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Reviewed by:
  • Undivided Rights: Women of Color Organize for Reproductive Justice, and: Policing the National Body: Race, Gender, and Criminalization, and: Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide
  • Sarah Lucia Hoagland (bio)
Undivided Rights: Women of Color Organize for Reproductive Justice by Jael Silliman, Marlene Gerber Fried, Loretta Ross, and Elena R. Gutiérrez. Boston: South End Press, 2004; Policing the National Body: Race, Gender, and Criminalization, ed. Jael Silliman and Anannya Bhattacharjee. Cambridge, Mass.: South End Press, 2002; and Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide. Andrea Smith. Boston: South End Press, 2005.

Organizers and activists all, the theorists of these volumes provide comprehensive analyses as well as strategies grounded in the struggle against violence against women of color and the struggle for reproductive justice for women of color. The understandings they develop highlight once again the inseparability of theory and practice. Concerned with building an inclusive movement that simultaneously fights violence against women of color and the structural violence faced by their communities, the authors contributing to all three books present innovative critical analyses detailing resistance and indicating how women of color are restructuring feminism. It is significant that these analyses are made available to us from South End Press.

Undivided Rights documents women of color creating organizations for reproductive justice that are racially and ethnically specific and separate from white organizations to successfully address problems arising from the mainstream movement's historic and ongoing practice of marginalizing women of color. Attacks on reproductive rights involve the welfare of communities of color. This is also true of violence against women. Policing the National Body addresses what Anannya Bhattacharjee calls "enforcement violence"—the repressive actions of law enforcement, challenging the mainstream movement against violence against women for its reliance on the state, and making clear the interrelationship between domestic, state, and global violence against women. In Conquest, Andrea Smith argues that entire communities are the victims of sexual violence. Indeed, she shows us how our analysis of sexual violence fundamentally shifts when we put women of color at the center of our thinking.

As the authors of these books demonstrate, putting women of color at center changes theory and practice. Jael Silliman, Marlene Gerber Fried, Loretta Ross, and Elena Gutiérrez reframe and expand analyses of reproductive rights. While the mainstream movement has focused on a single issue steeped in liberal individualism, these authors document how articulating reproductive issues within culturally specific contexts has been essential to developing resistance, a political agenda, and constituency bases in communities of color. [End Page 182]

Women of color have shifted the discourse from "pro-abortion," "pro-choice," and even "reproductive freedom" to "reproductive justice." Constraining women of color's reproduction are population and fertility controls, sterilization abuse, long-term and unsafe contraceptives, welfare reform, criminalization of women of color, immigration policies, medical experimentation, coercive and intrusive family planning policies and programs, and more. Reproductive justice redirects our focus to "recognize that the control, regulation, and stigmatization of female fertility, bodies, and sexualities are connected to the regulation of communities that are themselves based on race, class, gender, sexuality, and nationality" (Silliman et al. 2004, 4).

Documenting the work of two organizations from each of four groups—African American, Native American, Latina, and Asian and Pacific Islander—Jael Silliman, Marlene Gerber Fried, Loretta Ross, and Elena R. Gutiérrez detail ways women of color are fighting for reproductive justice. They make clear how immigration and sweatshop labor policies affect the reproductive freedom of Latina and Asian and Pacific Island women, whereas for Native women, sovereignty and environmental racism are central. Critical to black women's reproductive freedom are bodily integrity, access to services, and HIV/AIDS care. If white women were to explore our reproductive freedom in a culturally specific way, we might come to understand that restrictions on our access to abortion along with sterilization abuses perpetrated on women of color are both designed to maintain the white race (note for example, Smith 2005, 15).

The authors address issues arising within the organizations they document, for example the intrusions of mainstream stereotypes, or difficulties for Asian and Pacific Islander organizers given the over sixty ethnic and national groups within the U.S...

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