Blog Post 2: The Faces of Oppression - Exploitation

I found exploitation to be a tricky subject. More or less, it refers to one group taking advantage of another group for their own benefit. Iris Young also describes the injustice of exploitation as a “transfer of energies from one group to another to produce unequal distributions,” (53) which again shows that one group is being oppressed. Those “energies” can also be thought of as power, in which case people gain power through exploitation, and those being exploited lose power. Exploitation is most commonly associated with the different economic groups; specifically, the lower working class is exploited, and it is often believed that they are exploited by the upper class capitalists. That being said, the most common cases of exploitation occur in the workplace. Some people (the ‘have-nots’) may be paid less than they deserve so that the people ‘on top’ (the ‘haves’) will make a larger profit, thus benefiting themselves. A more intense form of exploitation would be child labor; employers exploit children by using them so that they can make a large profit.

There is also the question of whether women experience gender exploitation. Young has found sources that support the idea that women’s energies are transferred to men, ultimately ‘exploiting’ them (Young 50). Christine Delphy also argued that marriage is a “class relation in which women’s labor benefits men without comparable remuneration” (Young 50). While I can see where these authors are coming from, I personally have a hard time seeing women as being truly exploited by men.

In our group, we discussed that applying exploitation to adoption is a bit of a stretch. The term was originally used in relation to the workplace and wages, and as I have mentioned, it is even a bit difficult to use the term in relation to gender, let alone adoption. However, we tried anyway.J The one party involved in adoption that relates most closely to exploitation is the birthparents. Of all the parties involved, the birthparents seem to be the ones that are the most oppressed, and may be exploited. They experience a significant loss, and there is a sort of ‘transfer’ from one group to another. The only issue is that in this case, we are talking about a human life, rather than money. It could be argued that there is still a sense of power transferred along with the child, however, since the child legally becomes a part of the adoptive family, and the birthparents lose their rights to the child. Although it could possibly be seen as exploitation, I don’t think that it is intentional exploitation on the part of the adoptive parents. Due to the structural nature of oppression, there doesn’t always need to be an oppressor, and I think this is one of those instances. While the birthparents may be exploited in a sense, I do not believe the adoptive parents are guilty of exploitation. The adoptive parents are certainly more privileged than the birthparents, generally speaking. While this is not always the case, adoptive parents tend to be in the upper middle class, and birthparents often are not as stable financially. Through this lens of ‘privilege,’ it once again seems as though birthparents may be exploited to a certain degree. While overall I think it is a bit of a stretch to apply this face of oppression to adoption, I can see some potential aspects of exploitation in adoption.

-Rachel H.

Iris Marion Young, Justice & the Politics of Difference, New Jersey: Princeton, 1990.