The Wombs of Women

Race, Capital, Feminism

Françoise Vergès (Autor)

Buch | Softcover

184 Seiten

2020
Duke University Press (Verlag)
9781478009412 (ISBN)

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In the 1960s thousands of poor women of color on the (post)colonial French island of Reunion had their pregnancies forcefully terminated by white doctors; the doctors operated under the pretext of performing benign surgeries, for which they sought government compensation. When the scandal broke in 1970, the doctors claimed to have been encouraged to perform these abortions by French politicians who sought to curtail reproduction on the island, even though abortion was illegal in France. In The Wombs of Women-first published in French and appearing here in English for the first time-FranÇoise VergÈs traces the long history of colonial state intervention in black women’s wombs during the slave trade and postslavery imperialism as well as in current birth control politics. She examines the women’s liberation movement in France in the 1960s and 1970s, showing that by choosing to ignore the history of the racialization of women’s wombs, French feminists inevitably ended up defending the rights of white women at the expense of women of color. Ultimately, VergÈs demonstrates how the forced abortions on Reunion were manifestations of the legacies of the racialized violence of slavery and colonialism.

FranÇoise VergÈs is an antiracist feminist activist, a public educator, an independent curator, and the cofounder of the collective Decolonize the Arts and of the free and open university Decolonizing the Arts. She is the author of Monsters and Revolutionaries: Colonial Family Romance and Metissage, also published by Duke University Press, and numerous books in French. Kaiama L. Glover is Ann Whitney Olin Professor of French and Africana Studies at Barnard College.

Preface ix
Translator's Introduction xiii
Introduction 1
1. The Island of Doctor Moreau 1
2. The Rhetoric of "Impossible Development": Dependency, Repression, and Anticolonial Struggle 29
3. The Wombs of Black Women, Capitalism, and the International Division of Labor 49
4. "The Future Is Elsewhere" 63
5. French Feminist Blindness: Race, Coloniality, Capitalism 89
Conclusion: Repoliticizing Feminism 115
Notes 125
Index 157

Erscheinungsdatum	18.08.2020
Reihe/Serie	Theory in Forms
Übersetzer	Kaiama L. Glover
Verlagsort	North Carolina
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 229 mm
Gewicht	272 g
Themenwelt	Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Geschichte / Politik ► Allgemeines / Lexika
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
	Studium ► 1. Studienabschnitt (Vorklinik) ► Histologie / Embryologie
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie ► Gender Studies
ISBN-13	9781478009412 / 9781478009412
Zustand	Neuware