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

Near the beginning of Seizing the Means of Reproduction, Michelle Murphy announces what distinguishes her book from more typical histories of the women’s health movement of the late 1960s and 1970s. Her account of the technologies deployed by feminist health activists will not follow the model of judging past feminisms for their successes and/or failures but rather attempt to “historicize their social and technoscientific practices as they were assembled, animated, and entangled within larger biopolitical conjunctures of the twentieth century” (8). Over the course of the next four chapters, Murphy fulfills her promise and gives readers an innovative and at times startling account of the entanglements of feminist health work. Murphy’s book is the most important book written about the women’s health movement since Sandra Morgen’s Into Our Own Hands, but its appeal expands far beyond feminist health scholars; Murphy’s introduction of “protocol feminism,” her careful attention to the biopolitical topology of the twentieth century, and her insistence not only that technoscience influenced feminism but that feminism influenced technoscience make this text a must-read for scholars interested in feminism, sex, reproduction, and/or science studies.¹

After introducing her project, Murphy turns in chapter 1 to her discussion of protocol feminism, “a form of feminism concerned with the recrafting and distribution of technosocial practices by which the care and study of sexed lived-being could be conducted” (28). The self-help practices of the women’s health movement saturated protocols with politics; the very process of, for example, a vaginal self-examination was choreographed to invite particular emotions and create particular types of knowledge. In many ways, this first chapter works as a sort of overview of the feminist self-help movement, identifying the characteristics of protocol feminism and then positioning self-help practices in several divergent milieus, including race and necropolitics, biomedicalization, and the politics of small groups. What is apparent by the end of the chapter is that many features of feminist self-help—the unraced female body, the valuing of emotional labor, the attention to the details of practice, and even the extensive use of consciousness raising as a political tool—were “strategic appropriations” of larger emerging discourses and practices.

The next three chapters focus on case studies of protocol feminism, tracing the entanglements of feminist practices across spatial and temporal boundaries. I focus here on chapter 2 on vaginal self-exams and chapter 4 on menstrual extraction, but I should note that chapter 3’s discussion of the pap smear—particularly Murphy’s attention to the ways in which “unraced” feminist self-help practices uneasily supported discourses of racialized risk and racial screening categories—is certainly insightful.

Chapter 2, “Immodest Witnessing, Affective Economies, and Objectivity,” focuses on vaginal self-examination, a practice that is all too often discussed in feminist scholarship as one of the more “extreme” aspects of self-help that more “mainstream” feminist activists avoided. Murphy places vaginal self-exam at the center of feminist health politics, not the edge; vaginal self-exam “elevated the layperson as expert in the particularities of herself” (75). The immodest witness of the vaginal self-exam found a more proximate and intimate route to objectivity, one that joined the observer and the observed. Notably, although self-exams could be completed alone, the self-help protocols situated vaginal self-examination as a collective exercise. Murphy argues that the practices of self-help, with vaginal self-exam as its iconic protocol, and their reformulation of objectivity are echoed in feminist standpoint theory (see Sandra Harding, Patricia Hill Collins) and Donna Haraway’s theorization of “situated knowledge.” In the end, Murphy’s recounting of the vaginal self-exam frames the practice as a particularly important moment in the reshaping of objectivity in the late twentieth century.

In chapter 4, Murphy turns to another feminist practice of science: menstrual extraction. What complicates the...