Population growth and climate change have increasingly become the interlinked hot button issues of the 21st century. In On Infertile Ground: Population Control and Women’s Rights in the Era of Climate Change (2018), Jade S. Sasser explores the diverse ways in which population-environment linkages are being revived through a female empowerment discourse in popular media, development interventions, and various forms of policy and advocacy.
Sasser, Associate Professor in the Department of Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of California (UC) Riverside, combines methodologies drawn from science and critical feminist studies to discuss developments in scientific knowledge, reproductive politics, and shifts in funding priorities of organizations. Her aim is to find out why population-based arguments continue to command international resources and attention, and what implications this has on the sexual and reproductive rights of women, especially women from and currently residing in the Global South.
Many scholars and activists have heard of (and often support) the rallying global cry to control population growth in an effort to combat climate change. Yet Sasser argues few know of the origins of the population-environment linkage that has gained “commonsense” status. The first two chapters explore the historical context of the origins of populationism, which posits that anthropogenic climate change is primarily caused by rapid population growth. Sasser writes that population first became an object of quantitative inquiry with the rise of Malthusian theory in 1798, when scholar-economist Thomas R. Malthus renders the population crisis intelligible by using then “modern” technologies and scientific studies to develop solutions and interventions like contraception (53, 59). In 1883, statistician-psychologist Francis Galton coined the term eugenics, which is the “science of improving stock” and has two functions: it encourages the childbearing of those deemed to be of better stock—“European races”—and it promotes the development of strategies to limit the procreation of the unfit (54, 58). Yet it wasn’t until 1954, when Hugh Moore published The Population Bomb (read by 1.5 million Americans), that population became an institutionalized security issue and birth control a national defence (33). While there was significant opposition by world leaders to population control imposed by the Global North initially (35), by 1994, the global debate had shifted to focus on the role of population in producing environmental problems (36). This was due to the rising narrative of apocalypse that continues to accompany climate change discourses today.
This urgency of solving anthropogenic climate change morally justifies actions that are neither “the least coercive nor the most, but those somewhere in the middle” (45). This narrative is dangerous because of what it makes possible, including military manoeuvres, increasing surveillance and policing of borders, the racial profiling of migrants and refugees, and the coercive control over female bodies (46). Sasser’s narrative draws out the underlying fear of “others” that has historically allowed the adoption of one-size-fits-all approaches focused on population control by populationist-ecologists like Garrett Hardin. In 1974, Hardin wrote that, admitting impoverished “others” to wealthy boats, conscious of the boat’s limits, would capsize the boat and kill everyone on board (72, 75). Sasser’s narrative paints a picture of populationism’s evident racist, sexist and classist origins, a movement now hailed and supported by a growing number of young environmental and feminist activists, as well as development organizations.
In the next three chapters, Sasser describes what she learns from interviews and participant observation on contemporary population-environment activism. Specifically, she explores the powerful role of donors in setting the agenda for population science (chapter 3); how young people transform from environmental or reproductive health activists into population-environment activists at the expense of poor, rural women in the “Global South” (chapter 4); and reflects on how the term “reproductive justice” is being co-opted by individuals and organizations alike by using it as a label rather than actively challenging inherently racist, classist and sexist populationist narratives (chapter 5).
Sasser’s work serves to challenge sactivists’ often well-intentioned desire to empower women. For example, images at a Sex and Sustainability gallery at UC Berkeley revealed faceless women bent double, babies strapped to their backs while they toiled in the fields and captions like “let’s see who dies this time, me or my baby” accompanied with statistics of fertility rates (105). One of the representatives of the event admitted that they were “just trying to get people in the door,” and that there would be time for nuance later (106). In this and other examples, Sasser teases out the static storylines linking poor, rural women to the environment as both victims of environmental catastrophes and agents of change, responsible for solving environmental problems. While the referents used to describe poor, rural women have changed, Sasser explains that the conceptualization of the “impoverished, Global South woman” has not. She remains characterized by poverty, above replacement fertility, and barriers to limiting childbearing (107) until she becomes a Sexual Steward, a moral agent who, without fail, manages her reproduction for the greater societal and environmental good (15).
Sasser concluded that populationism was intentionally being repositioned to fit into the social justice discourse as a strategic distraction. Instead of engaging with social justice in an ethical and committed way, Sasser found that her interviewees were uncertain about the racist eugenic discourses underlying population-environment linkages and family planning solutions (125). In transforming from environmental activists into population-environment activists, young people unknowingly perpetuate systems of neo-colonialism, racism, classism and sexism. Controlling the population in an effort to combat climate change has served as a distraction from the real causes of environmental decline: consumption and industrial production. It has enabled the “Global North” to point their finger of blame outward to formerly colonized nations for their high fertility rates, without acknowledging their own historical and contemporary responsibility as the primary emitters of greenhouse gases and carbon dioxide. Sasser argues that these beliefs must be dismantled, yet organizing towards this goal has proven to be difficult due to the ways in which the narrative of population-environment activism has been co-opted.
Without a precise understanding of the origins of populationist movements, racial and sexist biases in maternal health will persist. The populationist organizations Sasser studied co-opt reproductive justice discourse by rallying behind the “right” causes to attract donors and organizational leaders. This process undermines the leadership of women of color from and in the Global South who spent their lives organizing under the banner of reproductive justice. Similarly, the majority of populationists interviewed by Sasser identified as feminists, who believed that women should have agency over their reproductive health rights, yet did so under a neoliberal framework where decisions are made by the individual. They make the assumption that women everywhere are free to make their own decisions and have access to contraceptive technology. In doing so, they wrongfully deem a fundamental restructuring of the conditions of women’s reproductive lives unnecessary (131). On Infertile Ground is a timely reminder to all of us that reproductive justice can neither be achieved without recognizing intersecting injustices rooted in race, class, history, politics and geography, nor without actively changing who participates in activist leadership. The book serves as a call to action to all those engaged in political activist movements, who knowingly or unknowingly further populationism, a concept rooted in racism and sexism, to stop placing the burden on women of colour from and in the Global South to solve all the world’s environmental problems.
Women Rowing North is a compilation of stories from Mary Pipher, the author, her female friends/acquaintances, and their collective experiences. All are dealing with ageism, loss and misogyny. All cultivate resilience and problem-solving techniques to deal with the challenges they face. And all do a rather fantastic job at it.
While, as a 23-year-old woman, I cannot invalidate the claims Pipher, a respected clinical psychologist and herself aged 72, makes about the elderly, I was surprised by the blanket statements she deduced about the elderly. For example, she strokes all elderly women with the same brush by using the word “we” repeatedly, without taking into account how divergent women and their lived-experiences might be from one another.
One such statement, “we older women are uniquely suited for community work,” paints a picture of elderly women as financially stable enough to give back to the community. It is not wrong in itself to assume that there are elderly women who are financially independent. In fact, it is important for women of all ages to cultivate hope through the stories of successful elderly women. This inspires respect for the elderly, which is increasingly lacking, hope for our own futures, and improved lives for the next generations.
However, it is wrong to assume that all elderly women are in a financially stable enough position to do community work, or that every elderly woman would want to in the first place. Pipher and her friends are in an economic position to afford camping trips to the Rocky Mountains and luxury outings at ranches in Mexico.
Yet this is not a reality for many millions. Pipher blatantly disregards the divergent ways in which women may respond to aging and illness, as well as geographical, environmental, familial, political, and economical difficulties—many of which become intergenerational or exclude the possibility of security and stability. For instance, climate change may force the elderly to move away from their homes, which served as lifelong safe havens, and the development of pipelines may lead the state to dispossess elderly Indigenous women of their lands. There are many such examples.
This begs the following questions: Is Women Rowing North overly optimistic about what elderly women can attain? Or does it do a disservice to women who do not wish to or cannot attain the goals Pipher assumes all elderly people want like “bliss,” and “awe”? Do all elderly women have access to money and emotional, spiritual, and psychological support? Do they all have families, friends, and co-workers to uplift them?
Do elderly women of colour strive for and want the same things? What about racial, religious, and ethnic discrimination faced by elderly women of colour and from First Nations or Inuktitut communities? What about refugees, migrants, and the environmentally displaced? What about elderly women who live in conflict zones or are continually in the process of migrating from place ot place? What about women from LGBTQ+ communities, as her sources Kestrel and Becca, a lesbian couple, cannot hope to represent the diversity in the LGBTQ+ community? And, finally, what about elderly women that continue to face mental and physical disabilities, state oppression, or domestic abuse, all of which may disable them from having any agency at all?
If Pipher had dedicated a chapter to explaining that her writings represent only herself and her friends, or even a certain socio-economic class in the United States, Women Rowing North would not lose its many strengths—its authentic, vulnerable, and transformative voice, which focuses on rendering feasible hope, joy and happiness. Without an acknowledgement of privilege or false representation, unfortunately, to me, it loses its credibility.
Unsettled is a stunning ethnography of the relentless maneuverings of the Cambodian refugee: her escape from imminent death at the hands of Khmer Rouge forces, her navigation through refugee camps, Bronx displacements, and the U.S. welfare system and, most importantly, her unforgiving captivity. The transnational experiences of Ra, a resolute refugee mother of seven, are the focus of Eric Tang’s book. Most sociological accounts of immigration depict a timeline from immigrant to permanent resident to citizen with each phase bringing greater stability (Birkvad, 2019, p. 801; Guild et al., 2009; Anderson, 2010, p. 63; Bassel et al., 2018, p. 227; Castles, 2000). Tang challenges these linear notions of time and space through Ra, who is never offered safe asylum, yet finds mechanisms for both survival and resistance through continual movement. Despite this, she is subjected to the discourse of refugee exceptionalism, which qualifies her as a foreign subject to be pitied and saved by feminist liberalism (Tang, 2015, p. 17). This sheds light on the postcolonial and imperial project that places Southeast Asian refugees in the hyperghetto without being from there, while simultaneously juxtaposing their experiences against those of African Americans (and to some extent Latinos), the deserving underclass, who are from there and should stay there (Ibid, p. 175). In other words, albeit the U.S.’ claim to be the protagonist against global fascism, refuge is never truly offered to the Cambodian refugee.
Without being offered safe asylum, Ra is never freed from the ever-present chains of captivity that minimize her access to resources, and put her family in danger. Though it is unclear how much Ra experienced of the violence committed by Khmer Rouge troops, her forced marriage to Heng was one in a long line of both racialized and gendered captivities. Dealing with Khmer Rouge soldiers in her village, Thai military at the border, aid workers in refugee camps, and slumlords in the Bronx, were no doubt only a few of the many instances of continued violence experienced by Ra and the other 150,000 Cambodian refugees who migrated to urban cities across the U.S. between 1975 and 1994 (Tang, 2015, p. 3). As cunning as she is, Ra never allowed herself to be estranged from this reality. She accepted that she would forever be navigating a global web of patriarchal power relations that disable her from escaping fugitive status.
Scholar-activist Tang has written an ethnographic revelation that will inspire scholarship targeted at temporal understandings of movement in a globalized world rigged with (political, legal, social, economic, historical and environmental) fugitive injustices. In Unsettled, a contribution to the emergent field of critical refugee studies, Tang asks crucial questions about the neoliberal hypocrisy that enables these increasingly globally connected systems of trade, technology and information, yet severely restricts the movement of people across arbitrary borders. Some of those questions will be analysed and are as follows:
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How does the refugee herself know and give expression to these supposed turning-point movements wherein she is said to cross into freedom?
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What does it mean for refugees to be recipients of this freedom?
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How can liberal warfare be combated, if refugees are continuously positioned as collateral damage — those “incidentally” injured in the war, then held in derelict housing conditions so that they could be targeted for a fictitious rescue that could never take place?
By UNHCR estimates, there are nearly 74.5 million refugees on the planet waiting to be resettled (UNHCR, 2019). Most are living in dire conditions as it is, and have seen extreme acts of violence enacted. Although these people are not Tang’s target audience, I wonder: if they were to read Unsettled, would they cease to apply for asylum in the United States? Or, would they, like Ra, choose to see it as the next step of fugitivity? I ask the question out of curiosity, but also because Ra’s children agreed with their mum in rejecting the notion that they were better off in the United States (p. 170). They all felt like they had not found refuge, were not safe, and had to keep moving. There seems to be no room for hope in their maneuverings through captivity, as though the violence of displacement is frozen in time, and captivates their psyches so unrelentingly that they will never be able to break free. Then, is their rejection of freedom a form of resistance against a neoliberal, capitalist and feminist liberalism that sees them as meaningful subjects only in the presence of pity and victimhood; and only in a juxtaposition against Black people? By rejecting freedom in its entirety and accepting indefinite fugitive status, are they not disabling themselves from the potential for redemption? Or, are they weighing in on Hannah Arendt’s argument that there are no universal and inalienable rights at all, and that life, as such, must be accepted?
Perhaps these questions are not useful in understanding the case of the individual who rejects the traditional notion of freedom in her ability to simultaneously accept captivity within the system and resist the same system by continuing to move. But these questions are useful when exported to the global. Refugees, instead of being perceived as by-products of a system that continually reproduces inequalities, are seen as the problem. Tang offers an explanation for the absence of refugee protections. He says that “as soon as issues of race, gender and sexual difference are coupled with a critique of capitalism’s dependency on the exploitation of difference, these issues lose their status as cultural categories to be celebrated and protected” (p. 87). Is this critique effective, despite its inability to point precise fingers at those accountable? And does his corresponding critique of patriarchy come too late in the final chapter on Motherhood (p. 137)? Would a female author have emphasized the patriarchy always looming overhead? Or did Ra purposely leave some blank spaces due to the gendered power relation with her interviewer?
I am not convinced that Tang did Ra’s holistic story justice, as a middle-class white Chinese American, who nonetheless acknowledges his privilege on multiple occasions. Though he states he will not engage in questions around patriarchal abuse with Ra, Tang speaks at great length about motherhood. Can he, or any man, who has not given birth to a child—let stand seven—attempt to explain motherhood or the internal dynamics of Ra’s family as they were torn apart? Does he sufficiently elaborate on the relationship between Ra and her youngest son, Vanna, who forgives his mum for having beaten him long before the legal system does (I deduce this forgiveness based on Vanna’s regular voluntary, yet illegal, visits to Ra)? I would question any man’s ability to explain childbaring and childrearing in their temporal existence from within to outside the womb due to biology and the ways we experience ourselves, and our children, within our own gendered bodies.
However, I do think Tang did Ra’s refugee story justice. As a former community organizer, Tang has a stake in advocating for the plight of refugees. As such, he states that any product made in an attempt to advocate for fugitive justice should do so in a way that attempts to help them heal. He also spends time explaining the challenge of advocating for Ra, who continually questioned the remedies proposed by those who sought to help her (p. 19). On several occasions, Tang concurs that Ra is different from other Cambodian female refugees. This made me wonder: Has Tang chosen the best possible representative of Cambodian refugee women in Ra, despite this and Ra’s ex-husband’s non-traditional traits (i.e. helping with homeworking; being passive with decision-making; abstinence)? As scholars, it is one of our duties to ensure we have excluded other potential sources in the case studies we choose to pursue. Tang only explains why he chose Ra, but not why he excluded others. Why, for instance, did he not engage in in-depth interviews with her children, who could have shed light on the family dynamics in ways Ra could never by herself? In the attempt to accurately depict the life of Cambodian refugees in the Bronx, should he not have expanded beyond several footnotes and paragraphs in the conclusion of Unsettled?
This analysis of Unsettled asks many questions that are critical to the integration process of immigrants and refugees into the western hemisphere, which is so often portrayed as superior in its ability to enact rights and freedoms as the rule of law for all. Ra’s experiences, along with millions of other refugees and migrants facing similar struggles, challenge this myth of arrival and safe asylum in a globalized world; a globalized world with arbitrary borders within the state that disable disadvantaged communities from finding a safe home in the city. Her constant movement through housing displacements, navigation of the welfare state, homeworking, motherhood and factory work are deeply political, and keep the interval of fugitive justice open. In so doing, Ra believes that perpetuating this movement enables her and her family to resist the system that keeps her captive. Tang seemed troubled about Ra’s lack of desire to find liberation. Perhaps, it is natural to want liberty for him, having grown up in a country where people fought for it, and are proud to “have” it. Ra never reaped the benefits of that same liberty, but her actions beg two fundamental questions of society: Who has access to agency and who doesn’t? And why is this so?