New Forms of Control of the Body / Nuevas Formas de Control del Cuerpo

Criminalization of pregnancy. A war on reproduction.

By Feminist Research on Violence Collective.

Elizabeth Downer, Susana Draper, Alejandra Estigarribia, Silvia Federici, Anna Fox, Lewanne Jones, Jesal Kapadia, Belén Marco-Crespo, Alice Markham-Cantor, and Begonia Santa-Cecilia.

Extract from the pamphlet

A pamphlet where we look at the criminalization of pregnancy, to highlight by what means this new war on women is being waged, what it represents, who it targets, and how we can struggle against it. Our argument, following that of Dorothy Roberts in Killing the Black Body (1997), is that the ‘criminalization of pregnancy,’ though justified in the name of the defense of life, is actually a case of ‘maternity denied.’ A core tenet of the reproductive justice movement, founded and developed by Black women, is the idea that true justice ensures not only that one has the right not to have a child, but that one has the right to have a child and to raise that child in a safe world. Black women-led reproductive justice organizations like SisterSong have long called attention to the issue of maternity denied. (In the last section of this pamphlet, we reference just a few of the organizations doing this crucial work.) Download the pamphlet here.

Arrests of and Forced Interventions on Pregnant Women in the United States, 1973-2005

In this article, researchers Lynn M. Paltrow, from National Advocates for Pregnant Women, and Jeanne Flavin, from Fordham University report and analyze on 413 cases from 1973 to 2005 in which a woman’s pregnancy was a necessary factor leading to attempted and actual deprivations of a woman’s physical liberty. Download here 

The Latin American Green Tide. Desire and Feminist Transversality

by Cecilia Palmeiro

An essay about popular feminism in Latiamerica today. “A popular feminism, of the streets, of the favelas, of blackness, of queerness, of youth, against militarisation and the war on drugs — a micropolitics that is beginning to find its way into macropolitics.” Download here

Hacia un análisis feminista y dialéctico de la globalización neoliberal: el peso del complejo militar-­industrial sobre las «mujeres globales»

Patriarcado: del borde al centro. Disciplinamiento, territorialidad y crueldad en la fase apocalíptica del capital

por Rita Segato

“La intervención colonial, del pasado y del presente, enlo que he llamado “el mundo aldea” (Segato 2015-a y b) ha terminado por “minorizar” todo lo querespecta a las mujeres.” Descargar aquí

Witch-Hunting, Globalization, and Feminist Solidarity in Africa Today

by Silvia Federici

Witch-hunting did not disappear from the repertoire of the bourgeoisie with the abolition of slavery. On the contrary, the global expansion of capitalism through colonization and Christianization ensured that this persecution would be planted in the body of colonized societies, and, in time, would be carried out by the subjugated communities in their own name and against their own members. (Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch, Women, The Body and Primitive Accumulation). Download here

De los asesinatos de Ciudad Juárez al fenómeno de los feminicidios : ¿nuevas formas de violencia contra las mujeres?

por Jules Falquet

Volver sobre los asesinatos como consecuencia de las violaciones y torturas de centenares de mujeres en Ciudad Juárez a partir de 1990, no tiene nada que ver con una voluntad de victimización de las “pobres” mujeres o con la demonización de los hombres especialmente “machistas” de un “lejano“ país del sur. Descargar aquí.

Witch-hunting, Past and Present and the Fear of the Power of Women

by Silvia Federici

Why were the witch hunts primarily directed against women? How does one explain the fact that for three centuries, thousands of women in Europe became the personification of “the enemy within” and of absolute evil? And how does one reconcile the all-powerful, almost mythical portrait that inquisitors and demonologists painted of their victims—as creatures of hell, terrorists, man-eaters, servants of the devil, wildly riding the skies on their broomsticks—with the defenseless figures of the actual women who were charged with these crimes and then horribly tortured and burned at the stake?

DOWNLOAD HERE