Unruly Fertility
As sexual and reproductive repression increases around the world, engaging with reproductive politics has become acutely urgent. This reproductive repression exists alongside pervasive economic precarity, untenable costs of living, and pressing demands for higher labor 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, T.D. Harper-Shipman shows how states and markets turn to poor Black women's fertility to assuage economic and social crises that would otherwise expose the failings of modern political economy. Moving through formative moments that draw reproductive health, gender, race, and labor into closer proximity—from the transatlantic slave trade through to the present—Harper-Shipman argues that reproductive health policies are instruments for national and international elites to regulate resource distribution and recreate 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.
—Adom Getachew, University of Chicago
"A compelling, smart, and persuasive exploration of the exigencies of capitalist nation-states' projects and narratives of progress centered on the management of poor Black women's fertility. Unruly Fertility is a capacious and theoretically original book that belongs on the bookshelves of everyone invested in feminist, anti-capitalist horizons of freedom centered on the lives and agency of some of the most marginalized racialized communities in the world."—Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Syracuse University
"Unruly Fertility is a well-conceived and innovative work of feminist international political economy and decolonial politics of reproduction. Even as Takiyah Harper-Shipman shows us how the ideologies of gender, fertility, and anti-Blackness conspire with the global economy to extract from Black women reproductive labor, this is not a story about defeats or reproductive dystopia. Instead, Unruly Fertility divulges the tactics and strategies of refusal Black women use to (re)claim their lives, dignity, and reproductive freedom."
—H. L. T. Quan, Arizona State University
"T.D. Harper-Shipman charts a novel path in studies of social reproduction and care by theorizing concretely from the vantage point of the social and political worlds of the excluded, exploited and marginalized, who she successfully recasts as major actors in the struggle between capitalist development and liberation. Unruly Fertilityis an elegantly written and compelling account of the surreptitious reliance by states on women's fertility to resolve enduring social and economic crises."—Lyn Ossome, Makerere University
