Governing Bodies: Forced Sterilization, Intersectionality, and the Architecture of State Violence

• In Event: Open Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 17: Bodies, Embodiment, and Reproductive Politics

Abstract

This paper examines the practice of forced and coerced sterilization as a violent systemic human rights violation and a mechanism of state and medically sanctioned control over women’s bodies. Tracing its origins from the medical experimentation on enslaved Black women in the 1800s to the legal institutionalization of sterilization in the early twentieth century, this study situates reproductive control in a broader framework of structural and biopolitical violence. Utilizing a critical historical literature review and timeline of legal sterilization practices in the United States (including cases in Puerto Rico) this paper showcases how reproductive oppression has been mobilized to enforce eugenic ideology and reproductive genocide or “reprocide” (Ross 2017:293). Theoretical frameworks of structural violence, biopower, necropolitics, intersectionality, and reproductive justice guide this work in revealing that reproductive regulation is both a gendered and racialization form of domination legitimated through law, policy, and medical practice/systems. This work argues that forced sterilization exemplifies how the state and medical systems weaponize legality to perpetuate systemic violence.

Author

• Madison Centeno, Syracuse University