“I mean really, it’s supposed to be illegal to experiment on people without their permission.” This quote from the documentary, “The Idiot Cycle” reminded me of how just because something is made illegal, doesn’t mean it goes away. It often just continues under another name. Although discrimination is illegal, it still exists in the form of housing discrimination, lending discrimination, education, the criminal justice system, etc. Laws banning unethical human experimentation were set into place to protect people, but it still persists in other ways, and the corporations that are responsible for the pollution and their potential detrimental health effects have so much power that they can ensure no regulations are in place to prevent them from doing business as usual.
We are led to believe that we have control over our own fates. That we choose whether to be healthy or not to be, but this documentary explores how our health is not in our hands. In “Complaints and Disorders” Ehrenreich and English write that “There is no way for us to come to terms with our own bodies, in whatever female ‘subcultures’ we may attempt to create, because, when you come right down to it, our bodies are not the issue. Biology is not the issue. The issue is power, in all ways.” The problem laid out clearly here, and in the Idiot Cycle, is a problem of power and how we transfer that power into our hands. This is just emblematic of the ways in which our Capitalist system is so catered to corporations because of its support of the profit model. This allows important regulations to be dismantled or their entire existence prevented because of the power that corporations have in shaping our laws and influencing our policymakers.
But is ‘oppression’ a useful term in addressing these issues?
I think ‘oppression’ is a useful term. I think use of the term is an important step in calling out the patriarchal structure of our society in order for it to be dismantled and reformed in such a way that we can then begin to address the individual features in the lives of the oppressed. In this way, I see merit in the goals of a Marxist feminist, who focuses on material conditions and how these create oppressive societal structures, particularly class. This structure was readily apparent in “The Idiot Cycle,” where power and influence coalesced among just a few big pharma-food companies but exerts dramatic health consequences upon an immediate indigenous population and the millions of other people that eat these foods.
This class of power, and their possibly harmful practices and products, cannot be challenged or questioned because individuals have little influence when acting alone. Only by calling out what this imbalance of power is, oppression, can individuals begin to unite and challenge the structure itself. This is a matter of health, of life, quality of life, and death. As Elizabeth Fee once wrote, “Capitalism, many Marxists argue, cannot free itself from dependence on sexism any more than it can transcend class oppression for the pursuit of private profit at the expense of the satisfaction of real human needs.” Use of the term oppression is a means to address these needs.
Jennifer Kim 