Sarah A. Williams

SARAH WILLIAMS, University of Connecticut, Storrs, Connecticut, was approved funding in October 2022 to aid research on “Pelvic Structures: How Race Science, Gender, and Knowledge Translation Shape Mexican Obstetric Practice and Gynecological Healing” “Pelvic Structures: How Race Science, Gender, and Knowledge Translation Shape Mexican Obstetric Practice and Gynecological Healing.” Blending archival research on the origins of obstetrics in Mexico and Yucatán with interviews and participant observations with birthing people, midwives, and obstetricians in the Mexican states of Quintana Roo and Yucatán, this study explores the role of race science and eugenicist beliefs in shaping obstetric practices that contribute to the over-use of cesarean sections and the sterilizations of Maya women. As this research illustrates, Yucatán’s history as a plantation society with close ties to Cuba, the Southern United States, and France shaped the development of its obstetric practices and the ways that reproductive healthcare has often been used to stratify reproduction in Indigenous communities. Meanwhile, the peninsula’s present as a major destination for tourists, immigrants, and domestic migrants has deepened and expanded these patterns, as both midwives and obstetricians navigate racialist thinking about reproductive bodies and make clinical decisions influenced, in part, by these ideas. Though obstetric violence, as unnecessary cesarean sections and coerced sterilizations are often categorized, has often been theorized and explained as manifestations of misogyny or patriarchy in medicine, this manuscript explores obstetric violence as a praxis that is an expression of the co-constitutive ideologies of both gender and racialization.