A scholarly paper from Duke University describes the insurgency against reproductive racial capitalism. "Such protests reveal the persistence of forms of specifically reproductive contestation that were pervasive in the context of forced reproduction in slavery. Here we are thinking about the long history of enslaved women regulating their own fertility through abstinence, emmenagogues, abortifacients, and self-managed abortions (Schiebinger; Schwartz; Fett; Latimer). We are also thinking about how a radical politics of abolition feminism remains to be realized. We have seen the perverse impact of the form of liberal abolitionism that was prevalent in the nineteenth century, which used women’s reproductive capacities to hijack the control of formerly enslaved women’s reproductive labor beyond formal Emancipation (Turner). We have seen the end of the slave trade without seeing the end of slavery (Sharpe; Hartman, Lose). We have seen former slaveowners explicitly building a system of extractive labor based on women’s reproduction after 1807. Likewise, in the present, we can clearly see, if we are willing to think outside the box about the meaning of substantive reproductive freedom, that liberal ideas of “the right to privacy” have not and will not suffice to protect the basic human right to control one’s body."
The authors imagine that they are female slaves in a 19th-century Southern plantation, where the owner is forcing them to have children to increase his capital. So they protest by refusing the capitalist's project. The whole thing is imaginary; they are fighting an inexistent slavery, like toddlers refusing to eat.
It is childish, to say the least.
P.S.: In Israel, there is a saying "הם חיים בסרט" they are living in a movie. Now that the internet is an important part of our "lived" life, it is easy to lose contact with reality. The authors above are living in a different reality, with female slaves being forced to breed. Of exploited slave-workers, in an invisible dictatorship. They are discriminated against and oppressed by an inexplicable system.
The best proof of living in the real world is if they are making money. They are, since a university pays them an excellent salary, and that proves that they are in touch with reality, and the "reproductive insurgency" nonsense is an effective survival tool. They are living in a movie, maybe, but it allows them to enjoy a comfortable existence. Oh boy!
