In her introduction, Miriam Ticktin sets up her methodology,
stating that more than one ethnographic site was needed in order to understand
what was happening (2011). By claiming two sets of ethnographic sites, she
analyzed “the politics of care” through distinct but interrelated lenses; a
feminist methodology of solidarity that included activism (Ticktin, 2011, 9)
and a methodology that focused on the production of expert knowledge about
French immigration policy. Additionally, Ticktin’s discussion of her use of
“politics” as a key way to understand and frame the effects and consequences of
exceptions to French immigration policy provides a way to talk about politics
where politics don’t appear to be.
Ticktin’s methodologies are helpful in thinking about how to
approach my work. In exploring knowledge production about disability in
prenatal clinical visits, I need to figure out how to get at the biomedicine
expert approach to disability, even as I interrogate how the “standard”
clinical definitions of disability are mediated through and by cultural
assumptions and values (Ticktin might call this ethics) about disability. Add to the mix parental expectations and
traditional bioethics, a field that claims to address these issues, and we’ve
really got quite a jumbled mess (or an entanglement!). I also am interested
in the political economy of the commercialization of nascent prenatal screening
technologies. The intense fights over patents in this area combined with
aggressive direct-consumer marketing will (hopefully) provide ample evidence
for this new technology’s importance for exploring the “effects and
consequences” (Ticktin, 2011, see also Timmermans & Buchbinder, 2013) on
cultural meanings of bearing a disabled child.
Arguably, decisions about whether to have prenatal
testing/screening and subsequent decisions that arise from that are considered
intensely personal and private. However, under a rubric that takes up
“politics” as anything that “engages and reproduces a set of power relations”
(Tickton, 2011, 20), we can understand these individual, clinical encounters as
revealing productive practices that reinforce, interrupt and act as instances
in which certain kinds of politics of knowledge are reproduced, while others
are ontologically and epistemologically out of bounds.
Tickton gives us an example of this move in her chapter
“Biological Involution,” where she explores how biology, for some subjects,
becomes a kind of commodity or tool that gets used in various ways to prove or
attain citizenship. In demonstrating that bodies come to be both self-revealing
and, at the same time, a referent for a certain kind of liberal subject,
Tickton theorizes a dual regime of truth that centrally asks, who is allowed or
expected to work on the body? In so doing, she names the French policy of the
“illness clause” as a part of this specific instance of biopolitics.
Something I’d like to talk about in class is how Ticktin
justified the uniqueness of her research sites, claiming France (and its
policies) as distinct from other states. At the same time, however, she is
influenced by transnational feminist theories and spends a good part of the
book discussing how MSF has its own logics, which are related to the French
state but also different. In pointing to the French state’s unique (explicit)
focus on care and compassion, however, how does this both reinforce the stated,
supposed apolitical aims of French humanitarianism and make us wonder how the
French state is really that different than other states? This is not so much a
critique as a recognition of the difficulty of methodologies that require
justification of a certain site, but also demand an account of that site’s multiple/shifting/contradictory
qualities. What do others think about this? How have you seen this dealt with
in other work, or how have you dealt with it in your own work?
Works Cited
Timmermans, S. & Buchbinder, M. (2013). Saving babies? The consequences of newborn
genetic screening. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
No comments:
Post a Comment