Reckoning with Saving

Cromer, Risa; Hardin, Jessica; Nyssa, Zoe

doi:10.1002/nad.12126

Cited by 6 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…In their alignments, we see how the necropolitics of reproduction produce a highly individuated icon of the grievable fetus while occluding the role of systemic racism—including the disparately racist environments and toxic futures forged through governmental degradations to the environment—in determining who (or what) lives and dies. The juridical construction of the aborted fetus as a grievable person advances a narrative of protecting imperiled human life (Cromer and Bjork‐James, 2020; Cromer et al., 2020), even as the same political leaders who celebrate the “humane and dignified” treatment of fetuses simultaneously advance policies that undermine protections for clean air, land, and water. In an age of biocide and impending climate collapse, personifying aborted fetuses as threatened forms of human life deserving dignified treatment also frames pro‐life legislators as doing moral work, even as their policies will likely, if unchanged, lead to the end of organized human existence.…”

Section: Necropolitics Of Reproduction In Indianamentioning

confidence: 99%

Deploying fetal death: “Fetal burial” laws and the necropolitics of reproduction in Indiana

Cromer

Bjork‐James

2023

PoLAR

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While abortion foes in the United States rhetorically promote “life,” discursive invocations of death are foundational to antiabortion advocacy. Pro‐life strategists have made gains mandating the mourning of aborted fetuses through fetal burial bills, which require abortion providers to cremate or bury fetal tissue from abortion procedures. Fetal burial bills are inextricably tied to biopolitical regimes that make and manage grievable life. Drawing on cultural anthropology, feminist social science, critical race theory, and long‐term research on white evangelicalism, this article examines government documents (e.g., Indiana statutes, court rulings, health reports, legislative activity, and state prosecutions) to provide a discursive critique of Indiana's fetal burial law. Constructions of aborted fetuses as grievable human life and the formations of personhood they promote undergird what anthropologist Leith Mullings called the necropolitics of reproduction—a framework explaining how reproduction is constitutive of political regimes that use systemic violence to determine who (or what) lives and dies. Legal conceptions of fetal personhood that hyper‐value fetal subjects entwine with systemic racism, Christian ideology, and anti‐environmentalism to diminish the Black and Brown bodies and environments on which their futures depend. This case is a bellwether for broader dynamics in anti‐abortion policy and activism in the post‐Roe era.

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Section: Necropolitics Of Reproduction In Indianamentioning

confidence: 99%

Deploying fetal death: “Fetal burial” laws and the necropolitics of reproduction in Indiana

Cromer

Bjork‐James

2023

PoLAR

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“…9 Diante dos dados que quantificam a vida em potencial, refrigerada em tanques de nitrogênio, emergem debates de grande efervescência que fundamentam posicionamentos pró-vida e pró-pesquisa. Nas iniciativas pró-vida, programas de "adoção de embriões", a maioria deles encampados por organizações religiosas, sobretudo nos EUA, buscam oferecer um "destino melhor" aos embriões (Collard;Kashmeri, 2011;Cromer, 2018;Cromer;Hardin;Nyssa, 2020;Roberts, 2011) . No Brasil, a adoção de embriões é incipiente ainda e parte de iniciativas pontuais de clínicas de RA.…”

Section: A Criopreservação De óVulos: Mudanças E Impactos Na Raunclassified

Biotecnologias, transformações corporais e subjetivas: saberes, práticas e desigualdades

Rohden¹,

Pussetti²,

Roca³

2021

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Esta coletânea apresenta 12 trabalhos inéditos que discutem o papel das biotecnologias nos processos de produção ou transformação corporal e subjetiva, por meio de investigações sediadas no Brasil, em Portugal e na Argentina. É resultado da articulação promovida pela Rede de Investigações Biotecnologias, Saúde Pública e Ciências na Vida que integra pesquisadoras e pesquisadores dedicadas/os a investigar a produção e repercussões do conhecimento e práticas biotecnológicas em diversos cenários. O eixo central das discussões gira em torno de como novas possibilidades tecnocientíficas direcionadas ao corpo e estruturadas nas chamadas Ciências da Vida traduzem uma série de tensões características das sociedades contemporâneas. Os capítulos constituem investimentos etnográficos e analíticos originais em cenários nos quais as tensões acerca de saúde e aprimoramento são reveladoras também do privilégio dado ao investimento individual em contraste com a ênfase na dimensão social ou coletiva, evidenciando, igualmente, os condicionantes econômicos e políticos em cena e a (re)produção de assimetrias sociais.

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“…Saving agents participate in and promote the differential valuing of life‐forms and, in doing so, often become leaders and laborers in fomenting rhetoric of risk. Greta Thunberg, Donald Trump, and Jane Goodall share company with embryo adoption advocates in framing figures of valued vulnerability as imperiled by threatening environments within their respective advocacy (Cromer, Hardin and Nyssa 2020). Saviors, like figures of valued vulnerability, are temporal figures whose activities align with what Vincanne Adams and colleagues (2009) call anticipation: a risk‐conscious, future‐facing mode that informs how the present is felt to be contingent upon unknowable futures for which each individual ought to prepare.…”

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confidence: 99%

Saving: Towards a Feminist Reckoning

Cromer

2022

Feminist Anthropology

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Lila Abu-Lughod suggested saving as a keyword twenty years ago by imploring feminist anthropologists to "be wary" saving discourses and actions, especially when they appear in a sympathetic form. Heeding this call in a sustained way remains a crucial task. Being wary of saving in a systematic way investigates what gives it broad-reaching appeal and power; how and where saving rhetoric is wielded by diverse agents; and why and how particular life-forms are deemed worthy of protection while many others are not. Being wary of saving supports reflexive considerations of how saving discourses operate within anthropology broadly, and feminist anthropology specifically, toward clarifying what an otherwise world "beyond" or "without" saving could look like. Keywords anthropology, reproductive politics, savingLila Abu-Lughod (2002) suggested saving as a keyword for feminist anthropologists twenty years ago. 1 In asking "Do Muslim women really need saving?" she drew critical attention to the violences of saving rhetoric that propelled post-September 11 geopolitics. The US military invasion of Afghanistan was framed as saving Muslim women from reductive renderings of Islam. 2 As US politicians deployed saving rhetoric to justify the "war on terror," there was a proliferation of what Abu-Lughod calls "neat cultural icons" that were "plastered over messier historical and political narratives" (2013, 34). Muslim women, cast as oppressed gendered and racialized religious Others, became the quintessential targets for saving. As then-First Lady Laura Bush claimed, these women "are no longer imprisoned in their homes … because of our recent military gains in much of Afghanistan" (Abu-Lughod 2013, 32). In turn, Islam was framed as a "special and threatening culture-the most homogenized and the most troubling of the Rest" (Abu-Lughod 2013, 6). The United States positioned itself as a righteous liberator of Muslim women from "the world the Taliban-and-theterrorists would 'like to impose on the rest of us'" (Abu-Lughod 2013, 34) by advancing the ideals of Western Christian liberal democracy with the most violent military in the world. The significance of Abu-Lughod's scholarship is once again clear as US media becomes awash with saving discourse following the Taliban's regaining of power in Afghanistan in August 2021 (Portnoy 2021).Abu-Lughod implored feminist anthropologists to "be wary" (2013, 47) of saving, especially when it appears in a sympathetic form. To illustrate, she showed how claims that US military invasions and occupations in the Middle East were "a fight for the rights and dignity of women" (32) shared "uncanny echoes" (47) with late-nineteenth-century Christian missionaries and colonial feminists "who devoted their lives to saving their Muslim sisters" (47), as well as with contemporary trends in mainstream US feminism. 3 Being wary of the "virtuous goals" (47) of saving when wielded by rightwing, religious, and war-mongering politicians may be an easier task than sustaining skepticism of

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Reckoning with Saving

Cited by 6 publications

References 15 publications

Deploying fetal death: “Fetal burial” laws and the necropolitics of reproduction in Indiana

Deploying fetal death: “Fetal burial” laws and the necropolitics of reproduction in Indiana

Biotecnologias, transformações corporais e subjetivas: saberes, práticas e desigualdades

Saving: Towards a Feminist Reckoning

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