For political geographies of fertilities

Abstract

Debates ranging from parental leave within universities to abortion rights, ‘anchor babies,’ racialized maternal mortality, and the continued disproportionate role of indigenous children within foster care systems demonstrate the wide range of politics informed by fertility. In this paper, I aim to prompt further academic research and personal reflection about the politics that underpin questions about fertility and the life course. There is an analytic potential and political urgency to understand these debates under the conceptual umbrella of ‘political geographies of fertility,’ as matters of fertility cross disciplinary and subdisciplinary boundaries and are – literally – matters of life and death. In this paper, I argue for framing fertility as a continued state of being, an anticipatory weight, that influences lives, behaviors, and politics at a variety of scales, from the border and the nation-state to academic workplaces and the body. By considering the range of spaces and scales where the politics of fertility take shape, I hope to encourage future researchers to devote attention to what gets made political through fertility – including but not limited to the biological events of reproduction.

Intimate technologies: Towards a feminist perspective on geographies of technoscience

“…It is only recently that feminist geographers have started to engage with technologies of (assisted) reproduction (Coddington, 2021; Collard, 2018; England et al, 2018; Fannin, 2019; Schurr, 2017, 2018; Smith and Vasudevan, 2017; Sziarto, 2017), abortion (Calkin, 2021; Calkin and Freeman, 2019; Freeman, 2017; Moore, 2015; Side, 2016) and forms of ‘reproductive mobility’ (Schurr, 2019; Deomampo, 2013; Parry et al, 2015; Side, 2016). Further, feminist geography has studied the role apps play in surveilling and managing women’s reproductive lives as processes of menstruation (Shipp and Blasco, 2020) and pregnancy (Hamper and Nash, 2021), showing how intimate data are increasingly entangled with global flows of data.…”

Abortion mobilities

“…A political geography of abortion requires contending with abortion ‘as a primary site of state‐making, where gendered power relations are enforced and opposed’ and abortion access ‘as a multi‐scalar process of contestation and resistance that implicates a variety of legal, medical, and social domains’ (Calkin, 2019, p. 28). Coddington's political geography of fertility, which includes abortion, further calls for consideration of the ‘temporal, spatial, and intersectional politics of fertility from a geographic perspective’ to explore ‘the logics of domination that seek to control, surveil, [and] police fertility across multiple contexts, often for similar ends’ (2021, p. 1687). A political geography of abortion, likewise, calls for examining the spatial politics and transformation of abortion (Calkin, 2019; Thomsen, 2022).…”

Reproductive geopolitics: Governing in/fertile bodies in Mexico’s past and present

“…While biopolitical concerns about the racialized makeup of the future nation are at the center of current debates on migration, state security and family politics (e.g. Gökarıksel et al, 2019; Gökarıksel and Smith, 2016; Hansen and Randeira, 2016; Schultz, 2022; Smith, 2019; Smith et al, 2019), geography is still rather reluctant to engage with questions of reproduction (a research lacuna recently also highlighted by Coddington, 2021).…”