Bodies, Nations, and Knowledge. Political Epistemologies in Germany, Poland, and Sweden in Historical Perspective.
I intend to use the grant to complete a monograph that will synthesise research that I have conducted in several projects in recent years on the body's politics in Poland, Sweden and Germany during the inter-war and contemporary periods. The comparison discloses an unexpected pattern, which unsettles previously accepted notions. The book answers two questions: (1) How is it that Germany and Poland, which are now classified as 'conservative' regarding reproductive rights and restrictive in the application of biomedicine, can be perceived as the pioneering countries concerning the right to bodily integrity, while Sweden, which today is considered 'liberal', has historically prioritised society's right to intervene in individual rights? (2) How have women's movements challenged the dominating discourse and how can their mutually different ways of prioritising and politicising issues of the female body be accounted for? The double comparison - between countries and time periods - will offer an innovative contribution into the inter-relationship between the body, science, democracy, and gender relations. The monograph unfolds the argument that 'big' debates on body issues are intrinsic to phases of the fundamental transformations, and a major terrain where the formative boundaries between private/public, citizenship are renegotiated. I plan research visits at the interdisciplinary Gender Studies Centres at Warsaw University and at the Technical University in Berlin.
Final report
THE PURPOSE OF THE PROJECT AND HOW IT DEVELOPED
The purpose of the grant was to synthesise research conducted during several projects in recent years on body politics in Germany, Poland and Sweden during the inter-war and contemporary periods. The comparison reveals an unexpected pattern that unsettles previously accepted notions. The monograph seeks to answer two major questions: (1) How is it that Germany and Poland, which are now classified as ‘conservative’ regarding reproductive rights and restrictive in the application of biomedicine, historically can be perceived as more permissive with respect to the right to bodily integrity, while Sweden, which today is considered ‘liberal’, has prioritised society’s right to intervene in individual rights? (2) How have women’s movements challenged the dominating discourses, and how can their distinct ways of prioritising and politicising issues of the female body be accounted for?
The aim was to contribute to the multifaceted international research by combining cultural and social scientific approaches and bringing more systematic insights into the inter-relationships between the body, sciences, democracy, national projects and gender relations. The focus of the research remained largely unchanged during the sabbatical. The elaboration and equivalent application of the interdisciplinary analytical framework to three countries and two periods proved more demanding than I expected. The work therefore continues to proceed beyond the planned timeline.
THE MOST IMPORTANT RESULTS AND CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE FIELD
The conceptual framework unfolded in the volume proved not only to be fruitful for the empirical analysis, but also to offer an important contribution to feminist theorizing through an amalgamation of comparative citizenship studies and insights from studies on the science-policy nexus. Whereas the former has until now rarely included the life sciences and their eugenic precursors, the gender perspective has been largely absent in the latter. The volume deploys the analytical concept of national ‘political epistemologies’ and advances it through the gendered and temporal perspective. What makes this temporal comparison particularly beneficial is that both periods under consideration have been formative in terms of societal change while also representing different knowledge paradigms. The anatomical, organic conception of the body as a solid unit has now been replaced by the molecular, ‘leaky’ body. In the political sphere, there is a parallel shift from hierarchical government with a focus on planning and rationalisation of society to governance through co-ordination within a network society and an invocation of active citizenship. The empirical analysis explores how these ideal typical epistemic orders materialize in their respective political contexts. The focus on temporality allows for an investigation of different configurations of spaces of articulation and for the discernment of national styles of thought that are established over time and in which meta-narratives about nations’ own histories are an important element. The monograph unfolds the argument that ‘big’ debates on body issues are intrinsic to phases of fundamental transformation and a major terrain on which the formative boundaries between private/public, citizenship and national belonging are re-negotiated.
The analysis of the interwar period elucidates the crucial role of the configurations of state formation, nation-building, class relations and democratization in the emergence of specific political cleavages that were in turn decisive for political opportunity structures and the varying capacities of women’s movements to challenge dominant discourses. It also illustrates that in all three countries the notion about the body as organic bounded entity and the nation state materialized in different entanglement between social, medical and population discourses. Germany was marked by a strongly gendered division between early social rights, which safeguarded the masculine status and a broad mobilization around reproductive rights as “women’s rights”, which started before the first World War as a reaction against a misogynist, pro-natalist discourse that was criticized as coercive procreation. The demand to repeal the abortion paragraph was raised “in the name of the free personality of the woman”, and a mass mobilisation in the Weimar Republic led to the enacting of one of the most permissive laws in Europe. These debates were embedded in the language of eugenics, but the strong tradition of the rule of law prevented the introduction of coercive, anti-natalist regulations until the rise of the National Socialist regime. The Swedish constellation was less gender-divided with regard to both political and early social rights. The internationally unique introduction of general medical inspection and hospitalization in combatting venereal diseases in the early 19th century paved the way for later coercive measures, including eugenically motivated marriage bans in 1915 and the sterilization law introduced in 1934. It established a political epistemology that applied “universal” equal rights to all citizens and subordinated individual rights to collective rights. In Sweden, it was not until the early 1970s that the women’s movement supported reproductive rights as individual rights. The Polish situation was strongly shaped by the country’s partitions, as well as by the regained sovereign statehood after 1918, celebrated as a “physical rebirth” requiring a concurrent “moral rebirth”. The Polish women’s movement was part of this constellation, dominated by a moral–cultural style of thought. The Second Republic was marked by the division between the republican–civil conception and the ethnic–sacred–nationalistic conception of statehood and civil rights. Poland adopted moderate regulations: Sterilisations were discussed but never obtained broader support. In addition, the abortion law was reformed, yet without the social clause included in the bill. As a part of broader reforms, permissive abortion laws were introduced in 1956, during the state socialist period: the concept of “conscious motherhood” introduced by the Polish sexual reform movement in the late 1920s was once again circulating in the public debate.
The investigation of the contemporary period reveals how certain elements of the earlier established style of thought continue to impact the renewed politicization of bodily rights from the 1970s onwards, especially with regard to new biomedical technologies and how the two epistemic paradigms mix and overlap. Germany was the only country in which the women’s movement triggered a mass mobilization against those technologies, formulating a position in the language of “enforced procreation” and a strong criticism of the “medicalization” of women’s bodies and medical “promises of happiness”. This frame resonated with other discursive recourses in the German context and led to rather restrictive legislation, but also to a participatory turn in science policy-making. In the Swedish context, a short critical debate remained without broader resonance. The major argument in favour of the technologies was formulated in accordance with the utilitarian ethical tradition, invoking the suffering caused by unwanted childlessness. In the 1990s, when the concept of the knowledge society was launched as a new Swedish model, a critical stance was increasingly labelled “fundamentalism” and the country continue the follow the traditional expert dominated policy style. The post-2000 Polish debate on the new technologies was a continuation of the “war on abortion”, which has been the foundational conflict in democratic Poland. A first legal, in fact rather permissive, regulation of reproductive technologies was finally adopted in 2015 under the liberal–conservative government. Here, the women’s movement largely mobilized to secure access to the technologies. The very specific current in the debate against the technologies is that opponents marked the children born through the medical treatment as “infected” and as a threat to the “Polish nation”. This frame draws on older images of infection and conspiratorial patterns of thought.
NEW RESEARCH QUESTIONS
The analytical framework and the empirical analysis undertaken move forward with some of the controversies about various new dimensions of citizenship that have been part of the EU-financed project FEMCIT and its subsequent publications, from which this book project evolved. Proposing a focus not primarily on demarcations between concepts such as bodily, intimate, and biological, the book regards them rather as a novel “fourth” category demonstrating that the citizen/worker societal fabric that has generated the classical triangle—civic, political and social citizenship rights—has been profoundly transformed. Today, issues of embodiment, kinship, belonging, corporality, life, and living matter are at the center of struggle within the new “body politic” embedded in societal relations in which the distinction between economy and culture is increasingly blurred. The biomedical field has been paving the way for a new kind of politicized intimacy in which emotions have become a powerful argumentative currency for rights. This, in turn, can be regarded as part of a new broader political transformation and affective governmentality that requires further scrutiny from a feminist perspective.
IMPLEMENTATION AND INTERNATIONAL DIMENSION OF THE PROJECT
The research period of 12 months included a two-weeks research visit at the interdisciplinary Gender Studies Centres at Warsaw. During the winter term 2016/17 I was a visiting scholar at the Centre of Research on Women and Gender at Technical University in Berlin. Both visits have been very fruitful for the project and new ideas for further research.
The purpose of the grant was to synthesise research conducted during several projects in recent years on body politics in Germany, Poland and Sweden during the inter-war and contemporary periods. The comparison reveals an unexpected pattern that unsettles previously accepted notions. The monograph seeks to answer two major questions: (1) How is it that Germany and Poland, which are now classified as ‘conservative’ regarding reproductive rights and restrictive in the application of biomedicine, historically can be perceived as more permissive with respect to the right to bodily integrity, while Sweden, which today is considered ‘liberal’, has prioritised society’s right to intervene in individual rights? (2) How have women’s movements challenged the dominating discourses, and how can their distinct ways of prioritising and politicising issues of the female body be accounted for?
The aim was to contribute to the multifaceted international research by combining cultural and social scientific approaches and bringing more systematic insights into the inter-relationships between the body, sciences, democracy, national projects and gender relations. The focus of the research remained largely unchanged during the sabbatical. The elaboration and equivalent application of the interdisciplinary analytical framework to three countries and two periods proved more demanding than I expected. The work therefore continues to proceed beyond the planned timeline.
THE MOST IMPORTANT RESULTS AND CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE FIELD
The conceptual framework unfolded in the volume proved not only to be fruitful for the empirical analysis, but also to offer an important contribution to feminist theorizing through an amalgamation of comparative citizenship studies and insights from studies on the science-policy nexus. Whereas the former has until now rarely included the life sciences and their eugenic precursors, the gender perspective has been largely absent in the latter. The volume deploys the analytical concept of national ‘political epistemologies’ and advances it through the gendered and temporal perspective. What makes this temporal comparison particularly beneficial is that both periods under consideration have been formative in terms of societal change while also representing different knowledge paradigms. The anatomical, organic conception of the body as a solid unit has now been replaced by the molecular, ‘leaky’ body. In the political sphere, there is a parallel shift from hierarchical government with a focus on planning and rationalisation of society to governance through co-ordination within a network society and an invocation of active citizenship. The empirical analysis explores how these ideal typical epistemic orders materialize in their respective political contexts. The focus on temporality allows for an investigation of different configurations of spaces of articulation and for the discernment of national styles of thought that are established over time and in which meta-narratives about nations’ own histories are an important element. The monograph unfolds the argument that ‘big’ debates on body issues are intrinsic to phases of fundamental transformation and a major terrain on which the formative boundaries between private/public, citizenship and national belonging are re-negotiated.
The analysis of the interwar period elucidates the crucial role of the configurations of state formation, nation-building, class relations and democratization in the emergence of specific political cleavages that were in turn decisive for political opportunity structures and the varying capacities of women’s movements to challenge dominant discourses. It also illustrates that in all three countries the notion about the body as organic bounded entity and the nation state materialized in different entanglement between social, medical and population discourses. Germany was marked by a strongly gendered division between early social rights, which safeguarded the masculine status and a broad mobilization around reproductive rights as “women’s rights”, which started before the first World War as a reaction against a misogynist, pro-natalist discourse that was criticized as coercive procreation. The demand to repeal the abortion paragraph was raised “in the name of the free personality of the woman”, and a mass mobilisation in the Weimar Republic led to the enacting of one of the most permissive laws in Europe. These debates were embedded in the language of eugenics, but the strong tradition of the rule of law prevented the introduction of coercive, anti-natalist regulations until the rise of the National Socialist regime. The Swedish constellation was less gender-divided with regard to both political and early social rights. The internationally unique introduction of general medical inspection and hospitalization in combatting venereal diseases in the early 19th century paved the way for later coercive measures, including eugenically motivated marriage bans in 1915 and the sterilization law introduced in 1934. It established a political epistemology that applied “universal” equal rights to all citizens and subordinated individual rights to collective rights. In Sweden, it was not until the early 1970s that the women’s movement supported reproductive rights as individual rights. The Polish situation was strongly shaped by the country’s partitions, as well as by the regained sovereign statehood after 1918, celebrated as a “physical rebirth” requiring a concurrent “moral rebirth”. The Polish women’s movement was part of this constellation, dominated by a moral–cultural style of thought. The Second Republic was marked by the division between the republican–civil conception and the ethnic–sacred–nationalistic conception of statehood and civil rights. Poland adopted moderate regulations: Sterilisations were discussed but never obtained broader support. In addition, the abortion law was reformed, yet without the social clause included in the bill. As a part of broader reforms, permissive abortion laws were introduced in 1956, during the state socialist period: the concept of “conscious motherhood” introduced by the Polish sexual reform movement in the late 1920s was once again circulating in the public debate.
The investigation of the contemporary period reveals how certain elements of the earlier established style of thought continue to impact the renewed politicization of bodily rights from the 1970s onwards, especially with regard to new biomedical technologies and how the two epistemic paradigms mix and overlap. Germany was the only country in which the women’s movement triggered a mass mobilization against those technologies, formulating a position in the language of “enforced procreation” and a strong criticism of the “medicalization” of women’s bodies and medical “promises of happiness”. This frame resonated with other discursive recourses in the German context and led to rather restrictive legislation, but also to a participatory turn in science policy-making. In the Swedish context, a short critical debate remained without broader resonance. The major argument in favour of the technologies was formulated in accordance with the utilitarian ethical tradition, invoking the suffering caused by unwanted childlessness. In the 1990s, when the concept of the knowledge society was launched as a new Swedish model, a critical stance was increasingly labelled “fundamentalism” and the country continue the follow the traditional expert dominated policy style. The post-2000 Polish debate on the new technologies was a continuation of the “war on abortion”, which has been the foundational conflict in democratic Poland. A first legal, in fact rather permissive, regulation of reproductive technologies was finally adopted in 2015 under the liberal–conservative government. Here, the women’s movement largely mobilized to secure access to the technologies. The very specific current in the debate against the technologies is that opponents marked the children born through the medical treatment as “infected” and as a threat to the “Polish nation”. This frame draws on older images of infection and conspiratorial patterns of thought.
NEW RESEARCH QUESTIONS
The analytical framework and the empirical analysis undertaken move forward with some of the controversies about various new dimensions of citizenship that have been part of the EU-financed project FEMCIT and its subsequent publications, from which this book project evolved. Proposing a focus not primarily on demarcations between concepts such as bodily, intimate, and biological, the book regards them rather as a novel “fourth” category demonstrating that the citizen/worker societal fabric that has generated the classical triangle—civic, political and social citizenship rights—has been profoundly transformed. Today, issues of embodiment, kinship, belonging, corporality, life, and living matter are at the center of struggle within the new “body politic” embedded in societal relations in which the distinction between economy and culture is increasingly blurred. The biomedical field has been paving the way for a new kind of politicized intimacy in which emotions have become a powerful argumentative currency for rights. This, in turn, can be regarded as part of a new broader political transformation and affective governmentality that requires further scrutiny from a feminist perspective.
IMPLEMENTATION AND INTERNATIONAL DIMENSION OF THE PROJECT
The research period of 12 months included a two-weeks research visit at the interdisciplinary Gender Studies Centres at Warsaw. During the winter term 2016/17 I was a visiting scholar at the Centre of Research on Women and Gender at Technical University in Berlin. Both visits have been very fruitful for the project and new ideas for further research.