The key objective of this paper is to emphasize the importance of acknowledging breastfeeding as an embodied social practice within interventions related to breastfeeding and lactation and illustrate how this recognition holds implications for public health ethics debates. Recent scholarship has shown that breastfeeding and lactation support interventions undermine women’s autonomy. However, substantial discourse is required to determine how to align with public health goals while also recognizing the embodied experiences of breastfeeding and lactating individuals. Presently, interventions in this realm (...) predominantly revolve around health-related messaging and the promotion of individual behaviors, often neglecting the systemic and structural factors that influence choices and practices. I closely examine breastfeeding interventions in India, in particular Mothers’ Absolute Affection health promotion program, along with breastfeeding narratives. I argue that for such interventions to evolve, they must acknowledge the intrinsic embodied social nature of breastfeeding during their design and implementation. Furthermore, it is important to emphasize that achieving equity and justice objectives necessitates moving beyond the confines of both conventional public health frameworks and frameworks solely centered on private choices. Instead, a more encompassing approach that embraces the concept of embodiment should be adopted. (shrink)

The concept of dignity is widely debated as to its efficacy as a ground upon which to base respect particularly in relation to human rights. Traditional concepts of inherent dignity associate dignity with the possession of rationality and autonomy, which consequently excludes non-rational humans from being viewed as possessing inherent dignity and therefore equal and inherent worth. This paper offers a theory of inherent dignity based on an account of a common humanity within which all humans might be seen as (...) possessing inherent worth and, therefore, deserving of being recognized and respected equally as ends in themselves. The theory is based on the communal practice and expectation of moral accountability, a practice that can be viewed as taking place universally both between and within human communities. (shrink)

We take our own life stories as points of departure to look at some of the ways in which women were politicized in Argentina and West Germany (our respective countries of origin), focusing on similarities as well as differences in our politicization processes. We aim at putting present discussions about global political movements into a historical perspective. We want also to illuminate the centrality of political identities in the construction of specific (gendered) subjectivities. Our focus lies on theorizing the ways (...) through which privileged (gendered) identities critically re-read their own position and transform their own understanding of themselves and the world through the field of the political. Methodologically, we want to contribute to ways of re-thinking Feminist methodologies by experimenting with a form of analysis in which we are alternately the subject and the object of our research process. The aim of this intervention is to transgress the binary oppositions between researcher/researched and challenge traditional understanding of social science where researchers provide analysis and informants have ‘experience’. One of our conclusions is that the 68 movement provided subject positions for living alternative normalities as an ‘insider-outside’, that is, for those who belonged to normalized groups in their respective societies, but for different reasons (of which we analyse some concerning our formation as ‘women’) could not identify with the dominant normalities offered to them. At the same time, the dominant male instrumentality of the movement estranged (some) women and allowed them (or forced them into) a kind of distanced engagement that, perhaps paradoxically, provided a basis for sustaining their political subjectivities through transformative experiences of defeat. (shrink)

This essay analyses the role played by okra in The Underground Railroad, together with how it functions in relation to the soil that sustains it and which allows it to grow. I argue that okra represents an otherwise lost African past for both protagonist Cora and for the show in general and that this transplanted plant, similar to the transplanted Africans who endured the Middle Passage on the way to ‘New World’ slave plantations, survives by going through ‘black holes’, something (...) that is not only linked poetically to the established trope of the otherwise absent Black mother but which also finds support from physics, where wormholes (similar to the holes created by worms in the soil) take us through black holes and into new worlds, realities or dimensions. This is reflected in Jenkins’s series (as well as Whitehead’s novel) by the titular Underground Railroad itself, which sees Cora and others disappear underground only to reappear in new states (the show travels from Georgia to South Carolina to North Carolina to Tennessee to Indiana and so on), as well as specifically in the show through the formal properties of the audio-visual (cinematic/televisual) medium, which, with its cuts and movements, similarly keeps shifting through space and time in a nonlinear but generative fashion. Finally, I suggest that we cannot philosophise the plant or the medium of film (or television or streaming media) without philosophising race, with The Underground Railroad serving as a means for bringing together plants and plantations, soil and wormholes and Blackness and black holes, which, collectively and playfully, I group under the umbrella term ‘black (w)hole foods’. (shrink)