prof arrested for speaking out against graphic anti-abortion display
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After all, the tagline for this project is “graphically exposing the injustice of abortion.” This “photo-mural” is a radical attempt to shame women with scare tactics, morph the reality of abortion and co-opt the horrific legacy of genocide for religious and political dogma. In addition, the group is self-admittedly fond of threatening feminist groups with litigious action if they speak out against their fear tactics.
GAP’s contradictory logic also frames this effort to legislate women’s bodies as an anti-government movement, but of course the real aim here is intense government intervention. Genocide is defined by the United Nations as a systematic effort to destroy a religious, ethnic or racial group. It is an attempt to conduct politics on the body. Anti-abortion activists attempt to move politics further onto the female body in an effort to advance their own political agenda. Of course this is in direct contradiction to conservative petitions for the privatization of health care and reduced governmental “bureaucracy.” And yet, when it comes to a woman’s right to make her own medical decisions, this logic is suddenly reversed. It seems that, for conservatives, women cannot be trusted with the same political rights as their male counterparts.
The group claims that abortion is akin to a “government massacre” and considers “the right to not be pregnant” to be “a far lesser right” than that of “unborn Americans.” GAP conveniently forgets the very gendered and racialized inflection of the atrocities they irresponsibly appropriate. The campaigns fails to acknowledge the rape camps of Bosnia, the ongoing use of women’s bodies as a weapon of war in the Congo (and elsewhere), and the continued disregard in the West for long-standing genocidal atrocities such what is happening in Sudan. Nor do the photos engage with the harmful rape culture of the U.S., which, as Steubenville showed us, continues to teach young boys that a woman’s body is not her own, is even a kind of plaything.
Anti-abortion propaganda like this also ignores the extensive gendered history of reproductive regulation in capitalism, which helps to maintain a division of labor that sees a woman’s place as the home, affirms rape culture, reinscribes the figure of the hysterical woman and perpetuates immobility for low-income citizens.
As the professors who spoke out against GAP’s visit to UB argue, the “inability to see women as capable of making decisions about their own sexuality” and the “pretense of protection” are all intimately linked to totalitarian forms of control. Moreover, the destruction of individuality at work here is also a primary mechanism of genocidal logic. The point is not to reverse GAP’s charges—as that would not advance the conversation either—but rather to show their twisted manipulation of history and their dictatorial philosophy.
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http://msmagazine.com/blog/2013/04/22/professor-arrested-for-complaint-against-campus-display-comparing-abortion-to-genocide/
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