The “Recalcitrant” Pregnant BodyReproducing Race: An Ethnography of Pregnancy as a Site of Racialization. By Khiara M. Bridges. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011.

Abstract

If ever an ethnography illuminated the structural instantiation of the reproducing body with race writ large, it is Reproducing Race: An Ethnography of Pregnancy as a Site of Racialization. Khiara Bridges makes a significant contribution to understanding the ways in which an obstetric technological complex forces itself on the “unfit” pregnant bodies of poor women. In the best tradition of scholars who have developed concise analyses of various aspects of reproduction, such as Dorothy Roberts’s Killing the Black Body (1998); Christa Craven’s Pushing for Midwives: Homebirth Mothers and the Reproductive Rights Movement (2010); Mignon Moore’s Invisible Families: Gay Identities, Relationships, and Motherhood among Black Women (2011), and the brilliant volume Conceiving the New World Order, edited by Rayna Rapp and Faye Ginsburg (1995), Bridges’s ethnography sheds a harsh light on the intersectional collision of race, reproduction, poverty, and medical care. Bridges centers attention on the micromanagement that pregnant women who are receiving Medicaid and prenatal health services experience in a public hospital. Her stated goal is “to demonstrate how race is socially constructed during the event of pregnancy” (p. 8). She captures how—through ideologies of race—women become artifacts who must succumb to universal care. What is accomplished is a concise ethnographic exploration of how race is manufactured through a number of processes, including screenings and hyperexaminations, at the Women’s Health Clinic (WHC) of “Alpha” Hospital. One of the major contributions of this ethnography is that what appears to be medical employees’ denial of racializing, is embedded in the production of racializing. Thus, they become both masters of naming the medicalized racialized body and innocents of their own intentions (Farley 1997). While much of what the United States understands to be the black/white dichotomy of race, Bridges does not insist on the