The Global Biopolitics of the IUD: How Science Constructs Contraceptive Users and Women's Bodies

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Chikako Takeshita

The Global Biopolitics of the IUD

How Science Constructs Contraceptive Users and Women's Bodies

Chikako Takeshita

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English

MIT Press
09 May 2023

Ethical issues: abortion & birth control; History of medicine; Fitness & diet

Series: Inside Technology

"The biography of a multifaceted technological object, the IUD, illuminates how political contexts shaped contraceptive development, marketing, use, and users.

The biography of a multifaceted technological object, the IUD, illuminates how political contexts shaped contraceptive development, marketing, use, and users.

The intrauterine device (IUD) is used by 150 million women around the world. It is the second most prevalent method of female fertility control in the global South and the third most prevalent in the global North. Over its five decades of use, the IUD has been viewed both as a means for women's reproductive autonomy and as coercive tool of state-imposed population control, as a convenient form of birth control on a par with the pill and as a threat to women's health. In this book, Chikako Takeshita investigates the development, marketing, and use of the IUD since the 1960s. She offers a biography of a multifaceted technological object through a feminist science studies lens, tracing the transformations of the scientific discourse around it over time and across different geographies.

Takeshita describes how developers of the IUD adapted to different social interests in their research and how changing assumptions about race, class, and female sexuality often guided scientific inquiries. The IUD, she argues, became a ""politically versatile technology,"" adaptable to both feminist and nonfeminist reproductive politics because of researchers' attempts to maintain the device's suitability for women in both the developing and the developed world. Takeshita traces the evolution of scientists' concerns-from contraceptive efficacy and product safety to the politics of abortion-and describes the most recent, hormone-releasing, menstruation-suppressing iteration of the IUD. Examining fifty years of IUD development and use, Takeshita finds a microcosm of the global political economy of women's bodies, health, and sexuality in the history of this contraceptive device."

By: Chikako Takeshita
Imprint: MIT Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm,
Weight: 369g
ISBN: 9780262547840
ISBN 10: 0262547848
Series: Inside Technology
Pages: 254
Publication Date: 09 May 2023
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

"Preface xi Acknowledgments xv 1 Turning the Gaze on Modern Contraceptive Research: An Introduction 1 2 ""Birth Control for a Nation"": The IUD as Technoscientific Biopower 33 3 From the ""Masses"" to the ""Moms"": Governing Contraceptive Risks 73 4 ""IUDs Are Not Abortifacients"": The Biopolitics of Contraceptive Mechanisms 105 5 ""Keep Life Simple"": Body/Technology Relationships in Racialized Global Contexts 137 6 Diffracting the Technoscientific Body: A Conclusion 163 Notes 171 References 201 Index 221"

Chikako Takeshita is Assistant Professor of Women's Studies at the University of California, Riverside.