How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics ─ From Welfare Reform to Foreclosure to Trump

Now all politics are reproductive politics, argues esteemed feminist critic, Laura Briggs. Today’s economic realities mean we are always at work, and time to care for dependents and communities has evaporated. Our households bear witness to this with trends towards later childbearing, growing use of IVF, widening racial disparities in infant mortality, and popular dependence on risky marriages and mortgages for semblances of security. Meanwhile an immigrant workforce (which is actually more female than male) cares for US households while leaving their own kids in home countries. This brilliant book outlines our crisis and explains how we got here. From Republican and Democrat stories of Black “welfare queens” and Latina “breeding machines” that helped destroy the so-called nanny state to stagnant wages in rising McJobs, and from a Queer turn to same-sex marriage to the blame game for the subprime crisis, Laura Briggs shows how from the 1980s to Trump and beyond, our current woes are anything but our fault.

Laura Briggs is Professor and Chair of the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is the author of several books on gender and empire, including Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico and, most recently, Somebody’s Children: The Politics of Transracial and Transnational Adoption. She also serves as an editor for the University of California Press American Crossroads series.