“I Have the Right to Parent, too”: Challenging The Hyper-Breeder Image in Latinx Feminist Policy Advocacy

• In Event: Black Feminist Sociology Meets Racial and Ethnic Feminist Theory

Abstract

Black feminists theorize how controlling images function as mechanisms of social control by distorting holistic perceptions of marginalized people. While social movement research documents the importance of culture in collective action, little research applies a controlling images interpretive framework to social movement contexts. This paper draws on three years of ethnographic observations with a Latinx feminist policy advocacy organization in California to reveal how members and staff often navigate the presumptions that create the hyper-breeder controlling image in their anti-poverty work and their collaborations with young parents. The Latina hyper-breeder is imagined as the cisgender, hyper-sexual, mestiza Latina version of the Black welfare queen and often presumed to be undocumented and opportunistic. The hyper-breeder is wielded against Latina mothers to position their wombs and their sexualities—as enemies of the state. This paper shows how the hyper-breeder is invoked in anti-poverty and young parent advocacy work to position Latinx families as social and economic threats to the U.S. national imaginary, and how CLRJ develops intersectional practices to contest the ideological force of this image. Ultimately, this image is used to misrepresent cisgender Latinas as bad feminists and thus poor advocates for reproductive autonomy in relation to white feminists in the United States. This paper has implications for the analytical possibilities of placing Black feminist theories in conversation with Latinx feminist research.

Author

• Rocío R. García, Arizona State University-Tempe