REPRODUCTIVE GOVERNANCE AND REPERTOIRES OF RESISTANCE IN THE AMERICAS
Organization : Claire-Emmanuelle Block (Université Rennes 2 - Arènes), Gabriela Del Salto (Université Paris Nanterre - Cresppa) et Christen Bryson (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle).
Abstract :
The most resounding milestone in reproductive and sexual rights in the Americas in recent years was the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022. This decision made apparent how fragile reproductive rights are as well as the absence of reproductive justice for women, transmasculine and non-binary people. Nevertheless, victories in this area have recently been won by feminist activists, particularly in Latin America, whose symbols and repertoires of activism are circulating transnationally. This is the case of the ubiquitous green scarf, first worn in Argentina in the early 2000s. Since then, it has become a larger symbol of the struggle for sexual and reproductive rights across South and North America.
This panel intends to explore the contours of “reproductive governance” (Morgan & Roberts, 2012) for women and people with uteruses in the Americas from a multidisciplinary perspective. We propose to analyze and question the foundations, modalities, and consequences of reproductive governance who have multiple actors (states, churches, health and educational institutions, NGOs, foundations, etc.) and can take the form of laws, public policies, injunctions, reports of care and violence. In the face of this biopolitics of reproduction, however, we must not deny the existence of the margins of autonomy and spaces of resistance. The second aim of this workshop, then, is to consider the many forms of resistance aimed at shaping both reproductive autonomy and the reappropriation of the body, from individual agency to the repertoires and actions of national and transnational collectives and their networks.
This workshop proposes to bring together researchers tackling a diversity of issues linked to the biopolitics of reproduction and resistance to them: contraception, abortion, sex education, sterilization, the medicalization of bodies and procreation, gynecological and obstetrical violence, and maternity. These issues will be analyzed through the prism of gender but should also be understood at the intersection of various social relations of domination (race, class, sexual orientation and gender identity, disability, age, etc.), insofar as reproductive governance is not exercised uniformly across an entire gender class.
