories, and with or without prescription drugs. The medical and scientific climate around sexuality and proposed and prescribed treatments are rather effects of a widespread and willful ignorance of women’s pleasure, and thus they represent a larger social lacuna. This is why it seems so imperative to shift the debate from the drugs themselves to the larger medical, scientific, social, cultural, and political milieux in which gender differences are configured and disseminated—configurations that have real consequences for how people experience their own bodies, other people’s bodies, and their sex lives. If taking a drug will make women feel the desire that they desire to have, and that is satisfying and pleasurable to them, then, by all means, we should have it! But let’s not stuff too many pills down our throats before seriously considering what we want, why we want it, and what we could potentially want for our futures (sexual and otherwise). There are many trajectories to that place of pleasure—if “sexual” pleasure is what we choose to pursue.

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When Does a Plea Become Pathology?
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NOTE: this author uses captions to describe the content of images so that visually impaired persons can have some access to the content of images through their audio readers. Readers with typical visual acuity may find some of the content of captions redundant while others will find it helpful or even necessary.

The February 2016 issue of Journal of Family Practice cover (image below) raises the issue of when a “difficult patient” actually should be diagnosed with a personality disorder. The examples of patient speech that are given on the cover and in the opening image of the article include “I’m not trying to be a difficult patient. (really.) I’m struggling. Can’t you see how hard this is for me?”  This kind of plea is exactly what a normal well balanced patient might offer forth to a doctor who did not seem to be empathizing with them. This is very troubling. Does the framing of this article encourage medicalizing the expression of patient dissatisfaction with care, and the expression of patient suffering as a result of difficult medical circumstances? I will focus on this and, along the way, discuss whether the framing provided by the cover and the graphics undercuts the article itself.

THE FRAMING

The image on the left shows the cover of the February 2016 Journal of Family Practice. Words form the shape of a head in profile, repeating in different sizes in light grey font. Larger words in the center of the head are picked out in bold black and red. They read as described in the first paragraph of this article. The image on the right is the image from the print edition of this issue which accompanies the first page of the article. In large blue text, it reads “Does your patient complain that you don’t understand him ‘the way his other doctor did’? Or does he frequently lose his temper? Perhaps it’s time to consider a personality disorder.”

The framing of the article by editorial decisions about the cover image and the introductory page clearly pick out difficult patients, patients who are insufficiently appreciate of their care, and patients who are emotional as candidates for diagnosis with a personality disorder. Two issues give me great pause with respect to this framing. First, there are longstanding concerns about physician empathy for patients in distress. Second, there is an ongoing conflation of noncompliant patients with “difficult patients.” Both raise serious problems for a compassionate and respectful patient-provider relationship, and both are reinforced in troubling ways by the framing of this article. Continue reading

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Something Happened to Women’s Health in the 20th Century
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I’ve been working recently on the relevance of growing income and wealth inequality for the issues of concern to bioethics. Gopal Sreenivasan pointed out in the Hastings Center Report a few years ago that universal health coverage is no panacea for social inequality in health—for the tendency of the wealthy to live longer and in better health, and the poor to live shorter lives more burdened with health deficits. In fact, using data from the UK’s Black Report (based on the famous Whitehall Study of civil servants), he pointed out that social inequality in health has increased since the implementation of the NHS. While I argue against his policy proposal (that we should address the social determinants of health instead of universal health coverage; see here), I also discussed some of the deep trends that lie in the background of this surprising data. This discussion is a starting point for discussing the normative and political significance of social inequality in health.

The Black Report data is based on male occupational status (British inequality studies have long been plagued by the problem of how to measure the class identity of women). Newly analyzed data from the US tells a troubling story about the gendering of growing social inequality in health.

While the growing inequality in life expectancy for men arises because richer men are getting healthier faster than poorer men are, the growing social inequality in health for women is driven both by the increasing health of the wealthiest women—and by a drop in life expectancy of the poorest third of women. The poorest 10%, born in 1920, could expect to live to 78 or 79; born in 1950, they barely pass 75. The New York Times summarizes the data.

What is happening with women’s health in America? It’s time for feminist bioethics to engage with distributional issues in population health. Continue reading

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The Regulation of Women’s Bodies:
Popular with Governments Everywhere!

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The Zika Outbreak: A Call for Greater International Collaboration
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Global concerns about spread of the Zika virus continue to grow. More than 20 countries in Latin America–especially Brazil–as well as Caribbean locations and several states in the U.S. have reported confirmed or suspected cases. Yet, more remains unknown than known about the consequences of being infected with the virus. Although it is well-established that the virus is transmitted by the Aedes mosquito, it is unclear whether people can become infected through sexual contact with an infected person (one case in which the woman’s male partner had traveled abroad was reported in Texas), or by blood transfusions, even though the virus has been detected in blood, urine, semen, and saliva. The most devastating effect appears to be microcephaly (abnormally small head size) and accompanying brain damage of infants born to mothers infected with the virus, with thousands of cases in Brazil alone. Most recently, the virus has also been associated with eye abnormalities in affected infants. But even in those cases, scientists maintain that a causal connection has not been established. Another possible connection is Guillain-Barré syndrome, a condition that causes weakness and can develop into temporary paralysis.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has declared the situation “a public health emergency of international concern.” This places WHO in the position of a global health coordinator in efforts to halt the spread of the disease, and also gives the organization’s decisions the force of international law. Even at this early stage, however, scientific research has been hampered by national laws such as one in Brazil that prohibits the transfer of human biological specimens to other countries. Continue reading

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