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CS92PROD
Race and Reproduction
ANTH 325
Spring 2025
Section: 01  
Crosslisting: FGSS 444, AFAM 329

This interdisciplinary course explores the intimacy of race and reproduction against the backdrop of capitalist modernity. We scrutinize the policies, priorities, and perversions of slave owners, the racially differentiated family planning programs under apartheid, the eugenicist movements and the criminalization of poverty in the United States to interrogate what is generated by the incapacitation of blackness across scales of time and space. We examine the Marxist feminist elaboration of the concept of social reproduction and then consider black feminist rejoinders that center the reproductive labor of black women -- as slaves, as domestic workers -- that implicate violence and ownership in the mediation of biological and social reproduction as a set of racializing practices in which value is generated, accumulated, and expropriated. Finally, the course considers the proliferation of assisted reproductive technology (ART) in the 20th century, the recourse to surrogacy, and family abolition to interrogate the extent to which the "race-reproduction bind" is disaggregated or reanimated in the present.
Credit: 1 Gen Ed Area Dept: SBS ANTH
Course Format: SeminarGrading Mode: Graded
Level: UGRD Prerequisites: None
Fulfills a Requirement for: (AFAM-MN)(AFAM)(ANTH)(FGSS)
Past Enrollment Probability: 90% or above

Last Updated on DEC-02-2024
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