The Global Biopolitics of the IUD: How Science Constructs Contraceptive Users and Women's Bodies

by Chikako Takeshita

Overview

The biography of a multifaceted technological object, the IUD, illuminates how political contexts shaped contraceptive development, marketing, use, and users.

The intrauterine device (IUD) is used by 150 million women around the world. It is the second most prevalent method of female fertility control in the global South and the third most prevalent in the global North. Over its five decades of use, the IUD has been viewed both as a means for women's reproductive autonomy and as coercive tool of state-imposed population control, as a convenient form of birth control on a par with the pill and as a threat to women's health. In this book, Chikako Takeshita investigates the development, marketing, and use of the IUD since the 1960s. She offers a biography of a multifaceted technological object through a feminist science studies lens, tracing the transformations of the scientific discourse around it over time and across different geographies.

Takeshita describes how developers of the IUD adapted to different social interests in their research and how changing assumptions about race, class, and female sexuality often guided scientific inquiries. The IUD, she argues, became a "politically versatile technology," adaptable to both feminist and nonfeminist reproductive politics because of researchers' attempts to maintain the device's suitability for women in both the developing and the developed world. Takeshita traces the evolution of scientists' concerns--from contraceptive efficacy and product safety to the politics of abortion--and describes the most recent, hormone-releasing, menstruation-suppressing iteration of the IUD. Examining fifty years of IUD development and use, Takeshita finds a microcosm of the global political economy of women's bodies, health, and sexuality in the history of this contraceptive device.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780262547840
Publisher:	MIT Press
Publication date:	05/09/2023
Series:	Inside Technology
Pages:	254
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Chikako Takeshita is Assistant Professor of Women's Studies at the University of California, Riverside.

Table of Contents

Preface xi
Acknowledgments xv
1 Turning the Gaze on Modern Contraceptive Research: An Introduction 1
2 "Birth Control for a Nation": The IUD as Technoscientific Biopower 33
3 From the "Masses" to the "Moms": Governing Contraceptive Risks 73
4 "IUDs Are Not Abortifacients": The Biopolitics of Contraceptive Mechanisms 105
5 "Keep Life Simple": Body/Technology Relationships in Racialized Global Contexts 137
6 Diffracting the Technoscientific Body: A Conclusion 163
Notes 171
References 201
Index 221

What People are Saying About This

Barbara B. Crane

Chikako Takeshita's investigation of the 50-year history of the IUD is insightful and provocative. Guided by a feminist perspective and methodology, her book is must reading for anyone interested in the evolving role of contraceptive technology in women's empowerment, reproductive health, and global population policy.

Elizabeth Siegel Watkins

The Global Biopolitics of the IUD provides a much-needed analysis of the history of intrauterine contraceptive devices; as such, it is a welcome addition to the existing scholarship on birth control, abortion, and sterilization. Deploying the methods of feminist science studies, Chikako Takeshita offers an innovative perspective on the multiple uses, interpretations, and meanings of this contraceptive technology in the Global North and South over the last five decades.

Endorsement

This is an excellent book that convincingly shows the local and global power dynamics involved in the co-construction of users and contraceptive technologies. Giving the IUD its dynamic history is a major contribution tofeminist theory and science and technology studies.

—Nelly Oudshoorn, Professor of Technology Dynamics and Healthcare at the University of Twente and author of The Male Pill: A Biography of Technology in the Making

From the Publisher

Chikako Takeshita's investigation of the 50-year history of the IUD is insightful and provocative. Guided by a feminist perspective and methodology, her book is must reading for anyone interested in the evolving role of contraceptive technology in women's empowerment, reproductive health, and global population policy.

—Barbara B. Crane, Executive Vice President, Ipas

The Global Biopolitics of the IUD provides a much-needed analysis of the history of intrauterine contraceptive devices; as such, it is a welcome addition to the existing scholarship on birth control, abortion, and sterilization. Deploying the methods of feminist science studies, Chikako Takeshita offers an innovative perspective on the multiple uses, interpretations, and meanings of this contraceptive technology in the Global North and South over the last five decades.

—Elizabeth Siegel Watkins, Department of Anthropology, History, and Social Medicine, University of California, San Francisco; author of On the Pill: A Social History of Oral Contraceptives, 1950-1970

This is an excellent book that convincingly shows the local and global power dynamics involved in the co-construction of users and contraceptive technologies. Giving the IUD its dynamic history is a major contribution tofeminist theory and science and technology studies.

—Nelly Oudshoorn, Professor of Technology Dynamics and Healthcare at the University of Twente and author of The Male Pill: A Biography of Technology in the Making

Nelly Oudshoorn

This is an excellent book that convincingly shows the local and global power dynamics involved in the co-construction of users and contraceptive technologies. Giving the IUD its dynamic history is a major contribution tofeminist theory and science and technology studies.

Editorial Reviews

The book's six chapters provide a thorough, well-documented study of the IUD as it involves a complicated relationship among women, health care providers, and bio/socio/political systems.—Choice—

...[A] fascinating and understandable history of a device that has harnessed women and that women have harnessed to control fertility, in ways that vary across time, space, ethnicity and socioeconomic status, even as it shaped scientific and political discourse.

—American Scientist—

From the Publisher

...[A] fascinating and understandable history of a device that has harnessed women and that women have harnessed to control fertility, in ways that vary across time, space, ethnicity and socioeconomic status, even as it shaped scientific and political discourse.

—American Scientist

Reviews

...[A] fascinating and understandable history of a device that has harnessed women and that women have harnessed to control fertility, in ways that vary across time, space, ethnicity and socioeconomic status, even as it shaped scientific and political discourse.

American Scientist

The book's six chapters provide a thorough, well-documented study of the IUD as it involves a complicated relationship among women, health care providers, and bio/socio/political systems.

Choice