Racial Management Through Reproductive Health, from the American South to Global South

The scientific knowledge produced through encounters with Latinx, Indigenous, and Black women created the medical lens that was applied to Filipino women, and subsequently informed future encounters that the US empire had with other racialized populations. Therefore, by examining the development of reproductive health under US empire and using a comparative ethnic studies approach, this particular history has the capacity reshape medical geographies beyond nation-based categories, and tell a more nuanced and expansive history of reproductive health and US empire.

In 1904, Theodore F. Riggs published the results of a study where he compared the size of black and white women’s sexual and reproductive genitals in comparison to their health outcomes after birth. This study was informed by Riggs’s experience growing up in an American missionary family on a Dakota reservation, where he was able to conduct a similar study on native women’s sex organs. Of course, these participants offered their bodies for scientific investigation under varying degrees of consent and coercion. After the US colonized the Philippines, Riggs’s studies informed the work of American and Filipino physicians in the new colony and produced research which compared Filipino women and Native and Black women’s genitals. The resulting controversy over the interpretation reveals a rhetoric of desire that defied fact. Women’s bodies become the fodder of reproductive health knowledge, which created a corporeal palimpsest that reflects the ways that US territorial expansion and American slavery have intertwined legacies for the populations managed and encountered by US empire.