Knowledge as Resistance: the feminist international network of resistance to reproductive and genetic engineering

stevienna de saille

The Feminist

International

Network of

Resistance to

Reproductive

and Genetic

Engineering

knowledge

as resistance

Knowledge as Resistance

Stevienna de Saille

Knowledge as

Resistance

The Feminist International Network

of Resistance to Reproductive and

Genetic Engineering

ISBN 978-1-137-52726-4 ISBN 978-1-137-52727-1 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52727-1

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017950309

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Cover illustration: t h a l I a Australian Visual Poet. Concrete Poem titled “Passionately Forward”

especially written for members of FINRRAGE Australia. Copyright 1986

Printed on acid-free paper

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Stevienna de Saille

Institute for the Study of the Human

University of Sheffield

Sheffield, UK

vii

In 2005, while I was doing a Master’s degree in the Centre for

Interdisciplinary Gender Studies at the University of Leeds, a woman

named Jalna Hanmer came to give a talk on the Feminist Archive North

(FAN), a repository in the Brotherton Library’s Special Collections, for

which she was a trustee. She carried with her a crate full of purple-inked

newsletters, some titles familiar to me, some not, representing the early

history of the British Women’s Liberation Movement. Intrigued, I

accepted her invitation to come see FAN for myself and wound up as a

volunteer archivist for the next 6 years.

During my MA I helped unpack and process a very large collection of

documents Jalna was donating to the archive, which centred on her time

in the Feminist International Network of Resistance to Reproductive and

Genetic Engineering (FINRRAGE). I became fascinated by the material,

too often getting little preservation done as I got caught up in reading

instead, encouraged by her offhand remark that as an activist FINRRAGE

represented some of the best work of her life, and she thought it would

make great material for a PhD one day if someone could think of some

interesting questions to ask.

The thought stayed with me as I finished my degree and went on to

take a non-academic job. I knew by then that I wanted to go on to do a

PhD, but I had been researching women in online communities and had

assumed I would continue in that field. However, as an adopted person,

Preface

viii Preface

I had definite concerns about the way third-party reproduction was too

often framed in ways which pitted biological against social parentage and

ignored the biographical needs of the child. FINRRAGE seemed like a

perfect PhD topic, focusing on issues I wanted to better understand,

without being directly personal. Eventually, I suggested this to Jalna, who

responded enthusiastically. She helped organise agreement from Renate

Klein and Maria Mies to gain access to the Australian and German

archives as well, and in October 2008 I began my PhD in the School of

Sociology and Social Policy at Leeds.

Initially, I kept trying to find an analytical approach in the social move￾ment literature; however, it quickly became apparent that FINRRAGE

was not going to fit any of its theoretical models particularly well. There

were no dues, no membership lists, it was neither a single organisation

nor did it really seem to constitute a social movement on its own. Instead,

as I began to read my way through the organisational documents in the

FINRRAGE collection and tried to identify potential interviewees, I

noticed two unusual trends. One was that these were not simply feminist

activists; they were also doctors, lawyers, scientists, academics and social

workers, bringing that expertise into the network. The other was that,

rather than choosing protest as a tactic, they had instead chosen to create

knowledge. Not just the kind of knowledge that activists would usually

create—the newsletters and manifestos and statements which outline a

position of resistance and why it’s important to take it. This I was familiar

with from my own years in the direct action environmental movement.

But FINRRAGE did something different, something more. Boxes and

boxes and boxes of more; articles and books and conference papers, docu￾ments that I thought the women had been reading to inform themselves

about the technologies they opposed, which turned out actually to have

been written by the women in the network. Whether their analysis had

been right or their efforts a success was far less interesting than trying to

understand who they were, and how they had created all this together,

what it meant to use the process of knowledge creation itself as a protest

tactic, as a form of organised resistance. While knowledge creation has

always been a feminist weapon of choice, rarely has it been directed at a

topic so technical, while it was emerging on a global scale.

Preface ix

These were the questions that set me off on a project it has taken almost

a decade—from the first interview in 2008 until the last in the spring of

2017—to complete. There are now 28 women from 14 countries whose

stories are woven throughout this book; each of them with their own

partial perspective, each touching upon dozens of other stories which

remain untold. While I have tried to at least mention as many of the

women as I could to acknowledge their work, I am also painfully,

apologetically aware that there will be some inadvertently left out, some

whose names I did not know, and many more whose names appear on

book chapters, articles and conference attendance lists who I could not

locate, or whose identification as FINRRAGE members I could not con￾firm. I cannot, therefore, claim this book to represent anything more

than a story about FINRRAGE, one refracted through the murky lenses

of distance and time and told by someone who was not there to see events

unfold. I can only try to tell it well.

Leeds, UK Stevienna de Saille

5 July 2017

xi

This book has been through a number of stops and starts since it origi￾nally began as a doctoral project in October 2008. Funding was provided

through a PhD bursary from the School of Sociology and Social Policy at

the University of Leeds, and the Worldwide Universities Network

Research Mobility Programme, which allowed me to undertake a visiting

fellowship at the University of Sydney for four months in 2010. My

thanks go to Anne Kerr and Paul Bagguley, for their patience, advice,

editorial comments and the occasional kick-start when the thesis seemed

overwhelming, and to Maureen McNeil and Angharad Beckett, for their

insight and suggestions. I would also like to thank Catherine Waldby,

Melinda Cooper and Lindy Gaze for warmly hosting me at the University

of Sydney. Additional thanks to the archivists in Special Collections at

the University of Leeds, and to the volunteers at Feminist Archive North,

who taught me about the importance of preservation and how to do it.

Thanks are also due to the many other people who gave me books,

papers and ideas which nudged my thinking in completely unexpected

directions: Donna Dickenson and the members of the IAS/WUN

Biopolitics Symposium; Sally Hines, Zowie Davy and Maria do Mar

Pereira for reminding me why I am still a feminist; the Postgraduate

Forum on Genetics and Society for leading me into STS and especially

Rachel Douglas-Jones for sticking it out till the end; Sandra González￾Santos for continually urging me back to the topic; Yuuka Sugiyama and

Acknowledgements

xii Acknowledgements

Chiaki Hayashi for their help with Japanese translation; and Noemie

Bouhana for academic advice given in between marathon bouts of crit￾ters, zombies and things that go boom in the night. My thanks as well to

Susan Molyneux-Hodgson for taking the newbie in hand, and to my

colleagues in the Institute for the Study of the Human (iHuman) at the

University of Sheffield, and especially Paul Martin, for giving me the time

and space I needed to finish.

A particular and extremely heartfelt thank you goes to the women of

FINRRAGE, for their generosity, hospitality and years and years of

patience. To say ‘I could not have done it without you’ is a vast under￾statement. I would also like to thank t h a l i a for use of her illustration,

and my editors at Palgrave, particularly Joanna O’Neill.

Last, but not remotely least, my thanks to Imona Haninger for con￾tinuing to put up with the madwoman in the attic, and all my friends and

family who accepted being ignored for months on end with grace and

affirmations of confidence. I hope to make it up to all of you soon.

Portions of this book were previously published in de Saille, Stevienna.

2014. ‘Fighting Science with Social Science: Activist Scholarship in an

International Resistance Project’. Sociological Research Online 19 (3): 18,

available at http://www.socresonline.org.uk/19/3/18.html. Used with

permission.

xiii

1 Introduction 1

Part I Action and Reflection: A Story of FINRRAGE in

28 Voices 27

2 Emergence 29

3 Expansion 69

4 Abeyance 133

Part II Studying It Up: The ‘FINRRAGE Position’ as

a Cognitive Praxis 179

5 Demonstration in Publication 181

6 Knowledge as Resistance 221

Contents

xiv Contents

Appendix: The Women of FINRRAGE Interviewed for

This Book 257

References 261

Index 291

xv

AID Artificial insemination by donor

ANZAAS Australia-New Zealand Association for the Advancement

of Science

ART Assisted reproductive technologies

BARD Bangladesh Academy for Rural Development

CATW Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (USA)

CEDRH Human Reproductive Rights Studies Commission (Brazil)

DAWN Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era

DHSS Department of Health and Social Security

ELSI Ethical, legal and social issues

ESHRE European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology

FAN Feminist Archive North

FINNRET Feminist International Network on the New Reproductive

Technologies

FINRRAGE Feminist International Network of Resistance to

Reproductive and Genetic Engineering

GATT General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade

GRAEL Green-Alternative European Link (Germany/Belgium)

GREPM Groupe de recherches et d’evaluation des pratiques médicales

[Research Group for Evaluation of Medical Practices]

(France)

HEW Department of Health, Education and Welfare (USA)

Abbreviations

xvi Abbreviations

HFEA Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (Great

Britain)

ICG International Co-ordinating Group, FINRRAGE

Germany, 1989–1997

ICPD United Nations International Conference on Population

and Development (Cairo, 1994)

IDAC Institute for Cultural Action (Brazil)

IRAGE (Issues in) Reproductive and Genetic Engineering

Isis-WICCE Women’s International Cross Cultural Exchange

IVF In vitro fertilisation

IWHC International Women’s Health Coalition

IWHM International Women and Health Meetings

LACAAP Latin America, Caribbean, Asia, Africa and Pacific

countries

MIC Management and Investment Companies (Australia)

MP Member of Parliament

NBCC National Bioethics Consultative Council (Australia)

NGO Non-governmental organisation

NHMRC National Health and Medical Research Council

(Australia)

NHS National Health Service (UK)

NPSU National Perinatal Statistics Unit (Australia)

NRT New reproductive technologies

OBOS Our Bodies, Ourselves

PROGAR Project Group on Assisted Reproduction (UK)

QVMC Queen Victoria Medical Centre, Melbourne

REDEH Rede de Defesa da Espécie Humana/Rede de Desenvolvi￾mento Humano [Network for Defense of the Human

Species/Network for Human Development] (Brazil)

RMT Resource mobilisation theory

RWH Royal Women’s Hospital, Melbourne

RZ Revolutionäre Zellen (Germany)

SMT Social movement theory

SPUC Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child (UK)

SSK Sociology of scientific knowledge

STS Science and technology studies

Abbreviations xvii

UBINIG Unnayan Bikalper Nitinirdharoni Gobeshona [Policy

Research for Development Alternative] (Bangladesh)

UK United Kingdom

UN United Nations

UNCED United Nations Conference on Environment and

Development (Rio, 1992)

US(A) United States of America

VSRACI Victorian Standing Review and Advisory Committee on

Infertility (Australia)

WGNRR Women’s Global Network for Reproductive Rights

WHO World Health Organization

WLM Women’s liberation movement (broadly 1960s–1970s)

WRRC Women’s Reproductive Rights Campaign (Britain)

WSIF Women’s Studies International Forum