Dangerous Affinities: The Silences in and Commitments of LARC Promotion in the US

• In Event: Producing Transformations: Drugs, Bodies, and Experimentation 2

Abstract

Long-acting reversible contraceptives (LARC) devices have become a ubiquitous symbol of reproductive freedom. Enthusiasm for LARC in the U.S. has given rise to new programs, policies and practices intended to promote their use and reduce unintended and teenage pregnancy, particularly among low-income women and women of color. Less visibly, LARCs have infiltrated the prison industrial complex, where prisoners may be coerced into LARC use. The seemingly heterogenous deployment of LARC warrants a critical pause to ask a difficult question: how have technologies scripted with meanings of empowerment become implicated in programs, policies, practices that restrict freedom, discipline bodies, limit life chances? There is a category of persons for whom LARC are assumed to be unproblematic—teenage girls and low-income women—and thus LARC promotion becomes a legitimated form of social control. My project takes LARC promotion as the launching pad for what I frame as “dangerous" questions about technologies and users that are superficially discrete but (bio)politically linked through their scripted meanings and social consequences. I position the target(s) of LARC promotion as ethically adjacent to the chemically castrated sex offender. I don’t conflate women encouraged to use LARCs with individuals convicted of sexual assault, but ask how the state’s deployment of LARC and chemical castration reveals a shared—rather than divergent—commitment to “unproblematic” technoscientific biopower that both a) challenges traditional framings of reproductive agency, and b) exposes the limits of Foucauldian governmentality to account for recent manifestations of diffuse forms of state control.

Author

• Jenny Dyck Brian, Arizona State University