Now all politics are reproductive politics, argues esteemed feminist critic, Laura Briggs. Today's economic realities mean we are always at work, and time to care for dependents and communities has evaporated. Our households bear witness to this with trends towards later childbearing, growing use of IVF, widening racial disparities in infant mortality, and popular dependence on risky marriages and mortgages for semblances of security. Meanwhile an immigrant workforce (which is actually more female than male) cares for US households while leaving their own kids in home countries. This brilliant book outlines our crisis and explains how we got here. From Republican and Democrat stories of Black "welfare queens" and Latina "breeding machines" that helped destroy the so-called nanny state to stagnant wages in rising McJobs, and from a Queer turn to same-sex marriage to the blame game for the subprime crisis, Laura Briggs shows how from the 1980s to Trump and beyond, our current woes are anything but our fault.

In the past two decades, transnational adoption has exploded in scope and significance, growing up along increasingly globalized economic relations and the development and improvement of reproductive technologies. A complex and understudied system, transnational adoption opens a window onto the relations between nations, the inequalities of the rich and the poor, and the history of race and racialization, Transnational adoption has been marked by the geographies of unequal power, as children move from poorer countries and families to wealthier ones, yet little work has been done to synthesize its complex and sometimes contradictory effects.

Rather than focusing only on the United States, as much previous work on the topic does, International Adoption considers the perspectives of a number of sending countries as well as other receiving countries, particularly in Europe. The book also reminds us that the U.S. also sends children into international adoptions--particularly children of color. The book thus complicates the standard scholarly treatment of the subject, which tends to focus on the tensions between those who argue that transnational adoption is an outgrowth of American wealth, power, and military might (as well as a rejection of adoption from domestic foster care) and those who maintain that it is about a desire to help children in need.

"You have to take the children away."-Donald Trump Taking Children argues that for four hundred years the United States has taken children for political ends. Black children, Native children, Latinx children, and the children of the poor have all been seized from their kin and caregivers. As Laura Briggs's sweeping narrative shows, the practice played out on the auction block, in the boarding schools designed to pacify the Native American population, in the foster care system used to put down the Black freedom movement, in the US's anti-Communist coups in Central America, and in the moral panic about "crack babies." In chilling detail we see how Central Americans were made into a population that could be stripped of their children and how every US administration beginning with Reagan has put children of immigrants and refugees in detention camps. Yet these tactics of terror have encountered opposition from every generation, and Briggs challenges us to stand and resist in this powerful corrective to American history.

This book applies a multi-disciplinary lens to examine obstetric fistula, a childbirth injury that results from prolonged, obstructed labor. While obstetric fistula can be prevented with emergency obstetric care, it continues to occur primarily in resource-limited settings. In this volume, specialists in the anthropological, psychological, public health, and biomedical disciplines, as well as health policy experts and representatives of governmental and non-governmental organizations discuss a scoping overview on obstetric fistula, including prevention, treatment, and reducing stigma for survivors. This comprehensive resource is useful in understanding the risk factors, epidemiology, and social, psychological, and medical effects of obstetric fistula. Topics explored include: A Human Rights Approach Toward Eradicating Obstetric Fistula Obstetric Fistula: A Case of Miscommunication - Social Experiences of Women with Obstetric Fistula Classification of Female Genital Tract Fistulas Training and Capacity-Building in the Provision of Fistula Treatment Services Designing Preventive Strategies for Obstetric Fistula Sexual Function in Women with Obstetric Fistula Social and Reproductive Health of Women After Obstetric Fistula Repair Making the Case for Holistic Fistula Care Addressing Mental Health in Obstetric Fistula Patients Physical Therapy for Women with Obstetric Fistula A Multidisciplinary Approach to Obstetric Fistula in Africa is designed for professional use by NGOs, international aid organizations, governmental and multilateral agencies, healthcare providers, public health specialists, anthropologists, and others who aim to improve maternal health across the globe. Although the book's geographic focus is Africa, it may serve as a useful resource for individuals who aim to address obstetric fistula in other settings. The book may also be used as an educational tool in courses/programs that focus on Global Health, Maternal and Child Health, Epidemiology, Medical Anthropology, Gender/Women's Studies, Obstetrics, Global Medicine, Nursing, and Midwifery.

"You have to take the children away."-Donald Trump Taking Children argues that for four hundred years the United States has taken children for political ends. Black children, Native children, Latinx children, and the children of the poor have all been seized from their kin and caregivers. As Laura Briggs's sweeping narrative shows, the practice played out on the auction block, in the boarding schools designed to pacify the Native American population, in the foster care system used to put down the Black freedom movement, in the US's anti-Communist coups in Central America, and in the moral panic about "crack babies." In chilling detail we see how Central Americans were made into a population that could be stripped of their children and how every US administration beginning with Reagan has put children of immigrants and refugees in detention camps. Yet these tactics of terror have encountered opposition from every generation, and Briggs challenges us to stand and resist in this powerful corrective to American history.

This issue of Meridians looks at the expansive domains of transnational feminism, considering its relationship to different regions, historical periods, fields, and methodologies. Through scholarship and creative writing, contributors showcase populations often overlooked in transnational feminist scholarship, including Africa and its diaspora and indigenous people in the Americas and the Pacific. Understanding that transnational feminism emerges from multiple locales across the Global South and North, this group of contributors, working in exceptionally diverse locations, investigates settler colonialism, racialization, globalization, militarization, decoloniality, and anti-authoritarian movements as gendered political and economic projects.Working with manifestos, archives, oral histories, poetry, visual media, and ethnographies from across four continents, the contributors offer a radically expanded vision for transnational feminism. Contributors. Elisabeth Armstrong, Maile Arvin, Maylei Blackwell, Laura Briggs, Ginetta E. B. Candelario, Ching-In Chen, Tara Daly, Nathan H. Dize, Deema Kaedbey, Nancy Kang, Rosamond S. King, Karen J. Leong, Brooke Lober, Neda Maghbouleh, Melissa A. Milkie, Nadine Naber, Laila Omar, Ito Peng, Robyn C. Spencer, Stanlie James, Evelyne Trouillot, Denisse D. Velazquez, Mandira Venkat, Judy Tzu-Chun Wu

A search for historic secrets may uncover a present day love' Writer-historian Jenna Cade has spent her life in search of the past, particularly with her latest quest to document abandoned cemeteries of the South and the stories behind the stones. But her search for a forgotten graveyard in quaint Sylvan Spring leads her to more than the ghosts of graves untended by human hands'it leads her to the doorstep of reclusive stone carver Con Taggart. Still grieving his wife's death, Con has shut himself away from the world, But then a beautiful historian shows up at his door seeking a link between mysterious burial stones and a legend that lingers in the town's history. Working together to uncover the truth behind the lost cemetery may form a deeper connection between them than either realizes. Can the ghosts of graveyards past show these two how to trust in God and to find a love more tangible than any legendary tale of apparitions?

In "Somebody's Children," Laura Briggs examines the social and cultural forces--poverty, racism, economic inequality, and political violence--that have shaped transracial and transnational adoption in the United States during the second half of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first. Focusing particularly on the experiences of those who have lost their children to adoption, Briggs analyzes the circumstances under which African American and Native mothers in the United States and indigenous and poor women in Latin America have felt pressed to give up their children for adoption or have lost them involuntarily.

The dramatic expansion of transracial and transnational adoption since the 1950s, Briggs argues, was the result of specific and profound political and social changes, including the large-scale removal of Native children from their parents, the condemnation of single African American mothers in the context of the civil rights struggle, and the largely invented "crack babies" scare that inaugurated the dramatic withdrawal of benefits to poor mothers in the United States. In Guatemala, El Salvador, and Argentina, governments disappeared children during the Cold War and then imposed neoliberal economic regimes with U.S. support, making the circulation of children across national borders easy and often profitable. Concluding with an assessment of present-day controversies surrounding gay and lesbian adoptions and the struggles of immigrants fearful of losing their children to foster care, Briggs challenges celebratory or otherwise simplistic accounts of transracial and transnational adoption by revealing some of their unacknowledged causes and costs.

Today all politics are reproductive politics, argues esteemed feminist critic Laura Briggs. From longer work hours to the election of Donald Trump, our current political crisis is above all about reproduction. Households are where we face our economic realities as social safety nets get cut and wages decline. Briggs brilliantly outlines how politicians' racist accounts of reproduction-stories of Black "welfare queens" and Latina "breeding machines"-were the leading wedge in the government and business disinvestment in families. With decreasing wages, rising McJobs, and no resources for family care, our households have grown ever more precarious over the past forty years in sharply race-and class-stratified ways. This crisis, argues Briggs, fuels all others-from immigration to gay marriage, anti-feminism to the rise of the Tea Party.

In the past two decades, transnational adoption has exploded in scope and significance, growing up along increasingly globalized economic relations and the development and improvement of reproductive technologies. A complex and understudied system, transnational adoption opens a window onto the relations between nations, the inequalities of the rich and the poor, and the history of race and racialization, Transnational adoption has been marked by the geographies of unequal power, as children move from poorer countries and families to wealthier ones, yet little work has been done to synthesize its complex and sometimes contradictory effects.

Rather than focusing only on the United States, as much previous work on the topic does, International Adoption considers the perspectives of a number of sending countries as well as other receiving countries, particularly in Europe. The book also reminds us that the U.S. also sends children into international adoptions--particularly children of color. The book thus complicates the standard scholarly treatment of the subject, which tends to focus on the tensions between those who argue that transnational adoption is an outgrowth of American wealth, power, and military might (as well as a rejection of adoption from domestic foster care) and those who maintain that it is about a desire to help children in need.

Original and compelling, Laura Briggs's "Reproducing Empire "shows how, for both Puerto Ricans and North Americans, ideologies of sexuality, reproduction, and gender have shaped relations between the island and the mainland. From science to public policy, the "culture of poverty" to overpopulation, feminism to Puerto Rican nationalism, this book uncovers the persistence of concerns about motherhood, prostitution, and family in shaping the beliefs and practices of virtually every player in the twentieth-century drama of Puerto Rican colonialism. In this way, it sheds light on the legacies haunting contemporary debates over globalization.
Puerto Rico is a perfect lens through which to examine colonialism and globalization because for the past century it has been where the United States has expressed and fine-tuned its attitudes toward its own expansionism. Puerto Rico's history holds no simple lessons for present-day debate over globalization but does unearth some of its history. "Reproducing Empire "suggests that interventionist discourses of rescue, family, and sexuality fueled U.S. imperial projects and organized American colonialism.
Through the politics, biology, and medicine of eugenics, prostitution, and birth control, the United States has justified its presence in the territory's politics and society. Briggs makes an innovative contribution to Puerto Rican and U.S. history, effectively arguing that gender has been crucial to the relationship between the United States and Puerto Rico, and more broadly, to U.S. expansion elsewhere.