Transantagonisms and the symbolic “woman” in U.S. settler reproductive rhetorics

ABSTRACT

Dominant reproductive rhetorics in the U.S. settler colonial nation-state, I argue, centralize a symbolic and universal womanhood that functions as a transantagonistic rhetoric. Transantagonism is the symbolic and material hostility that is mobilized to maintain cisnormativity and the colonial/modern binary gender system. I reveal how these settler reproductive rhetorics operate to maintain this system through an analysis of the Dobbs v. Jackson and L.W. v. Skrmetti court rulings.

KEYWORDS:

• Transantagonism
• reproductive rights
• binary gender
• decolonial feminism
• anti-trans legislation

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank E. Cram, Logan Rae Gomez, Ashley Hall, Mary Hyepock, Bryan J. McCann, Tiara Na’puti, and Rico Self for their support and feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, 945 U.S. 265 (2022), the Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan dissenting opinion.

2 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s, 2022, the Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan dissenting opinion; Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973).

3 Dobbs v. Jackson, 2022, para. 1.

4 Dobbs v. Jackson, 2022, para. 1.

5 Celeste Michelle Condit, Decoding Abortion Rhetoric: Communicating Social Change (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1994).

6 The term “colonial/modern binary gender system” is adopted from Lugones’ term “colonial/modern gender system.” See María Lugones, “Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System,” Hypatia 22, no. 1 (2007): 186–219.

7 See Autumn Asher BlackDeer, “Unsettling Feminism in Social Work: Toward an Indigenous Decolonial Feminism,” Feminist Inquiry in Social Work 38, no. 4 (2023): 615–26; Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990); bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (New York: Routledge, 1981); Lugones, “Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System”; María Lugones, “Toward a Decolonial Feminism,” Hypatia, no. 4 (2010): 742–59; Chandra Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” Feminist Review 20, no. 1 (1988): 61–8; Haunani-Kay Trask, “Feminism and Indigenous Hawaiian Nationalism,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 21, no. 4 (1996): 906–16.

8 bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1984), 18.

9 Rachel Alicia Griffin, “Feminist Consciousness and ‘Unassimilated’ Feminisms,” Women’s Studies in Communication 37, no. 3 (2014): 255.

10 See Ashley Noel Mack et al., “Between Bodies and Institutions: Gendered Violence as Co-Constitutive,” Women’s Studies in Communication 41, no. 2 (2018): 95–9; Ashley Noel Mack and Tiara R. Na’puti, “‘Our Bodies Are Not Terra Nullius’: Building a Decolonial Feminist Resistance to Gendered Violence,” Women’s Studies in Communication 42, no. 3 (2019): 347–70.

11 The arguments I advance here are not intended to suggest that we eradicate the use of the word “woman,” or that those who are women should not be able to call themselves women. Instead, I am suggesting that we develop an openness to understanding how the language we hold dear can (if used in a manner that homogenizes experience) foreclose on and restrict access to safety, security, and livelihood for those who live otherwise.

12 Ashley Noel Mack, “The Self-Made Mom: Neoliberalism and Masochistic Motherhood in Home-Birth Videos on Youtube,” Women’s Studies in Communication 39, no. 1 (2016): 47–68.

13 Loretta Ross and Rickie Solinger, Reproductive Justice: An Introduction, vol. 1 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2017).

14 See Lisa B.Y. Calvente, “Thingified Flesh: A Womanist Approach to De/Colonial Reproductive Politics and Research,” Women’s Studies in Communication 46, no. 4 (2023): 354–9; Christine Dehlendorf et al., “Evolving the Preconception Health Framework: A Call for Reproductive and Sexual Health Equity,” Obstetrics & Gynecology 137, no. 2 (2021): 234–9; Shui-yin Sharon Yam and Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz, “Against Gender Essentialism: Reproductive Justice Doulas and Gender Inclusivity in Pregnancy and Birth Discourse,” Women’s Studies in Communication 46, no. 1 (2023): 1–22.

15 Pedro Paulo Gomes Pereira, “Reflecting on Decolonial Queer,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 25, no. 3 (2019): 403–29. For an example of a poststructuralist approach, see Butler, Gender Trouble.

16 See Marquis Bey, Black Trans Feminism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022); Scott Lauria Morgensen, Spaces between Us: Queer Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Decolonization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).

17 See Maile Arvin, Eve Tuck, and Angie Morrill, “Decolonizing Feminism: Challenging Connections between Settler Colonialism and Heteropatriarchy,” Feminist Formations 25, no. 1 (2013): 8–34; Asher BlackDeer, “Unsettling Feminism in Social Work”; Jodi A. Byrd, “What’s Normativity Got to Do with It? Toward Indigenous Queer Relationality,” Social Text 38, no. 4 (2020): 105–23; J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, “Native Hawaiian Decolonization and the Politics of Gender,” American Quarterly 60, no. 2 (2019): 281–7; Rauna Kuokkanen, “Globalization as Racialized, Sexualized Violence: The Case of Indigenous Women,” International Feminist Journal of Politics 10, no. 2 (2008): 216–33; Lugones, “Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System”; Lugones, “Toward a Decolonial Feminism”; Mack et al., “Between Bodies and Institutions”; Mack and Na’puti, “Our Bodies Are Not Terra Nullius”; Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes”; Morgensen, Spaces Between Us; Scott L. Morgensen, “Conditions of Critique: Responding to Indigenous Resurgence within Gender Studies,” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 3, no. 1–2 (2016): 192–201; Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí, The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); Freya Schiwy, “Decolonization and the Question of Subjectivity: Gender, Race, and Binary Thinking,” Cultural Studies 21, no. 2–3 (2007): 271–94; C. Riley Snorton, Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017); Shui-yin Sharon Yam and Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz, “Dobbs, Reproductive Justice, and the Promise of Decolonial and Black Trans Feminisms,” Women’s Studies in Communication 46, no. 4 (2023): 362–8; Saylesh Wesley, “Twin-Spirited Woman: Sts’iyóye Smestíyexw Slhá:Li,” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 1, no. 3 (2014): 338–51.

18 Oyěwùmí, The Invention of Women.

19 María Lugones, Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition against Multiple Oppressions (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003); Lugones, “Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System”; Lugones, “Toward a Decolonial Feminism.”

20 Walter D. Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 13.

21 Lugones, “Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System”; Lugones, “Toward a Decolonial Feminism”; Morgensen, “Conditions of Critique”; Wesley, “Twin-Spirited Woman.”

22 Asher BlackDeer, “Unsettling Feminism in Social Work,” 617.

23 See Lugones, “Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System”; Lugones, “Toward a Decolonial Feminism”; Schiwy, “Decolonization and the Question of Subjectivity”; Wesley, “Twin-Spirited Woman.”

24 See Snorton, Black on Both Sides; Imani Perry, Vexy Thing: On Gender and Liberation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018); Dorothy E. Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (New York: Vintage Books, 1999); Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 65–81; Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and the Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014); Alys Eve Weinbaum, The Afterlife of Reproductive Slavery: Biocapitalism and Black Feminism’s Philosophy of History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019).

25 See Roberts, Killing the Black Body; Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe.”

26 Maya Manian, “Immigration Detention and Coerced Sterilization: History Tragically Repeats Itself,” American Civil Liberties Union, September 29, 2020, https://www.aclu.org/news/immigrants-rights/immigration-detention-and-coerced-sterilization-history-tragically-repeats-itself; Roberts, Killing the Black Body; Sally J. Torpy, “Native American Women and Coerced Sterilization: On the Trail of Tears in the 1970s,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 24, no. 2 (2000): 1–22; Weinbaum, The Afterlife of Reproductive Slavery.

27 Roberts, Killing the Black Body; Eva Lopez, “The Indian Child Welfare Act: Keeping Indigenous Children within Tribal Communities,” ACLU (November 21, 2022), https://www.aclu.org/news/racial-justice/icwa-a-law-that-protects-native-families-is-at-risk.

28 L.W. et al. v. Skrimetti, et al., No. 23–5600 U.S. (2023) (majority opinion), https://www.opn.ca6.uscourts.gov/opinions.pdf/23a0146p-06.pdf.

29 L.W. et al. v. Skrimetti, et al., 11.

30 L.W. et al. v. Skrimetti, et al., 11.

31 L.W. et al. v. Skrimetti, et al.

32 Manu Vimalassery, Juliana Hu Pegues, and Alyosha Goldstein, “Introduction: On Colonial Unknowing,” Theory & Event 19, no. 4 (2016), https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/article/633283; Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006): 387–409.

33 Dahlia Lithwick and Neil S. Siegel, “The Lawlessness of the Dobbs Decision,” Slate.com, June 27, 2022, https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/06/dobbs-decision-glucksberg-test-lawlessness.html.

34 A.J. Stone Jonathan, “Not Just a Woman’s Burden: Implications of Gender-Specific Language in Abortion Law,” Gender Law Justice, December 14, 2022, https://genderlawjustice.org/under-deconstruction/not-just-a-womans-burden-implications-of-gender-specific-language-in-abortion-law.

35 El Tecolote is a bilingual newspaper published by Acción Latina, a non-profit based in San Francisco.

36 Mara Cavallaro and Olivia Cruz Mayeda, “Abortion Is Sacred: Native Perspectives on the Overturning of Roe vs. Wade,” El Tecolote, September 22, 2022, https://eltecolote.org/content/en/abortion-is-sacred-native-perspectives-on-the-overturning-of-roe-vs-wade/.

37 Cavallaro and Cruz Mayeda, “Abortion Is Sacred.”

38 Cavallaro and Cruz Mayeda, “Abortion Is Sacred,” paras 14–15.

39 Cavallaro and Cruz Mayeda, “Abortion Is Sacred,” para. 12.