I am really grateful that we were able to hear Mia Mingus and Cara Page speak about their work. It was really eye-opening to hear the precise differences between all the branches of Reproductive activism, and I really hadn’t been aware of exactly what the division was between reproductive rights and reproductive justice. Because so much of the debate surrounding this issue is, as Mia mentioned, abortion-centric, I think it’s really important to take time to listen to how complicated this issue is.
Also, I thought the Visual Images Project was a really important piece of work. I think it’s crucial to understand that the dominant conversation surrounding the availability of birth control and access to abortion clinics stifles the debate that women of color have initiated over how to change the circumstances that make it difficult to have and raise children. Furthermore, the images show that the conversations stemming from the dominant structure both make a spectacle of mothers and their children in less wealthy parts of the world, and also do so in order to present overpopulation as a problem that comes from those regions.
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It's interesting that you said that female fertility is looked at as a spectacle in less wealthy parts of the world. We saw those pictures and it was almost as though we were looking at animals (the way the pictures were presented and their contexts): uncontrollable breeding, primitive, simple. It's as though the West has to come in there and tame them. I thought it was peculiar that this was related to the problems we are witnessing in the environment. What would be a better way to show these problems?
Nrnaik, you ask how can we better show these problems. We can start by zooming out beyond the frame the picture was taken. During the class with the two guest lecturers, we look at the picture of the two young girls taking water from the well. If had been able to zoom back the frames of the picture, what would we have seen? We may have seen how the surrounding environment these young girls live has been so heavily impacted by pollution that they have no clean free water and have to resort to taking water from wells owned by businesses. If can zoom out in more of the visual images presented to us, we may e more able to better observe the pictures in the proper context and understand how certain forms of control work to present an image or idea that does not actually exist
Mia and Cara really opened my eyes to way that the media portrays individuals and the framing techniques they use to subtly get their wicked agendas across. Since the Reproductive Justice lecture, I have been looking at ads quite differently and have noticed the racist and classist undertones of several organizations. After looking at the Planned Parenthood website, I noticed that many of the models or pictures of people were minorities. It was as if they were saying that minorities need their services more than Whites. We must definitely look at the intentions of these types of organizations that are set up to “help” us because their intentions may be completely different than they seem.
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