Teaching Gender in Social Work - MailChimp

International Association of Schools of Social Work in 2004. Solidarity and
joint action can be adapted by the social work community at both national and
international levels through collaboration with other groups and organisations
to promote reproductive health “and to make freedom of reproductive choice
a reality rather than a rhetorical illusion”. 4
Theoretical Approaches to the Study of Human Reproduction
Human reproduction is a large concept. It covers social practices, experiences
and structures that affect how individuals, communities and populations
reproduce. There are a variety of ways to approach the topic. A prevailing
bio medical approach to human reproduction often obscures its socially
constructed and politically contested nature. To see human reproduction as a
socially constructed concept means to examine how its boundaries are socially
constructed in such a way so as to become real for social actors.
Faye Ginsberg and Rayna Rapp 5 defined human reproduction as “events
throughout the human and especially female life-cycle related to ideas and
practices surrounding fertility, birth and childcare, including the ways in which
these figure into understandings of social as cultural renewal”. Reproductive
events are critical at both the local and the global levels for the various groups of
actors involved in the processes and outcomes of reproduction: the state, nation,
community, household and individual. Reproductive strategies, interests and
decisions are the sites of contestation and negotiation within these levels between
men and women, different groups of women, states and individuals, nations and
states. Within each group or category, there are also differential interests influenced
by the type of market economy, the form of government, class or occupational
position, religious beliefs, gender, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, and so forth.
There are a variety of ways in which individual women, either singly
or collectively, act in ways to “control” their reproductive situations. Fertility
control can be viewed as a constant process of ongoing decision making and
fateful events in individual and collective lives, that always exists within specific
political, economic, social and cultural contexts. Angus McLaren 6 points out
4
Ibid., 225.
5
Faye Ginsberg and Rayna Rapp, “The politics of reproduction.” Annual Review of Anthropology 20, (1991): 311–343.
6
Angus MacLaren, A history of contraception from Antiquity to the present day (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990).
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