Decolonizing Reproductive Rights in Latin America

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Peru, Decolonizing Reproductive Rights in Latin America examines forced sterilisation through various registers, from the ways women speak about reproductive abuse to urban feminist activism and bureaucratic responses. The author argues that a hierarchy of discourse shapes the dominant understanding of reproductive abuse, rooted in repronormativity. This focus often overlooks other harms, such as loss of strength and changes that are less easily measured. The book shows that these different perspectives are not isolated but overlap and clash.

Introducing dissonance as a decolonial feminist methodology, the book analyses how colonial, racialised, and gendered histories shape legal and experiential incommensurability, and the hierarchies of discourse. As the first ethnography on sterilisation cases in Peru, this book contributes to reproduction, Latin American, and feminist decolonial studies.