In our September dialogue, we focused on the topic “Body as battleground.” Obviously, with the current political attack on womens’ reproductive rights, the conservative media’s sexist slandering, and the general ways that patriarchy interferes on every angle of our daily lives, there was a lot to talk about.

We delved into a slew of intense and interesting themes, but for me it was the reading I did in preparation for the night that really floored me. I have been reading a book called Caliban & the Witch for the past few months. It’s been recommended to me countless times and finally a copy landed in my house and beckoned to me. It focuses on the history of capitalism (or, as the book refers to it – primitive accumulation) through the context of the working class and the effects of the development of capitalism on the experience of women (particularly in Europe). It does a remarkable job of drawing the connection between economics and the control of women’s bodies and describing the ways that the State and the Church instigated and sanctioned violence against women specifically as a way to redirect and suppress poor and working class struggles. What?

Yeah. I always suspected but never knew how intentionally and intricately those two things were connected to each other and it has made the current political landscape make so much more sense to me. Throughout medieval times, the revolts, uprisings and struggles of the laboring class were winning them progressively more rights – but to each uprising and gain, the feudal lords, Church and later the State (as power consolidated in this new way) responded with counter-revolutions to further suppress and control the masses.

The heretic movement was one such uprising in the 12th century. I knew already that the heretics were persecuted for defying their religious customs, but what I didn’t know is that they were also a strong anti-authoritarian movement which “denounced social hierarchies, private property and the accumulation of wealth” (p.33). They confronted the church’s power on all fronts. Many people at this time, including many of the hererics, recognized that it was undesirable to have children (because increased population meant decreased access to the existing jobs and resources and therefore led to a decreased power of labor). Subsequently, they began practicing ways to control their reproduction. It was largely in response to this that the Church began politicizing sexuality and began prescribing “positions permitted during intercourse, the days on which sex could be practiced, with whom it was permissible, and with whom forbidden” (p. 38). The church intensified attacks on all forms of non-procreative sex and attacked and massacred the heretics and many others anti-authoritarians in the guise of the Inquisition. The Church turned a political movement into a religious crime.

The effect of this counter-revolution was to give the Church and those with money and power control over the population and over reproduction and to further centralize their control over people – instilling the idea that a person should not have this control over themselves – the legacy of which I think we see subtly and not-so-subtly in the anti-choice movement today as well as in sterilization movements and the like.

Then, Federici continues, after the Black Death swept through Europe in the 15th century, the population was even scarcer, giving the working class a huge upper hand in labor negotiations. Land bondage had practically disappeared and workers were rising up everywhere and demanding (and getting) fair wages. And, so, how did the Church and State respond? Political authorities decided to “co-opt the youngest and most rebellious male workers…and turn class antagonism into antagonism against proletariat women” (p. 47). In order to do this, they basically decriminalized rape of lower class women and institutionalized prostitution by opening municipal brothels throughout Europe. In so doing, they tempted working class male youth with the privileges often denied them and were able to take control of class relations and “create a climate of intense misogyny… that desensitized the population to the perpetration of violence against women” (p. 48). This also normalized the violence against women that was about to happen through the witch hunts.

And the examples of this pattern of using violence and control as an economic tactic abound in every century since then. So it’s been making it a lot clearer why right-wing Republicans respond about abortion when asked about a seemingly unrelated economic question. It makes me think about healthcare, welfare, food supplies and every resource that continues to be limited while our population continues to expand. In what ways does an intentional creation of a scarcity of resources force us to remain dependant on the current political and economic systems?

Does control of the population and economy through reproductive repression continue today? Are those in power still benefiting from redirecting our anger at the system towards violence within our communities? When I look at the world today, I get this creepy feeling that the answer is yes to all of the above.

For me, it’s one thing to begrudge the Church and State for not protecting my rights, and it’s another to realize how actively the both have organized every aspect of this culture to violate my rights. It makes the current political landscape make so much more sense to me – because every act of violence makes subsequent acts of violence easier to perpetrate. Because violence makes us feel unsafe and that makes us more easy to manipulate.

We didn’t get a chance to dive in to this at the dialogue, but Zara had sent me this article as we prepared for the night. In it, Jamia Wilson relates her mother’s experiences during the civil rights movement – “Among many other accounts, she spoke about being kicked repeatedly in the area surrounding her reproductive organs by white men for sitting at a lunch counter.” The focus on a women’s reproductive areas when perpetrating violence is a specific way to target her sexually and ensure she understands that this is violence against her as woman. And it’s part of the same legacy of controlling us politically and socially through State-condoned sexual violence.

In the article, Wilson talked about the ways in which women in the civil rights movement were far more likely to be attacked. “White men used violence against black women as a tool to buttress their notions of racial and gender superiority, to flaunt control, and to disrupt the movement’s progress through harassment and intimidation.” She believes that violence against women can be used as an indirect form of violence against the men who share communities with the women – thereby dehumanizing everyone involved.

Of course, it’s not just violence against women that has become a normalized method of state control. It’s violence against people of color, violence against indigenous and migrating peoples, violence against queers…Violence is part of the process of marginalization and it’s used against anyone who finds a way to oppose the oppression of the status quo. But systemic, state-sponsored, sexualized and gender-based violence are especially insidious forms of domination because they also serve to reinforce patriarchy, arbitrary systems of control and he notion that a women should not be in charge of he body.

So, how do we start to reclaim our right to safety and self-determination in our communities? How do we make these connections more clear to more people? How do we unravel the violence from our communities and direct it away from our bodies and back towards the systems of domination that we want to change? How do we reclaim our visions of human nature? Because I think we can.