Part One: Evoke the "natural" mother
49 images capturing the privatization and capitalization of white body reproduction
Please watch this 2 minute visual documentary before reading!
There is no way to communicate the full history of reproduction in white women over the past 400 years! It is impossible to capture the complexity and nuance of all the layers and imposing forces.
In this collection of 49 images and a few words, I am attempting to convey a storyline of contradictions, lies and false promises that kept changing for women in Europe. These were peasant women who became the working class. These were women who looked up to the bourgeoisie (upper class) of the time. They were subject to ongoing violence and oppression from the upper class and then through their male "husbands".
Although this might not be a surprise to most people, women were not naturally nurturing and devoted to their children pre-capitalism. Women and non-conforming people were self-determined in as many ways as they could be under feudalism. They had more choices around their body, the number of children they were birthing and were able to sustain themselves through the labour of their communities. They were out among the people. There were very little rules around where they could be.
Because we are living under capitalism today (even as it crumbles), I find it highly valuable to understand how the role of reproduction plays into capital and how the same reproductive injustices taking place in the pre-industrial and industrial revolution time period are taking place still today! It doesn't take long to observe how women and non-conforming bodies are being policed all over the western world!
This paper by Camille Barbagallo is pivotal in understanding the groundwork the upper-class powers had to lay down to convince women that their body belonged to the state. They used art (the main form of indoctrination) as a catalyst for training men and women how to behave.
These 49 images are examples among many many others showing the dramatic shift from public/social systems of care to privatized, nuclear family and institutional care. The erasure of femme and queer plant knowledge to usher in a policed, hierarchical knowledge and control over the body. From self-actualized labour to forced labour. The capitalist project is a body project. It is an effort to control the bodies and the reproduction of those bodies. Knowledge is power.
Part Two: Evoke the “tough” mother will express the brutal and harsh reality of the Transatlantic slave trade that propped up the Industrial Revolution. I wish to give a visual glimpse into how dramatically different the reproductive crises was for Black women in colonized America.
This is so interesting and I’m looking forward to the next part. I have lots of thoughts around herbal and natural medicine and its suppression and also the idea that it is a natural and wrong that an older woman might prefer not to have a sexual relationship. It is insisted even todaythat this is a medical malfunction! There are so many aspects to what you were writing about, and I am looking forward to them unfolding. I look forward to part two.