For sled dogs and women: Hormonal contraception and animacy hierarchies in Danish/Greenlandic Depo-Provera debates

Abstract

Empirically centring the hitherto unexplored mainstream Danish-Greenlandic Depo-Provera media debate, in this article, we show how syringes of synthetic progesterone circulated across bodies, borders, generations, and species to reproduce and disrupt animacy hierarchies in ‘post-colonial’ times. Feminist scholars have attended to the reproductive injustices revealed in the unequal global distribution of Depo-Provera. However, these critiques have not been brought into conversation with recent environmental humanities scholarship tracing toxic relationalities and their connections to toxic power hierarchies such as settler colonialism. This article connects this scholarship by foregrounding the ways in which birth control injections not only worked on feminised bodies to prevent pregnancies but also to highlight – and further expose – subordinated groups of reproductive subjects, rendered abnormal on the basis of ideas about agency and cognitive ability. To be treated with Depo-Provera was, in the debates, to be marked as Other – and to be marked as Other was to be marked as a candidate for ‘The Shot’.