Population, race and gender: on the genealogy of the modern politics of reproduction

Abstract

In this article I explore the genealogy of the modern politics of reproduction. My claim is that during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries a political-epistemic regime emerged that came to function as a kind of matrix for subsequent projects of regulating and intervening in processes of reproduction. In particular, I show how this regime was constituted through the three interrelated biopolitical problematics of ‘population’, ‘race', and ‘gender’. In the first part, I reconstruct articulations of the concept of reproduction with regard to ideas about the contingency and regularity of reproductive processes that played an important role for the formation of strategies of ‘improving’ the population. The next section shows that the notion of reproduction was constitutive for the formulation of the genealogical concept of race, and that it was closely intertwined with the political regulation of global reproductive relations. Third, I analyse how the concept of reproduction from the late eighteenth century on was enmeshed with ideas of sexual complementarity. Sexual reproduction, I argue, was one of the main reference points on which cultural and social assumptions about the modern order of the family, based on the parental heterosexual couple, relied. In the final part of the article I argue that rethinking biopolitics from the perspective of the politics of reproduction is crucial for understanding synchronic and diachronic entanglements of contemporary politics of reproduction that otherwise often remain unnoticed.