12 lines
1.8 KiB
Markdown
12 lines
1.8 KiB
Markdown
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title: "Italian feminist self-managed health centres"
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At the beginning of the 1970s, feminist movements placed the body at the centre of their political reflection. In Italy, feminists loudly reclaimed the right of self-determination of women, opening a public polemic against what they denounced as the "medicalisation" of life, the naturalisation of sexuality and of reproductive functions, and the "pathologisation" of ways of being and desires considered "deviant" from normative womanhood. During this period, activists began opening a new kind of self-managed health centres, often in occupied spaces, focusing specifically on women's health and reproductive medicine. These centres were just one of the many practices that the feminist movement simultaneously developed during that period to address the lack of care and research focused on the female body.
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Self-managed health centres were accompanied by other initiatives, such as the publication of informational pamphlets, self-help and consciousness-raising practices, networks in support of abortion. Feminist activists also performed symbolic occupations of hospitals and medical congresses to get the attention of the public.
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As Silvia Federici explained, one of the limitations of these feminist health policies, one that she fears ended up weakening the overall movement, was the progressive separation between the struggles for the right to abortion on the one hand and a more inclusive demand for "reproductive justice" on the other. The latter could have been focusing more attentively on the demands of those women who were denied the possibility of reproduction, either for economic or racial reasons; women whose children were taken away or who were subjected to forced sterilisation.
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_Note based on Rebelling with Care (WeMmake, 2019)._
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