Reproductive Lives

This chapter considers the centrality of feminist approaches to reproduction and reproductivity (and its refusal) in geography. Much of the early work on reproduction in feminist cultural and social geography was driven by an effort to show how reproductive spaces – be they hospitals, clinics, homes, bodies, borders, or cultural imaginaries – were governed by struggles over power and knowledge. Increasingly, these critical efforts are accompanied by work that explores affirmative contributions to thinking the futures of reproduction otherwise, imagining new speculative futures for reproduction, and pluriversal approaches to caring for life that wrest it from its eugenic past. The chapter closes with a consideration of the new methods – collage, zines, drawing, and body mapping – feminist geographers increasingly draw on to explore what it means to be reproductive.