Policing the National Body: Race, Gender and Criminalization in the United States

Aggressive law enforcement is devastating women of color and their communities. Yet the mainstream reproductive rights movement, largely dominated by white women and consumed with protecting the right to abortion, has failed to respond adequately to the policing, criminalization, and incarceration of large numbers of poor people and people of color.

Policing the National Body places issues of race, class, and gender at the center of its reproductive rights and social justice agenda by focusing on a key concern among women of color and poor communities today: the difficulty of maintaining families and sustaining community in the face of increasing criminalization.

Women of color have independently articulated a broad reproductive rights agenda embedded in issues of equality and social justice, while keenly tuned to the state's role in the reproduction and regulation of women's bodies. In an effort to protect their reproductive rights, they have challenged coercive population policies, demanded access to safe and accessible birth control and asserted their right to economic and political resources to maintain healthy children.

Policing the National Body discusses the policing of bodies by examining the experiences of women prisoners, women with AIDS in correctional facilities, women in systems of prostitution, immigrant women, women of color, and young women with a keen awareness of their multiple identities and oppressions. This groundbreaking anthology is one the few works to link the reproductive rights and anti-enforcement violence movements.

Jael Silliman teaches at the University of Iowa, and is co-editor of Dangerous Intersections: Feminist Perspectives on Population, Environment and Development. Anannya Bhatacharjee teaches at New York University and is a co-founder of SAMAR (South Asian Magazine for Action and Reflection). Both belong to the Committee on Women, Population and the Environment (CWPE), a multi-racial alliance of feminist activists, health practitioners and scholars.