Population Politics, Social Engineering, and Nation-Building: Women's Bodies in the Service of the Authoritarian State in Chile and Peru

This paper explores population politics as tools of specific projects of nation-building and modernization under authoritarian rule in two national settings. In Chile and Peru, authoritarian governments yoked women's reproductive behavior to their politics of modernization. The military dictatorship in Chile (1973-1989) tied the control over women's reproduction to conservative ideals of womanhood and to geopolitical goals of population growth by limiting women's access to family planning. Population politics in Peru had gendered and ethnic dimensions: in the 1990s, the authoritarian government of Alberto Fujimori launched a massive campaign that coerced thousands of women to undergo surgical sterilizations. In particular, indigenous populations were deemed “unfit” citizens of the “modern” nation envisioned by elites. In both national settings, I expose population politics as strategies of “modernization” as well as resistance to violations of citizenship-rights of different groups of women targeted to fulfill specific goals in nation-building projects of the 20th century.