Paradoxes of Reproduction, Grammars of Power

Abstract:The rise of biopolitical governmentality and its interest in the optimal administration of the life of populations gave a new political relevance to women’s reproductive capacity and conduct—while not automatically converting their pre-political status. While reproduction takes on a different status and meaning for different forms of power, these can also coincide rather than replace each other. In consequence, the oscillations between rights and health within modern debates over reproductive justice concern more than a politically strategic choice between alternative languages. Instead, the friction between the formulations of reproductive justice and biopolitical interest are better understood as articulated together in an interlocking grammar of different forms of power whose relationalities have given rise to new means for understanding the paradoxes of rights, necroresistance, and corporeal contradictions.