By: BrookOn April 9, Miriam Perez of Feministing.com visited ODU to talk about leadership, feminism and the future of activism, then joined us for some food and conversation at the Tahphouse, a local's favorite.
Miriam Perez was born in Chapel Hill, North Carolina where she was raised in a Cuban immigrant household that she deems ‘extremely conservative’. Throughout her adolescence, her and her father’s polar political views dominated family discourse and ultimately pushed her towards public speaking and debate on issues surrounding multi-cultural identity formation, reproductive rights, sexual identity and feminism. These early debates took her from the living room to the classroom where she travels year round speaking on the politics of reproductive justice and her activism as a radical doula.
Miriam’s social positioning is unique insofar as she is a doula who is also a pro-choice/abortion advocate; typically deemed contradictory to the reproductive health field. Further, she is also a multicultural, gender queer lesbian that seems to challenge all notions of typical identity formation in her fields. These reasons effectively set her apart from the birth activist movement, but also place her in a newly emerging, more progressive subfield of the movement. Miriam talked in great length about how her skills as a doula are more holistic in approach as she utilizes them as transferable to other life transitions outside of simply the reproductive sector.
This positioning allows for numerous positive implications on views of alternative health and wellness and towards the social impact of expanding gender roles/binaries. Her availability as a radical doula allows her to not only engage with women seeking birthing assistants, but also women who are seeking abortions, IVF, or even women transitioning into menopause. Most impactual, I believe, her work allows for interaction with not just women, but men.
To elaborate, our society is experiencing a subtle shift in gender divides that is producing a variety of different gender identities outside of the male/female binary. This shift signals the importance of her work by emphasizing her particular attributes as a gender queer lesbian. Transgendered persons making the transition from male-to-female and female-to-male are establishing necessary space within the reproductive arena for more gender aware, gender sensitive advocates and medical professionals. Many female-to-male (f2m, transwoman) persons who do not undergo hysterectomy/ hormone replacement therapy and/or genital reassignment surgery and thus become pregnant face doctors and other birthing professionals who either refuse treatment, treat them insensitively, and sometimes even treat them aggressively.
Miriam also serves as a bridge between two important reproductive fields for women: the birthing activists [doctors, nurses, midwives, doulas] and the pro-choice activists [policy and legislation, pro-choice organizations: planned parenthood]. These two fields, so important to women’s health and liberation, typically appear antithetical, and due to this assumed opposition, they often work against one another, rarely focusing on possible shared issues and struggles. Shifting the focus from not just the pregnant woman’s journey but the woman choosing not to parent allows for her to exercise her feminist politics and help alleviate the social stigma that women endure when making this choice for their lives.
On a last note, when hearing her hopes for the future trends of birth activism and feminism alike, the one thing left unsaid was the current state of the doula profession as still very woman-identified. The industry endorses the doula as woman, with the popular ‘mothering the mother’ motto as promotion. Gender roles are still deeply embedded in this field and within the provision of alternative birthing assistance. This is a trend I hope Miriam’s gender queer identity brings into check alongside the many other progressive trends she’s brought to the birthing/reproductive movement as a radical doula.
photo by kelly
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