Medical Anthropology Research Talk!
Title: Reproductive Fugitivity: Characterizing Black Brazilian Women’s Reproductive Navigations of an Anti-Black Reproductive Landscape
Abstract: Drawing from my book project: The “Family Planned”: Racial Aesthetics, Sterilization, and Reproductive Fugitivity in Brazil, this talk focuses on insights and concerns from Brazilian Black women regarding the experience of family making, family planning, and doctors’ refusals to provide tubal ligations. Despite the legalization of tubal ligations and the establishment of a national family planning program, many Black Brazilian women find themselves navigating a reproductive landscape that is more like a reproductive death-world. Reproductive fugitivity characterizes these women’s navigations, manipulations, their inventive uses of the anti-Black racism and abuse of the medical and health care system, as well as societal rules and hierarchies to their advantage as they manage their needed constant movements between the freedoms and unfreedoms of the reproductive landscape. Through paying attention to their maneuvers, I demonstrate how sterilization is not the only site of a necropolitics, denials of sterilizations are too.
Bio: Ugo Edu is a medical anthropologist working at the intersection of medical anthropology, public health, black feminism, and science, technology, and society studies (STS). Using interdisciplinary approaches, her scholarship focuses on reproductive and sexual health, gender, race, aesthetics, body knowledge, and body modifications. Her book project: The "Family Planned": Racial Aesthetics, Sterilization, and Reproductive Fugitivity in Brazil, traces the influence of an economy of race, aesthetics, and sexuality on reproductive and sterilization practices of women in Brazil. She is working on a play, Securing Ties, which draws heavily on her book project as a means for critical public engagement and an incorporation of the arts in her scholarship. She is an Assistant Professor in the African American Studies Department and leads the Black ASH Lab at UCLA. She is also a co-founding director of The Collaboratory for Black Feminist Health and Healing.