Sakura of DOOM

This is a collection of essays by Asian-American feminists about Asian-American feminists (with the "American" indicating the US, although there is one that focuses on Canadian healthcare). From my recollection, the range seems fairly large—there were quite a few essays on lower-class women and I think the essays spanned a good range of ages, although I could be remembering wrong. I was especially pleased to see good representation of South and Southeast Asian women. I think there could have been more by and about queer women and differently-abled women, though I really loved the round-table with three punk queer Asian women.

I had read about half of this maybe half a year ago; I reread most of it and dashed through the rest to cope with some RL race-related unfunness. I find I don't read these kinds of collections of fairly personal essays by WOC very often, but when I do, they are so inspiring and so life-saving. Maybe that's why I can't read them often... I have to save them up so I have something to turn to when it feels like everything is working against me. I'm not going to be particularly academic in this write up because my reaction is so emotional. This book inspires me and makes me want to do more and to do better, to keep working at things, to try to give back some of the support that I've found within.

One piece that particularly stood out for me was "Bringing Up Baby: Raising a 'Third World' Daughter in the 'First World'" by the mother-daughter team of Shamita Das Dasgupta and Sayantani Das Dasgupta and how jealous I was that Sayantani Das Dasgupta had her mother when she was growing up, how she had a personal role model for radical politics. I hate envying other people's positions, because I'm sure they have problems I do not, and because I am and will always be grateful to my parents for giving me Taiwan. But my family and almost everyone I grew up with were not particularly radical (or liberal even), and I wish I had had something outside of ink and paper, someone human and alive and breathing and talking to go to when I was growing up.

Other themes that struck me were all the mentions of grassroots organization and community outreach; several groups described in the book are grassroots organizations started by women of color to fight sexual violence in communities of color or lower-class women of color mobilizing to fight racism and classism and sexism. It reminds me of how Andrea Smith starts from Native women in Conquest and works out from there, and how by doing so she finds solutions that help those women and help many other communities as well. But I was thinking of activism and fighting oppression and how important it is to start from the ground up, especially because of how oppression works from top down. I am also not sure I am making sense here; I'm still working through what I can do and how I can do it.

One of the pieces was annoying, with the American woman author talking about a group of women in another country, and it just felt so condescending and "I am the outsider talking about these foreign people." I am pretty sure it was Deila D. Aguilar's "Western Feminism and Asian Women," but I am not entirely sure because I do not have my copy of the book next to me.

That said, overall I very much liked how international the book was, how so many of the pieces recognized that many of us might have been born in the US, but we still have families in other countries, still have stakes there that we cannot give up. I also liked how the book not only pointed out racism in the US, but also global structures that support racism, such as the piece on Canadian healthcare and how much of the cost of national healthcare has been offloaded onto immigrant Filipina nurses.

I found this book so personally necessary and so comforting that I have no idea how useful this write up will be to anyone who's not me. Still, recommended!

For coffeeandink

Roberts writes about reproductive freedom for poor black women and how that reproductive freedom often differs from the standard definition used by most white feminists, particularly the mainstream feminist movement for the right to abortion and birth control versus the right to not be coerced or deceived into sterilization or into taking birth control drugs you did not agree to. From there, she examines the meaning of liberty in the United States and what to do when the idea of negative liberty butts up against the idea of social justice.

I suspect I would have found this book much more mind-blowing had I not read Andrea Smith's Conquest first (read it! READ IT!); as such, I still think it's a very necessary read, although it's a bit more dated and Roberts doesn't synthesize her argument quite as well. The book goes through the history of black reproductive freedom, particularly black female reproductive freedom, from the days of slavery, when a black woman's reproductive system was, along with the rest of her, property of white men, when masters could and would whip their pregnant slaves even as they dug holes in the dirt to protect the property in their wombs. And while slavery is over, Roberts shows again and again that the same attitude about black women's bodies and reproductive systems are perpetuated.

She goes on to show that if black women's babies cannot be the property of white people, they are instead portrayed as a burden ("crack babies" and "welfare mothers"). While I completely agree with her argument, I felt she could have drawn more parallels with how race and sex and class intersect; frequently she would point to classist language ("welfare mothers") and note that they were racially coded, even if not explicitly so in the language. It's not to say that she ignores class; class is a constant throughout the book, as it is always the poorest black women who have the worst choices forced upon them. I think I just wanted a more detailed connection.

I had the same issue with ablism. Roberts cites several cases in which black mothers are classified as "mentally disabled" as a convenient way to convince others of the need to sterilize them. In some of the cases, the mother was not differently abled, but in some of the others, she may have been, and I think the book would have been stronger had Roberts incorporated a critique of the ablism inherent in many of the arguments for sterilization. This goes doubly when she discusses the eugenics movement, which she mainly writes about as being a barely coded means for white people to talk about black genocide. Again, I completely agree with her here and in no way want to lessen the strength of her argument. But I think synthesizing classism and ablism further into her analysis of racism and sexism would only make it stronger, a la Andrea Smith drawing parallels among sexual violence against Native women, Native American genocide, and environmental violence.

Many of the chapters on medical experimentation on black women, forced sterilization, uninformed drug trials, and coerced birth control are familiar from Smith, and though I don't have the book with me anymore, I'm fairly certain Roberts is talking about present-day happenings. Norplant and Depo-Provera again, and who knows what big Pharma is doing in Africa (thank you, Sonia Shah). She also links the present with the past, from owning black bodies to the Tuskegee Syphilis Studies.

Still, the most painful part of the book is when she shows how the interests of poor black women and middle-class white women have collided, particularly when it comes to a waiting period for sterilization and informed consent for birth control. This is where I think Roberts does her best work; this is where she takes the idea of negative liberty and contrasts it with social justice:

This notion of liberty rests on the assumption that privileging individual autonomy over social justice is essential to human freedom. [...] The primacy of liberty over equality, then, accepts the possibility that inequality may be inevitable in a liberal society. Although the pursuit of equality, once liberty is assured, is commendable, liberalism cannot guarantee its realization.

She manages to critique the mainstream feminist movement and how it has historically ignored issues central to the well-being of poor black women while still arguing for a need of both increased access to abortion and birth control along with protecting those who have historically been the most abused. I'm still thinking over many of her points about liberty and justice and especially wondering how it works in places that promote positive liberty instead of negative.