Week 3 Day 2

 Post 3

While reading this week’s texts, I couldn’t help but think about my own experiences with learning about my own body and puberty as I grew older. Growing up in a very Catholic, Mexican household, the discussions surrounding the female body and menstruation were hardly ever brought up and only spoken of when absolutely necessary. I remember that the only time this quiet presence around our bodies was broken was when my sisters and I got our periods or when my tia had just given my older sister a book called, “The Care and Keeping of You: The Body Book for Younger Girls” by Valorie Schaefer that regarded itself as a guide for young girls spanning topics from bras to pimples. I recall opening the book out of curiosity and being (a) terrified at the thought of puberty and later on (b) confused at the way these topics were being presented, especially since I wasn’t used to such blatant honesty and blunt conversations about the female body. This similar reflection reminded me of the conversations being had by both Kathy Davis’s  “Feminist Body/politics as World Traveler: Translating Our Bodies, Ourselves” and Michelle Murphy’s “Unsettling care: Troubling transnational itineraries of care in feminist health practices.” 

In Kathy Davis’s piece, the introduction and replication of Our Bodies, Ourselves reminded me very much of the similar thoughts going through my head while reading “The Care and Keeping of You: The Body Book for Younger Girls.” Davis grapples with the way global feminism can be a form of cultural imperialism, especially if knowledge is being shared in a way that presents the experiences and issues women face as equal or similar throughout the world. When I was reading the guide for girls, I recalled learning about tampons and how to use them and was left extremely confused because in my household, the use of tampons is very taboo and its use is heavily discouraged in comparison to other products, like pads. This confusion of mine presents a very simplistic representation of what would have happened if Our Bodies, Ourselves were not allowed to be adapted and translated to other women around the world. They would have presented, and some were due to a lack of funding or resources, a piece of text whose cultural and societal presentation and conversations of topics would not have been similar to the way that certain cultures or societies discuss certain topics where women live. Like in my case, the guidebook for young girls was meant to be presented to girls who were white or strictly American in background. It didn’t take into consideration the varying upbringings of immigrant children or non-American families who had access to the book, explaining why the way that my body and products were not talked about in a similar fashion. The text argues that because original writers encouraged the ability to have Our Bodies, Ourselves translated and adapted by the local feminist groups of their region, the text was able to be widely appreciated and adopted by so many people across the globe. The everchanging and malleable book was a foundation for the conversations and knowledge that were being distributed due to that text, “The original OBOS was reworked and contextualized in accordance with the translators’ notions of what was appropriate, useful, or necessary in their particular situation,” (Davis 235). This piece of information that was originally meant for the white, middle-class, college-educated women, turned into a global hit that has been translated and sold across the world due to its ability to form and adaptability.

Michelle Murphy’s “Unsettling care: Troubling transnational itineraries of care in feminist health practices” was an incredibly interesting read that alerted my attention to different central points that American feminist movements focus on compared to other feminists around the world. An important distinction is that of the focus on the “self” and the ability to care for and look after one’s own self and body. “As one ancestor of feminist science studies, feminist self-help was a subversive way of hitching together care and science that both deserves attention and need troubling. It was protocol feminism inventive of practices, manuals, and guidelines that could move translocally and that explicitly sought to take note of how power, emotion, and bonding circulated within clinical settings so as to create less oppressive medical experiences and less pathologizing research,” (Murphy 719). Murphy emphasized throughout the text how oftentimes “self-help” was a heavily preached topic for Americans (although bonding between people was noted) and I found that Davis points out this emphasis when discussing how Latina women were changing their translation of Our Bodies, Ourselves from a focus on the self to community. “The focus of the new NCNV shifted from the individual woman and her ability to take care of herself to the importance of family and community for women’s health and well-being. The term ‘self-help’, so prevalent in the original OBOS, was banished in favour of a  more community-oriented term, ‘mutual help’,” (Davis 236). Murphy and Davis's examples and discussions of feminist thought and practices both bring to light the varying ways in which feminist thought is practiced from region to region, culture to culture, and community to community.