Retheorising Women’s Health: Shifting Paradigms and the Biomedical Body
Seminar 1
Governance
May 27 2009, University of Warwick. Ramphal Building Room 3.41
Introduction & Welcome
Deborah Lynn Steinberg
1. Welcome
I would like to warmly welcome you to this first of four ESRC seminars on
‘Retheorising Women’s Health: Shifting Paradigms and the Biomedical Body’
Today’s theme is on the question of Governance.
We are delighted to welcome our three speakers:
Professor Mary Rawlinson (Stoneybrook, SUNY, NY)
Professor Sally Sheldon (University of Kent, UK)
Professor Maya Goldenberg (University of Guelph, Canada)
Our speakers will provide both food for thought and their own perspectives on the
interrogative agenda concerning the question of ‘governance’ vis a vis women’s
health.
Aims
We hope today’s workshop will stimulate free ranging, multidisciplinary
conversation concerning the relationship of governance to women’s health given
radical shifts in the socio-cultural, political, economic and technological landscape of
women’s health in this ‘third wave’ period of feminist politics and theory.
Thus, our aims are:
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in part reflexive, as we consider the successes, problems, relevance and
purchase of earlier formations of feminist health politics for today’s world
in part a consideration of the current complexities of health care praxes,
ethics and politics both locally and cross-culturally and the challenges these
pose to a feminist understanding and politics of health
and in part a projection forward, as we consider what we might argue are the
logical or salient trajectories for feminist health politics into the future.
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The Changing Landscape of Women’s Health and Feminist Health Politics
Since the foundational insights of the women’s health movement were forged
during the decades from the late 1960s-the new century, there have been in many
cases radical transformations in the social, ethical, economic and cultural landscape
surrounding women’s health.
These include, for example, the convergence of new communications technologies
and IT with wider revolutions in biomedical and health technologies , the advent and
normalisation of new reproductive and genetic technologies, radical shifts in legal,
bioethical and cultural commonsenses and representational contexts concerning
questions of bodily autonomy, bodily integrity, kinship and identity.
Health inequalities, while they have continued to profoundly underscore women’s
divergent social situations and status globally, the forms these inequalities take, and
the ways in which they have developed and changed over the past decades, remain
radically inconstant.
The question of ‘governance’
The question of governance has been a core point of interrogation for feminist
analyses of the nexus of gender and health politics, and a core principle and
trajectory of feminist health politics and advocacy.
My work
Certainly, they have formed both an explicit, and in recent years perhaps more
implicit, consideration in my own research.
In my 1997 book Bodies in Glass: Genetics, Eugenics, Embryo Ethics, I set out three
principles analysis in my assessment of IVF and genetics. These principles were
inspired by what I understood as an axiomatic principles of the women’s health
movement: ‘our bodies, ourselves’. The principles were: ‘privacy’, ‘integrity’,
‘autonomy’: which I understood not only as inalienable rights, and as necessary
defences for women in the face of would be and extant state, medical and
commonsense incursions, but also as affirmative principles of embodied, healthful
and good life for women –for myself as a woman.
As I looked over my older work on this subject I found myself wondering if these
principles really worked now? For example,
What does a principle of ‘integrity’ mean when medical or health practices that I
have sought for myself, do involve incursive, dis-integrative interventions on the
body? Does this principle hold up in the context of breast cancer? Or when
advocating for access to medical or other health practices are a priority agenda?
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Does a principle of ‘privacy’ continue to hold up? Or has it been made irrelevant by
the revolution in communications technologies.
By ‘autonomy’, did I mean ‘sovereignty’ in the legalistic sense? A notion of personal
ownership of body and self? A right to refuse? A right to comply? Does this concept
still fly as an adequate defence of women’s reproductive decisionmaking? Does it
work as an affirmative concept of self-identity and embodied well-being?
It is interesting for me to consider the degree to which these concepts square with
my current interests in governance issues and women’s health:
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Medicine and medical care as an affective terrain (affective governance): in
other words, a concern with feelings and feeling structures and their link
with the plausibility of particular health knowledge’s
Health and illness as a moral terrain (linking not only questions of agency and
obligation: but what I term the imperatives of action (or ethical burden) of
medical and scientific knowledge’s and praxes)
What makes a ‘good patient’? what are the commonsense and
commonemotional principles that shape ‘good’ or ‘bad’ patienthood?
Transference and faith: the place of belief and the symbolic in particular
health or medical contexts?
Key questions
1. what are the forces of ‘governance in the current context of women’s health?
 What social, political, economic, and cultural processes does
‘governance’ encompass?
 Would we argue that the notion of governance, traditionally focused on
the regulative dimensions of law, health ethics and clinical/scientific
protocols be expanded?
 What would an expansive understanding of governance include?
 Why, for whom, and in what ways, is governance a central issue facing
women’s health and the women’s health movement?
2. How have the terms of governance vis a vis female bodies shifted, for example,
in the wake of technological innovation, globalizing markets in health, the impact
on the one hand of neoliberal political-economies and on the other, of
fundamentalist religious discourses, state policy and politics?
3. How would we define a feminist paradigm of governance and to what degree
might earlier agendas and paradigms toward that end need to be rethought?
 For example, do the axiomatic principles of the early women’s health
movement concerning consent, bodily integrity, sovreignty and self
determination still have purchase?
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Schedule for the Seminar
9:30am-10am arrive/check in & coffee/tea
10am-1)-30am Introduction and welcome, Professor Deborah Lynn Steinberg (University of
Warwick, UK)
10:30am-11am Professor Mary Rawlinson (Stony Brook, SUNY, New York, USA)
11am-12:00pm Group Discussion
12:00pm-12:45pm Discussion Highlights from Group Rapporteurs
12:45pm-1:45pm Lunch
1:45pm-2:45pm Professor Maya Goldenberg (University of Guelph, Canada) & Professor Sally
Sheldon (University of Kent, UK)
2:45pm-3:45pm Group Discussion Discussion
3:45pm-4:40pm Discussion Highlights from Group Rapporteurs
4:30pm-5pm Coffee/Tea Break
5pm Conclusion
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