Reproduction, Technoscience, and the Body: Forced Sterilizations and Violence in Peru

Between 1996 and 2000, almost 300,000 Peruvian women were sterilized following

president Fujimori’s ‘National Program of Reproductive Health and Family Planning

1996-2000’. Promoted as a liberal-feminist enterprise at the International Conference

on Population and Development in Cairo (1994) and the Fourth World Conference on

Women in Beijing (1995), the program was supposed to empower women by giving

them education and choice regarding family planning and their reproductive health.

However, the program disproportionately targeted indigenous Quechua-speaking

women of rural areas of Peru living in extreme poverty, performing surgical

sterilizations on thousands of women without their consent, through coercion and

intimidation. By focusing on the material and technological semiotics of violence and

gender, this paper studies the ‘National Program of Reproductive Health and Family

Planning 1996-2000’ document as part of the conditions of possibility that enabled

coercive sterilizations and the construction of the bodies of indigenous women as the

objects of reproductive violence. Drawing on post-human and science and technology

feminist theories, I explore the scientific-technological aspects of reproductive control,

the production of gendered and racialized embodied subjects, and understandings of

violence in the context of the then on-going armed conflict between the Peruvian state

and Sendero Luminoso.