Book Discussion: Unmaking Russia’s Abortion Culture: Family Planning and the Struggle for a Liberal Biopolitics, by Michele Rivkin-Fish

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Brief Description

Rivkin-Fish's book is a major study of post-Soviet reproductive governance and Russian gender politics seen through the eyes of family planning activists and experts. In dialogue with scholars of post-socialist illiberalism and gendered populism, Rivkin-Fish shows how attacks against contraceptive services unleashed the gendered, anti-liberal backlash now dominant in Russian society. Despite family planners’ efforts to design a culturally-meaningful liberalism, conservative elites responded to the physical and psychological upheavals of the 1990s by promoting demographic and sexual sovereignty. They found attacking gender and reproductive rights to be a useful target for generating nationalist and patriarchal responses to the brutal conditions of Russian neoliberalism. While contraceptive habits have become routine, and abortion rates have fallen dramatically, the demise of family planning institutions illuminates the reasons Russia’s campaign for so-called traditional values has hindered Russia’s liberal scientific intelligentsia for decades.

Sub Unit

• Anthropology, Cultural Studies

Chair

• Inna Leykin, Open U (Israel)

Roundtable Members

• Sylwia Kuzma-Markowska, U of Warsaw (Poland)

• Michele Rivkin-Fish, UNC at Chapel Hill

• Olga Shub

• Valerie Sperling, Clark U

• Catherine Wanner, Pennsylvania State U