Shifting the Critical Gaze – Challenging the Binary Distinctions Informing Dominant (Feminist) Discourses of Marginalization in the US Debate on the 'protection of Human Life’

I examine the relationship between reproductive justice and democracy with a focus on the debate around ‘the constitutional right to abortion’. I study the logic of the US Supreme Court’s official argumentation in favour of overturning Roe vs. Wade (1973) in 2022. I carry out a critical analysis of discourse and explore the intersection of multiple relations of power shaping the decision. My aim is to point out the overlap across the harms the various groups of women suffer in the wake of the Court’s limitation of their access to reproductive health care. My ideology critique is focused on the conceptualization of ‘beginning/end of human life’ and the US citizens’ constitutional rights provided they are ‘deeply rooted in history.’ I argue that in the wake of the decision, a vast range of US population has been rendered – directly and indirectly – in the status of the living dead (Mbembe 2019). I argue that the multiple distinctions underpinning the court’s decision is integral to the white supremacist discourse of contemporary US political communication. It reiterates the particularly loud voice of ‘patriotic manhood’ since the Trump administration which is articulated from the perspective of the aggrieved entitlements by hegemonic (white hetero Christian) masculinity (Kimmel 2013). I uphold the importance of organizing collectively against the escalation of the hate rhetoric of right-wing populism that has caught various groups of women in a spectatorial fight of the relatively harmed collectives against one another (Berlant 1998). Instead of this competitive struggle for relative gains against one another, I propose to focus on the overlaps across trans* and heterosexual middle-class womanhood, a position that hinges on their will of to accept that we all have the figure of patriotic manhood in the way – albeit in different ways – of reproductive justice.