This panel critically examines the old hierarchies of gender inequalities and health disparities as related to reproductive health and rights, and the new and emerging possibilities to disrupt these hierarchies.
Anthropologists and feminist scholars recognise that various forms of legislative, policy, technological and other modes of formal and informal reproductive governance reinforce marginalisation of women and pregnant people through restrictions that impact reproductive health, well-being, access to care, and autonomy.
In recent decades, reproductive governance has been taking on new permutations resulting from contemporary politico-economic crises and transformations. These include COVID-19 pandemic and intensification of precarity, state ‘austerity’ measures, neoliberal damage to public health services and increasing corporatisation of health care systems, rising digitalisation and datafication of health, forced displacement of people, and environmental degradation. These have had distinct gendered effects, often intersecting with racial, class, ethnic and caste identities, exacerbating and reproducing existing inequalities and marginalisations, and sometimes presuming newer forms.
In light of these crises, however, different social actors or configurations of actors struggle to overcome or fight against gender inequalities and health disparities through mobility, illegal, clandestine, and subversive practices, and social and political mobilisation.
These struggles include but are not limited to: emergence of new technologies such as self-managed abortion, telehealth, digital self-tracking and quantification of reproductive health, clandestine surrogacy practices, emergence of new feminist and postcolonial oppositional movements and interventions, and resistance against surveillance.
Building on scholarship on feminist theorisation, medical anthropology, and science and technology studies (STS), this panel will explore these encounters and confrontations between the mechanisms maintaining gendered marginalisations and various configurations of actors and practices that contest and/or attempt to dismantle the old hierarchies inherent in restrictive reproductive health and rights governance and surveillance.
