News

A Publication by Akina Mama wa Afrika (AMwA), written by Zawadi Nyong’o and edited by Christine Butegwa and Solome Nakaweesi-Kimbugwe.

AMwA has been working in partnership with sex worker activists in Uganda and other countries in East Africa. This oral history project allowed women to speak for themselves to try and better understand the politics behind sexuality, sexual rights and sex work.

The research tries to present the multiple dimensions of women’s lives,

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This past week, I attended the 29th Annual Gender Studies Symposium at Lewis & Clark College. Since I am local and available, I seem to get invited just about every single year on various panels, but this year I was invited to speak on the topic of disability and sexuality.

There is also a dinner reception on the first day of this conference for organizers, college staff, and presenters each year. I’ve never actually attended the dinner in all those years I’ve been part of the conference, but this year I thought I’d check it out. So I walked into a room full of people I didn’t recognize, and picked a table to join.

It turned out that all four people sitting at the table I picked were administrators at Lewis & Clark who had something to do with the conference. After a quick introduction, they went back to the conversation they were having before I joined the table, which was about the small swastika drawing inside men’s bathroom at the said campus.

To summarize their conversation, they were talking about how students initially did not take the issue seriously, dismissing the drawing as an isolated incident that didn’t mean anything. But the school took time holding campus-wide conversations about the incident and how it might affect Jewish students, students of color and others targeted by the Neo-Nazis and other white supremacy groups, and many white non-Jewish students began to understand that it meant something to some students and should not be tolerated.

“Can I ask a question?” I asked. “Well I was reading the program for this year’s conference, and correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems that all main speakers and performers seem to be white this year. I don’t think this conference was like that in other years I came. Has there been any conversations about that?”

Immediately, a couple of the administrators started stressing, “it was not intentional!” “We noticed that after we planned all the main speakers, but we didn’t do that on purpose. We picked our speakers according to their expertise in this year’s theme, and it was a coincidence that they were all white.”

It wasn’t on purpose? Of course it wasn’t! If I thought it was on purpose, there is no way I would step a foot on this campus ever again (and while this isn’t the main point of this blog post, WTF is up with the name of this school anyway?). And am I supposed to feel comforted because even though all of the main speakers and performers in this conference are white, it was not intentional?

The problem, of course, is not the presence of malicious intent, but the absence of anti-white supremacy intent to create a conference whose speakers and performers are not just competent, but also diverse. It is about the lack of willingness on the part of organizers to go a little bit deeper to find and invite researchers and speakers of color with equal level of expertise and knowledge who are not receiving fair share of attention or status either because of their background or because of the focus of research that white academia deems unimportant.

And if the college is not interested in making an effort to not let very predictable “coincidence” after “coincidence” take place not just in terms of the racial breakdown of the main speakers, but in other aspects as well, what’s the point of hosting Gender Studies Symposium anyway? Besides, how did the administrators fail to see the parallel between the defensiveness of Lewis & Clark College students over the swastika drawing on the urinal and their own defensiveness in response to my query?

“Worst come to worst I’ll just do a call with you.”
-new client

After a month or two of scholars and intersex activists challenging the prenatal dexamethasone treatment on fetuses suspected of having congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH) designed to prevent the virilization of clitoris, the pro-dex doctors are starting to publicly defend the controversial treatment.

In Bioethics Forum, a blog published by Hastings Center and where Hilde Lindenmann, Ellen Feder, and Alice Dreger have previously published a piece criticizing the treatment, two articles defending the treatment have been published.

• Ambiguous Genitalia: To Treat or Not by John Lantos
• Not Fetal Cosmetology by David A Diamond, Jeffrey Ecker, Ingrid Holm, Susan Kornetsky, Christine Mitchell, and Norman Spack

In addition, there is a research review paper in the current issue of Obstetrics and Gynecology Survey which apparently suggests that the dexamethasone treatment has benefits (But what is the “benefit” they are talking about? Not being born intersex?).

I had also written my own response, which was posted on Bioethics Forum, to the scholars’ letter of concern about dexamethasone treatment (”letter of concern from bioethicists”) to express my broader concern about the field of bioethics and role it plays in legitimizing ethically troubling medical treatments designed to address social problems.

While I haven’t been able to read the Obstetrics and Gynecology Survey piece yet (although it seems to be a straightforward review paper), both of the responses in Bioethics Forum seem to be exactly the examples of the problems with the field of bioethics that I was trying to address in my own piece.

Lantos epitomizes the tendency for pediatric bioethicists to endorse “let the parents decide” model whenever an ethical question is raised about any particular treatment, rather than seriously considering social and ethical implications of such treatment. It’s interesting that he calls for the “marketplace of ideas and marketplace of medical treatment” to sort it out, as it apparently would mean that bioethicists should have an opinion one way or another only when evidence is completely on one side of the debate, a scenario that does not require bioethicists in the first place. Who needs bioethicists if marketplace is competently guided by the invisible hands of God?

Diamond et al. (I only recognize the names of Diamond and Spack among them) embodies another problem with the bioethics, that is the main concern of my essay: bioethics’ obsession with regulatory mechanisms and procedures rather than the actual ethical considerations. I feared that Alice Dreger’s and others’ critique of Maria New’s practice as an un-authorized, un-supervised human subject research involving off-lable medication would only lead to a kinder, gentler version of the same practice under full IRB review, and that appears to be precisely what Diamond et al. are calling for. That is definitely an improvement over the current situation, and perhaps it’s a step we must go through, but I really don’t want to wait for ten or more years before the registry begins to produce useful information.

I want to write more, but I have to finish writing grant proposal to get a new group for queer people with developmental disabilities funded due Monday (and it’s 12:30am on Monday) and get ready to fly out to the East Coast in less than 24 hours…

By the way, if you happen to be near Providence, I’m presenting a workshop at Brown University on Wednesday, March 17th as part of Brown’s Pride Series 2010. The workshop is titled “Transgender inclusion, or Demilitarizing the Borderlands of Binary Gender System.” See their site for more info.

From this gallery titled Windy. It was windy here today so I picked it. It wasn’t warm enough to frolic naked outside though.