Reproductive Justice against Eugenics Past and Present
With Dr. Dána-Ain Davis, Cara Page, and Dr. Evelynn Hammonds
April 7, 2023 @ 1-2:30 pm, via Zoom
Conventional timelines place eugenics in the past, as a wrongheaded but ultimately failed experiment in selective human breeding. Yet eugenic logics still fundamentally structure reproductive realities. In the US, stolen and hoarded health and wealth ensures the reproductive flourishing of propertied white families. Conversely, Black, Indigenous, community of color, disabled, undocumented, working class and poor, and queer and trans communities struggle to create and sustain family on their own terms. While the former are cushioned by institutional protections, the latter groups often face the violent disruption of kinship by means as various as hospital protocols, contraceptive coercion, policing, and toxic exposures, just to name a few. This dialogue will bring together landmark work on medical violence and eugenics, as well as reproductive justice and healing justice in the face of these historical and ongoing forms of violence.
Dána-Ain Davis, Professor of Urban Studies at Queen College, and Director of the Center for the Study of Women and Society at the Graduate Center, CUNY. A Medical anthropologist and doula, Davis is the author of the award-winning book Reproductive Injustice: Race, Pregnancy, and Prematurity (2019) and the co-author of Feminist Ethnography: Thinking through Methodologies, Challenges, and Possibilities, among other publications. In 2018 she was appointed by New York Governor Cuomo to the Governor’s Maternal Mortality Taskforce. Davis is currently carrying out an archival project on the eugenics movement.
Cara Page is a Black Feminist Queer cultural/memory worker, curator, and organizer. An architect of the Healing Justice movement, she has fought for LGBTQGNCI, Black, People of Color & Indigenous liberation for over 30 years. She is the former Executive Director of the Audre Lorde Project. She is also the co-founder of the Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective. Her current project, Changing Frequencies, is a Black Queer Feminist led, abolitionist organizing project that designs cultural memory work to disrupt the harms & experimentation of the Medical Industrial Complex* (MIC).
Professor Evelynn M. Hammonds is the Barbara Gutmann Rosenkrantz Professor of the History of Science, Professor of African and African American Studies in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and Professor of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health at Harvard University. This academic year she is the inaugural Audre Lorde Visiting Professor of Queer Studies at Spelman College. Her research focuses on the history of scientific, medical and socio-political concepts of race, gender and sexuality in the histories of medicine, science and public health in the United States.