“All I Asking for Is My Body”: The Common Politics of Reproductive and Worker Rights

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Some years ago I was teaching Milton Murayama’s wiry and wonderful 1975 novel All I Asking Is My Body in a working-class literature course I had designed for the university where I teach. When we started reading the novel together as a class, I recall a student expressing her surprise at the content of the novel.  Based on the novel’s title, she explained, she had expected a feminist novel centering, in some way, a woman’s quest for autonomy, especially sexual and bodily autonomy, in a male-dominated, gender-stratified, and sexually-repressive society.

Of course, her expectation and insight made perfect sense, and I felt a little silly that I hadn’t noticed or remarked for myself on what was obvious to her: “All I Asking for Is My Body” easily–and obviously–encapsulates a key demand informing a healthy portion of any feminist agenda.

I was immersed in thinking about the history and cultural tradition of representing working-class life and justice struggles in this class and hadn’t overtly focused on feminist identity and politics, even though any worthwhile discussion of class politics must incorporate gender analysis and sexual politics (just reflect on the fact that women still make only a fraction of what men make for the same work to understand how gender is a category by which people are positioned in our class-stratified capitalist economy).

All I Asking for Is My Body, while not without feminist content (the second novel in Muryama’s tetralogy Five Years on a Rock might be considered particularly feminist), focuses on the life of the Oyama family living on a sugar plantation in Hawaii in the World War II Era, particularly on the economic and working conditions the plantation workers endure. The title comes from the mantra of the eldest son of the family Toshio, who is trying to pursue a boxing career while also working on the plantation out of a sense of family responsibility, trying to help pay the family’s debts.  We see the under-nourishment and exhaustion from which the family suffers, which is particularly acute for Toshio as he seeks to build his strength and train without an adequate diet.

His plea is a protest against a plantation system that effectively owns and controls his body.

And we can clearly hear in Toshio’s mantra the echo of women’s pleas of protest against a sexist patriarchal culture and society that controls women’s bodies.

The student’s insight made clear the fundamental politics undergirding both women’s and workers’ liberation movements:

Both movements entail a basic goal of reclaiming control over one’s own body.

Both, at bottom, imagine freedom in terms of bodily autonomy as a key element of self-determination.

Recognizing this fundamental and shared politics is especially urgent at this political and historical moment which calls for men in particular and our culture at large to recognize that reproductive or abortion rights as more than simply women’s issue but an issue that impacts us all.

Denying women’s reproductive rights affirms a political world in which controlling people’s bodies is granted legitimation. It paves the way for denying people bodily autonomy in all kinds of contexts.

And just to be clear, the politics of denying women reproductive rights and access to abortions are not about saving a baby’s life. We can see in recent examples that women without viable pregnancies who need the abortion procedure as a form of healthcare to treat their miscarriages are being denied that healthcare and are dying or enduring extreme and needless suffering because they are denied this basic care (for examples, see here and here). And we know that abortion bans in the United States, as the United Nations report, have put millions of women dn girls at risk, and we’ve seen the results of these bans in surges in pregnant women’s death rates particularly in Texas and Georgia. 

And in the sphere of labor, as Murayama’s novel makes clear, the way has already been paved fo denying workers autonomy.

For an example of the assault, we can take Amazon as an example.  Jeff Bezo’s corporate giant is notorious for abusing workers’ bodies, as nearly half its workers suffer from burnout and exhaustion or routinely take unpaid time off to recover from the harsh work routine.The company has experienced such a high turnover rate in workers, that it even has worries over labor shortages, over finding more people to work for them because the company disposes of workers so quickly.

Or we can remember how during the pandemic, those deemed “essential workers” were effectively forced back to work in often life-threatening situations. Managers at a Tyson meat-processing plant even gambled on which workers would contract COVID.

Or we can just look at the many coal mining disasters in the past couple of decades resulting from company’s refusing to maintain basic safety standards (see here and here).

We see the disregard in these instances for workers’ bodies and lives, and it mirrors the disregard for women’s bodies and lives which is quite explicitly expressed and realized in abortion bans around the nation.

We need to recognize how as a culture and society we are creating contexts that devalue people’s lives, in these cases those of women and workers, by depriving them of bodily autonomy and thus threatening their very lives.

And we need to recognize that women’s reproductive rights are connected to everybody’s rights; they aren’t just women’s issues. And workers’ rights aren’t just workers’ issues.

These rights are about all of our rights to bodily autonomy.

Let’s all ask for our bodies.