I understood Emily Martin's idea about how "endowing egg and sperm with intentional action... lays the foundation for the point of viability being pushed back to the moment of fertilization" (500), but aside from point I fail to see the purpose of the article as a whole. It makes sense that she is angry that scientists continue to use intentional language in describing the reproductive process, because cells are not beings with intent or choice. However, I do not understand why she feels the need to argue so vehemently about one- or two-word choices in specific descriptions by scientists. Her criticisms of, for example, the semantics of how the sperm move along the fallopian tubes (489) seem nitpicky and counterproductive. Her points about intentional action are valid, but because she uses this as only one aspect of the greater critical whole, it is lost in a whiny-sounding discussion of the words "drift" versus "deliver". This is not likely to get the greater (patriarchal?) scientific audience to agree with her ideas, and may only annoy and alienate them.

Regarding Laura Briggs' article about sterilization in Puerto Rico, I find that the way they determine whether or not sterilization is "justified" is inherently flawed in that they do not factor in the social and economic distinctions of different classes. There was one mention that wealthier women tend to favor hospital sterilization (156). Of course one might say wealthier women will express such sentiment in such a study; they have the means to acquire it with little risk to the financial situation of their families... A poorer woman on the other hand might have to determine whether potentially having a child even at the risk of her own health and happiness would be better for the family economically (another helping hand, or $25 saved from operation procedure, or simply the will of her husband), or whether she should put her own well-being and desires at the forefront. Judging people's reactions to one question, in this case "is sterilization good or bad?", does not take into account the variety of life experiences of the subjects. Which simply highlights the fact that reproduction is and has always been a personal issue that should not be placed on a distant and impersonal public platform for government dis/approval.


I also laughed heartily at Martin's article. I study the aging of stem cells in fruit fly testes and I have remarked occasionally how very interesting they are. But this is not because I value males over females, but rather because their testes are approximately 1/3 the size of their body which goes to show where all of their prerogatives lie. If one were to compare fruit fly ovaries with testes, there would be no "derogatory" terms used for females, for their eggs mature much the same as sperm mature, and there is no preset egg cache in the body waiting to deposit over the individual's lifespan. When Martin rails about comparisons of "wastefulness," then, her characterization of females being conservative and sparing are not entirely correct. In fact to focus an entire argument on human anatomy without considering the biological systems of other gendered organisms is sort of silly, because animals are classically studied in far more detail and were dissected centuries earlier than humans due to moral squeamishness against dissecting human beings. Also, I can't imagine a Martin-esque feminist's description of the fertilization process. Maybe it would go something like "The egg sailed valiantly down the fallopian tube, while some blindly flailing tadpoles swam in the opposite direction; eventually the feebly groping sperm collided with the egg and a baby was conceived..."

In my opinion Emily Martin's piece "the Egg and the Sperm" brought more laughter than knowledge. Martin's parallels of sexism to biology are ridiculous. To say that scientific facts are in some way gender stereotyping is to argue conclusive and definite research. Biology textbooks are not being sexist when they describe the difference between sperm and eggs. They are not being sexist when they describe the process of giving birth. Perhaps I am being naive but I think it is rather far fetched to discredit the scientific world because of the language that is chosen to explain natural bodily functions. What do you think??

Emily Martin's essay provides some part of an explanation for the stereotype of women as passive, dependent creatures. If something as "exact" as biology present female's in this light, doesn't it make sense that cultural norms would assume this same notion of women? Both Larkin and Briggs show how this stereotype actually plays out in a cultural context. On the issue of reproduction, women (like the passive, dependent egg) sit around waiting to be controlled and manipulated by outside forces. Martin attributes this control to large international organizations, and Briggs questions whether this is the case on the issue of sterilization in Puerto Rico. Were big US policy-making organizations really to blame for the forced sterilization? Or, as Briggs argues, it is equally valid to claim that women actually ask for the ability to control their ability to reproduce (or not)? My question is, why does it have to be one or the other? Why is it always a matter of "victims" being forced to do something when sometimes, people are actually lobbying to make that happen? It all comes down to choice: if some people want to reproduce a whole bunch, let them! And if some people don't want to at all, why not? This seems to be the core problem with most political issues: gay marriage, abortion etc. How do we begin to create a government in which choice is the ultimate agenda?

I found The Egg and the Sperm to be a very interesting article. However, there are some questions I have with Emily Martin's implications and proposals. On page 495, she mentions, "It has been more than a century since Hermann....peered into his microscope and became the first person to see a sperm penetrate an egg, fertilize it and form the first cell of a new embryo." Surrounding this fact, she discusses how this scientific language, puts the male sperm into the active state and the female egg as the "damsile in distress", also compared to as sleeping beauty. I feel like her bringing up this fact implies that because a man first discovered or saw this biological event, that that is the reason why the male's sperm is considered as the active, aggressive, dominant part of the fertilization process. My question is, what if a woman first discovered this? If this was the case, I doubt she'd describe the egg as active. She wouldn't think about the possible sexist implications but rather just would describe the process as she saw it.
My other questions deals with the last sentence. Emily says that by "waking up such metaphors, by becoming aware of their implications" we will "improve our ability to investigate and understand nature" and thus "rob them( the metaphors) of their power to naturalize our social conventions about gender". However, she earlier gets upset when the egg was described as active because it was too active that it was aggressive and spider-like. [Which I couldn't help but compare to H. Clinton in that when she became active she was considered butch and aggressive] This quotation implies that is we change scientific writing to the egg being more active but less aggressive then it will change our stereotypes that are now social concentions that females are passive and males active. Would there then be arguments made by the men? More importantly, is this possible?

Local or Global Action?

In "Global Aspects of Health...," Larkin identifies the problem that local initiatives face; she writes that "it is more difficult to assess their impact... where a variety of officially sanctioned initatives and informal women's projects are to be found," and that "many of the more formally based programmes have been criticised for being no more than add-on initiatives to existing programmes." Are these "formally based programs" wrongly criticised? Do they serve to help or to dilute the force of a unified and broader initiative? I think that working on a local level is more effective; this way, needs that are visible only to those with an "epistemological privilege" can be addressed. However, at the same time, this way also suffers from its single-ness (by which I mean it is less accessible to the most amount of people). So, what is your opinion, which is better--or rather, if you had to choose one, which and why--action at a local or global level? Where does the balance between the two rest, how much should local initiatives rely on global initiatives, and vice versa?

11/13 discussion

Laura Briggs offers us yet another example of anticolonialist feminist activism that "inadvertently recaptiulated the terms of a US colonialist narrative" (144). Briggs calls it "the problem of speaking on behalf of the subaltern" (145). It does not matter whether one argues for or against colonialism, but rather if one "claims to "know" the desires and subjectivities" of the subaltern. For, as Briggs states, "there is no such subaltern subject" (160). The mainland feminist activists who portrayed the rise in sterilization as the result of a government policy and a mechanism of social control--the "women were forced" argument--ignored the role of Puerto Rican women both in making decisions and advocating for birth control, removing the possibility of agency altogether. 

A more complex and comprehensive history is clearly called for. But I was most interested by the response of Margarita Ostolaza Bey, who argues that "the anticolonialist discourse is also hispanophilic, antifeminist, and reactionary because it is based on the idea that the past--any past--was better" (160). Is anticolonialist discourse ultimately as problematic as colonialist discourse, because it follows the dichotomy established by the latter and results in the erasure of the actions and ultimately the agency of the colonized peoples themselves? Is it possible to conceive of an anticolonialist discourse that does not fall into this trap, or do we need to look for another kind of discourse altogether?