Viewpoint: Feminist social justice post-modernist professor rejects reproductive ‘technological innovations’ because they promote ‘intersectional oppressions’

Gig work in childcare, nursing, and transportation; non-invasive prenatal testing; gene editing; and space expeditions can all be attributed to one mistaken, pervasive assumption: that “we can innovate our way out of the thorniest problems, including reproductive ones”.

In Reproductive Labor and Innovation: Against the Tech Fix in an Era of Hype, feminist political theorist Jennifer Denbow demonstrates why the U.S. has put so much of its hopes, and its money, on technological “innovations”––and why that hasn’t addressed crises in reproduction and caregiving.

Denbow [emphasizes] the need for “deep structural change” to “undo intersectional oppressions and the structures of racial capitalism, ableism, and misogyny,” transforming these structures so that they better support reproductive labor.

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With tech elites including Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy taking on leadership roles in Donald Trump’s new administration, Denbow’s caution against an uncritical embrace of innovation takes on a new urgency. Rather than accepting unfettered development and commercialization of reproductive and genetic technologies, she urges to us seriously assess where these technologies will lead.

This is an excerpt. Read the original post here.