Date of Award
Fall 2022
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
History
First Advisor
Rogers, Naomi
Abstract
This dissertation brings together key moments of reproductive violence inflicted on Indigenous Peruvian women between 1995 and 2002 and their relationship to the Peruvian State’s Programa Nacional de Salud Reproductiva y Planificación Familiar (PNSRPF). Each chapter focuses on how the violent constraining of Indigenous Peruvian women’s reproduction through PNSRPF linked that campaign to longstanding patterns of reproductive violence against Indigenous Peruvians. It argues these events are connected through reproductive sovereignty as produced by public health data and historical memory. Reproductive sovereignty explains how the Peruvian state has coerced, restricted, and neglected the reproduction of Indigenous Peruvian women who it has never included as full citizens. While PNSRPF was an expression of reproductive sovereignty in the neoliberal era, this population control campaign must be seen against the backdrop of ongoing efforts to maintain control over a class of people who are excluded from modernity on the basis of their gender and ethnicity. I argue that these ongoing efforts can be traced through public health data and state memory of violence. During the 1990s, public health data collection campaigns reinscribed the so-called backwardness of Indigenous health knowledge. While family planning officials envisioned the culture and tradition of Indigenous women as an axis of producing knowledge and intervention into the field of reproductive health, they conditionally and temporarily allowed some women into governance while excluding most women from modernizability. During the same period, historical memory refused to acknowledge how the violence of the state targeted Indigenous people’s reproduction. The state’s use of human rights frameworks to understand violence vacate its responsibility for acts of violence against Indigenous Peruvians by not acknowledging the undergirding project of constraining Indigenous reproductive possibilities. Chapter 1 addresses how global family planners perceived reproductive rights and family planning in the mid-1990s and how Peru used guidelines from a major women’s rights conference to enact PNSRPF. Chapter 2 turns to the state’s management of these policies in the years following the conference. Chapter 3 is a case study of a grassroots feminist organization’s partnership with the United States Agency for International Development and how data it collected about the reproductive health concerns of Indigenous Peruvian women was exploited by state and international actors. Chapter 4 turns to the level of international family planning aid and focuses on how the neoliberal agenda to empower women through family planning aid failed to provide economic, political, social rights, leaving room for conservative actors to claim possession of those rights . Lastly, Chapter 5 returns to the Indigenous women’s exclusion from human rights archives in Peru and examines an archive of their experiences through which we can begin to reconstruct the history of reproductive violence and resilience.
Recommended Citation
Egger, Emilie E., "Diminished Citizens: Reproductive sovereignty through historical memory and health data in Peru, 1995-2006" (2022). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 730.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/730
