Regulating Sex, Sexuality, and Reproduction

This issue explores the regulation of sexual identities, reproductive practices, and commercial sex in a global context. The articles highlight the constraints that medicine, law, and community placed upon women; how conventional understandings of honor, femininity, and motherhood shaped their choices; and how regulation was met with resistance. The policing of women's bodies, sexual acts, and reproductive choices often occurred quite literally through the surveillance of law enforcement agencies and the punishments they administered through legal codes. Communities also policed women, attempting to impose historically contingent understandings of sexual respectability and heteronormative desire. The legal and cultural regulation of sex, sexuality, and reproduction; the constrictions of traditional gender roles; and the creative means by which women circumvented these norms are all fundamental questions for our authors.

We begin with a pair of articles that foreground women's resistance to the gender and sexual identities sanctioned by religion, community, and the state. Jonas Roelens discusses official and popular responses to a sodomy trial involving two women in Bruges, Belgium, in 1618. The official interrogation record reveals an "exceptional self-awareness regarding their sexual preferences" for other women, well before any "modern construction of such mental frameworks." The author contrasts the two women's clarity about their feelings of same-sex desire with the inability of those around them to conceive of sex between women or sex that did not involve penetration with a penis. According to religious, medical, and popular discourses in early modern Europe, female sodomy typically was understood either as an act of diabolic witchcraft or as the product of sex with one "hermaphroditic" partner whose genitals permitted penetration. Popular representations of "deviant sex" and "deviating bodies" feature prominently in Roelens's account.

The following essay also juxtaposes hegemonic understandings of gender and sexual identity with the life histories of two women, this time in early twentieth-century Igboland, West Africa, where the colonial gender order valorized subordinate Christian wives among the Igbo. But the author, Ndubueze L. Mbah, is most interested in women of the Ohafia clan who refused the European gender binaries imposed by missionaries and other adherents of the colonial state. His article "uncouples" masculinity from "anatomical maleness and patriarchy" by showing how women could perform "wealth-power masculinity" through trade and matronship and also take "masculine female husbands." In this example, masculinity was most certainly a dense network of power, self-advancement, and privilege. But wealth-power masculinity could be performed by women, and all members of the community—whether women or men—were subordinate to those who held it. This means that not all men performed masculinity, women's "masculinity performance" cannot be equated with a quest to become male, and both men and women were its victims. The essays by Roelens and Mbah challenge our understanding of the presumed links among anatomy, identity, desire, and power.

Next we turn to Julianne Weis's analysis of the medicalization of childbirth in Ethiopia under the Emperor Haile Selassie, who created a national network of European-style medical services between 1930 and 1974. Female health auxiliaries were part of the emperor's plan for modernization, in keeping with his essentialist ideas about women's capacity for compassion and nurturance. They were to indoctrinate other Ethiopian women in "modern" ideas about reproduction, childbirth, and child rearing, whether educating pregnant women about the importance of rest and nutrition, introducing ideas about sanitation, or "correcting" traditions that exacerbated obstetric complications. But the division of labor within the Ethiopian health professions was gendered: only male physicians could perform surgeries or practice in hospitals. Because women practitioners, in contrast, were to "reform culture" rather than cure disease, the "priorities and needs of women struggling under the burdens of poverty and maternal morbidities remained largely ignored" despite Ethiopian aspirations toward modernization and national development.

The three final articles are situated in modern Latin America. The first, by Cassia Roth, describes police scrutiny of poor women's reproductive lives in early twentieth-century Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, revealing how modern state formation cannot be separated from questions pertaining to the female body, reproduction, and the family. She shows...