Articulating Liberation: The Reproductive Justice Fight Against Biopolitical State Violence

This study explores the historical and contemporary connections between reproductive justice and anti-state violence organizing and social movements. Rather than focusing on moments of overlap between distinct social movements, I argue that working towards reproductive justice necessarily works against state violence. I utilize three years of ethnographic, archival, and interview-based data to demonstrate how reproductive justice theory, framing, and praxis are connected to eradicating state violence. Chapter 1 introduces readers to the landscape of social movements for reproductive health, rights, and justice and a brief history of organizing to better contextualize the project that follows in this document. It also showcases the qualitative methods and data analysis employed in this project. Chapter 2 sketches a brief history of eugenic reproductive control before utilizing archival data to illuminate more contemporary manifestations of this biopolitical violence. I demonstrate how reproductive justice theory, framing, and organizing is uniquely situated to resist biopolitical control. In Chapter 3, I ground my analysis in the words and experiences of organizers and activists to examine art as an important avenue for connecting movements for reproductive justice and against state violence. I examine artwork as a pedagogy of connection along three distinct types of social movement tactics, and demonstrate how race, gender, and sexuality are focal points in the intersections of art and organizing. Chapter 4 examines how organizing work affects the emotions and embodied experiences of activists and organizers themselves. I demonstrate linkages between social structures of race, gender, and sexuality; emotions and feelings; and the body. I then elucidate how these linkages inform the creation of collectives based in corporeal feeling and eventually transform social movement strategy. To conclude, Chapter 5 reviews the analyses and findings presented in this study and offers conclusions, reflections on limitations, implications for the field of sociology and outside of academia, and directions for future research.