BIRTHBRAZIL · Birthing Abolition: Reproduction and the Gradual End of Slavery in Brazil
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2017-09-01 → 2019-08-31
- EU contribution
- €183,455
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF
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Results in brief
Birthing Abolition: Reproduction and the Gradual End of Slavery in Brazil
Recent debates about gender equality have begun to include reproductive health as a fundamental aspect of women’s rights. But present-day emphasis on gender and health is rooted in an extensive history of state and elite preoccupation with women’s bodies. The institution of slavery across the Americas was one instance in which certain women’s reproductive capabilities attracted the attention of the economic and ruling elite. For Brazil, historical demographers have long discussed the reproduction of the enslaved population in quantitative terms. More recently, historians have begun to situate women’s legal agency as central to the abolition of slavery. But scholarship has not analyzed the important role enslaved women’s reproductive health played in the rise and fall of slavery in Brazil—and across the Western world. BIRTHBRAZIL aims to address this gap in scholarship by analyzing how enslaved women’s reproduction shaped gradual abolition in Brazil (1850-1888). The project contends that the struggle to end slavery was intimately entangled not only with elite understandings of slave reproduction but also with enslaved women’s own agency. Enslaved women’s reproductive lives, the birth of their children, and their real and imagined understanding of motherhood were present in a wide variety of medical, political, and legal debates about the cessation of Brazilian slavery. Understanding demographic trends in conjunction with enslaved women’s reproductive agency is the only way to fully comprehend gradual abolition. BIRTHBRAZIL contributes to bioethical questions in medical history, gender studies, and critical race theory. Recent public health developments such as Zika have shed light on the continued intersection of race and gender in determining health inequalities. This research paves the way for understanding how historical state preoccupations with women’s reproduction underpin modern Brazilian healthcare. BIRTHBRAZIL's overall objectives are two peer-reviewed articles, a book monograph, "Birthing Abolition: Reproduction and the Gradual End of Slavery in Brazil" (envisaged press, Cambridge UP); an international conference on reproductive control aimed at researchers across the ERA, US, and Brazil; and the teaching of an original upper-level module on gender and abolition in HCA.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
BIRTHBRAZIL is an interdisciplinary project that will analyze how enslaved women’s reproductive trends and practices shaped the gradual abolition of slavery in the middle to large plantation holdings of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil from 1850 (the definitive end of the country’s slave trade) to final abolition in 1888. The project aims to contend that the struggle to end slavery was intimately entangled not only with elite understandings of slave reproduction but also with enslaved women’s own agency. To do so, it examines demographic trends among the enslaved population, elite views of enslaved women’s reproduction, and enslaved women’s own reproductive practices and agency. Like most Atlantic slave societies, the Brazilian slave population was reproduced through imports and not natural growth. Historians have argued that for 19th-century Rio de Janeiro state, harsh labour regimes and disease caused negative growth rates, dismissing the idea of “reproductive resistance”—the female enslaved practices of abortion and infanticide as purposeful attacks on the institution of slavery—popular in theories on Caribbean and US slavery. While enslaved women’s fertility control may not have caused negative population growth in 19th-century Rio de Janeiro state, BIRTHBRAZIL hypothesizes that enslaved women’s practices of fertility control played an important symbolic role in how elites understood and approached slavery itself. The findings of BIRTHBRAZIL are expected to demonstrate that enslaved women’s fertility control, both real and imagined, created the opportunity for abolitionists to implement the legal framework that abolished slavery. In doing so, the project provides historical background to current-day debates on reproductive rights, women’s health, and gender equality. The results will be disseminated through an academic monograph, peer-reviewed open-access publications, a website, an international conference, public history blogs, and a series of community lectures.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH · EdinburghCoordinatorUnited Kingdom
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union