Renate Klein - Böcker

Family members, friends, coworkers and neighbors are often the first to know that a woman has been abused by an intimate male partner. What is the proper course of action for those with knowledge of abuse? Using a wide range of empirical data from international sources, Renate Klein documents informal third parties as the first port of call, sources of support and interference, and gatekeepers to formal services. Family and social network members disrupt ongoing assaults, respond to disclosures of abuse and provide solace and practical help. These networks do not always side with victims, however, and may either sympathize with or actively support perpetrators. Klein illuminates the complexities of these contingent situations. Her analysis highlights the potential of informal third parties for effective intervention, demonstrating their significant role in promoting societies free from rape and domestic violence.

Family members, friends, coworkers and neighbors are often the first to know that a woman has been abused by an intimate male partner. What is the proper course of action for those with knowledge of abuse? Using a wide range of empirical data from international sources, Renate Klein documents informal third parties as the first port of call, sources of support and interference, and gatekeepers to formal services. Family and social network members disrupt ongoing assaults, respond to disclosures of abuse and provide solace and practical help. These networks do not always side with victims, however, and may either sympathize with or actively support perpetrators. Klein illuminates the complexities of these contingent situations. Her analysis highlights the potential of informal third parties for effective intervention, demonstrating their significant role in promoting societies free from rape and domestic violence.

With examples from throughout Europe and the United States, the contributors to this volume explore how gender violence is framed through language and what this means for research and policy. Language shapes responses to abuse and approaches to perpetrators and interfaces with national debates about gender, violence, and social change.

With examples from throughout Europe and the United States, the contributors to this volume explore how gender violence is framed through language and what this means for research and policy. Language shapes responses to abuse and approaches to perpetrators and interfaces with national debates about gender, violence, and social change.

Surrogacy is heavily promoted by the stagnating IVF industry which seeks new markets for women over 40, and gay men who believe they have a ‘right’ to their own children and ‘family foundation’. Pro-surrogacy groups in rich countries such as Australia and Western Europe lobby for the shift to commercial surrogacy. Their capitalist neo-liberal argument is that a well-regulated fertility industry would avoid the exploitative practices of poor countries. Central to the project of transnational surrogacy is the ideology that legalised commercial surrogacy is a legitimate means to provide infertile couples and gay men with children who share all or part of their genes. Women, without whose bodies this project is not possible are reduced to incubators, to ovens, to suitcases. And the ‘product child’ is a tradable commodity who has never consented to being a ‘take away baby’: removed from their birth mother and given to strangers aka ‘intended parents’. Still, those in favour of this practice of reproductive slavery speak of ‘Fair Trade International Surrogacy’ and ‘responsible surrogacy’.

Celebrity couple Kim Kardashian and Kanye West and their sweet new baby Chicago. Tom Daley and Dustin Lance Black and their cute little baby Robert. And thousands of other couples and single people around the world who obtain babies through surrogacy arrangements. The general public is compassionate to their plight and supportive of their 'right' to a baby. But who are the faceless, nameless women who nurture and give birth to these babies? These women who are left with empty arms and leaking breasts after delivery? Surrogacy-dealing companies call them ‘special angels’ who ‘make miracles possible’, giving ‘an extraordinary gift’. IVF clinics call them ‘gestational surrogates’. The intended parents have promised them healthcare, full reimbursement, and ongoing contact with the baby. What could possibly go wrong? Everything. Because surrogacy violates the human rights of the women whose bodies are used, and the children who are born. Because it is a fundamentally flawed and misogynist concept to imagine that women are interchangeable. And it is wishful thinking that watertight legal contracts and counselling can fix this. In this book, strong and courageous women from the USA, the UK, Canada, Australia, India, Austria and Russia share their true stories of becoming 'surrogate' mothers out of kindness and compassion (or need for money), only to be deceived, neglected, abused, harassed, or abandoned by ‘baby buyers’, clinics, and lawyers. Their stories are tragic, shocking, and revelatory of a profit-driven industry that preys on desperation and women’s compassion. It becomes clear that it is not the occasional dysfunctional relationship or unreasonable surrogate causing problems in the surrogacy industry. Rather, it is the very nature of surrogacy as well as the surrogacy industry to use and abuse and discard. This book throws down a challenge to Big Fertility and its minions: women are not ovens or suitcases, babies are not products. Love is not to be bought.

What happens when an old radical lesbian feminist has an idea of publishing a collection of her papers? She looks at her writings and despairs. She has written too much. The idea gets shelved. Fifteen years later, she revisits the project. But it is worse now because she has written more … But being stared down by her publisher she gets a grip and (painfully) pares down her oeuvre to a manageable size.This then is a skeleton journey through Renate’s life and her survival in patriarchy. The book starts with her passion for autonomous Women’s Studies as an intellectual necessity and radical feminist research methodology to give women a voice. And why men don’t belong in Women’s Studies classes. Next, she documents her immersion in a critique of reproductive technologies as a member of FINRRAGE. We hear about the exploitation of a desire in IVF followed with problems of egg ‘donations’, cloning, and of course the human rights violation of women and children in surrogacy. A critique of the illusion of ‘choice’ – endorsed by liberal feminists – has to be in the book and with it papers on long-acting contraceptives. Necessary warnings about the unethics of hormone replacement therapy and the French abortion pill RU 486 are included too.As a feminist women’s health activist, Renate Klein has always been concerned about the fact that women are our bodies and that reproductive technologies in tandem with postmodern and queer theories result in the fragmentation and dismemberment of women: from the one an egg, from the other a uterus … this erasure of women is helped by dissociation and a belief in delusions – such as the assault on women’s existence by transgender ideologues.But not to be beaten by such attacks, Renate Klein continues her quest for the liberation of all women, whatever age, sexuality, abilities and wherever we live. Aged 80, she is ‘not dead yet’ and hopes this collection will stir young women into action to continue the crucial rebellion against the system of patriarchy before it fully crushes women, animals and nature.