Seizing the Means of Reproduction: Entanglements of Feminism, Health, and Technoscience by Michelle Murphy (review)

Forty years after the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective familiarized readers with the concept of health feminism, the do-it-yourself activism of the 1970s appears as dated as the black and white photographs that grace the pages of Our Bodies, Ourselves. Yet, the ideas and actions of feminist health activists prove to be useful fodder for academic analysis, as recent publications attest. Michelle Murphy’s Seizing the Means of Reproduction focuses on the actions of the feminist self-help movement in California in the 1970s and 1980s in order to tease out the overlaps between feminism and technoscientific practice in women’s health politics. As her title suggests, Murphy is interested in the specific methods by which feminist health activists sought to regulate and control their reproductive capacities. They were not, of course, the only group interested in redefining and reshaping reproduction. In this new era of biomedicine, synthetic hormones, tissue cultures, and fertility treatments introduced by scientists altered the terrain of sex and health. But while most analyses position feminists in direct opposition to proponents of the wide-scale use of technoscience, Murphy stresses the ways in which it was impossible to completely separate feminism from technoscience. Murphy characterizes this as a form of entanglement, arguing for “the importance of attending to entanglements, defined as attachments of material, technical, and social relations across divergent and even antagonistic terrains of politics” (12). Thus, despite the fact that health feminists such as Lorraine Rothman and Carol Downer interpreted their actions—seizing the means of reproduction—as entirely distinct from those that linked individual reproductive capacities to global, racial, and environmental concerns, Murphy suggests that such a distinction was elusive.

At the center of Murphy’s analysis is what she labels “protocol feminism,” a term that underscores the entanglements of science and feminist thought. As she explains, protocol is most commonly associated with biomedicine, defined as a way of naming the “formal guidelines, instructions, or standards for composing a task” such as drawing blood (29). Within the feminist self-help movement, the process by which a task was performed (such as a Pap smear or a pelvic exam) could determine whether or not it was a feminist encounter. Yet as much as they tried, self-help feminists could not extricate their practices from the biomedical regime of the late twentieth century. This becomes clear in Murphy’s close analysis of three forms of feminist self-help: the pelvic exam, the Pap smear, and menstrual extraction. For example, Pap smear screening, routinely practiced since the 1940s as a way of detecting cervical cancer, was also central to the professionalization of gynecology and the field of clinical cytology. The “sheer quantity of readings” generated by the massive number of annual pelvic exams ushered in a “dense infrastructure” of industrialized laboratories. Thus, she argues, the “Pap smear was a fundamental component in the rearrangement of medical practice as a risk-based, industrialized, laboratory-centered mode of diagnosis” (112). As Alex Stern notes in her recent book, Telling Genes: The Story of Genetic Counseling in America (Johns Hopkins, 2012), research on risk experienced a “meteoric boom” in the 1970s, as risk analysis created a framework in which actors make individual decisions based on what level of risk is considered “acceptable” (37). Thus, at the very moment when feminist self-helpers determined to remake the gynecological exam as a feminist encounter, risk studies and the “new pervasiveness of screening projects” caused them to accept uncritically the use of the Pap smear as a useful practice. Advocating regular examination of the cervix indicated the extent to which self-help activists were “eager participants in Pap smear surveillance” (119–120). More recent epidemiological studies linking cervical cancer to the human papilloma virus (HPV) and locating 80 percent of all cervical cancer deaths in “developing” countries...