Unruly Fertility

Reproductive politics have become acutely urgent as we witness increased sexual and reproductive repression around the world. This reproductive repression is unfolding alongside widespread economic precarity, untenable costs of living, and demands for higher productivity. What feels like the emergence of a novel reproductive and economic dystopia, however, is a long-lasting reality for poor Black women globally. Comparing Senegal and North Carolina, Harper-Shipman shows how states and markets routinely turn to poor Black women’s fertility to resolve enduring social and economic crises. Moving through formative moments that draw reproductive health, gender, race, and labor into closer proximity—from the trans-Atlantic slave trade and colonialism through to the present—Harper-Shipman argues that reproductive health policies are essential to understanding international regimes for regulating resource distribution and recreating future stores of differentiated labor across time and space.

Unruly Fertility attends to the innovative and unconventional forms of resistance that poor Black women use to decouple their productive and reproductive labor from state efforts to manage their fertility. These discreet forms of resistance establish new possibilities that scaffold decolonial reproductive politics. Harper-Shipman compels us to view reproductive politics as an enduring battle over which bodies deserve the fruits of modernity, and which bodies get perpetually marked as the vehicles for carrying all of humanity forward.

Author Biography

T.D. Harper-Shipman is Associate Professor and Chair of Africana Studies at Davidson College.