Presentation: Politics of reproduction from a latin american perspective: dialogues between Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay

Abstract

This article introduces the special issue Politics of Reproduction: Latin American Perspectives by situating contemporary debates on reproduction within a field of long-standing political, moral, and racial disputes. By considering public discourses that blame poor women for their fertility or invoke demographic panics in the Global North, we show how reproduction remains a strategic terrain in which decisions are made about who should or should not be born, under what conditions, and in the service of which future projects. These dynamics are embedded in a history shaped by coloniality, racism, and elitism that continues to structure reproductive governance at global and regional scales. Reproduction is understood here as extending beyond the biological to include social reproduction and practices of care. From this perspective, the presentation draws on feminist anthropology to argue that all reproduction is political and that all politics is likewise reproductive and racialized. We engage with the concepts of the politics of reproduction, reproductive governance, and reproductive justice to demonstrate how moral regimes regulating fertility and motherhood produce hierarchies between legitimate and illegitimate maternities — promoted and interdicted, celebrated and rendered invisible. The presentation further shows how these grammars of suspicion and moralization are reproduced in everyday interactions within institutions of health, care, and social assistance, where the state operates not only as a manager of resources but also as an authority of surveillance and moral judgment. Finally, it argues that analyzing the politics of reproduction in Latin America requires articulating history, ethnography, and intersectional critique to understand how reproductive inequality constitutes a central problem of democracy, social justice, and the distribution of the future