Preliminary Programme

In socialist Poland rape trials and expert publications on sexual violence sticked to a certain scenario: victims were presented as provocative in various ways and perpetrators were perceived as confused boys who were neither aware of their wrongdoing nor the victims’ suffering. In both rape court cases and expert discussions about sexual violence, it was gender that went on trial. It was the survivor’s gendered performance that was being judged: her earlier sexual experience, how she was dressed that night and if she had met the perpetrator voluntarily. However, there were some exceptions to these scenarios, in particular, trials in which there was an ethnic or racial difference. Although ethnicity or race were not explicitly discussed (just like in many other contexts, Somerville 1998), these cases seem to have different dynamics: in these, it was race and ethnicity that went on trial. Rapists belonging to ethnic or racial minorities (e.g., Romani men) were perceived as sexually violent and that makes them guilty regardless of the circumstances; victims of minority backgrounds were seen as sexually “hyperactive” and therefore perceived as not being raped even if randomly attacked on the street while wearing modest clothes and walking in broad daylight. This paper draws on archival materials (the press, court files, expert publications) and asks how sexuality, gender and race/ethnicity intersected in the context of sexual violence in socialist Poland. (Show less)

The injectable contraceptive Depo-Provera was introduced in Britain in 1976 for short term use only. The contraceptive was also frequently administered to women along with the rubella vaccine. It soon became apparent that the drug was being administered ‘without any explanation of its side-effects and that sometimes it’s given without the woman’s permission’. (Wendy Savage, 1982). Significantly, it was women from minoritized background who were most likely to be given the drug without consent in England. In 1978, a Campaign Against Depo-Provera was established by members of the Women’s Liberation Movement alongside Black women activists. As part of a submission to the public hearing on Depo-Provera in 1983, for example a 22-year-old West
Indian woman reported “I’d hardly got in from the hospital with my new baby – I was just taking the shawl off when there was a knock at the door”. She reported being given an injection by a doctor “to stop me getting pregnant…she didn’t warn me about any side effects.” In addition, the drug was also given to women from underprivileged backgrounds in Scotland. Rowena Arshad, who worked for the Scottish Education and Action for Development in the mid-1980s recalled “being sent to work in Ferguslie Park, which is a very
poor area in Scotland, very very poor, and learning there that the women had been given Depo-Provera, which was a contraception drug at that time, and thinking, hey, hang on a minute, women in India are being given this as well.”
As Dorothy Roberts has shown for the American context, ‘racism helped to create the view of birth control as a means of solving social problems.’ (Roberts, 2016). While scholars such as Roberts have conducted valuable work exploring the links between racism and birth control in the United States, less research has been done in the British context with limited important
exceptions (Stella Dadzie, 1985; Cecily Jones, 2013; Caitlin Lambert, 2020). Through the use of the reproductive justice framework and with focus on two geographic case studies, London and Glasgow, this paper aims to build on our understandings of the intersections of medical authority, race, class and resistance, through an exploration of the history of Depo-Provera in
1970s and 1980s Britain. Drawing on the archives of the Wellcome Collection, Black Cultural Archives and Glasgow Women’s Library, and focusing on the voices of women who were prescribed the contraceptive as well as those of activists who campaigned for its ban, this paper seeks to show how, in the hands of the medical profession, the drug became a tool of violence towards women of colour as well as women from underprivileged backgrounds.
Yet, movements such as the ‘Campaign against Depo-Provera’ not only helped to highlight the complex issues around the drug but also to illustrate attempts at uniting feminists along class and racial lines. (Show less)

Eugenic ideas in Mexico were popularized after the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920) as a way of ‘modernizing’ and ‘civilizing’ the nation. As a result, eugenic ideas were able to linger and be maintained through different departments, institutions, and individuals from all disciplines. After eugenics being considered a pseudoscience its practices and ideas continued through population control measures which targeted indigenous populations for sterilization, a trend that still prevails. The purpose of this presentation is to explore the legacies of eugenics in current sterilizations procedures mostly targeted to indigenous communities in Mexico. I offer the term ‘slippery eugenics’ to account for the legacies of eugenics in Mexico which, in this specific case, resurface in the systematic forced and coerced sterilization procedures targeted to indigenous communities. (Show less)

Polish-born Dr Henry Morgentaler (1923-2013) became the figurehead of Canada’s pro-choice movement from the late 1960s and well into the 1990s. Morgentaler’s life story is illustrative of a life dedicated to pro-choice activism but one that was lived in the shadow of the Holocaust. Morgentaler was an early proponent of abortion on demand up until the second trimester of pregnancy, insisting that a woman had a right to decide until then whether she wished to continue with a pregnancy. Another reason for his support of abortion on demand focused directly on the plight of unwanted children. For Morgentaler, the fate of an unwanted child was dire: neurosis, psychosis, criminality and anti-social behaviour. The cost to individual and society was, therefore considerable. Imprisoned as a young man because of his Jewish origins, first in the Lodz ghetto and then in the concentration camps of Auschwitz and Dachau, Morgentaler immigrated after the war with his wife, Chava Rosenfarb, to Montreal, where he received his medical degree. After taking up the cause of abortion as a woman’s right, and openly flouting abortion laws by performing abortions in his Montreal clinic, Morgentaler was imprisoned for a time and often vilified in anti-Semitic terms. Morgentaler’s early years and the Holocaust cast a long shadow over his life; his survival against the odds in Poland and Germany prepared him to withstand two decades-worth of legal battles in Canada. And, given his growing insistence that unwanted children primed societies to accept authoritarianism, it also led him to justify abortion as a solution to the spread of fascism. (Show less)