Mapping the (Trans)national Politics of Reproductive Control in ‘Punjabi Canada’

Keywords: Reproductive control, Punjabi women, 'Punjabi Canada', reproductive rights, reproductive justice
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Tuesday
Session Start / End Time: 3/1/2022 05:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 3/1/2022 06:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 46

Abstract

Punjabi women’s reproductive bodies have continuously been used as battlegrounds for (trans)national concerns about the preservation of family honour and community identity on the one hand, and the ‘safeguarding’ of national identity and moral citizenship on the other. In Canada, the Punjabi family/ community has been at the heart of public and political conversations about reproductive rights and freedoms; specifically, in relation to forced and fraudulent marriages, family violence, and gender-biased sex selection. Many discourses - from cultural texts, to policy intervention, to public debate, to scholarship – frequently reduce portrayals of Punjabi women’s reproductive health and decision-making to essentialist narratives of a ‘gender oppressive’ culture, constructing Punjabi women as cultural victims. What is often neglected, however, are the ways in which these discourses themselves contribute to what I term ‘institutional reproductive control’ – structural efforts to manage Punjabi women’s reproductive behaviour and decision-making. This paper emerges from my doctoral dissertation proposal, wherein I center the relationship between the biopolitics of migration, race, and reproduction and material practices of social reproduction to ask questions about the feminist political geographies of reproductive control and justice in ‘Punjabi Canada’. In this paper, I examine the operation of institutional reproductive control in ‘Punjabi Canada’, framing it as a bordering practice. As I demonstrate, it is intricately woven into the history of the Canadian settler colonial state and is intimately tied to ongoing efforts to control the reproductive bodies and futures of Black, Brown, and Indigenous Peoples in Canada and transnationally.