Paper/Proposal Title
The Audacity of Choice: Unconventional Forms of Resistance and Reproductive Autonomy in the U.S. and Senegal
Location
M2225
Start Date
November 2023
End Date
November 2023
Keywords
International Development, Family Planning, Africa and the diaspora
Abstract
This workshop explores the more discreet and unconventional tactics and strategies that Black women in the U.S. and Senegal use to secure protracted reproductive freedom. This theme is anchored in two chapters from second book manuscript on the political economy of race and family planning in the U.S.and Senegal. The workshop encourages participants to unsettle countries in the global North as 'developed' and thus incomparable to places in the global South read as 'developing'. Disrupting this binary that sustains colonial forms of knowledge production expose new ways of understanding power and resistance. I illustrate this point by showing similarities between population policies in Senegal and those in the U.S., where both states have long history of framing Black women's reproductive capacities as the source of social and economic instability. Their personal decisions to consume or not consume family planning technologies becomes a matter of national and international development. The prescribed and proscribed range of reproductive actions for Black women in Senegal and the U.S. dictates how we read choices to have multiple children, not use family planning, receive welfare, etc. In Senegal, I demonstrate how the circulation of anti-family planning myths, which are conventionally read as backwards and anathema to population policies and women's health, are forms of resistance that give Senegalese women an alternate source of family planning information to draw on that is rooted in a deeper and wider sense of community. In the U.S., I show how Black women receiving welfare payments from the state, which has historically been disparaged and racialized as irresponsible reproduction, grants these women and communities access to resources that would otherwise not be redistributed. Both instances have implications for decolonial theorizing. Reading Black women's unconventional acts of reproductive resistance through a decolonial lens pushes past the notion that indigenous practices are the only source of alternatives to coloniality.
Author/Speaker Biographical Statement(s)
T.D. Harper-Shipman, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Assistant Professor of Africana Studies Davidson College
The Audacity of Choice: Unconventional Forms of Resistance and Reproductive Autonomy in the U.S. and Senegal
M2225
This workshop explores the more discreet and unconventional tactics and strategies that Black women in the U.S. and Senegal use to secure protracted reproductive freedom. This theme is anchored in two chapters from second book manuscript on the political economy of race and family planning in the U.S.and Senegal. The workshop encourages participants to unsettle countries in the global North as 'developed' and thus incomparable to places in the global South read as 'developing'. Disrupting this binary that sustains colonial forms of knowledge production expose new ways of understanding power and resistance. I illustrate this point by showing similarities between population policies in Senegal and those in the U.S., where both states have long history of framing Black women's reproductive capacities as the source of social and economic instability. Their personal decisions to consume or not consume family planning technologies becomes a matter of national and international development. The prescribed and proscribed range of reproductive actions for Black women in Senegal and the U.S. dictates how we read choices to have multiple children, not use family planning, receive welfare, etc. In Senegal, I demonstrate how the circulation of anti-family planning myths, which are conventionally read as backwards and anathema to population policies and women's health, are forms of resistance that give Senegalese women an alternate source of family planning information to draw on that is rooted in a deeper and wider sense of community. In the U.S., I show how Black women receiving welfare payments from the state, which has historically been disparaged and racialized as irresponsible reproduction, grants these women and communities access to resources that would otherwise not be redistributed. Both instances have implications for decolonial theorizing. Reading Black women's unconventional acts of reproductive resistance through a decolonial lens pushes past the notion that indigenous practices are the only source of alternatives to coloniality.
