Full Description
Over the past hundred years, population policy has been a powerful tactic for achieving national goals. Whether the focus has been on increasing the birth rate to project strength and promote nation-building--as in Brazil in the 1960s, where the military government insisted that a "powerful nation meant a populous nation, " -- or on limiting population through contraception and sterilization as a means of combatting overpopulation, poverty, and various other social ills, states have always used women's bodies as a political resource.
In Reproductive States, a group of international scholars--specialists in population and reproductive politics of Japan, Germany, India, Egypt, Nigeria, China, Brazil, the Soviet Union/Russia, and the United States--explore the population politics, policies and practices adopted in these countries and offer reflections on the outcomes of those policies and their legacies. The essays in this volume focus on the context that stimulated nations to develop demographic imperatives regarding population size and "quality," and consider how those imperatives became unique sets of priorities and strategies. They also illuminate how these nations crafted their own policies and practices, often while responding to United Nations- and U.S.- driven population goals, tactics, and interventions.
The global perspective of this volume shines light on national specificities, including change over time within a nation, while also capturing interconnections among various national politics and discourses, including evolving constructions of the key and complex concept of "overpopulation."
The first volume to survey population policies from key countries on five continents and to interweave gender politics, reproductive rights, statecraft, and world systems, Reproductive States will be an essential work for scholars of anthropology, women and gender studies, feminist theory, and biopolitics.
Contents
TABLE OF CONTENTS ; 1. Introduction: Reproductive States by Rickie Solinger and Mie Nakachi ; 2. Bio-politics, Demographobia, and Individual Freedom: Lessons from Germany's Century of Extremes, by Annette F. Timm ; 3. Bleeding Across Time: First Principles of U.S. Population Policy by Rickie Solinger ; 4. From Abortion to ART: A History of Conflict between the State and the Women's Reproductive Rights Movement in Post World War II by Miho Ogino ; 5. From Gandhi to Gandhi: Contraceptive Technologies and Sexual Politics in Post-Colonial India, 1947-1977 by Sanjam Ahluwalia and Daksha Parmar ; 6. Reproducing the Family: Biopolitics in Twentieth Century Egypt by Omnia El Shakry ; 7. Iran's Population Policies: A Historical Debate, by Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet ; 8. Reproductive Statecraft: The Case of Brazil by Sonia Correa, Margareth Arilha, and Maisa Faleiros da Cunha ; 9. Interpreting Population Policy in Nigeria by Elisha P. Renne ; 10. Liberation without Contraception?: The Rise of the Abortion Empire and Pronatalism in Socialist/Post Socialist Russia by Mie Nakachi ; 11. China's Population Policy in Historical Context by Tyrene White
