Mel Pearce | Untitled | In response to Alexis Late’s ‘Procedure’
It is the injustice of the clinical condescension the speaker critiques, and which connects this poem to wider cultural and political debates taking place in contemporary feminism and cultural criticism about mansplaining and abortion. ‘Mansplaining’ – a neologism for the routine gendered behaviour of men explaining to women, arrogantly, condescendingly and uninvited, things women can be expected to already know, has recently made its way into mainstream culture. Mansplaining has its origins in social media responses to US cultural critic Rebecca Solnit’s 2008 Los Angeles Times essay ‘Men Explain Things to Me’ (Solnit). ‘Mansplain’ was added to the Urban Dictionary in 2009, was Word of the Year in the New York Times in 2010 and has been translated into 34 languages and counting, with creative translations including an American Sign Language version which adds the sign for ‘above you’ connoting condescending superiority, and a translation into Polish incorporating the boredom of the listener (Kinney).
In the carnival of horrors that is the opening months of the Trump Presidency in the United States in 2017, women’s reproductive rights and bodily autonomy are under renewed attack. The Trump administration quickly re-instated and ‘massively expanded’ the ‘global gag rule’ – an executive order that strips US foreign aid from any NGO globally which so much as mentions abortion to its healthcare patients (Goldberg). In the wake of the Trump administration’s executive order, the Australian Christian Lobby has announced a plan to re-instate Australia’s global gag rule, and with the courting of right wing independents and minor parties by the LNP, there is a ‘real danger’ the Coalition might capitulate (Rice). Mansplaining at every level is central to this historical moment, as exemplified in an infamous photo of the signing of the Trump executive order captioned ‘As long as you live you’ll never see a photograph of 7 women signing legislation about what men can do with their reproductive organs’ (Belam).
Never was the resistance against mansplaining more visible than in the global Women’s Marches. On January 23, 2017, millions of women, gender diverse people and allied men worldwide protested the inauguration of President Trump (New York Times), demanding civil rights, reproductive rights, healthcare rights, and bodily autonomy for all women: women requiring abortion, cisgender women, trans women, and queer women, as well as non-binary folk and trans men who face compounded forms of discrimination in healthcare and legislative systems. Women speaking about the complex lived realities of abortion is more important than ever, and an emerging generation of poets, artists, activists and cultural critics are refusing to be silenced. Alexis Late’s ‘Procedure’ contributes to this extraordinary ongoing movement. As the signs at the Women’s Marches said: A woman’s place is in the resistance.
