Politics Of Reproduction Research Articles

Multiplying Meanings of Pregnancy Through Personal Accounts of Gestational Trophoblastic Disease

In cultures where reproduction is highly medicalised, pregnancy is often understood in terms of foetal development and an anticipated baby. This is connected to a wider privileging of the ‘foetal subject’ in these settings, which has had implications for reproductive autonomy. In this article, I disrupt dominant understandings of pregnancy by engaging with qualitative accounts of gestational trophoblastic disease. This rare condition can entail experiences of pregnancy without foetal development, allowing for scholarly attention to the wider biological, affective and relational constituents of this corporeal event. In this article, I pay particular attention to the ‘pregnancy hormone’ human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG), which in the context of gestational trophoblastic disease becomes a biomarker for disease. My research extends feminist science studies perspectives destabilising understandings of maternal and foetal bodies as bounded and distinct entities. The article de-centres foetal development as the most significant consequence of conception and enriches feminist discussions of reproductive politics.

The first frame: A camera-less photographic encounter with the foetus

This article examines two first-hand encounters with the foetus to reflect on the familial, photographic and political dimensions of 3D and 4D foetal portraits. It examines the photographic status of foetal portraits as intimates of the family album while acknowledging their public meaning in reproductive politics. The article aims to situate 3D and 4D foetal portraits within photographic history, theory and practice by examining how these camera-less images align with photographic vision.

Book Review: The State of Desire: Religion and Reproductive Politics in the Promised Land, By Lea Taragin-Zeller

Book Review: <i>The State of Desire: Religion and Reproductive Politics in the Promised Land</i>, By Lea Taragin-Zeller

Governance by Gaslight: The Reproductive Politics of the Two-Child Limit

Abstract In 2017, the UK government limited the number of children for a whom a low-income family could claim a means tested benefit (the “child element” of “Universal Credit”) to two. Since then, over 400,000 families—including 1.5 million children—have been affected by the “two-child limit.” Emerging research indicates that the limit has done little to influence fertility rates, nothing to influence workforce participation, and a great deal to increase financial hardship and poverty. Via a synthesis of existing research, and a critical analysis of formal policy dialogue, I explore the specifically reproductive politics of the two-child limit. I cast the limit as “successful” reproductive governance, a “technology of discipline” with complementary effects and rationales, which works by further marginalizing intersectionally marginalized women. In concluding, I argue that the state justifies this abject outcome via what has been termed “cultural gaslighting.”

Reproductive Injustice and Genetic Counseling in the Socialist Politics of Disability

ABSTRACT This article examines how socialist experts were integrated into the entrenched global agenda of demographic security. The interplay of supranational and national priorities of reproductive politics is examined through three progressively developing practices: (1) research on “congenital malformations” as an argument for surveillance over women since the mid-1950s; (2) involvement of socialist experts in global debates regarding reproductive responsibility in the 1960s; and (3) revision of approaches to the “right to life” during the 1970s and 1980s. The layering and conversion of these practices explains the role of reproductive injustice in extensive segregation against people with disabilities in post-socialist countries.

We are future ancestors: on authoritarian politics and the deepening of our radical roots

ABSTRACT Written in a conversational exchange, this essay charts urgent connections among queer/trans/disability frameworks of environmental, climate, and reproductive justice centered around community planning and county level democratic politics. We reflect on the lessons learned in our local context of Iowa between 2023–2024, during unprecedented legislative control of queer and trans lives and reproductive politics. In our conversation, we argue anti-trans legislation is a form of authoritarianism and political violence, a frame which shifts how organizers might draw connections among issues and energize future struggles. We reflect on the organizing strategies and advocacy work in our community and connect this labor as crucial care work necessary for queer and trans life.

Unreproductive citizenship: Social sterilisation of queer and trans people in Poland

This paper offers the term unreproductive citizenship to characterise the social positionality of LGBTQ people in Poland. Unreproductive citizenship is brought about by means of social sterilisation: while queer and trans people are ‘tolerated,’ they are not treated as reproductive subjects with a potential to participate in social reproduction. Drawing on Polish and international literature on queer families, reproductive politics, and forced sterilisation, as well as research including interviews, political speeches and auto-ethnography, I argue that the discursive and political framing of LGBTQ people as unreproductive subjects is eugenic. Leading political figures representing Poland's robust political right-wing, as well as the majority of Poles, have expressed fears that LGBTQ reproduction could somehow ‘contaminate’ future generations and therefore poses a threat to the nation's moral order. The social sterilisation of queer Polish people as ‘unreproductive citizens’ illustrates how the logics of reproductive righteousness operate in contemporary Poland.

Motherhood, wet-nursing and nation: nineteenth-century Brazilian medical perspectives

This paper explores the viewpoints of nineteenth-century Brazilian physicians regarding women’s roles as the ‘propagators of the race’. It emphasises their perspectives on reproduction, breast feeding, and the involvement of...

“Being useful, I think it's the result of a sick society”: Critical reflections on reproductive politics and markets by women freezing their eggs in Spain

AbstractThis piece analyzes the way in which women that froze, are considering freezing or are freezing their eggs in Spain think critically about broader reproductive politics in Spain and about assisted reproduction. Drawing partially on previous studies around egg freezing, Thomas Lemke has suggested that cryopreservation practices represent a “politics of suspension” characterized by both reversibility and disposition, and concomitant with broader political inaction (Lemke in Sci Technol Hum Values 48(4):1–27, 2021). Drawing on feminist literature, and on how some of these women think about motherhood, it is relevant to emphasize this ‘suspension of politics’ that takes place along with a “politics of suspension,” meaning that certain matters (such as reproduction and its postponement) are only to be dealt with privately and individually, through marketized fertility preservation programs in this case. Some of the women interviewed describe these programs as useful tools within a problematic context: technologies that give time in a context that leaves them on their own to figure out motherhood (or its absence) in the midst of uncertainty and loneliness. This paper shows their critical views on these matters, while reflecting on how their experiences and desires become increasingly imbricated with the fertility industry in the making of their reproductive biographies (Perler and Schurr in Body Soc 27(3): 3–27, 2021).

The Ethics of Self‐Care: Risk, Responsibility, and Reproduction in Chile

AbstractThe meanings of self‐care are complex, ranging from radical political warfare to structural biopolitical governmentality. This paper explores lived tensions of self‐care by analysing women's experiences negotiating pregnancy in Santiago de Chile. Drawing on 40 life story interviews, the findings show that although sexual education, contraception, and abortion remain constrained and structured according to class inequalities, women are expected to care for themselves by managing the risk of pregnancy and assuming responsibility for their reproductive outcomes. I argue that politics of reproduction in Santiago de Chile are shaped by a neoliberal ethics of self‐care that outlines women as autonomous, rational, and self‐regulating agents while neglecting structural constraints that affect whether and when to have children. This neoliberal ethics of self‐care reinforces the overburdening of the self, the feminisation of reproduction, the privatisation of care, and the institutionalisation of carelessness, undermining the subversive and emancipatory potential involved in caring for oneself.

“An act of compassion”: Emotion and the struggle for reproductive justice

AbstractIn dialogue with the rich scholarship on affect and the role of emotions in feminist knowledge production, this article explores how compassion is mobilized by activists in the struggle for reproductive justice. The author centers emotional knowledge by drawing on conversations with a reproductive justice advocate in central Florida, the musical anthem of Viva Ruíz and the Thank God for Abortion Collective, and her own personal experience with pregnancy loss. This includes a discussion of the ways that coloniality persists in the racialized and gendered landscape of reproductive politics, with particular attention to the experiences of Puerto Ricans. Ultimately, the article argues that an attunement to “a radical compassion”—that is, a deep concern and understanding of the intersectional oppressions that place value on certain bodies over others—engenders the possibilities of reproductive justice and produces alternative ways of knowing and feeling.

Enabling the ‘Breastfeeding-Work Dyad’ and Understanding the Contextual Pentad of Productive Work, Reproductive Work, Reproductive Health, Reproductive Rights and Reproductive Politics: The Tantalizing Microcosmic Perspectives Encapsulated with Some Imaginatively Innovative Interventions

This ‘Invited Narrative Review’ seeks to explore how best to ‘Enable Breastfeeding-Work Dyad’ extrapolated from conceptualizing the ‘Contextual Pentad Components’ which have been disposed to reflect ‘Optimality begetting Optimality’ and situate with ‘Logical Sequential Flow’ re: ‘Optimal Productive Work’ flows from ‘Optimal Reproductive Work’ which itself flows from ‘Optimal Reproductive Health’ ultimately flowing from ‘Optimal Reproductive Rights’ also flowing from, and encapsulated and facilitated by, ‘Optimal Reproductive Politics’. ‘Optimal Infant and Young Child Feeding’ is reportedly a ‘Programmatic Fulcrum’ of ‘Optimal Reproductive Work’. The Treatise is replete with ‘Tantalizing Teasers’ to stimulate and invite further ‘Contextual Conversational Surfing’. The ‘Thrust’ of the Narrative Review: ‘Enabling the Breastfeeding-Work Dyad’ mirrors the ‘2023 World Breastfeeding Week Theme’ which is ‘Enabling Breastfeeding: Making a Difference for Working Parents’. Some ‘Imaginatively Innovative Initiatives/ Interventions’ are ventilated to whet the appetite. ‘Breastfeeding’ is a ‘Low-cost High-impact Strategy’ to achieve ‘Optimal Reproductive Work’ for engendering ‘Optimal Productive Work’.

Thingified Flesh: A Womanist Approach to De/Colonial Reproductive Politics and Research

Thingified Flesh: A Womanist Approach to De/Colonial Reproductive Politics and Research

Critical engagements with “Climate Change as Class War”—the climate, public power, and the means of social reproduction

Matt Huber’s book Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet has been fiercely debated in terms of its implications for the US climate movement, but it also offers important implications for how we think about the politics of social reproduction beyond US borders. This review draws out theoretical implications from Huber’s work that are especially relevant for understanding social movements, social reproduction, and the state in this ecological moment. This paper is part of the SPE Special Theme “Critical Engagements with ‘Climate Change as Class War.’”

The Politics of Social Reproduction and the Vicissitudes of 'Surplus Population'

The Politics of Social Reproduction and the Vicissitudes of 'Surplus Population'

Fertility, Health and Reproductive Politics: Re‐Imagining Rights in India By MayaUnnithan, London: Routledge. 2019. pp. 233.

Fertility, Health and Reproductive Politics: Re‐Imagining Rights in India By MayaUnnithan, London: Routledge. 2019. pp. 233.

Ujarzmiana kobieta. Cielesność matek w "Mrówkach" Marii Pawlikowskiej-Jasnorzewskiej

This article is an attempt to describe subjectivation (assujettissement), the concept of Michel Foucault, based on the example of the story of women in the tragicomedy Ants written by Maria Pawlikowska-Jasnorzewska. The play, which was staged in 1936, has a complex compositionalidea. The first and third acts take place in a totalitarian insect state, while the second act intersects and completes the story of the ants, similarly illustrating the obligation to procreate in patriarchy. The allegory of the anthill was used by the writer to represent the process of politicisation ofthe female body in the fascist system. The growing-up heroines of the tragedy try to oppose the ideology of the anthill by fighting for individual freedom, including the right to abortion. Michel Foucault, in Discipline and Punish. The Birth of Prison, describes a process of disciplining whichtakes place on several layers of subjectification. To the first layer of “power-knowledge” pleasure is added and combined with sexuality as a political instrument. An important context for the above discussion is the thought of Elizabeth Grosz, the author of corporeal feminism, who postulates a non-dualistic perception of the individual. Corporeality, which is an important theme of Ants, is a place where the influences of power and knowledge merge. Pawlikowska-Jasnorzewska describes the story of a woman’s struggle for the right to freedom. The solution, as it seems, is love and the possibility of women and men working together. A society in which women are not forced to comply with the demands of reproductive politics will become healthier and happier.

After choice, after justice?: race, reproduction, and the uncertain futures of feminist political desire

ABSTRACT This essay engages contemporary narratives of black maternal ambivalence to unsettle residual attachments to choice within the frame of reproductive justice. The contemporary fiction of Brit Bennett’s The Mothers and Tayari Jones’s An American Marriage, as well as Black feminist work on Assisted Reproductive Technologies, reconsider the difficult ways that race and ‘choice’ have been in tension with each other in political and medical discourse around reproductive rights. Feminist choice debates have been intentionally reframed away from ‘rights’ and toward 'justice’ as an attempt to account for the hyper-control of Black reproduction across a modern history that includes enslavement, mass incarceration, and myths of hyper-reproduction. Complex narrative accounts of thwarted or uncertain Black reproduction built from the embodied experiences of blackness can consider both choice and justice without romanticising motherhood or autonomy. This article troubles the weight on black feminism to conceive and carry children – symbolic and material – into and through precarious life chances into secure (political) futures. Through thick descriptions of the reproductive that run through desire, uncertainty, debt, and vulnerability, black feminist thought and expressive culture can displace autonomy as the underpinning and endgame of feminist reproductive politics.

Racial Capitalism, Political Reproduction, and the Commons: Insights from Migrant Solidarity Politics in Glasgow

AbstractThis paper foregrounds the centrality of reproductive politics in constituting the spaces of migrant activism. Addressing social reproductive issues as racial issues, it exposes how “premature death” and questions of survival shape migrants’ lives throughout the uneven geographies of racial capitalism. Drawing on the political experiences of the “No Evictions Network”—a migrant and activist‐led group campaigning for asylum seekers’ rights in Glasgow (Scotland)—the paper suggests the concept of “political reproduction”, grasping the interchange between care, trust, empowerment, political subjectivation, and the overcoming of barriers towards political action that take place within spaces of migrant activism. Building upon migrant voices and Black and Brown histories of organising, the paper explores the racialised, gendered, and classed character of reproductive activist labour in these spaces, evidencing the ways the notion of “political reproduction” breaks racialised and gendered constructions of political work.

“Domestic Feminism”: The Politics of Reproduction and Motherhood in Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale

Popularized by Hulu’s television adaptation, the allegories and iconography of The Handmaid’s Tale have been used in women’s reproductive rights activism around the world. However, at the same time, the series has been recognized and critiqued as offering white, conservative feminism. This article explores how Hulu’s adaptation often works to domesticate Margaret Atwood’s novel and the series’ feminist implications in regard to reproduction and motherhood. While The Handmaid’s Tale has become spectacularly visible as a popular feminist television series, its reproductive politics and representations of women, family and motherhood are largely conservative: waging a limited resistance on behalf of neotraditional white Anglo-western mothers. In light of the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, this article is motivated by the conviction that it is increasingly important to hold sociocultural representations of reproduction and motherhood to account.