The Studio Solara

With the recent overturning of Roe v. Wade by the U.S. Supreme Court, the lack of access to safe abortions in the United States has raised questions about reproductive violence, justice, and autonomy. The discourse extends beyond safe abortion as healthcare; it extends to the affordability of child support, accessibility of government benefits and the possibility of food insecurity among children of minimum wage workers. Stephanie Land, author of Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay and a Mother’s Will to Survive, said in a CNN interview: “With food stamps, you’re required to work a certain number of hours a week in order to get a benefit. As a human being, getting food to eat is dependent on how many hours you can work at a job. It is so degrading. It’s so demeaning”. She later stated in an NPR interview: “There’s no way that you can work full time minimum wage and have a family”.

The ban of safe abortions and forced births will blur the line between being an inept parent and an underserved, financially struggling one. It is quite othering to assume that those underserved by systemic inequity such as this are morally obliged to follow through and uphold similar social standards of those privileged. We witness time and again the intersectionality of gender, status, and income at play in access to healthcare and generational wealth, among others. Though post-Roe, we may also witness the redefining of motherhood, parenthood, and womanhood in relation to the contested social constructions of moral obligations. Back in February, I had the pleasure of reading Rahel Könen’s essay on witch-hunts in Early Modern Europe and its social and political spheres of influence, resulting in the othering of marginalized groups. I could not help but notice, in parallel to Roe v. Wade, the othering of underserved women and mothers in modern society. Here, I explore what Rahel Könen’s essay, “Woman, Witch, Other: A Decolonial Ecofeminist Recount of the Witch-hunts in Early Modern Europe” means in the post-Roe context.

“As modern subjects, many of us have lost touch with relational ways of understanding the world. In Vistas of Modernity, decolonial scholar Rolando Vázquez (2020) notes that decoloniality calls for “the recovery of relationality”, where we are called to ask ourselves: “How can we remember ourselves Earth-bodies?”

Women, Witch, Other (p. 1)

In a post-colonial world, subjects of colonization were transformed back to, once again, individual agents. Along with this transformation ensues “the recovery of relationality” or the individual connection to others and to the network of meaning. The colonial violence of othering held no space for relationality, whereas the reclamation of relationality would allow post-colonial societies to mitigate social subjugation of those neglected by the system, and make available the diverse ways of knowing that recovers the significance of one’s relationality to all others and the system itself – an active cosmology that is part of a cultural, current conversation and not merely passive historical manifestations of enforced structural inequality. 

“A recurring theme within the study of colonial violence is the practice of othering through which modernity/coloniality has come to justify and legitimize the expropriation, dehumanization and domination of diverse peoples, knowledges and lifeworlds. Such a practice forms part of “the colonial politics of being”, which according to Suárez-Krabbe (20015) explains a mode of existential and material violence that uses the “negation of the other” to establish a norm (p.7). The norm of humanness, of what it means to be human.”

Woman, Witch, Other (p. 2)

The negation of the other was a historically convenient justification for systemic inequity. It socially implies that the othered were negated not by the failure of the system but rather by natural means of systemic implementation not established for the negated. The possible act of negating parents of minimum wage to establish a norm of parents who are readily able to provide for children in the post-Roe context may illustrate this.

“Such colonial politics is an exercise of power that is actively chosen by the colonizer to establish an ontological difference between themselves and the colonized and to devalue the colonized to a space of nonbeing.”

Woman, Witch, Other (p. 2)

The othering makes easier the justification for inhumane treatment as the othered were not historically or socially perceived to consist of humanness in the first place. What does this othering mean post-Roe? The suffering of systemic consequences by those subjected to the othering may hold less weight socially than active individual agents, for instance, the possible desensitization of reproductive violence faced by a minimum wage worker and the sensitization of certain members of the Supreme Court reconsidering the overturning of Roe v. Wade. 

The ideological emancipation of the othered can translate socially through radical imagination for ways of knowing that allows the othering to be, not an inevitable product of a governed way of being, but a falsehood to a sovereign way of life emanating from, rather than negating of, oneself.

“Racial and sexual differences were increasingly used to distinguish between those categorized as humans and nonhumans. Mignolo (2018a) notes that “in the sexual sphere, a distinction was traced between necessary and dispensable women. Dispensable women invented by Human/Man were witches; necessary women were wives whose function was to secure the regeneration of the species” (p.158). Following Federici’s (2004) insights, it is certainly true that the assault on women’s bodies and the persecution of witches served the goal of European elites to regain power and control over the sphere of reproduction. That was to ensure that women would play their future role in providing unpaid reproductive labor ”

Woman, Witch, Other (p. 3)

In post-colonial society such as Malawi, womanhood is neither necessitated nor dispensable. In fact, Malawi’s menarche rituals establish women as social agents of change through the maintenance of cultural dignity, wherein gender is a personal realization: “to be female is collectively ascribed, and individually understood”.  Bacalja Perianes & Ndaferankhande (2020).

“Removing animist concepts about the world and cosmos has ultimately led to, what Merchant (1990) calls, “the death of nature”: The world, once perceived and worshipped as a beautiful organism, is now a “mere system of dead, inert particles” that has legitimized its exploitation and manipulation ever since”

Woman, Witch, Other (p. 5)

The exploitation of the earth allows for the normalized translation of violence and oppression onto the exploitation of our bodies, especially the bodies of the othered irrelevant to the web of meaning exclusive of nature’s animism. Violence to the earth dehumanizes us, the exploitation of the earth commoditizes us, and the extradition of the earth meant the desensitization of violations to bodily autonomy. To understand and navigate the times post-Roe, we must first understand the colonial violence of othering, the social-engineering of extradition and the negation of the othered, and how this ties into the modern understanding of reproductive violence, justice, and autonomy.

Sources:

Gross, T. (2021, October 15). In ‘maid,’ a single mother struggles to make it on minimum wage. NPR. Retrieved June 26, 2022, from https://www.npr.org/2021/10/15/1045995752/in-maid-a-single-mother-struggles-to-make-it-on-minimum-wage 

Könen, R. M. R. (n.d.). Woman, Witch, Other: A Decolonial Ecofeminist Recount of the Witch-hunts in Early Modern Europe. [Unpublished manuscript]. Lund University.

Perianes, M. B., & Ndaferankhande, D. (2020). Becoming female: The role of menarche rituals in “Making women” in Malawi. The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Menstruation Studies, 423–440. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-0614-7_33 

Prior, R. (2021, October 1). ‘maid’ netflix series shows the reality of poverty and abuse. CNN. Retrieved June 26, 2022, from https://edition.cnn.com/2021/10/01/tv-shows/maid-netflix-stephanie-land-wellness/index.html