The “Family Planned:” Racial Aesthetics, Sterilization, and Reproductive Fugitivity

Ugo Edu
African American Studies
UC Los Angeles

This book manuscript examines the conditions and consequences of denying Black Brazilian women access to voluntary sterilization. I characterize the economic, racial, aesthetic, sexual, and political influences upon the reproductive and contraceptive landscapes as a family planning industrial complex. By listening carefully to the stories of Brazilian Black women and their efforts toward voluntary sterilization, I critically examine the hierarchies within the discourses and practices of reproductive health and illuminate this family industrial complex. I develop reproductive fugitivity as a way to analyze Brazilian Black women’s navigation through this complex reproductive terrain. A central argument of my book is that the shifting politics of controlling fertility and particularly rethinking the status and purpose of sterilization as a part of the fertility control arsenal continues to be informed by and informs societal and cultural values, stratifications, and formations. The Family Planned is an ethnography of aesthetics, race, and the politics of voluntary sterilization in Brazil, framed within the larger and broader politics of fertility control, reproductive rights, access, women’s bodies, and shifts in the ways families are conceptualized and understood.

Image credit: Ugo Edu.