Whose reproductive futures? Race-biopolitics and resistance in the Black infant mortality reduction campaigns in Milwaukee

Abstract

This paper contributes to Foucauldian population geographies by examining an infant mortality reduction campaign in Milwaukee. The infant mortality rate for Milwaukee’s Black community is about three times that for whites and higher than rates for other racialized groups. This paper asks how Milwaukee’s public health interventions came to focus on sleep deaths, when population data show that preterm birth and congenital abnormalities are the leading causes of all infant deaths in the city, and the greatest contributor to the racial gap. The City of Milwaukee Health Department and partners drew on contradictory biopolitical logics and practices: On one hand, they located the problem of the “gap” in particular segregated neighborhoods-in-crisis, and on the other hand, they used an ostensibly “race-blind” strategy of promoting safe sleep environments. These spatializations together shifted blame for the crisis onto “failing” parents, especially Black parents. Tracing instances of resistance through the development and implementation of the campaign suggests possibilities for an anti-racist biopolitics.

Intimate technologies: Towards a feminist perspective on geographies of technoscience

“…It is only recently that feminist geographers have started to engage with technologies of (assisted) reproduction (Coddington, 2021; Collard, 2018; England et al, 2018; Fannin, 2019; Schurr, 2017, 2018; Smith and Vasudevan, 2017; Sziarto, 2017), abortion (Calkin, 2021; Calkin and Freeman, 2019; Freeman, 2017; Moore, 2015; Side, 2016) and forms of ‘reproductive mobility’ (Schurr, 2019; Deomampo, 2013; Parry et al, 2015; Side, 2016). Further, feminist geography has studied the role apps play in surveilling and managing women’s reproductive lives as processes of menstruation (Shipp and Blasco, 2020) and pregnancy (Hamper and Nash, 2021), showing how intimate data are increasingly entangled with global flows of data.…”

Toward critical demography 2.0

“…In mortality, for example, James Tyner (2015) suggests a bio-logics (biopolitical) reframing that interrogates how surplus populations are rendered disposable or precarious. Similarly, Kristian Sziarto (2017) uses a Foucauldian approach to discuss the racialized biopolitics of an infant mortality reduction campaign that lays blame on “failing” black parents. In fertility, conceptual innovations have been influenced by feminist theory.…”

Reproductive Justice: Impulse für intersektionale Bevölkerungsgeographien

“…Denn obgleich die race-spezifischen Unterschiede als besorgniserregend erkannt werden, werden institutionalisierter Rassismus, obstetrische Gewalt und Transfeindlichkeit im Gesundheitssystem selten als Risikofaktoren in Generativitätsstatistiken herangezogen (Bey et al, 2019:8). Obwohl transgenerationelle Traumata und toxischer Stress aufgrund alltäglicher Diskriminierungen Auswirkungen auf die reproduktive Gesundheit haben (Lakhani, 2019), werden die Ursachen beispielsweise in Präventionskampagnen zur Reduktion der Mütter-und Säuglingssterblichkeit häufig bei dem Verhalten der Mütter selbst gesucht (Brunson und Suh, 2019;Sziarto, 2017). Die Ausblendung der machtgeladenen reproduktiven Relationen in bevölkerungswissenschaftlichen Analysen prägt folglich auch die gesundheitspolitische Herangehensweise an ebendiese Problemlagen.…”