Reproductive Violence in Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats and Gaspar de Alba’s Desert Blood

Social beliefs and values regarding human rights shape practice and policy related to social injustice. Reproductive and environmental justice are among some of the pressing issues facing many people around the globe. Social work, with its focus on social justice, will need practitioners who are well educated and trained in these areas to both help clients and advocate for social change. In this exploratory study, students were surveyed about their knowledge of and attitude toward human rights, reproductive justice, and environmental justice. Results indicated that higher endorsement of human rights, previous human rights’ coursework, and a greater importance of religious beliefs explained 61% of the variance in support of reproductive justice. These results may inform curriculum development efforts, which could employ a human rights framework to explore social justice issues across many domains, including reproductive and environmental justice.

This research paper explores various circumstances of de bordering between human and non-human bodies in Ishiguru’s Klara and the Sun. In this novel, Klara represents non-human body whereas Josie, her family members and others embody human bodies. The article investigates the ways in which Klara, the Artificial Friend or Robot, behaves similarly to human beings and serves to conflate the roles of AI and human bodies. It goes on to examine the various settings in which human and non-human bodies border and de-border inside the storytelling. It contends that AI’s emotional complexity, interaction with human beings and perceptions of the world reinforce to unfold the bordering and de bordering between human and non- human bodies. For this purpose, this study primarily employs the perspectives of Donna Haraway and N.K. Hayles about cyborgs and post human. It expects to open up a new approach for further research on boundaries of human and non-human bodies in

I introduce insights from Latin America and across disciplines to advance our understanding of environmental injustices as written on women's bodies. This paper will entice environmental justice scholarship into conversation with geography to stress how embodied geographies of environmental justice are necessary to understand the geographical, gendered, sexualized, and racialized arrangement of environmental injustices. Expanding Environmental Justice to incorporate the body through Segato's understanding of cuerpo-territorio, a concept that blends geography, territory, and the body, we blur the lines between public and private—emphasizing the role of the state and global capitalism in the subjugation of women and people of color. By asking who reproduces, what is reproduced, and where, in environmental justice work, we underscore that environmental matters are reproductive, and the disproportionate embodied consequences of environmental injustices on sexualized, gendered, and racialized bodies. This violence against feminized bodies is explained as the unintended consequences of global capital accumulation, but decolonial, queer, Black, and feminist geographical insights show how these are central for capital accumulation. Attending to the body as an important geopolitical site allows us to articulate mundane, everyday instances of environmental justice and reproductive justice as geopolitically important. I propose that Embodied Geographies of Environmental Justice that center the concept of cuerpo-territorio underscore that the physical territory of both environmental justice and reproductive justice struggles is in racialized and feminized bodies. By bringing in feminist, Marxist, and postcolonial understandings of production and reproduction, I provide a framework that allows for a global and nuanced understanding of gendered geographies of violence, environmental, and reproductive justice. A reading of a Moraga poem toward the end of the paper, demands that we attend to women of color theorizing their own experiences in radical and innovative terms that resist and transform oppressive relations offering possibilities for renewal, regeneration, and healing.

Corporeal: Exploring the Material Dynamics of Embodiment

Environmental reproductive justice is increasingly being utilized as a framework for exploring how environmental exploitation and pollution contribute to reproductive health and reproductive injustices. However, little research explores how settler colonialism and historical oppression contribute to the physical transformation of land, and how this undermines tribal members’ health. Even less research explores the intersection of environmental justice and reproductive justice among Indigenous groups, especially in the Gulf South, who are especially vulnerable to environmental justice issues due to climate change, land loss, and oil company exploitation, and for tribes that are non-federally recognized. A qualitative description research methodology was used to conduct 31 life-history interviews with women from a Gulf Coast Indigenous tribe. Findings of this study reveal that central components of reproductive justice, including the ability to have children and the ability to raise children in safe and healthy environments, are undermined by environmental justice issues in the community. Among concerns raised by women were high rates of chronic healthcare issues among community members, and issues with infertility. Recognizing Indigenous sovereignty is central to addressing these environmental reproductive justice issues. This research is unique in exploring the topic of environmental reproductive justice among a state-recognized Gulf Coast tribe.

In order to fully understand the impact of contamination on Indigenous communities, this chapter explores how intersectionality has been integral to the development of environmental justice (EJ) and reproductive justice (RJ), and how considering the ways in which these two frameworks then intersect with each other is necessary to more fully explicate how toxicants have threatened the reproduction of human beings and tribal culture. The concept of environmental reproductive justice (ERJ), or ensuring that environmental issues do not interfere with physical or cultural reproduction, involves expanding reproductive justice to include a deeper focus on the environment, and to include the reproduction of language and culture as concerns, in addition to the reproduction of human beings. ERJ also aims to expand the framework of environmental justice to more closely consider the impact of environmental contaminants on physical and cultural reproduction. Through the example of Akwesasne, a Mohawk American Indian community located downstream from industrial sites on the New York/ Canadian border, this paper explores how the concept of ERJ can be utilized to understand the unique situation of American Indian communities who are arguing that justice necessitates going beyond equal protection.KeywordsAmerican IndianMohawkPCBsEnvironmental contaminationIntersectionalityEnvironmental justiceReproductive justiceEnvironmental reproductive justice

In this chapter, we explore environmental reproductive justice as a theory to guide social work practice. We begin by defining environmental justice and presenting related social work efforts. We then provide examples of how environmental injustices—specifically a lack of clean air, water, and nutritious foods—affect maternal and child health. These accounts help readers understand the connection between environmental justice and reproductive justice and lead into Katsi Cook’s theory of environmental reproductive justice. To provide a framework of action, we offer the Social Work Application Model–Environmental Reproductive Justice. We finish the chapter with a “Voice from the Field” written by a practitioner who works in food insecurity and exemplifies social work efforts in environmental reproductive justice. The chapter concludes with recommendations for the social work profession.

ABSTRACTIn order to fully understand the impact of contamination on Indigenous communities, this paper explores how intersectionality has been integral to the development of environmental justice (EJ) and reproductive justice (RJ), and how considering the ways in which these two frameworks then intersect with each other is necessary to more fully explicate how toxicants have threatened the reproduction of human beings and tribal culture. The concept of environmental reproductive justice (ERJ), or ensuring that environmental issues do not interfere with physical or cultural reproduction, involves expanding reproductive justice to include a deeper focus on the environment, and to include the reproduction of language and culture as concerns, in addition to the reproduction of human beings. ERJ also aims to expand the framework of environmental justice to more closely consider the impact of environmental contaminants on physical and cultural reproduction. Through the example of Akwesasne, a Mohawk American Indian community located downstream from industrial sites on the New York/Canadian border, this paper explores how the concept of ERJ can be utilized to understand the unique situation of American Indian communities who are arguing that justice necessitates going beyond equal protection.

The Ethics of Interspecies Performance:Empathy beyond Analogy in Fevered Sleep's Sheep Pig Goat Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Sheep Pig Goat. (Photo: Ben Gilbert, courtesy of Wellcome Collection and Fevered Sleep.) [End Page E-1] Introduction How can humans change the way they perceive nonhuman animals? What would it take to see animals differently and what role might empathy have in this process? If humans could perceive the world from the animals' point of view, would this change how humans perceive animals and, in turn, how they behave towards them? What role might performance play in allowing humans to occupy the animal's world as produced by its specific embodiment—its powers to affect and be affected that both differ from and overlap with human worlds (that are themselves differential)? And what happens if performance itself is seen from the animal's perspective? I begin with these questions in an attempt to mark out the fundamentally ethico-political stakes of engaging animals in performance: the urgent question of how performance might contribute to addressing anthropocentrism, speciesism, and the violence toward animal bodies such perspectives enable. In my ongoing work, I am interested in the capacity of performance to produce reciprocally transformative encounters, in which the affective worlds of both human and nonhuman bodies can be un-made and re-made, and wherein "animals are invited to other modes of being, other relationships, and new ways to inhabit the human world and to force human beings to address them differently."1 These interests have led me to the project I will focus on here: Sheep Pig Goat (2017) by the UK-based performance company Fevered Sleep, a project in which I played the role of "research advisor" when it was first staged in March 2017. I am also collaborating with the company to develop a new iteration of this work which will be hosted at the Vet School at the University of Surrey in February 2020. In this essay, I consider Sheep Pig Goat alongside the work of foundational animal studies scholar and philosopher of science Vinciane Despret, whose important book What Would Animals Say If We Asked the Right Questions? (2016) was one text among many others that the company themselves read as part of the preparation for the project. In particular, I draw from Despret to explore multiple possible understandings of the notion of "interspecies empathy," noting that, for Fevered Sleep, a core aim of the project was to investigate how performance might "increase understanding of, and empathy towards nonhuman animals" (both their own as a company and those of the audiences who encounter their work).2 Here, however, the mode of empathy I am reaching toward is not one that operates through analogy or identification, but an "embodied empathy" that operates as a mode of affective thinking alongside rather than "about" the animal, and as a performative encounter between human and nonhuman animals that produces both parties anew. Both embodied empathy and attention have key roles to play in securing greater ethical consideration of nonhuman animals in relation to the production of knowledge. As Donna Haraway suggests, the etymology of seeing––from the Latin verb respecere, to look again––invites consideration of the relationship between attention and respect: to taking care in an ethical sense and the careful, iterative act of observation that does not judge on first impressions, but considers others as worthy of re-spect, or a second [End Page E-2] look.3 But this ethics of attention is not just about vision or sight, and this is why performance might play a leading role in its investigation. Rather, as Amanda Boetzkes has argued, if "the fundamental ethical question" concerns "how we might develop a complex sensibility of and for non-human animals"4 or if ethics is a matter of embodied behaviors improvised between actors within the uncertainty of specific contexts, then performance practices surely have much to contribute to the development of our understanding of what constitutes an interspecies ethics. Interspecies performance practice might be understood as a primary domain for the creation and investigation of what Traci Warkentin also describes as "an...

This paper highlights the value of an Environmental Reproductive Justice framework in social work and argues that environmental justice and reproductive justice should not be approached as two distinct issues. Because social work is a human right and social justice focused profession, it is uniquely poised to simultaneously address environmental justice issues impacting reproductive health and wellbeing. An Environmental Reproductive Justice framework centers Intersectionality to address sociopolitical issues at the intersection of environmental and reproductive concerns. We offer examples of organizations utilizing Environmental Reproductive Justice approaches, whether implicitly or explicitly. We conclude with implications for social work education and practice.

Reproductive justice (RJ) is an intersectional social justice movement birthed by Black feminist thought. It is undergirded by the right to sexual, bodily, and gender autonomy and has three core tenets: 1) the right to have a child, 2) the right to not have a child, and 3) the right to parent in safe and sustainable communities. A movement that acknowledges the White supremacist policing of childbearing and raising of minoritized groups, RJ seeks to uplift and amplify the voices of folks on the margins and empower them to make the best reproductive choices for themselves and their families. RJ’s emphasis on sexual and gender autonomy, self-determination, community building, and advocacy aligns beautifully with social work theory, education, practice, and macro-level work. Social Work and Reproductive Justice: A Necessary Fit is the first book of its kind to directly align RJ and social work through illustration of how the three main tenets can inform and infuse into social work practice and empower social workers to engage with all levels of the profession from an RJ perspective. Written by interdisciplinary authors of diverse identities, chapters provide a comprehensive and necessary education for social workers on areas embedded in the three main tenets, including obstetric racism, fertility access; maternal-fetal surgery; incarceration; abortion; the Dobbs decision; environmental justice; and resources for schools. At the end of each chapter, “Voices from the Field” introduces readers to individuals on the ground engaged in RJ work.

Reproductive justice is a framework encompassing reproductive and sexual health and rights in a social justice lens that targets reproductive oppression inflicted through multiple systems of oppression of race, class, and gender. In this paper, we aim to highlight the importance and relevance of adopting a Reproductive Justice framework, as opposed to a reproductive rights one, in order to build cross-movement solidarities that organize against the multiplicity of oppressions and inequalities facing women and trans* persons in Lebanon. Through a Reproductive Justice lens, we analyze the points of convergence of citizenship, migration, refuge, domestic violence, intimate partner violence, sexual violence, access to sexual and reproductive health services, in addition to gender identity and sexual orientation, adoption and assisted reproductive technologies, and environmental justice. Mobilizing under Reproductive Justice as a holistic framework, and away from operating in silos within the confines of singular rights, connects different struggles and creates a remarkable opportunity for cross-movement building and solidarities.

Reviewed by: Italian Ecocinema Beyond the Human by Elana Past Matteo Gilebbi Past, Elena. Italian Ecocinema Beyond the Human. Indiana University Press, 2019, pp. 226. Elena Past's book is a fascinating and insightful examination of five Italian films through the lens of material ecocriticism, a framework that allows her—as she points out in the introduction—to read these films by engaging "both matter and meaning" and by focusing on "pressing environmental questions" (2). Past suggests that we consider ecocinema not simply as a genre that engages with ecological themes through stylistic or narrative choice, but as "an interpretive approach" that focuses on the film industry's ecological footprint, the use of nonhuman actors, and the relationship with the material places represented on screen and, most importantly, held and traversed by film casts and crews (3). Past is aware that this approach to Italian ecocinema carries binding ethical implications: by connecting films to a more-than-human world, she positions her work in a non-anthropocentric, anti-speciesist, and bio-centric perspective which questions human exceptionalism, the dominance over nonhuman animals, and the right to control and transform the environment. Therefore, her inquiry into ecocinema asks "new questions" about the physical and ecological impact of films and their condition of being enmeshed in the world (11); these questions rise, in fact, from considering films as "cyborg forms," that is, "places where naturecultures are formed, composed of light particles and technologies and interactions between human and nonhuman bodies" (12). Each of the five book chapters is a case study focusing on a single film, with a research approach unique not only to Italian film studies but also to other studies on ecocinema: Past constructs the analysis of each film by intertwining a canonical reading with interviews of film crew members and with environmental humanities theories, in particular the work of Serenella Iovino, Rosi Braidotti, Matthew Calarco, Donna Haraway, Roberto Marchesini, Timothy Morton, and Cary Wolfe. This allows for a compelling analysis that connects the lived experience of the people involved in the actual, physical making of the film, with the current speculative research in ecocriticism, posthumanism, and environmental philosophy. [End Page 359] The first chapter focuses on Michelangelo Antonioni's Red Desert (1964) and interrogates how the film was "thoroughly entangled in the petrochemical landscape in which it was filmed, and was a byproduct of those very industries" (28). Past reads Antonioni's work as a metaphorical and material catalyst between the film story, the actors, the industry, the workers, the geographical area of Ravenna, and modern Italian society, all interconnected by their dependence on petrol and its chemical and cultural byproducts. Past interprets the film as an artifact that testifies to the "radical connectedness of all matter, while admitting the ontological and environmental crises that can result from such entanglement" (30). Therefore, in Past's study, Red Desert becomes the perfect example of "petrocinema," i.e., cinema that represents the petrochemical industry and some of its many stories while also stimulating a reflection on how this industry creates and supports cinema itself: "both in form and subject, Red Desert traces the shape of this dynamic landscape" where hydrocarbons "drive nearly every aspect of contemporary life" (35, 36). One of the most interesting conclusions drawn by Past is that, by focusing on the geological origin of fuel, Red Desert allows a non-anthropocentric gaze on dilated geological time, juxtaposed to the dominant anthropocentric view of the compressed time of modern Italy and its accelerating economic growth. In other words, Red Desert triggers an epistemological and ontological shift from the fast time of neocapitalism to the slow time of environmental consciousness, while contemplating the realization that the film, like the industry it represents, emits toxins and endangered the biosphere, since cinema itself is a byproduct of petrol that therefore enables the negative environmental effects of the petrochemical industry. In the second chapter, Past continues her analysis of the environmental footprint of both the economy and cinema by collecting the stories of crew members of Matteo Garrone's Gomorrah (2008). They recount how making this film meant "getting dirty" with the wasteful film production process, with Campania's waste management crisis, and...

The purpose of this paper was to re-visit data from a nine-week scrapbooking project, with Black and Latinx youth, in an urban after-school programme, using an affective lens. To examine the entanglement of human and non-human bodies, I (White, woman, researcher) returned to week three of the nine-week project, during which the youth and I explore health and fitness-related magazines. I explicate how affect, using feminist new materialism, drew me into three affective moments, which took place during and after the project had officially ended. In looking at these non-linear moments, I explain the ways in which the participants, materials and, perhaps, most importantly, myself became affected by a co-constitutive entanglement of human (youth, adult) and non-human (scrapbooks, images, texts) bodies. These moments generated affects that were uncomfortable, disruptive, and productive. I end the paper by urging researchers, educators, and practitioners to continue to engage in critical scholarship with youth, particularly in the United States. While this is a modest beginning, it is also a point to pause in discomfort and disruption which can, in turn, produce possibilities for youth and adults to destabilise traditional hierarchies in research and practice and learn from each other.

This conceptual article highlights the intersections of the historical and current status of reproductive violence and environmental injustices in the United States. Environmental injustices intersect with individuals’ ability to determine whether and when to have children and how to parent in safe and sustainable communities, affirming their culture. Current trends exacerbate racial, ethnic, and cultural disparities. The Grand Challenges of Social Work mandates the profession to identify new perspectives and opportunities for change. Reproductive justice and environmental justice offer comprehensive human rights and justice-based frameworks that edify systemic oppression and call for equitable solutions. Social work practice, research, and education can benefit from following reproductive justice and environmental justice frameworks recommended to identify opportunities and solutions. Opportunities for social work are outlined at the micro, mezzo, and macro levels.