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Towards free reproductive futures: mapping geographies of race, gender, and reproduction
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Wolfe, Taida. Towards free reproductive futures: mapping geographies of race, gender, and reproduction. Retrieved from https://doi.org/doi:10.7282/t3-95db-tw88

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TitleTowards free reproductive futures: mapping geographies of race, gender, and reproduction
NameWolfe, Taida (author); Daniels, Cynthia (chair); Rodgers, Yana V (member); McLemore, Monica (member); Cooper, Brittney C (member); Rutgers University; School of Graduate Studies
Date Created2023
Other Date2023-01 (degree)
SubjectWomen's studies, Geography, African American studies, Abortion, Human geography, Race, Reproductive justice
Extent398 pages
DescriptionFor this dissertation I use geography as a lens to explore how history, reproductive health politics, medical practice, human experience, and sensation (which I define here as both our visual and affective understandings and experiences of the world) merge to produce and reproduce Blackness and the abortion clinic as dangerous and in need of state control. This process of mapping Blackness and clinic spaces as dangerous promotes a number of intimate collisions that I argue will help us understand the abortion clinic as a site of reproductive struggle—a site that demonstrates clinic actors’ investments in normative ideologies of motherhood, sexuality, and fertility. I use both human geographical frameworks and feminist anthropological methods to examine the social-spatial workings of abortion clinics in order to understand how a particular place, the abortion clinic, helps us theorize about reproductive subjectivity. I explore how different actors—including patients, clinic staff, and myself as an abortion provider—experience the abortion clinic as a place. The collisions that happened in the three scenes of friction of the clinic demonstrate many clinic actors’ investments in normative ideologies of womanhood. These investments in normative womanhood point to the endurance of heteronormative racialized gender hierarchies despite liberal racial, gender, and reproductive movements that have sought to contest its prescriptions. I use my ethnographic research alongside, and in conversation with, the work of Black studies scholars, human geographers, and feminist thinkers to argue for the need to dismantle the racialized gender order ushered in with the overrepresentation of Western Man with the Human. I argue, that this overrepresentation, which produces the modern colonial gender system, is the origin of our reproductive unfreedom. As such, the abolition of the racialized gender order is necessary for us to realize free reproductive futures. While total abolition is not immediately around the corner, I look towards those resistance acts which help place us on the path towards reproductive liberation. I believe by investing in a politics of the deviant and by building wayward geographies, we can move towards free reproductive futures.
NotePh.D.
NoteIncludes bibliographical references
Genretheses
Persistent URLhttps://doi.org/doi:10.7282/t3-95db-tw88
LanguageEnglish
CollectionSchool of Graduate Studies Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Organization NameRutgers, The State University of New Jersey
RightsThe author owns the copyright to this work.
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