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Epilogue: Opposing the Malthusian Matrix

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

Susanne Schultz
Affiliation:
Goethe-Universität Frankfurt Am Main
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Summary

“People are not population!”

Declaration of a 1993 transnational feminist conference in Bangladesh (E.Coli-bri 1994)

Researching reproductive racism leads in many directions, as the work on this book has made very clear. Reproductive racism involves pronatalist family policies in so-called welfare states that primarily support the wish to have a child of those parents who are better off anyway. At the same time it includes a political focus on migrantized people as a segregated population with an ‘inappropriate’ birth rate, and not as subjects with reproductive desires. Reproductive racism is at work in efforts to combine the imaginaries of ‘shrinking and aging nations’ with continuously exclusionary racist and class-selective migration policies. And it becomes obvious in the revival of antinatalist agendas for the Global South, which are once again becoming more explicit. Moreover, there are myriad other ways in which the aim of protecting the dominant status quo is translated into the imaginaries of governing population, with all the violent consequences these agendas have for those whose lives are interpreted as less valuable or even disposable. In this epilogue, I will start by summarizing some crosscutting insights of the research findings on migration, birth control and the conjuncture of demographization that have been presented. I then address some more recent challenges, taking into account new conjunctures of demographization. As is typical for long-term academic research, the studies in this volume revolve around developments in the 2000s and 2010s, despite some updates. However, the Covid-19 pandemic since 2020 and the Russian war in Ukraine, which has ushered in a new phase of war and has reinforced militarization and imperial bloc formation, raise new questions about the bio- and necropolitics of population. Moreover, the ways in which diverse political forces are currently referring to Malthusian narratives in the context of the climate crisis also bring in new challenges, as I will discuss in the following. However, beyond these worrying observations, I will end by reflecting the new visions of resistance. The framework of reproductive justice as addressed in Chapter 6 will be referred to as a clearly anti-Malthusian intervention. Current counterhegemonic feminisms are exploring the potentialities of this framework, thereby also remembering a history of likeminded struggles which have often been marginalized or forgotten.

Type
Chapter
Information
Reproductive Racism
Migration, Birth Control, and the Spectre of Population
, pp. 191 - 202
Publisher: Anthem Press
Print publication year: 2023

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