Course description
The US Supreme Court's recent refusal to block a near-total abortion ban in Texas has inflamed old debates about life and choice. Why is family planning at the heart of the cultural divide that polarizes contemporary American politics? This course focuses on birth control in its broadest sense (the management of human reproduction) as a lens through which to see how the evaluation and cultivation of national populations has shaped government in the modern world. Beginning with Thomas Robert Malthus, Michel Foucault, and colonialism, we take a global view of these issues to put American debates in perspective. We consider assisted reproductive technologies, such as gamete donation and surrogacy, who is granted access to them, and why. The course concludes with fears about the limits of bodily autonomy and the inability to reproduce, ending by asking about the work these dystopian visions do in our political present. In studying topics such as race and eugenics, overpopulation and sustainability, sterilization and demographic nationalism, students draw on a variety of sources (including novels and films) to develop their own ideas about government and self-government in the age of birth control.
